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RSN: Have We Reached Peak Trump Yet? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 01 February 2021 09:32 |
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Ash writes: "Is Trump destined for a triumphant return to the Oval Office, or has he jumped the shark once too often?"
January 6, 2021 | Then President Donald J. Trump's voice and image are broadcast to a crowd of supporters at the Ellipse near the White House telling them to go to the Capitol and 'fight like hell.' (photo: John Minchillo/AP)
Have We Reached Peak Trump Yet?
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
01 February 21
 s the wounded Trump animal shelters in splendor @Mar-a-Lago, it plots new counterattacks against pursuers and detractors alike and a return to power it sees as its birthright. Is Trump destined for a triumphant return to the Oval Office, or has he jumped the shark once too often?
Trump clearly still wields fearsome power. With his naked attempt to convert the American Democratic Republic to a dictatorship under his control thwarted by over 81 million voters in the largest voter turnout in US history, he has turned his attention to consolidating his power over the Republican Party. The vast majority of Republicans are clicking their heels in compliance, vowing to go down with the SS Trump before surrendering. But there’s a book they might want to read first.
Rick Wilson is a Republican strategist, some might say operative. He’s no fan of Donald Trump. His 2018 New York Times bestseller titled Everything Trump Touches Dies underscored the harsh reality of doing business with Trump: your interests are subservient to his, and it’s not a matter of if he will cash you in, it’s only a matter of when.
Though his supporters can little see it, Trump is, if nothing else, an epic meltdown machine. A serial trainwreck in motion looking for the next curve in the tracks to derail, hurling all passengers into the cold night. Take note, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, that means you.
In fairness to McConnell and McCarthy, in the moments after the Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters at his direction, both, clearly shaken, moved to repudiate and distance themselves from Trump. They have been brought back by the Republican base, better defined as the Trump base, for now. So Trump’s populism remains his strength and his most potent weapon.
Trump was a uniquely unorthodox and unconventional president wielding power in unprecedented ways. The moment when his supporters stormed the Capitol, truly believing they could overthrow the US government and keep him in power, was thus far the high point of Trump’s campaign to control American affairs. Dark though it may have been.
Tump’s supporter army, assembled of individual participants from a wide array of American communities, now proves no match for federal law enforcement. The FBI can pick at its leisure which cases to prioritize and which to monitor. Trump’s brazen, full-scale assault on the Republic having failed, the question now arises: Has he played his strongest card to no avail? That question is best answered by another question: Will Trump be president again?
If the “massive wave of defections” from Republican voter ranks after the Capitol insurrection is any indication, while Trump’s control of the party remains nearly total, the party seems to be, if not imploding, at least contracting around him.
If Trump fails now, he takes everyone and everything who supported him with him. It would be a fitting tribute to the coronavirus victims they allowed to die.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Rich Countries Should Subsidize Vaccination Worldwide |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50009"><span class="small">Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Sunday, 31 January 2021 14:00 |
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Chotiner writes: "More than half of all available COVID-19 vaccine doses have been ordered by wealthier nations; meanwhile, many of the world's poorest countries may be unable to vaccinate more than a fifth of their populations by the end of this year."
Vaccinating a fifth of the world's vulnerable population would cost less than forty billion dollars; not doing so could incur losses of more than $1.8 trillion. (photo: Umit Bektas/Reuters)
Rich Countries Should Subsidize Vaccination Worldwide
By Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker
31 January 21
 ore than half of all available COVID-19 vaccine doses have been ordered by wealthier nations; meanwhile, many of the world’s poorest countries may be unable to vaccinate more than a fifth of their populations by the end of this year. A team of economists affiliated with the University of Maryland, Harvard University, and Koç University, in Turkey, recently published a study about the potentially disastrous consequences, emphasizing both economic and moral imperatives for increasing worldwide access to COVID-19 vaccines. The authors of the study (which was commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce) found that unequal vaccine access among countries will likely lead to a “total cost for the world” between $1.8 trillion and $3.8 trillion, with up to half the losses paid for by wealthier nations. In contrast, the cost of vaccinating one-fifth of the world’s vulnerable population, as the World Health Organization’s COVAX initiative aims to do, would cost less than forty billion dollars, with expenses decreasing over time.
I recently spoke over Zoom with Selva Demiralp and Muhammed A. Yildirim, two of the paper’s authors. Demiralp, a professor of economics at Koç University, previously worked at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. Yildirim is an assistant professor at Koç University and an associate at the Center for International Development, at Harvard. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the biggest problems the global economy will face if poor countries go unvaccinated, why certain government efforts to prevent economic collapse have worked better than others, and why policymakers don’t always plan well for the future.
