There are a lot of caveats to these numbers. They’re not from a peer reviewed study but rather the latest data from the Israeli health ministry. While the Pfizer mRNA vaccines remains highly effective at preventing hospitalization and serious illness (over 90%), the efficacy against infection with the Delta variant has dropped markedly.
Twenty five years ago the Oklahoma City bombing took the lives of 168 people. The building collapse in Surfside, Florida appears set to mark a death toll with only about 20 fewer lives lost. And it was pretty clear from day one that the tragedy was heading in this direction.
In the United States, or at least in parts of it, we are moving into a post-COVID era. Or more accurately, we are moving into a post-Crisis COVID era. There’s still COVID. People are still getting sick. People are still dying. But in regions of high vaccination illness and severe disease are becoming rare enough and manageable enough that society can begin to function more or less as normal. Understanding the dynamics of this new era, the precise levels of vaccine efficacy, the specifics of asymptomatic disease and so forth have become a minor obsession of mine. And TPM Reader JL, an academic in the field, has been a helpful.
Here are some basic questions. How effective are the mRNA vaccines and how effective are they against the Delta variant of Covid? To the extent the vaccines are marginally less effective against Delta, do they continue to provide very high levels of protection against symptomatic and severe disease?
From TPM Reader TD from 8:48 AM …
I am currently under a shelter in place order, because, 8 armed men were stopped on a nearby highway.
2 are currently in custody, some are in the nearby woods and others are still in vehicles.
They claim not to be sovereign citizens, but that the laws of the United states don’t apply to them.
Dominion Voting Systems is already suing Rudy Giuliani personally for defamation. It’s now pulling the former mayor and currently suspended lawyer into its suit against Fox News.
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Yesterday we were talking about GETTR, a purported Trumpite social network which looked from the visuals more like a hook-up site or worse. It was the project of (apparently) recently canned Trump spokesman and gatekeeper Jason Miller, though Trump himself said he wouldn’t be joining it. There were other oddities beyond the name – like the fact that it seemed to be populated by posts scraped from Twitter.
But overnight things got much more weird.
The US economy finally gots its fat jobs report after two shaky months. The US economy added 850,000 jobs in June.
Never Trump Republicans come in for a lot of grief and often rightly so. But at least they’re not JD Vance. He’s the Yale graduate looking to start a political career whose 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy presented him as a voice for the forgotten culturally conservative culture of rural America who actually came from that world as opposed to Queens. An authentic intellectual from ‘real America’ who eschewed the hyperpartisanship of the times. Alas, it turned out that Trump was a political meal ticket after all. And now he’s deleting his old tweets asking God’s forgiveness for Trump to start running as the new MAGA senator from Ohio.
TPM Reader TL follows up on my discussion yesterday of Teddy Roosevelt and where he fits in the ranking of US Presidents, specifically whether the seemingly consistent decision to place him 4th is rating him too high. TL makes what I think is probably the best case that can be made, and it’s a pretty good one. It focuses on the fact that Roosevelt is in many ways the first modern President. He’s the first American President who approached the job in a way that would be fundamentally recognizable to us today.