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!*

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*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.