Equitable distribution of vaccines across countries is important for reasons of fairness and human decency, but why is it important for the self-interest of wealthier nations?
Muhammed A. Yildirim: Let me say that I think the moral argument is the most important argument, but moral arguments sometimes don’t work. We still have a lot of poverty in the world. We still have all the things that we are dealing with, like global warming and so forth. But putting that aside, we are living in this super interconnected world, right? So everything that we do, any item that we use, some parts come from China, some parts come from Mexico, and everything is co-integrated and gives us the products that we use every day. So, as economists, we simplify; we try to understand how this works. So we divide these types of interactions into categories.
The first category is final goods: the iPhone that we use as consumers, or computers that we use, or the bar of soap that we use in our everyday life. When it comes to also making these final goods, there are a lot of intermediate skills that are exchanged between countries and industries. And those are also affected. Because, if Turkey is experiencing the pandemic, let’s say, and the United States is not, and Turkish workers are experiencing sickness and so forth, what would happen is that Turkish workers would not be able to make the intermediate inputs needed for the U.S. industries to be used in their final products.
On the other hand, Turkey also makes some final products. And those also use intermediate inputs from the United States. American producers wouldn’t be able to send their intermediate inputs to Turkey. But this is not just two countries; this is happening globally. So, if you treat this disease in advanced countries only, because of the trade relationships, the advanced economies will still be affected tremendously. So that’s the bottom line of the paper. Even without the moral argument, if you’re thinking about this in terms of return on your investment, it makes sense to do this investment of vaccinating other nations.
Selva Demiralp: As economists, when we make decisions, we compare the costs with the benefits. So, in the paper, we calculate the costs of inequitable distribution of vaccines. And, under certain assumptions—and suppose we say advanced economies are vaccinated in half a year, and emerging markets can only vaccinate half of their population by the end of the year—in this scenario, we find that total global costs can be as high as $3.8 trillion. And advanced economies, due to the links that Muhammed mentioned, bear about fifty per cent of this. So, then, what we are comparing is if you contribute to something like COVAX and enable two billion doses of vaccines, you just need twenty-seven billion dollars more. But, if you don’t, and you allow the rest of the world to suffer, and let the pandemic drag down their economies, then advanced economies are going to face something close to two trillion dollars. So, when you compare twenty-seven billion dollars with something close to two trillion dollars, then the decision is trivial for an economist—you should actually invest in this COVAX initiative and avoid paying a higher toll down the road.
I think the way many people perceive the relationship between richer countries and poorer countries now is that poorer countries produce goods that rich countries then consume in some way. Why is this too simplistic?
S.D.: Clearly the relationship is much more complicated. Rich countries also have export relationships. They produce and sell to emerging markets, so, if emerging markets are still suffering from the pandemic because their income levels are low, they won’t be able to afford those goods from advanced economies. So advanced economies won’t be able to sell those exports to emerging markets. That’s one channel, plus advanced economies also import intermediate goods from emerging markets; you use those goods in order to produce your final good. So, if Turkey produces steel, which is imported by America to produce a car, and if Turkey is suffering from the pandemic, there are lockdowns and we cannot produce that steel. Then the United States won’t be able to produce the final product, which is the car. So American production is going to decline because of the ongoing pandemic in Turkey.
M.A.Y.: We looked at the industrial costs in the advanced economies and emerging markets and compared them. The most affected sectors are the manufacturing sectors, because they need the imports from the other countries. So it’s not the case that supply chains were simply divided into raw materials versus final goods, or that emerging markets were providing the cheap goods. It has become so much more interconnected in the last twenty years or so. So, when we look at the results at the industrial level, in the advanced economies, it’s the manufacturing sectors that get affected the most. In the emerging markets, it’s the service sectors, because, in the emerging markets, owing to the ongoing pandemic, people still cannot go to a restaurant.
S.D.: In the paper, we look at the sector of costs ranked from the lowest to highest for advanced economies and emerging markets in our hypothetical scenario, assuming that advanced economies get the vaccine and emerging markets don’t. The story in emerging markets is very similar to the story that we lived through in 2020, all around the world. We have seen how the services sector collapsed because people are avoiding consuming services that require close proximity.
We say that, in 2021, if emerging markets don’t receive the vaccination, the same story is going to repeat for them. But, for advanced economies, their trade exposure to emerging markets is going to be proportional to their exposure to unvaccinated emerging markets. So the more a particular sector either buys or sells goods to a sector from an emerging market, then the higher the costs borne by the particular sector are going to be.
