Unfortunately I think TPM Reader JB is right about this …
Continue reading “Which Side Are You On?”One other difference between Sen. Manchin and Sen. Tester you might have mentioned in your podcast this week is that Manchin is self-consciously wealthy.
While Congress is in recess this week, we’ll be watching negotiations on the infrastructure bill and presenting them to you in an evening briefing. Check in here to find out how the sausage-making is shaping up.
Continue reading “The Sausage Making: Manchin And Sinema Continue To Be Difficult In Their Own Special Ways”Like much of the reconciliation package, its chief climate provision has existed in a weird limbo for weeks.
Continue reading “The Crux Of Democrats’ Climate Plan Is Hovering Somewhere Between Life And Death”We have a lot of questions.
Continue reading “Arizona AG Posts Vid Of Himself Twirling Nunchakus For Some Reason”I’ve noted several times over recent weeks that former President Trump lacks most of the unique protections he had as President. That means the Jan 6th committee should be able to press a real investigation whereas the House committees in the previous Congress and the two impeachment processes could not. Much of this is because ex-Presidents have no executive privilege. But it’s just as much that they don’t control the Justice Department and that possession is 9/10ths of the law. The current President, in some cases directly and in others indirectly, has custody of the records of the government of the United States. But it’s a small wrinkle to this story that I want to expand on today, both because it’s interesting to know in its own right but because it’s a window into how this latest investigation really puts not only the judiciary but the elite legal profession itself on trial.
Continue reading “The Jan 6 Investigation Puts the Legal Profession on Trial Too”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Facebook continues to lie to the public with abandon. That is one of the main takeaways from the Facebook whistleblower’s testimony last week. Even now, having been called out, Facebook is frantically working to obscure and underplay its own dishonesty.
Continue reading “The Jan. 6 Committee Has The Right Idea: Now Congress Should Subpoena Zuckerberg”A Capitol Police Officer faces two counts of obstruction for allegedly urging an accused Jan. 6 rioter to delete evidence that he’d entered the Capitol.
Continue reading “Capitol Police Officer Accused Of Urging Jan. 6 Rioter To Erase Evidence”A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the plodding reconciliation negotiations, coming showdown on the Jan. 6 committee, and quasi-revival of the stalled-out voting rights push.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.
More than 200 million U.S. residents have gotten at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine with the expectation that the vaccines slow virus transmission and save lives.
Researchers know the efficacy of the vaccines from large-scale clinical trials, the gold standard for medical research. The studies found the vaccines to be very effective at preventing severe COVID–19 and especially good at preventing death. But it’s important to track any new treatment in the real world as the population-level benefits of vaccines could differ from the efficacy found in clinical trials.
For instance, some people in the U.S. have only been getting the first shot of a two-shot vaccine and are therefore less protected than a fully vaccinated person. Alternatively, vaccinated people are much less likely to transmit COVID-19 to others, including those who are not vaccinated. This could make vaccines more effective at a population level than in the clinical trials.
I am a health economist, and my team and I have been studying the effects of public policy interventions like vaccination have had on the pandemic. We wanted to know how many lives vaccines may have saved due to the states’ COVID-19 vaccination campaigns in the U.S.
In March 2021, when weekly data on state COVID-19 vaccinations started to become reliably available from state agencies, my team began to analyze the association between state vaccination rates and the subsequent COVID-19 cases and deaths in each state. Our goal was to build a model that was accurate enough to measure the effect of vaccination within the complicated web of factors that influence COVID–19 deaths.
To do this, our model compares COVID-19 incidence in states with high vaccination rates against states with low vaccination rates. As part of the analysis, we controlled for things that influence the spread of the coronavirus, like state–by–state differences in weather and population density, seasonally driven changes in social behavior and non-pharmaceutical interventions like stay-at-home orders, mask mandates and overnight business closures. We also accounted for the fact that there is a delay between when a person is first vaccinated and when their immune system has built up protection.
To check the strength of our model before playing with variables, we first compared reported deaths with an estimate that our model produced.
When we fed it all of the information available – including vaccination rates – the model calculated that by May 9, 2021, there should have been 569,193 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. The reported death count by that date was 578,862, less than a 2% difference from our model’s prediction.
Equipped with our well-working statistical model, we were then able to “turn off” the vaccination effect and see how much of a difference vaccines made.
Using near real-time data of state vaccination rates, coronavirus cases and deaths in our model, we found that in the absence of vaccines, 708,586 people would have died by May 9, 2021. We then compared that to our model estimate of deaths with vaccines: 569,193. The difference between those two numbers is just under 140,000. Our model suggests that vaccines saved 140,000 lives by May 9, 2021.
Our study only looked at the few months just after vaccination began. Even in that short time frame, COVID-19 vaccinations saved many thousands of lives despite vaccination rates still being fairly low in several states by the end of our study period. I can say with certainty that vaccines have since then saved many more lives – and will continue to do so as long as the coronavirus is still around.
Sumedha Gupta is an associate professor of Economics at IUPUI.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
At least part of the standstill over Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill is still rooted in Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-AZ) refusal to up taxes on corporations and wealthy Americans, according to Insider.
Continue reading “Report: Sinema Digs In Heels To Oppose Corporate Tax Hike While Blocking Reconciliation”
