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”The Jan. 6 Committee Has The Right Idea: Now Congress Should Subpoena Zuckerberg
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”Capitol Police Officer Accused Of Urging Jan. 6 Rioter To Erase Evidence
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”Time To Act
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.
How Many Lives Have Coronavirus Vaccines Saved? We Used State Data On Deaths And Vaccination Rates To Find Out
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.
Building an accurate model
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.
Vaccines saved lives
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.
Report: Sinema Digs In Heels To Oppose Corporate Tax Hike While Blocking Reconciliation
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”GOP’s Anti-CRT Hysteria Leads To Requiring Teachers To Find ‘Balance’ On The Holocaust
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.
The Inevitable Outcome
A top administrator for the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, Texas, actually told teachers to provide students with “other perspectives” on the Holocaust in their classroom libraries last week.
- “Make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives,” Gina Peddy, the school district’s executive director of curriculum and instruction, told the teachers during a secretly recorded meeting on Friday.
- Peddy cited Texas’ new law that bans “critical race theory,” a term conservatives have distorted to encompass any classroom learning material that discusses systemic racism.
- Peddy’s directive came during a training session after a teacher in the district was reprimanded for having an anti-racism book in her classroom.
- The GOP lawmaker who wrote the bill, state Sen. Bryan Hughes (R), insisted that Holocaust denialism wasn’t part of the plan. “I’m glad we can have this discussion to help elucidate what the bill says, because that’s not what the bill says,” he said.
- Meanwhile, “teachers are literally afraid that we’re going to be punished for having books in our classes,” an elementary school teacher told NBC News.
Jan. 6 Committee Testimony Delays
The House select committee moved to slap criminal contempt charges on former White House adviser Steve Bannon after he skipped a scheduled deposition on Thursday, and his absence seemed to have shaken up the proceedings with the other subpoenaed Trump foot soldiers (ex-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, ex-Defense Department official Kash Patel and Trump social media chief Dan Scavino).
- Patel was scheduled to testify on Thursday as well, while Meadows and Scavino were slated to appear in front of the panel today.
- The committee has decided to postpone the depositions with those three men, according to CNN and MSNBC.
Appeals Court Rules Against DOJ In Challenge To Texas Abortion Ban
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Thursday rejected the Justice Department’s request to reinstate a lower court order that temporarily suspended the enforcement of the six-week abortion ban in Texas.
- The decision is likely to be appealed in the Supreme Court, where the conservative majority allowed the ban to take effect last month.
GOP Guv Threatens Reporter For Flagging Online Security Breach
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) threatened criminal prosecution against a reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Thursday for informing the state’s Department of Education that teachers’ Social Security numbers were visible in the HTML source code of the department’s web pages.
- Parson accused the reporter of being a “hacker” who was part of a “political game by what is supposed to be one of Missouri’s news outlets” and was “attempting to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet.”
- The Post-Dispatch pointed out the obvious, which is that the journalist informed the state government of his findings because it’s, uh, bad to display people’s Social Security numbers online!
- The paper held off on publishing the reporter’s story on the website flaw until the education department fixed it.
Sinema’s Numbers With Dems Are Just Atrocious Back Home
As she continues to stonewall the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-AZ) net disapproval among likely Democratic primary voters is 70 percent, according to a new poll by progressive group Data for Progress.
- Keep in mind, though, that her primary isn’t until 2024.
? Morning Memo Radio ?
That’s Just Like, Your Opinion, Man
After Trump declared on Wednesday that Republicans “will not be voting” in the 2022 or 2024 elections if “we don’t solve” the 2020 election, National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) chair Tom Emmer responded with this on Thursday: “He’s a private citizen and he’s entitled to his own opinion.”
Bill Clinton Was Hospitalized Earlier This Week
The former president is “on the mend” and “in good spirits” after being admitted to UCI Medical Center in Orange, California on Tuesday evening for a “non-Covid-related infection,” his spokesperson, Angel Ureña, announced on Thursday night.
The Right-Wing Media Cesspit
Fox News host Tucker Carlson made this dig at Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay Cabinet member, for going on paternity leave after the birth of his adopted twins:
Taking care of your newly born children? Hah! How gay is that, folks? [Seinfeld guitar riff]
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McConnell States That Revival Of Stalled Voting Rights Push ‘Is Going Nowhere’
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Thursday declared that the new voting rights bill Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is set to bring to the floor next week is “going nowhere.”
Continue reading “McConnell States That Revival Of Stalled Voting Rights Push ‘Is Going Nowhere’”Where Things Stand: Sinema Is Fundraising For Dems In Europe Right Now Because What Could Be More Pressing
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) is spending her Senate recess in Europe, fundraising for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, her office confirmed to the New York Times this week.
It’s curious that Sinema has taken it upon herself to be a shining visage for the Democratic Party overseas when her mere existence as a senator is holding up the entire party agenda. But that, we are coming to learn, is par for the course for the Arizona senator.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Sinema Is Fundraising For Dems In Europe Right Now Because What Could Be More Pressing”The Sausage Making: Some Dems Champing At The Bit For Legislative Win Before Worrisome Virginia Election
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: Some Dems Champing At The Bit For Legislative Win Before Worrisome Virginia Election”