Which sectors in advanced economies, generally, are most central to what you’re talking about?
S.D.: Agriculture and fishing, wholesale and retail manufacturing, or basic metals: these are the top three most severely affected sectors for advanced economies. And, if we dig down to look at what causes that, we see that their exposure to unvaccinated countries is higher compared with the other sectors.
We’ve now had the pandemic for almost a year. Most people around the world have not been vaccinated, even in rich countries, and we’ve seen a global economic shock. But, at least in the United States and in most of Europe, there aren’t shortages of goods that I’m aware of. You can still buy what you bought before. What have governments done over the past ten months to prevent these shocks to the supply chain that you’re talking about?
S.D.: Well, for one thing, demand declined, and then supply declined. So that’s one reason that we don’t see shortages in the market. And the second factor is that there were unprecedented amounts of monetary and fiscal stimulus. And we have seen that the Federal Reserve has actually done what it had done during the 2008 crisis. They lowered interest rates to zero. They pumped trillions of dollars into the economy. So the idea was to keep the demand alive and allow those households that are most severely affected from the pandemic to have a subsistence level of income. But that clearly doesn’t mean that the demand remains intact. Over-all global G.D.P. declined by about five per cent in 2020, but it could have been worse.
M.A.Y.: Those are the things that government intervention helped with. It would have been much worse. We had a paper about emerging markets and so forth prior to this, and we advised governments to spend. Without the government help, we would have seen shortages. We would have seen many industries collapsing.
S.D.: The pandemic started, and governments were considering lockdown policies, and we wanted to calculate the economic costs for Turkey and emerging markets. And what we have shown in that paper is that an early lockdown policy that effectively contains the pandemic is going to minimize the economic damage, because the sooner the pandemic is controlled, the sooner demand is going to normalize, and the sooner supply is going to be back into force. There won’t be any further people who get sick and drop out of the labor force, and you won’t need to implement lockdown. So one thing I can say is that if we compare those governments that implemented an early and effective lockdown, they were able to shield themselves against the pandemic. And, for them, there were fewer production interruptions on the supply side, and demand was also stronger in places like New Zealand or Sweden or Australia.
Your latest paper is making this point that as unequal as vaccine distribution may be, the economic hit is actually going to be more equal. But the economic hit of the coronavirus has hit rich countries less so far, because they have been able to provide more government support, correct?
S.D.: It depends on the particular policy approach that you have adopted. In terms of growth numbers, the economies of poor countries contracted more than the rich countries. That being said, however, I can say, in general, countries where there’s a larger informal sector were hit more heavily, because most of the stimulus packages or direct transfers are essentially channelled to the formal sector. A country like Turkey doesn’t really receive its fair share.
M.A.Y.: If you give people money through credit, people go buy luxury stuff, right? Like luxury cars. It’s a different type of economic stimulus than if you give money directly to the people in need and ask them to spend.
S.D.: I believe the share of direct transfers compared with G.D.P. is about ten per cent for the United States, but that number was more like five per cent for Turkey, for example, when we did the comparison. And it is important because, in the credit-growth-based stimulus packages, only those people who can have access, who’re eligible to get credit from the bank, will be able to protect themselves. But, in the case of a direct transfer, you actually can target the sectors that are most affected from the pandemic and provide strict income transfers.
Correct me if this is wrong, but in addition to the fairness of getting money to people who are suffering, they’re the most likely to spend the highest percentage of it, too, right?
S.D.: Yes. And advanced economies definitely did better because they could afford more. It’s not actually just the fact that you can afford more. It is also where your budget deficit was when the pandemic started, because, technically, even if you’re a poor country, you can borrow, you can increase your budget deficit, and you can provide the stimulus. But countries that started the pandemic at a bad time, if you already had a high budget deficit, like Turkey, we didn’t have much fiscal space to provide further stimulus. So I guess that’s another thing. If your macroeconomic balances were already healthy when the pandemic started, those countries were able to implement both accommodative fiscal policy and monetary policy, which would be able to offset the negative impact of the pandemic better.
You talk about this philanthropic initiative to pay for vaccines. And the total cost is about thirty-eight billion dollars, correct?
M.A.Y.: We’re saying twenty per cent of the vulnerable population [can be vaccinated with that]. Hopefully, with time, these costs go down, right? Because the vaccines are new, and they’re in the production process. Maybe next year the prices will go down per vaccine. So it’s not going to be five times thirty-eight billion dollars over all.
