From TPM Reader JM (this one got to me perhaps more than any other we’ve published so far) …

My COVID moment was the culmination of a year of thinking we were going to be OK, and then realizing we weren’t.

In 2019, months before the COVID crisis struck, my elderly but still brilliant mother moved from Florida to the NY exurbs to live with my family. Like anyone in their late 80s, my mother had her share of age related health issues but overall was in remarkable shape. When the crisis struck last year, we seemed to be doing all the right things: working and attending school from home, wiping down our groceries, wearing masks, etc.

However, I have teenagers, one of whom has been slowly radicalized by sociopaths on YouTube (Ben Shapiro is a favorite.). At some point, my teen decided that COVID was overblown, masks were stupid, and it would all be over on election day. (I might be a recovering conservative, but I believe in math and science like some people believe in Q or flying saucers.)

First it was his conservative podcast for the youths. Then his op-ed in the Daily Signal, hyping Trump’s “Big Lie.” Then meetings with an agency that reps former politicos on the speaking circuit.

Now, it’s narrating a four-part Fox Nation series commemorating racist shock jock Rush Limbaugh (this, according to Politico Playbook).

Below I publish TPM Reader WH‘s note. He’s also pretty high on President Biden’s speech. But he asks whether there’s any good rundown about what’s true and not true about vaccine preparation under Biden and Trump. Is it really true, as a number of publications like the Times have reported in recent days that the Biden administration is taking credit for a lot of great stuff Trump had underway? Or resorting to the devious trick of underpromising and overdelivering? (Yes, really.) Our team was actually pretty deep into the reporting on this story last year. So we are going to put that piece together. Look out for it. But I think I can preview that briefly.

In our email correspondence over many years, TPM Reader AB has often been highly – to my mind often reflexively – critical of Democrats, even to the degree that it’s led to some exasperating clashes of opinion between the two of us. With that background I was very struck by his reaction to President Biden’s speech.

I thought it was the best presidential speech I have ever heard in my lifetime.

I thought the President’s speech was very good. It was also very much Joe Biden. Obviously one couldn’t remotely imagine Donald Trump giving this speech. But I would have a hard time imagining Barack Obama giving it either. Obama’s would have been good too. But it would have been very different.

A few quick observations.

It’s too early to know for sure. But I’ve begun to wonder whether ex-President Trump’s greatest legal jeopardy may not be in Georgia, where there is what seems to be a pretty active investigation into his efforts to bully Republican officials into falsifying the 2020 election results and making him President. (We now have the actual recording of another of those bullying calls, the existence of which was reported back in January.) Trump ended his presidency in such a burst of criminality that it’s easy to lose sight of the egregiousness of so many of the individual acts. But the Georgia effort makes a good claim to be the most egregious.

TPM has been working remotely for one full year, as of today.

Because such things as space and time and memories have escaped into the ether, a photo memory app on my phone alerted me to the grim anniversary.

On this week’s podcast episode, we discuss Democrats passing the COVID relief package and handing President Joe Biden his first big legislative win — while the filibuster lurks just around the corner.

From TPM Reader RT …

I can’t really say I had a COVID moment. It was a series of COVID moments. The first was when I sat around playing with MATLAB a year ago to understand the implications of what an R0 value of three means. Like many other folks I’d seen the movie Contagion and thought I knew about reproduction numbers. But I really didn’t. I hadn’t really internalized what the mathematics implied. Staring at the numbers in disbelief. Texting my friend who is biostatistician at a major medical college hoping I was wrong. His reply was simply “Do you have enough food to last for three weeks?”. Then the long days of isolation and encounters with the maskless while trying to just simply shop for groceries. Constantly fretting if I got to close. Did I touch anything? What’s that sniffle mean? The slow decent over summer and fall into the illusion that these precautions would keep my family safe.

Then came the phone call the day after Christmas. “I don’t think your father is feeling good, can you put a mask on and come see?”

From TPM Reader LC …

I think my start of COVID era is very common: rumors and rumblings in February, a friend who’s a medical professional telling me that things were going to get bad, realizing that COVID was here when the NBA was canceled and Tom Hanks got sick, and then getting sick myself in March 2020 (I was not sick enough to get tested by March 2020 standards, but I’m 99% sure I had COVID).

However, I rather talk about a more recent, dare I say joyous, COVID moment. Based on my age, occupation, and health status, I didn’t think I’d get a vaccine until May at the earliest. My husband’s a teacher so he would be eligible before me, but my state (Georgia) has fairly strict requirements for eligibility and we weren’t sure that he would get the vaccine before the end of the month. I don’t think Georgia moved into the 1B phase until this week!