Reasonable Conservatives and Vaccine Mandates

Well, Biden's speech on COVID has now allowed sane and rational conservatives to stake out a position -- in favor of vaccines, but against mandates.  It is depressing to read columns by Jonah Goldberg or George Will because they drive home just how far we are apart.  On the other hand, I do believe that disagreement is healthy for democracy, so let me offer a little healthy disagreement here. Both men agree that Biden's anger and frustration with people who won't take the vaccine is understandable and justified, but does not justify a national mandate.

Will begins by denouncing the idea that rights are granted by government and can be revoked by government and says:

This nation’s Founders thought otherwise: Governments are, as the Declaration of Independence says, instituted to “secure” preexisting rights. To this end, the Constitution’s Framers gave the federal government finite, enumerated powers and reserved police power to the states.

Do I have to point out why that makes no sense at all?  If "governments" secure pre-existing rights, then presumably that rule applies to all government, whether federal or state. Yes, there are plenty of arguments for limiting federal power and leaving plenty of power in the hands of states. Regulations that are appropriate to one area may not be appropriate to another.  People in one area may have different values, different ideas of what is appropriate, etc. 

But the basic idea that any action by the federal government, outside of a few narrowly enumerated powers, is inherently tyrannical, while identical actions taken by states are inherently not tyrannical amounts to a view that the states can do no wrong.  That view has been subjected to extensive testing in the field and decisively proven wrong.  Or, to put it more directly, Will's argument here is exactly the same one segregationists used to oppose civil rights.

Obviously Will is right that it would be lawless for the President to unilaterally order such a  mandate at the snap of his fingers.  But that is not what is happening. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is going to issue such a regulation through the normal regulatory process.  OSHA has been issuing such regulations since the 1970's.  Workplace safety regulations sound very much like the sort of "police powers" that were originally reserved to the states.  Will does not say that he considers OSHA unconstitutional, only that he considers this particular regulation unconstitutional.  But he never explains why this regulation is different from other workplace regulations.  So Will should have to answer, what makes this regulation different from normal regulation?  Or, if he cannot explain that, does he consider OSHA to be constitutional at all?

As for Goldberg, it is hard to say exactly what he favors. His view appears to be that now that anyone who wants a vaccine can have one, whether to have a vaccine is a personal choice. If people who oppose the vaccine prefer 150,000 new cases and 1,500 new dead per day, that is their business.  There are three problems with this view.  The first is that people under 12 are not yet eligible for the vaccine and somehow have to be protected.  The second is that the vaccine is not 100% effective.  Countries with much higher vaccine rates than ours are having serious secondary outbreaks as a result of breakthrough infections. Pre-delta variant, we could treat the vaccine as close enough to perfect, but with the delta variant that is clearly not the case.  And finally, even if a 100% effective vaccine was available to people of all ages, there is still the problem with an outbreak on the scale we are seeing now overloading the healthcare system and limiting healthcare available for other conditions as well.

Goldberg correctly comments that Biden made a mistake in declaring victory, only to see it swept away by the delta variant, and that we will never fully defeat COVID, that it will be here to stay.  Yet he concludes by criticizing Biden for saying just that. His grounds for criticism appears to be that acknowledging that COVID is here to stay fosters a chronic crisis mode and encourages arbitrary power grabs, a fair concern.  But he also seems to consider treating 150,000 new cases and 1,500 dead per day as a crisis to be mere pandering the crisis-mongers.  "The most pro-vaccine voters and voices are often the most pro-mask, pro-school closure and pro-shutdown."  

Well, yes, but do we have to point out the opposite?  The most anti-shutdown voices became anti-mask when masks became a less intrusive alternative to shutdown, and then went on to be anti-vaccine. Being pro-all of these is a consistent view to take to halt the spread of a dangerous contagious disease.  Being anti-shutdown is to point out very real social and economic costs of the resulting isolation and loss of community.  But any rational anti-shutdown viewpoint would want to find some sort of less intrusive way to curb contagious disease.  Instead, people who are anti-all of these seem to be driven by mindless, reflexive opposition.  Herein lies the problem with denouncing Biden's speech as culture wars.  Of course it is culture war.  Absolutely any action to curb the pandemic is culture war.  

Can We Match Republican Mobilization with Abortion?

 Let me make clear from the outset that abortion is not my issue.  I realize it is heresy on my side, but I fully agree that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, that you will scan the Constitution in vain for any mention of anything even tangentially related to abortion, and that in the end abortion will have to be left to the political process.

That being the case, I am absolutely thrilled to see Texas pass an outrageous law allowing absolutely anyone to sue anyone however tangentially related to providing an abortion, and that the Supreme Court may finally repeal Roe in the upcoming session.  My reasons are ones of naked political calculation.