O.K. But even if thirty-eight billion dollars covers only twenty per cent of the vulnerable population, and even if the prices didn’t go down, we’re still talking less than two hundred billion dollars over all. Without vaccination, the economic losses you’re talking about are several trillion, even for rich countries alone. So this seems like a no-brainer—national governments should step in and just foot the bill.
S.D.: That’s our message.
M.A.Y.: And that’s the argument that you want to support on top of the moral argument, right? Because, when you talk about the moral argument, it was more about “O.K., this is a humanitarian crisis. We should be helping everybody.” You can think of it as poverty. But then we think about poverty, and what governments think about poverty, and development budgets for many countries are less than two per cent of their budget and so forth. But this is something more than a charity thing, right? This is more about an investment for your future.
S.D.: Just to reiterate, our argument is that this is not an act of charity. It’s an act of economic rationality. And the over-all message is that, when emerging markets suffer, advanced economies are going to suffer as well from an economic perspective. The prologue for our working paper is actually a quote from John Donne, “No man is an island.” So we are actually saying that, look, the suffering from other people’s losses is going to affect you in an economic way. So we say no economy is an island and that we are all connected.
There wasn’t enough testing in the United States initially, and people wondered why the government didn’t just spend a ton of money on testing, because it was clearly going to help contain the epidemic, which would help the economy. I don’t know how often a version of this has come up in every national economy, but it does seem to me as a general matter that governments should be very proactive.
S.D.: I would say that when there’s uncertainty it blurs our vision. And sometimes what seems to be very trivial is not necessarily implemented. The same thing happened with mask use. It became very political. And even though a simple mask could have been as effective as a vaccine, governments, especially the United States, didn’t push them. And sometimes a decision, even though the decision might be clear, the governments may have different political views. And, sometimes, although it may be clear to economists, maybe we cannot convey the messages to politicians. For example, at the earliest stages, everybody thought there was a trade-off. Should we save lives? Or should we save economies? But, at that point, very early on, we were saying with our first paper that there is no such trade-off. Even if you keep economies open, people will get worried about the number of cases, and you won’t be able to normalize demand because people will distance themselves from the rest of the world in a voluntary way.
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How the Christian Right Helped Foment Insurrection |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58138"><span class="small">Sarah Posner, Reveal</span></a>
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Sunday, 31 January 2021 13:59 |
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Posner writes: "The January 6th Save America March, where then-president Donald Trump incited a crowd to attack the U.S. Capitol, opened with a prayer. Trump's longtime spiritual adviser and White House adviser, the Florida televangelist Paula White, called on God to 'give us a holy boldness in this hour.'"
Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images)
How the Christian Right Helped Foment Insurrection
By Sarah Posner, Reveal
31 January 21
Christian-right activists inside and outside of government promoted the election fraud lie and claimed God told them to “let the church roar”
 he January 6th Save America March, where then-President Donald Trump incited a crowd to attack the U.S. Capitol, opened with a prayer. Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser and White House adviser, the Florida televangelist Paula White, called on God to “give us a holy boldness in this hour.” Standing at the same podium where, an hour later, Trump would exhort the crowd to “fight like hell,” White called the election results into question, asking God to let the people “have the assurance of a fair and a just election.” Flanked by a row of American flags, White implored God to “let every adversary against democracy, against freedom, against life, against liberty, against justice, against peace, against righteousness be overturned right now in the name of Jesus.”
Within hours, insurrectionists had surrounded the Capitol, beaten police, battered down barricades and doors, smashed windows and rampaged through the halls of the Capitol, breaching the Senate chamber. In video captured by The New Yorker, men ransacked the room, rifling through senators’ binders and papers, searching for evidence of what they claimed was treason. Then, standing on the rostrum where the president of the Senate presides, the group paused to pray “in Christ’s holy name.” Men raised their arms in the air as millions of evangelical and charismatic parishioners do every Sunday and thanked God for allowing them “to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs.” They thanked God “for allowing the United States of America to be reborn.”
