“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
Facing rampant viral spread, 2,000 dead Iowans with more surely on the way and hospitals packed to capacity, Gov. Kim Reynolds issued — finally — a sort of statewide mask mandate.
“If Iowans don’t buy into this,” she said, “we lose.”
Unfortunately, she’s spent the summer and fall helping Iowans buy into the importance of masks, distancing and avoiding gatherings at rallies like the one she appeared at in a Des Moines with Donald Trump.
Gov. Reynolds helping Iowans buy into the importance of masks, distancing and avoiding gatherings in Des Moines with Donald Trump.
Mandates from the state certainly matter. Prohibiting group fitness classes will lead to classes being canceled, which will mitigate spread, even if it’s not enough to save our healthcare system from being overwhelmed. Requiring masks at indoor public places will lead a segment of Iowans who weren’t to finally wear masks.
But Reynolds has taken away, or at least severely undercut, her other, best tool: messaging.
That’s critical to getting that buy in because, as she admitted in her address undercutting her message, the state doesn’t have the enforcement capabilities to police everywhere.
So, while there’s a lot of photos of her out in her Iowa flag mask (modeling good behavior!), her other actions (modeling bad behavior!) and continued, vocal resistance to issuing a mask mandate coupled with weak statements about trusting Iowans to do the right thing, sent a different message: mask wearing was a choice like a scarf in winter not a requirement like a seatbelt in a car.
Her own press releases were missed opportunities, always touting the continuation of State Public Health Emergency Declaration and never highlighting the mitigation efforts they contained. In the age of social media, the headline matters most.
Her own department of public health, responsible for her ballyhooed public awareness campaign for those segments that are still unaware we’re in the midst of a raging, deadly pandemic, fumbled with an idiotic, now-deleted post.
In Reynolds’ press conferences and other remarks, she always seemed to focus on the loopholes and exceptions to her mitigation efforts, instead of focusing on the requirements. I’ve spent the last eight months re-writing her press releases to emphasize the mitigation parts.
Even in her address, she made a point of acknowledging there wasn’t a real way to enforce any of the mandates or measures.
And so, while Iowans brace (or don’t) for a rapidly worsening state of the pandemic, instead of clear messages, we’re left to wonder: do we have a mask mandate?
If Reynolds hadn’t spent her time, effort and political attention undermining mitigation efforts by muddying her message and doing another, Iowans would be much more likely to “buy into this.”
