Here is a topic I don’t see enough discussion of. We hear a lot today (for good reason) that voting rights and the protection of democracy is the issue. Social spending, climate, immigration, infrastructure … they’re all important but they all rest on having a working democracy where voting determines who runs the government. All true. But the laws we’re actually talking about, the ones that are written and ready to pass (if Sinema and Manchin would let them come to a vote) or even in concept don’t actually address the main issue that has everyone’s attention. They’re critical. Don’t get me wrong. But they don’t actually address the catalog of situations in which you hold a vote, count the votes and then simply set the votes aside if you don’t like the result.

I start with the proviso that we are in a radically better position than we were two years ago. Most of the population is vaccinated. We have experience treating COVID. We have effective antivirals coming online. But this morning in New York City has a feeling of déjà vu. My inbox is filled with a rush of cancellations: school holiday events; a journalists’ drinking get-together that had just restarted after a two year hiatus postponed the morning of; lines outside testing centers snake around the block. It all has the feel of Spring of 2020 when everything was normal and then on a dime it wasn’t.

Let me share a couple more thoughts on boosters.

The UK is currently in a mad dash to get boosters into the arms of as many people as possible. We’re certainly pushing boosters here too. But it’s a singular focus there in a way that is not the case here. That’s the first, second and third part of their strategy basically. They’re advising work from home and universal masking. But basically it’s to buy time for getting boosters in as many arms as possible over the next two to three weeks. They’re deploying the military to set up pop-up clinics, advising hospitals to suspend routine care to focus on booster administration. They have a goal of getting every adult in the country boosted by the end of the month. So really they’re pulling out all the stops.

We have the first study (still un-peer-reviewed) that advances an evidence-based hypothesis for why Omicron COVID may actually produce milder disease. I want to emphasize this is a single study, which has not undergone peer review. The gist is that Omicron was much faster at taking hold in the air passage leading to the lungs but much less efficient in replicating in lung tissue. The surmise is that this makes it much better at jumping from host to host – which is demonstrated by rate of spread in multiple countries – but much less efficient at creating illness once it gets into the lungs.

NBC sparked a flurry of discussion a couple hours ago when it reported that Democrats were “shelving” the Build Back Better bill and switching to passing voting rights legislation.

So many people involved in the “voter fraud” sham are simply stone cold liars or the types who play act believing things with some winks and nods to themselves. But the movement also has lots of people who genuinely believe. And now one of them has been indicted for running a guy off the road and putting a gun to his head back in October 2020.

Mark Aguirre is a former Houston PD captain who was hired by a straight-out-of-central-casting “conservative activist” named Steven Hotze. They were operating as what Aguirre identified to police as the “Liberty Center,” which seems to have been a self-styled private Big Lie-centered investigation. (It’s full legal name is The Liberty Center for God and Country, because of course it is.)

I’m sorry I’ve done less posting than usual over the last week or so. I’ve been trying to put together my ideas about the last 5 or 6 years and the way America often today seems embattled and besieged in a global system and media landscape that she herself largely created. How did we get here from the breezy global primary America enjoyed in the 1990s? What broad lessons can we draw or what connections can we make connecting our current moment to the beginning of our era in 1989, 1990 and 1991?

It’s a challenging topic in itself. But it’s also challenging for me because my writing muscles aren’t really trained for writing at length. TPM has given me a lot of practice writing a rapid fire thousand words or even closer to two thousand. I can do it multiple times a day if the need arises. But much over that length is where writing shifts from the dynamics of a sprint to something more like distance or endurance running. There’s more pacing involved, more strategy and organization than just run absolutely as fast as you can until the finish line. Anyway, it’s giving me a chance to flex some of these muscles. So I’ll report back when I can.

I want to give you another update on COVID. The outlook … well, it’s not good. Certainly not in the near-term. Here is a good summary of the emerging science of Omicron from Dr. Eric Topol. We now have at least ten lab studies that look at immune response to Omicron, specifically neutralization studies which broadly measure the body’s first line of defense against infection. The more studies we see the more they reinforce each other. Very limited protection against infection with a two dose mRNA regimen, though presumably still substantial protection against severe illness and death. A booster appears to get up towards the level of protection against infection two doses provided against Delta, though not quite as high. Two doses and prior infection also seems to produce fairly effective protection. Three doses and two doses plus infection seem to be in the same ballpark of protection.

Cristina Cabrera has all the top quotes from the Fox hosts with their hair on fire begging Mark Meadows to get the President to condemn and end the insurrection as it happened on January 6th. But for my money the best isn’t even a Fox host, or at least not formally: It’s Donald Trump Jr. “He’s got to condemn this shit ASAP. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.”

Earlier we noted the mystery of congressional candidate George A. Santos’ driving habits. Despite having a short commute (in miles if not in time) of 15 miles from Queens into Manhattan he apparently manages to drive at least 1,000 miles a week. And it’s costing him a ton of money. But now TPM Reader AL may have solved the mystery: Santos might be commuting each day to work in Florida!