White evangelicals have been Trump’s most dedicated, unwavering base, standing by him through the cavalcade of abuses, failures and scandals that engulfed his campaigns and his presidency — from the Access Hollywood tape to his first impeachment to his efforts to overturn the election and incite the Capitol Riot. This fervent relationship, which has survived the events of January 6th, is based on far more than a transactional handshake over judicial appointments and a crackdown on abortion and LGBTQ rights. Trump’s white evangelical base has come to believe that God anointed him and that Trump’s placement of Christian-right ideologues in critical positions at federal agencies and in federal courts was the fulfillment of a long-sought goal of restoring the United States as a Christian nation. Throughout Trump’s presidency, his political appointees implemented policies that stripped away reproductive and LGBTQ rights and tore down the separation of church and state in the name of protecting unfettered religious freedom for conservative Christians. After Joe Biden won the presidency, Trump administration loyalists launched their own Christian organization to “stop the steal,” in the ultimate act of loyalty to their divine leader.
Since even before Trump took office, his cry of “fake news” was embraced by GOP leaders and leaders on the Christian right, who reinforced their followers’ fealty by seeking to sequester them from reality and training them to dismiss any criticism of Trump as a witch hunt or a hoax. At the 2019 Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, held just months after special counsel Robert Mueller released his report on the Russia investigation, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell accused the president’s critics of “Trump derangement syndrome,” and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, urged the audience to disregard mainstream news and turn instead to the “most important name in news” — “you and your circle of friends.” A few months later, amid Trump’s first impeachment hearings, then-Rep. Mark Meadows, who would go on to become Trump’s chief of staff, encouraged Christian-right activists at a luncheon at the Trump International Hotel in Washington to counteract news reports by retweeting him and other Trump loyalists in Congress. He underlined the power of this alternative information system, claiming that recent tweets from himself and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio — who would later vote to overturn the results of November’s election — had received 163 million impressions, “more than the viewership of all the networks combined.”
Over the course of 2020, those circles of disinformation became infested with QAnon conspiracy theories about a satanic, child-sex-trafficking “deep state,” priming Trump’s White evangelical shock troops for his ultimate conspiratorial lie: that the election was stolen from him and that Biden’s victory was the result of fraud. As Trump and his legal team fanned out across the country’s courthouses and right-wing airwaves, insisting that they would prove voter fraud and reverse the results of the presidential election, Christian-right leaders and media picked up the rhetoric and ran with it. By Thanksgiving, the lie that the election had been stolen from Trump had become an article of faith.
Coverage of the Capitol insurrection has focused on such far-right instigators as the white supremacist Proud Boys and the Three Percenters, a militia group. But a reconstruction of the weeks leading up January 6th shows how a Christian-right group formed to “stop the steal” worked to foment a bellicose Christian narrative in defense of Trump’s coup attempt and justify a holy war against an illegitimate state. In late November, two federal workers, Arina Grossu — who had previously worked for the Christian-right advocacy group Family Research Council — and Rob Weaver, formed a new Christian right group, the Jericho March. The new group’s goal, according to a news release announcing its launch, was to “prayerfully protest and call on government officials to cast light on voter fraud, corruption, and suppression of the will of the American people in this election.” In fact, the Jericho March would help lay the groundwork for the insurrection.
The group held its first rally in the nation’s capital December 12th, the same day other protests against the democratic process took place there. That night in Washington, the protests devolved into violence as armed members of the Proud Boys roamed the city’s streets looking to fight, stole a Black Lives Matter banner from a historic Black church and set it on fire. The Jericho March rally, which had run most of the afternoon on the National Mall, featured a lineup of some the right’s most incendiary figures, blending conspiracies and battle cries with appeals to Christianity. Eric Metaxas, a popular author, radio host and unrelenting promoter of the false claim that the election was fraudulent, was the emcee.
In an interview from the rally posted on the influential disinformation site The Epoch Times, Weaver compared the marchers he enlisted to the capital to the story of Joshua’s army in the Bible, which encircled the city of Jericho as priests blew trumpets, causing the walls to tumble down so the army could invade. Grossu told an interviewer that the election had been “stolen” from Trump, citing Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s baseless claims about voting irregularities. Grossu promised, “God can reveal all the election fraud and corruption that stole the election from him.”
Other Jericho March speakers linked to the Trump administration pressed themes of biblical war and Christian redemption. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators, described the walls of Jericho as a metaphor for the walls around the “deep state” and pledged, “We’re going to knock those walls down.” Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone, who claimed to have been born again since his conviction for obstructing the Mueller investigation, told the crowd in a recorded message: “It was Jesus Christ who gave our president, Donald Trump, the courage and the compassion to save my life when I was unfairly and illegally targeted in the Mueller witch hunt. … My faith is in Jesus Christ, and we will make America great again and we will stop the steal.” These testimonies were punctuated with the blowing of shofars, traditionally Jewish ritual objects, to echo the trumpets sounding outside Jericho that summoned an invasion.