Republicans are incredibly fired up and mobilized right now, over two issues – COVID mitigation, and the supposedly “stolen” 2020 election.  They are mobilizing at the most granular level, taking over the Republican Party apparatus from the ground up.  They are particularly interested in taking over school boards to block any mandatory COVID mitigations, and all election offices to insure that no Democrat can ever ”steal” another election.

It is normal for the party that lost an election to be fired up and mobilized.  Normally, however, they mobilize over genuine complaints and real issues.  When the Tea Party mobilized to block Obamacare, when MAGA mobilized to oppose immigration, and when the Resistance mobilized to save Obamacare – well, Congress really did pass and then attempt to repeal Obamacare, and large numbers of immigrants really were arriving from Central America.  This time, however, the election was not, in fact, stolen, and Republicans’ hysterical attempts to block all COVID mitigation is causing widespread sickness and death.

In my personal view, preventing mass sickness and death and stopping Republicans from imposing a one-party state are worthy causes that should be more than enough to cause mass mobilization among Democrats.  These are truly cases of self-preservation.   But they don’t seem to be provoking much of a reaction.

But if there is one thing that can seriously mobilize Democrats at all levels, it is a threat to abortion.

Let me vent my frustration a little about the MAGA crowd and COVID

 

Look, Ma, no mandate!

All right, MAGA crowd, let us concede that your right to unimpeded lifestyle is supreme over all, and that sickness and death are simply a natural phenomenon and therefore a morally neutral one.  How many people get sick, how many people die, how many people experience long-term health problems, whether hospitals are overloaded and people do not get adequate medical care, not just for COVID, but for a wide range of problems, are simply the workings of a virus with no moral agency and therefore cannot be treated as a moral evil.

But might I humbly suggest that even if the sickness and death caused by the virus are not evil in the moral sense, they are nonetheless bad in the sense of being undesirable.  That if your right to an absolutely unimpeded lifestyle trumps all public health concerns, nonetheless, given the choice between your unimpeded lifestyle causing less sickness and death and your unimpeded lifestyle causing more sickness and death, choosing your favored lifestyle with less sickness and death is a clear no-brainer. 

So guess what?  Getting the vaccine will not interfere with your chosen lifestyle!  Two brief visits to a pharmacy that is giving shots and perhaps a day’s sickness and it is all over!  You are free to return to your favored lifestyle with much less sickness and death than if you had not taken the shot!*

_________________________________________________________

*Yeah, I know.  Hardcore anti-vaxxers don’t accept any of these premises.  Our office deplorable has known enough people who got COVID that he has to admit that it exists, but he still denies that it is any worse than ordinary flu, or that there has been any increase in the death rate.  And he has all sorts of hypothetical horrors he can imagine about the vaccine.

A Less Optimistic Comment on COVID

 

I saw a Twitter post saying that in six months we will look back on today and marvel at how tranquil it was.

I fear that is true, and here is why.  Some time within the next six months the COVID-19 vaccine will be approved for children under 12.  And then all hell will break loose.  Parents will rush out to have their children vaccinated.  Some will demand vaccine mandates in schools to protect children.  Others will denounce vaccine in general and vaccine mandates in particular as an intolerable threat to freedom and to children’s health.  Each side desperately wanting to protect its children and fearful for their safety.

You think it is bad now?  Wait till the fight becomes one over children.

Biden's Speech -- Late in the Game, But Spot-on

 

I did not watch Joe Biden's COVID speech, but I did read the transcript and the six-

point plan at the White House website.  

It all looks good, although it would have been much better to start a lot of this before the disease got this bad.

Obviously, the announcement of a mandate for all employers over 100 employees to require either vaccine or negative test has gotten the most attention.  But that is by no means the entirety of what Biden is proposing.

Most importantly, at least from my perspective, is that he has finally acknowledge that vaccines alone will not beat the delta variant, and that we need to increase testing and treatment.  In particular, he promised to use the Defense Production Act to increase test production and to increase production of monoclonal antibodies and train medical personnel in their use. I had wondered what sort of production we have now and what is feasible, and the website contained an answer.  We are currently producing 100,000 doses of monoclonal antibodies per week, and Biden plans to increase production by 50%.  That would mean 150,000 doses per week.  Currently we are having that many new cases diagnosed per day.  Thus Biden's plans do not come anywhere close to making monoclonal antibodies routine treatment for infection. The treatment will be available, at most, to one in seven new cases.  On the other hand, increased vaccination, testing, and quarantining, if done right (a major assumption, I admit) can reduce the total number of infections and thus allow a greater percentage of infected people to be treated.  

