Iowa May Receive Up to 30% Fewer COVID-19 Vaccine Doses Than Anticipated

Andrea May Sahouri and Tony Leys for the Des Moines Register:

The Iowa Department of Public Health announced Wednesday evening that Iowa will receive less COVID-19 vaccine in its initial wave than anticipated — as much as 30% less. […]

Other states will also fail to receive their anticipated volume of vaccine doses as well, the department wrote in the news release. The department did not disclose which states could be affected.

I’m skeptical of the “in the March time period, I think you’ll start seeing more like a flu vaccination campaign,” and this feel like just the beginning of a lot of downward adjustment on vaccination expectations.

Are the high expectations a trap? Human nature? More incompetence? Maybe it’s the truth and it’ll fall along that timeline after all.

Iowa Republicans Acknowledge Biden will be President, Without Admitting He Won

Laura Belin rounded up what Iowa elected officials have said:

“Is it time to acknowledge Biden as president-elect?” [Sen. Charles] Grassley dodged: “I don’t have to – the Constitution does.”

Hughes followed up: “And do you acknowledge him as president-elect?” Grassley replied, “I follow the Constitution.”

This is a continuation of Grassley et al. pretending that the Constitution is the beginning and end of the rules and norms they must adhere to. That’s why he blocked Merrick Garland from the Supreme Court under Obama (“A majority of the Senate has decided to fulfill its constitutional role of advice and consent by withholding support for the nomination,” he said) or why he kept voting for unqualified Trump appointees. It’s a form of Originalism but for the legislative branch. And if you strip away interpretations from the Constitution, you can make it fit your raw political motives.

The Masks and the Experts

Matthew Yglesias:

Washing your hands is, obviously, a great thing to do in life. But the forget-masks-wash-your-hands era, even if motivated by a concern about medical supplies, carried a larger implication that’s stuck with us — fear dirty things. The correct message should be to fear contaminated air.

Good public messaging is hard, and even harder when you’re dealing with a novel, contagious and deadly virus experts are learning about in the fly. Compound that with motivations driven by supply shortages, and it’s way, way worse.

Incompetence breeds incompetence.

The good news is that poor messaging on ventilation means you don’t have to pay through the nose for an air  purifier.

Past Tense of Succeed

Sen. Joni Ernst has been posting on her official social media channels about Operation Warp Speed, which has been, setting aside declining additional Pfizer vaccine over the summer, one of the Trump Administration’s few success stories in a pandemic that killed more than 3,000 Americans yesterday alone.

I’m fascinated by her use of the past tense here, since exactly zero Americas have received an approved vaccine yet, and we don’t expect widespread vaccine availability until summer 2021 at best.

But it wouldn’t be the first time a politician prematurely and patriotically trumpeted success.

Pfizer’s Vaccine is a “Grand Slam by Any Measure”

Noah Weiland and Carl Zimmer for The New York Times:

The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech provides strong protection against Covid-19 within about 10 days of the first dose, according to documents published on Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration before a meeting of its vaccine advisory group.

The finding is one of several significant new results featured in the briefing materials, which include more than 100 pages of data analyses from the agency and from Pfizer. Last month, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their two-dose vaccine had an efficacy rate of 95 percent after two doses administered three weeks apart. The new analyses show that the protection starts kicking in far earlier.

What’s more, the vaccine worked well regardless of a volunteer’s race, weight or age. While the trial did not find any serious adverse events caused by the vaccine, many participants did experience aches, fevers and other side effects.

“This is what an A+ report card looks like for a vaccine,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University

Science is amazing. In this case, it’s given us a 95-percent effective vaccine that seems to work equally well across demographic groups in record time. It’s also given us tons of knowledge about how SARS-CoV-2 transmits and simple ways we can protect ourselves.

There’s an alternate reality where there’s a large mass of people who don’t see their religious beliefs in conflict with science. Instead, they hold up science and the knowledge it gives us as an amazing expression of their god, as a confirmation of the brilliant order of the universe, and our inability to fully understand creation.

How Iowa Mishandled the Coronavirus Pandemic

Elaine Godfrey for The Atlantic:

Iowa’s problem is not that residents don’t want to do the right thing, or that they have some kind of unique disregard for the health of their neighbors. Instead, they looked to elected leaders they trust to tell them how to navigate this crisis, and those leaders, including Trump and Reynolds, told them they didn’t need to do much at all. (Although some residents have certainly deliberately ignored the advice of public-health experts.)

