Josh Marshall
The Great Vax Switcheroo Hits the States
According to Brett Kelman, health care reporter for The Tennessean, the state of Tennessee has completely reversed its decision to discontinue near all forms of adolescent vaccine advocacy. “We put a pause on many things, and then we have resumed all of those,” said Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey. This decision was a huge story little more than a week ago. Now it’s being completely reversed.
I thought I was done with poring over COVID case data. Things change.
I took a look at what is happening in the US on a state by state basis. It’s stunning to see. The best metric for prevalence of COVID is number of cases adjusted for population. Specifically, I’m looking at the number of new cases over a seven day period per 100,000 residents. Through this prism the crisis is overwhelmingly concentrated in three contiguous states along the Mississippi River: Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana. Plus Florida.
Even Joe noticed …
Prez Biden name-checks the Fox vaccine switcheroo. pic.twitter.com/gl3j7aH2JS
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 22, 2021
Interesting and disappointing news that the NYPD uniformed and civilian workforce significantly lags the city’s rate of vaccination. An NYPD spokesperson told the New York Post that 43% of the agency’s workforce has been vaccinated. The city’s rate is 53%. Obviously not all city cops live in New York City. But the vaccination rate in the state overall is even higher – 56%.
Remember how Arizona’s Maricopa County had to decertify and junk most of its election equipment because it had been compromised by the “audit” folks. Well, now the same thing has happened to a county in Pennsylvania.
The upshot of McCarthy’s decision to withdraw all his nominees from the Jan 6th committee is that the committee will only include people who want to investigate the insurrection. It would have been a mistake not to allow the Republicans to be represented on the committee. But having refused good faith participation, Republicans not being there is a good thing. It’s good that Liz Cheney is there. It would be good if there were other Republicans who were actually in support of a real investigation were there. But McCarthy won’t allow that. So here we are. This is the best outcome.
WTF Is Going On Here? Part II
I’ve had a slew of people asking me what’s behind the apparent about face on vaccination and COVID generally from so many rightwing influencers, media luminaries and officeholders. You’ve also sent in a bunch of emails. I’ll be publishing some of them today. I continue to be baffled by the apparent about-face.
The switcheroo is reminiscent of when the rightwing networks started putting out canned statements recanting any suggestion that voting machine companies had rigged the election. Lots of people are saying they may be reacting to some as yet unknown lawsuit. But that really doesn’t add up. Unless I’m really missing something there’s no entity that would have any standing to sue anyone or plausible shot at winning a case. So it really can’t be that.
Fox News hosts go full vaccine.
Hannity Monday night: “I can’t say it enough. Enough people have died. It absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated. I believe in science, I believe in vaccine science.”
Chris Ruddy, owner of Newsmax, announces Biden is doing a totally awesome job with the vaccines which are great.
After months of stalling Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R) gets vaccinated, calls it “safe and effective.”
Right wing homunculus Ben Shapiro: “Get vaxxed. I did. My wife did. My parents did.”
I think my colleague Nicole LaFond get at the heart of what’s going on here in this passage below.
Who Is Tom Barrack?
This big indictment of Trump confidante Tom Barrack is not anything I had on my dance card for today or any time in the future. But as Josh Kovensky suggests in our first write up of this news Barrack had his hands in all sorts of stuff in the Trump world so legal trouble was never hard to imagine. The investigation people were expecting he’d get in trouble for was the one into the Trump inaugural, that Barrack chaired.
Barrack is the guy who put Trump together with Paul Manafort when Manafort was desperate for the gig. He was also at the center of the feeding frenzy of Gulf governments and plutocrats attracted to the fee-for-service culture surrounding the Trump campaign. Barrack was in the mix in numerous parts of the Trump-Russia story but never quite at the center of it.
Enough with Persuasion
I made this point yesterday. I wanted to restate it here and add some further points: The best and most equitable path forward is to restrict non-essential public activities to those who are vaccinated or have non-subjective medical reasons for not being vaccinated.
Now, I say this recognizing that in our current political reality this is highly unlikely to happen. Red states won’t do this and rightwing courts will limit our ability to do this at the federal and state level. But it is important to understand and articulate what the right policy is even if it can’t or won’t be implemented fully. You cannot get anywhere without at least knowing where you are trying to go. At present we are in the perverse position of beginning to add new burdens to the vaccinated/responsible population (mask mandates) to make up for the persistent irresponsibility of the non-vaccinated. The social cost of low vaccination rates should be borne as much as possible by those causing the problem, the voluntarily unvaccinated. So restrict non-essential public activities to those who are vaccinated.