Editors’ Blog
The Numbers Start to Clarify
A central mystery of the Delta variant in recent weeks hasn’t just been limited data but also wildly inconsistent data. The Israeli health ministry has been placing vaccine efficacy somewhere near 40% against infection – vastly lower than the original clinical trials and much lower than other current measurements. But a slew of Israeli public health experts have challenged those tabulations. A UK study in that went through May and was published in The New England Journal of Medicine on July 21st placed efficacy against the Delta variant at 88%, only slightly less than against the Alpha variant. But yesterday another UK study was released by the Imperial College London which showed substantially reduced efficacy against infection – though apparently not hospitalization and disease.
This study puts vaccine efficacy against all infection at 49% and against symptomatic infection at 59%.
Boy Congressman Insurrection-ing Again?
There was a heated school board meeting last night down in Buncombe County, North Carolina, which includes Asheville. The topic was a new mask mandate for the county’s schools. But it’s a targeted one: the board voted to mandate masking for those who don’t show proof of vaccination. The vote was 4 to 2 in favor. Protesters insisted that this constituted dictatorship if the board didn’t agree to vote again.
But that wasn’t the end of it. The meeting attracted a pride of feral Trumpers who tried to disrupt it and pushed all sort of conspiracy theories about like “the fake vaccine is the plandemic.”
You can see one of the outbursts here.
Great deep dive into the American right-wing’s love affair with authoritarian nationalist Viktor Orbán. Tucker Carlson is actually late to the party.
I’m so glad Matt Shuham ran this to ground. It’s the story of how the GOP’s latest COVID dodge and anti-immigrant freakout started with someone flagging down a police officer in La Joya, Texas because they saw what they believed was a family of immigrants sneezing and coughing and not wearing masks at the local Whataburger.
Where Things Stand: QAnon Congresswoman Goes To Iowa 
The tour of terribleness is, apparently, just getting started.
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Watch The New Episode Of The Josh Marshall Podcast: Burdening The Vaccinated
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is now live! This week Josh and Kate discuss infrastructure progress, the January 6 investigation and the COVID pandemic still raging among the unvaccinated.
Watch below and email us your theme song submissions and questions for next week’s episode. This is the last week for theme song submissions, please send entries in by Sunday 8/8/21 the latest!
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Richard Trumka, Dead at 72
Richard Trumka is dead at 72. Head of the AFL-CIO and a fixture of the American labor movement for decades. Heart attack appears to be the cause of death but that’s still supposition. More to come.
New GOP Message on Surging COVID: It’s Juan’s Fault!
As Delta COVID surges cases across the country and fills hospitals in low-vaccine Red States, Republicans have been test-driving a range of messages to maneuver out of accountability for their reckless policies on vaccines. They’ve tried a belated effort to push vaccines, deny they were ever against them and then sidled back to opposing various kinds of vaccine mandates. But over the last couple days they’ve started pushing a new message: the problem is undocumented immigrants “pouring” over the US-Mexico border. Embattled Florida Governor Ron DeSantis put it this way (emphasis added) in a fundraising email sent out yesterday: “Joe Biden has the nerve to tell me to get out of the way on COVID while he lets COVID-infected migrants pour over our southern border by the hundreds of thousands. No elected official is doing more to enable the transmission of COVID in America than Joe Biden with his open borders policies.”
I want to flag again what I discussed here yesterday. Only a handful of jurisdictions across the country are tracking and publishing COVID data broken down by vaccination status. As far as I can tell all of two states – Oregon and Virginia and one county, San Diego County in California – are tracking so-called breakthrough infections in any way that gives us a helpful understanding of the state of the pandemic.