We have mishandled the pandemic, but I have a quibble with the headline. It should be “How Iowa is Mishandling the Pandemic” because, first, we are very much in it and, second and most frustratingly, we have all the tools we need right now to prevent this death and suffering.

We are left with bad choices, but there are different magnitudes of bad. As one Iowa City healthcare provider put it:

The endgame of uncontrolled spread is a choice between massive death and suffering and overflowing hospitals, or shutting things down. This is the equivalent [of] choosing between death or amputation—when you could have had an earlier surgery, which would have been painful but would have prevented this scenario from developing in the first place.

Innocent, But Fined

Matt Taibbi:

In State of Iowa v. Jane Doe, a woman charged in 2009 with domestic abuse had her case dropped, for the sensible reason that she was actually the one being abused.

Upon dismissal, Jane Doe was sent a bill for “unpaid court costs” of $718.38, again involving counsel fees. Nearly a decade later, she tried to get her case expunged (a 2016 law had made this easier), but a district court ruled she could not. Why? She still owed court costs she had never been able to pay in the first place.

In Iowa, it seems, those who see their charges dropped can be subjected to more costs and fines than if they’d been convicted.

Comprehensive COVID-19 Screening Would Pay for Itself Many Times Over

Dee Gill on more ambitious testing than anything the United States has tried yet as we await widespread vaccination:

A nationwide COVID-19 screening program that includes quick verification of positive test results would provide economic benefits far beyond its considerable costs, according to new research out of UCLA and Harvard. A two-test protocol could spur economic recovery by greatly reducing the number of people and businesses sidelined by COVID-19–related fears and unnecessary quarantines, as well as lowering actual sickness and death rates.

The study analyzes three hypothetical protocols for federally funded screening programs that test large swaths of the mostly asymptomatic population every 4, 7, 14 or 30 days. Any one of the scenarios would induce GDP growth that generates more than enough additional tax revenue to pay for the testing costs, according to findings detailed in a working paper by UCLA’s Andrew Atkeson and Harvard’s Michael C. Droste, Michael Mina and James H. Stock.

The idea is to pair a cheaper rapid test with a more expensive, more accurate test to shorten quarantines, keep schools open and ease fears.

As the study points out, while there’s good news on the vaccination front, but we still don’t have one approved or in mass production.

How Your Brain Tricks You Into Taking Risks During the Pandemic

Marshall Allen and Meg Marco, reporting for ProPublica:

[Psychologist, writer and champion poker player Maria] Konnikova’s psychology expertise tells her that most people have a hard time thinking through the uncertainty and probabilities posed by the pandemic. People tend to learn through experience, and we’ve never lived through anything like COVID-19. Every day, people face unpleasant and uncertain risks associated with their behavior, and that ambiguity goes against how we tend to think. “The brain likes certainty,” she said. “The brain likes black and white. It wants clear answers and wants clear cause and effect. It doesn’t like living in a world of ambiguities and gray zones.” […]

Good public health communication requires testing messages to make sure they are interpreted correctly by a wide range of people, [Carnegie Mellon University psychologist studying risk and decision-making Baruch] Fischhoff said. “Our official communicators have dropped the ball, and they have been undermined by people who don’t have the public’s interest at heart,” he said.

National Security Petri Dish

It’s easy to lose sight of just how poorly our government has handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tucked away in this piece by Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs about Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, is some perspective which offers biting criticism:

O’Brien’s trip to Asia came at a delicate moment in the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. outbreak is again surging, with the country recording more than 140,000 new cases a day the week of his departure.

Vietnam, by comparison, has reported just over 1,300 cases since the pandemic began. Some Trump advisers remarked that there may have been more cases just in the president’s orbit — including the president himself, and most recently, his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr.

Vietnam’s total cases are just 1 percent of the United States’ daily cases.

And so the Americans were treated like “human Petri dishes” with precautions such as meals left outside hotel room doors, tests performed by officials in head-to-toe protective gear, restricting the guests to a single hotel floor and not allowing the Air Force flight crew to stay in Vietnam while the delegation conducted its business.

All of these seem like wise precautions, since at least three members of the flight crew developed symptoms and tested positive while on the trip.