Maybe I am being optimistic here, but I don't even see the Republican uproar about employer mandates as all that bad.  To be clear, I am not impressed by people seeing political upside because such mandates are popular.  Once the uproar gains momentum and the issue becomes yet another culture war battleground, I have no doubt the mandate will become unpopular.  

Own those libs!

But I am optimistic that the uproar over the vaccine mandate will take the focus off testing and treatment and make them less of culture war issues.  After all, Republicans passionately oppose any sort of lockdown or restriction in activity to stop contagion. When masks became an alternative to lockdowns, Republicans came out against masking.  And once vaccines became an alternative to either, Republicans came out against vaccines, or at least against requiring vaccines.  So why not come out against testing while you are at it?  But if testing is less something liberals are trying to force over and more something that is just becoming more and more available in drugstores everywhere, maybe it can avoid being a culture war issue.  (OK, that is very optimistic).

And when even what medication to use to treat COVID becomes a culture war issue, maybe we can hope the medication that cured Donald Trump and is being pitched by Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott can manage to avoid controversy.

Hey, I can dream.

An Unconventional Remembrance of 9-11

Today is the 20th anniversary of 9-11. To those of us old enough to remember, it means memorials, and a vow never to forget.

It also means that the generation graduating from high school this year and heading off into the world -- to the job market, to college, and some to the military -- were not even born when the event occurred and will never understand the shock of that day -- just as my generation will never understand the shock of the Kennedy assassination.

We vow never to forget, but forgetting is inevitable as one generation replaces the next.  We should teach our memories to the younger generation.  But it is unfair to expect the younger generation to feel the same emotional resonance that we fee.

The Latest from Trumpistan Facebook

 

Why no prominent Democrats?

Every once in a while one of the posts I see from Trumpistan Facebook just gets to be too much for me.  In the midst of so many notable Republican anti-vaxers dying of COVID, someone noticed that the affliction just doesn't seem to be affecting prominent Democrats.  The obvious conclusion -- some sinister conspiracy.

At Last, Some Meaningful Statistics Out of Afghanistan

Something has been badly off about the figures coming out of Afghanistan.  I have heard the Biden Administration give a figure of about 20,000 Afghans who have worked with us, and 70,000 counting family members.  Other estimates have run as high as 300,000.  And while there has been happy talk about nearly 120,000 people evacuated from the airport, somehow the government has never told us how many are Afghans versus allies evacuating their own nationals.

This article finally has some sort of meaningful estimates.  It gives figures of 31,000 people evacuated by the US from August 17 to August 31, including about 23,000 Afghans. The others evacuees were presumably other countries removing their own people.  On the other hand, the article also reported General Mark Milley as saying 20,000 Afghans had been brought to the US and another 40,000 at bases in other countries.  It is not clear if these figures are contradictory or if some are Afghans evacuated by other countries.  The article also gives the figure of 120,000 people evacuated, meaning only about half of them were Afghans.

The article gives a figures of 18,000 to 20,000 Afghans who worked for the US and applied for Special Immigrant Visas (SIV's).  Counting family members there were about 70,000 in the SIV pool.  It estimates another 50,000 who were eligible for the program because of their work with the US government but did not apply or were turned down.  Finally, it gave the number of 265,000 Afghans "and their families" "may have had some form of eligibility to apply for a U.S. visa because of their work with U.S. governmental and nongovernmental organizations during the past two decades."  

It is not clear from the article whether that refers to a total of 265,000 people, or whether family members are in addition to the 265,000.  If the family members are in addition to the 265,000, and we assume about 3.5 family members for each applicant (based on 20,000 SIV holders yielding 70,000 family members), the total would come to about 927,500 people eligible for visas!  Not only is this an impossible number to airlift out, it comes to approximately 2.8 percent of the total population.  If we were truly dealing with that number, I have more sympathy for the Administration, faced with a truly impossible task.  

If the total was 265,000 -- well, it would have taken at least of month of airlifts all at peak efficiency, to say nothing of the logistical burden of providing for so many, but maybe.  If we were dealing with 70,000 SIV holders, that was clearly possible to go, given that we evacuated nearly that many.  Another 50,000 potential SIV holder should be possible with better planning.  

There is still a large element of the fog of war here.  I await more reliable information about who we got out and who we left.

Follow up on Economic Royalism

On the other hand, I supposing mocking right wingers for not living up to their economic royalist principles on COVID may  not necessarily be endorsing those principles. 

I have seen a number of posts commenting that if right wingers are so concerned about "demographic replacement," maybe they should stop raising the death rate for their own demographic!  That is certainly not an endorsement of demographic replacement theory, just an expression of frustration and an attempt to connect at some level.