Among the speakers were leading figures in the subsequent insurrection. Weaver and Grossu, the rally’s organizers, sang “God Bless America” with Ali Alexander, founder of Stop the Steal and a prominent organizer of the January 6th rally. Alexander had previously attracted attention in Trump circles – he was invited to a 2019 social media summit at the White House and appeared with GOP figures such as Rep. Paul Gosar at previous Stop the Steal rallies — and has said he worked with Gosar and Republican House members Andy Biggs and Mo Brooks to plan the January 6th rally. He rallied the December 12th Jericho March crowd, declaring that the event “is only the beginning.” He urged them to return to Washington on January 20th — Inauguration Day — to “occupy D.C.” According to an archived page from the Jericho March website, organizers took up the call, planning several subsequent rallies and marches, including mobilizing for Stop the Steal’s “Wild Protest” on January 6th.
Stewart Rhodes, founder of the militia group Oath Keepers, also appeared, vowing that if Trump did not “show the world who the traitors are and then use the Insurrection Act to drop the hammer on them,” then “we’re going to have to do it ourselves later in a much more desperate, much more bloody war.” Oath Keepers have since been arrested and charged with conspiracy for allegedly helping to coordinate movement inside the Capitol siege.
Alex Jones, the far-right conspiracist radio host and Trump booster, electrified the Jericho Marchers with his invocation of the Book of Revelation, thought to prophesy Christ’s return. “Christ’s crucifixion was not our defeat, it was our greatest victory,” he shouted. “The state has no jurisdiction over any of us. Our relationship with God is sacred and is eternal.” He vowed that Biden “will be removed, one way or another.
Grossu and Weaver, though, were more than just Trump fellow travelers. They were on the payroll of the federal government, which constrains employees from engaging in certain partisan political activities. Grossu was a contractor in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights, on a contract from November 6th, 2017, through January 30th, 2021, according to an agency spokesperson. For his part, Weaver was named an adviser in the department’s Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in July 2020 and served, according to the spokesperson, through January 8th, 2021. Earlier, in 2017, Trump had nominated Weaver to serve as director of the agency’s Indian Health Service. But the nomination was withdrawn after The Wall Street Journal reported that Weaver had misrepresented his experience on his resume. Weaver leveraged his new health department role at the Jericho March, saying in the live interview that day that he worked for the federal government and claiming, without providing any details, to have “seen a lot of really hidden things that I just can’t stand.” The country, Weaver said in the interview, “stands on the shoulders of Jesus. He’s the real government.”
Weaver went on, “God told me to let the church roar.”
Grossu did not respond to a request for comment, and Weaver’s email at the Department of Health and Human Services was no longer functioning; the public relations firm that handled Jericho March media relations also did not respond to requests for comment.
Speakers at the December 12th Jericho March continued to show up at protests decrying the election as fraudulent. Jones, for example, returned to Washington on January 5th for a rally at Freedom Plaza, near the White House. That rally, according to the permit, was hosted by a group called the Eighty Percent Coalition, an apparent reference to a Gallup poll that showed more than 80 percent of Republicans did not trust the results of the election. That evening, Jones reprised his Christian nationalist bombast. Employing apocalyptic language about a coming “new world order,” he called Biden a “slave of Satan” and warned that “things are going to be rough, things are going to get bad in the future.” He added that “not everybody is going to make it, but that’s OK, because in the end, God will fulfill his destiny and will reward the righteous.”
Then he turned to the next day’s events. “Tomorrow is a great day,” he shouted. “We don’t quietly take the election fraud, we don’t quietly take the scam and believe their BS. We’ve seen the evidence. The system has had to desperately engage in this gambit to maintain control, but this will be their Waterloo, this will be their destruction.”
The next day, Trump goaded protesters to march to the Capitol. Jones is seen in video footage of the insurrection scraped from Parler and other social media giving directions to rioters through a bullhorn. The day after the insurrection, Jones claimed the White House had asked him to lead the march to the Capitol.
The events of January 6th shook the nation, but they appear to have done little to weaken Trump’s White evangelical support. A Marist College/PBS/NPR poll, conducted after January 6th, found that 63 percent of White evangelicals did not trust the election results were accurate, and a similar number, 65 percent, did not believe Trump was to blame for the violence at the Capitol. A poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found that while Trump left office with his lowest overall favorability rating since his 2016 campaign — 31 percent — his approval rate was twice as high among White evangelicals.
