It started with “Fox and Friends” host Steve Doocy on Monday morning, urging viewers to get the COVID-19 vaccine because it will “save your life” — all while his co-host Brian Kilmeade hedged that “we’re not doctors” and said the network anchors aren’t going to “go there and give you other medical advice.” (FWIW, Doocy has been a encouraging viewers to get the shot for some time now, unlike some of his co-hosts.)
Join
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.
From a TPM Reader …
Watching anti-vaxx harden into a MAGA/GOP loyalty test reminds me, yet again, of an important insight into: Trump’s is a follower of the right-wing irreality, not its leader. And the way we know this to be true is that, if Trump had the power to sway (and not simply surf) the conservative outrage mob, it would have been in his interest to claim credit for developing the vaccines. He can’t because he doesn’t have that ability to do so. Trump is good at getting his name on things that he didn’t build. That’s the best way to understand Trumpism, too.
This isn’t totally right. But there’s a lot in it that is right.
The insider sheets this morning paint Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats in a pretty tough bind, with Republicans holding most or all of the cards. Schumer is creating a put up or shut up moment for the bipartisan mini-bill by scheduling the first of several votes on the deal for this Wednesday. If Republicans don’t produce 10 votes, either 500 billion or a trillion of ‘hard’ infrastructure falls by the wayside and that in turn endangers the series of compromises that gets all 50 Democratic Senators lined up for the big infrastructure reconciliation package where most of the big progressive priorities are housed.
But this misstates the dynamics at play or rather places the initiative or leverage in Republican hands more than it is. Coverage in the big outfits like the Post seems entirely oblivious to this part of the story and takes Republican stalling tactics at face value, as no more than good faith efforts to write legislative language. Let’s start with the reality that this will be a months long, really complicated process. Democrats have to carry all of it alone with Republicans trying to upend it at every stage. Schumer is pressing forward aggressively now both because Republicans don’t hold the deciding hand here and to ensure that they don’t.
Read More
Texas House Democrats venture to D.C. is not only keeping the state from passing restrictive voting laws during the state’s special session. It’s also at least temporarily blocking the state legislature from passing a new law that would further discourage teachers from discussing race and systemic racism in Texas classrooms.
JoinWe’re now more than two weeks into Donald Trump publicly insisting that the January 6th insurrection was a righteous act and that the federal government must free and/or drop charges against everyone involved. He also continues to demand retribution against the Capitol Police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt while defending Congress was the attack. To date, none of the journalists with access have pressed any congressional Republicans to respond to these demands from the leader of their political party.
Getting or recording responses is a major priority for us this week. If you see any examples in print or electronic media please contact us with details.
The Republican plan in the Senate for months has been to cause delay and create uncertainty. As Democrats got behind a global reconciliation outline last week, Republicans insisted they needed more time to finalize the bipartisan mini-bill. Now Chuck Schumer says it’s got to come to a vote this week. No more delays. We’re live-blogging that story is it unfolds on Capitol Hill.
There’s no longer any question. We’re in the midst of a wave of new COVID infections, driven largely by the highly contagious Delta variant. Little more than a month ago Israel’s daily case count was in the single digits. It’s now crested over 1,000 a day. Great Britain has seen a similar trajectory and cases counts are rising rapidly in almost every US state. And these are only the parts of the world that have the luxury of widely available vaccines. But in those highly vaccinated countries, the chained relationship between infection, hospitalization and mortality has also clearly been broken. So are we heading back to something like we saw in the Spring of 2020 or the winter of 2020-21 or are reacting to infection numbers in a way that is simply outdated in the context of widespread vaccination?
Many public health experts and officials will tell you that this is the point of vaccines: to prevent death and serious illness, not notional infections which may cause no symptoms at all. Indeed, there’s a real debate about what constitutes infection or cases of COIVD. COVID can briefly take hold and reproduce in a person’s nasal cavity and upper respiratory system before being knocked down by effective vaccines. That will produce a positive result on a PCR COVID test. But it’s an open question whether we should be treating that as an infection or a case of COVID for the purposes of setting public policy or judging our success in emerging from the pandemic.