The Sunday after the insurrection, Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White was back in the pulpit at City of Destiny, the church she pastors in Apopka, Florida. Trump and White have been friends since the mid-2000s, when he invited her for a meeting after he spotted the blond televangelist while channel surfing. White briefly condemned “lawlessness,” but then mounted a strong defense of free speech rights and assured her congregation that “God is still at work.” She recounted the story in the first Book of Samuel, in which the Philistines stole the Ark of the Covenant. In the biblical story, the ark is considered too holy for the apostate Philistines, “the eternal enemies of God,” as White described them, to handle, and God returns it to the Israelites — evidence that, in White’s view, God will restore America to its rightful inheritors, too.
Other evangelical leaders sought to deny reality, blaming the violence of that day on antifa or Black Lives Matter protesters who they falsely claimed had posed as Trump supporters. Michele Bachmann, the former Republican congresswoman who is now a dean at Regent University, had been inside the Capitol during the January 6th siege. Speaking to a prayer call with other Christian-right leaders that evening, she said: “You know the kind of people that we were with. The nicest, friendliest, happiest — it was like a family reunion out there. It was incredible, it was wonderful, and then all of a sudden, this happens.” Of the rioters at the Capitol, Bachmann insisted that “this wasn’t the Trump crowd, this didn’t look anything like the Trump crowd or the prayer warriors.”
Lance Wallnau, a popular evangelical author, speaker and Trump loyalist who attended the January 6th protest, echoed that same theme. “This is not your typical evangelical, I’m telling you right now,” he told Metaxas on his radio program the day after the insurrection, “and they’re banging on the hoods of the police and they’re creating a scene, I said, ‘This is the local antifa mob and this is like from the playbook 101.’ ”
By January 8th, the Jericho March had posted a statement denouncing violence and scrubbed any reference to Stop the Steal’s January 6th protest.
Accountability for the former president was not on the table. Pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church of Dallas has been close to Trump for years, as one of the first evangelical leaders to endorse his candidacy in 2016. He condemned the violence but stopped short of blaming it on Trump, telling Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting that while he accepts the election results, Trump “has a right to believe” that it was stolen.
Another influential Trump ally, Franklin Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, sent an unmistakable signal to Republican lawmakers that their White evangelical base would not tolerate a second impeachment. In a Facebook post, Graham compared the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump to Judas, whose betrayal of Jesus led to his crucifixion. “It makes you wonder,” he wrote, “what the thirty pieces of silver were that Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi promised for this betrayal.”
Meanwhile, the Christian right is readying its troops for an escalation of the culture war: a campaign to delegitimize not only Biden’s presidency, but any Democratic election victory. Bachmann, during the prayer call just hours after the insurrection, claimed that Democrats also “stole” control of the Senate when Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their seats in Georgia — a development Bachmann repeatedly called a “coup.”
That narrative means that Republican lawmakers can rest assured that their most loyal base will have their back as they reject Trump’s second impeachment, obstruct the Democratic legislative agenda and refuse to accept the legitimacy of the Democratic president and Democratic leadership of Congress. The movement’s new jeremiad, a battle against the democratic process itself, is just getting started.
On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security issued a terrorism advisory bulletin that warned of the potential costs of the false claims at the heart of that battle: “Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence.”
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Get Vaccinated. Then Keep Your Mask On. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50222"><span class="small">Umair Irfan, Vox</span></a>
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Sunday, 31 January 2021 13:57 |
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Irfan writes: "After months of exhausting isolation, widespread economic pain, and an extraordinary toll on human life and health, several Covid-19 vaccines are here. Surely, this means we can stop wearing a face mask?"
Hundreds of thousands of Texans will likely get their first doses of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine starting this week at sites like this one in Robstown, Texas. (photo: Eddie Seal/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Get Vaccinated. Then Keep Your Mask On.
By Umair Irfan, Vox
31 January 21
What we know and don’t know about how Covid-19 vaccines slow the spread of the virus.
fter months of exhausting isolation, widespread economic pain, and an extraordinary toll on human life and health, several Covid-19 vaccines are here.
Surely, this means we can stop wearing a face mask?
Eventually.
As with so much else in this pandemic, there isn’t an easy answer for exactly when we can start to relax. But, clearly, the rapid rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, like the ones developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, is our best path out of the crisis.
“We have every reason to believe that these are among some of the very best vaccines that we have ever tested,” said Aaron Richterman, a fellow researching infectious diseases at the University of Pennsylvania.
Though clinical trials give us confidence that the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines block close to 95 percent of cases of the disease — thereby preventing the most severe outcomes of Covid-19 — there are still some uncertainties. Key among them is how well vaccines work to block transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Vaccines serve not only to protect individuals but also, after a certain threshold of vaccination, the population as a whole. That threshold is herd immunity — where even people who haven’t been vaccinated or infected before are protected because so many of the people around them are immune.
Transmission also has important practical consequences for the risks that arise as vaccinated individuals interact with everyone else, whether that’s in public parks, schools, households, or health care facilities. Early evidence points toward vaccines reducing transmission of Covid-19, but by exactly how much remains unclear. And that’s stirred up a fierce debate lately around how cautious we should be when talking about the power of the vaccines.
The question, given what scientists know and don’t know, is what message should people get about Covid-19 vaccines and how should they behave when they get them?
It’s a difficult needle to thread, to convey both optimism and caution, and there’s disagreement among scientists and experts over what should be the selling point of vaccines in the current moment. If you’re thinking about how your life might change after you get your shots, here’s what to consider.
What we know about Covid-19 vaccines and transmission
The main problem is that while the Covid-19 vaccines that are now available are amazingly effective at protecting recipients, it’s not clear how much they can prevent them from spreading the virus to other people. And because of that uncertainty, along with the current levels of spread of the disease, public health guidance still calls for the immunized to maintain social distance and wear face masks.
In the meantime, research is underway to figure out by how much vaccinated people can transmit the virus. During phase 3 clinical trials, the main thing researchers are looking for is how well vaccines prevent disease — that is, people getting infected and showing detectable symptoms like fever, coughing, shortness of breath, and a loss of taste or smell.
However, asymptomatic transmission has emerged as a major driver of Covid-19. Getting a handle on how much asymptomatic transmission can occur even with a vaccine requires mass testing to detect the virus since there are no other outward signs of infection. For clinical trials with thousands of participants, testing is a tedious, time-consuming endeavor, and there aren’t many robust findings yet.
That said, there is emerging evidence that Covid-19 vaccines do slow transmission.
Moderna, for example, screened its trial participants for SARS-CoV-2 between the first and second doses of its vaccine, finding that two-thirds fewer people in the vaccine group tested positive for the virus compared to the placebo, according to the company’s briefing to the Food and Drug Administration in December. It suggests that some asymptomatic infections start to be prevented after the first dose.
During the clinical trials for the Covid-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, which has not been approved in the US, researchers tested participants more frequently. An early analysis showed that the vaccine may be 59 percent effective at stopping asymptomatic infection.
There are other signs indicating the vaccines can reduce spread. Changes in immune system markers like antibodies in people who are vaccinated comport with what scientists expect in a situation that prevents the virus from setting up shop in people’s airways.
Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, said the focus on transmission in the context of Covid-19 vaccines can be misleading when comparing them to other vaccines. Part of what’s skewing the picture is that we have more information about Covid-19 transmission dynamics than other respiratory infections. “We never do mass testing for any respiratory virus unless you don’t feel well,” Gandhi said.
There are lessons we can draw from other vaccines, too. Researchers say it’s highly unlikely that a vaccine with a high efficacy against disease wouldn’t also make a significant dent in transmission. In fact, there are vaccines that are given mainly to prevent transmission more so than the disease, like the rubella vaccine, according to Paul Sax, clinical director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School.
With Covid-19 vaccines, the fact that they prevent the most severe outcomes — even if they don’t prevent every instance of disease — can reduce transmission by itself. People with milder symptoms are less likely to cough and spread the virus through the air to others. “Even if it shifts it from symptomatic Covid to asymptomatic Covid, that still is a win for transmission because asymptomatic people are less likely to transmit it because they don’t have as much virus for as long,” Sax said.
On the other hand, there are other vaccines that can prevent disease but have a much weaker effect on transmission, like the pertussis, or whooping cough, vaccine.
For the most part, the evidence is pointing toward Covid-19 vaccines reducing transmission of the virus. The critical question is by just how much, since that will shape the point where herd immunity occurs. “The exact amount that it reduces asymptomatic transmission is going to have consequences,” Richterman said. The answer will likely emerge in the coming months as researchers gather more data from clinical trials as well as among vaccine recipients in the general population.
What message do we send in the moment?
So scientists generally agree: The vaccines are essential for ending the pandemic, though they will take weeks or months to blunt the spread of Covid-19 across the population. Until that time, it’s necessary to keep up mask-wearing and social distancing in public.
But it’s not as though one day the country will cross a line going from unsafe to safe; rather, there will be a decline in risk over time. “I think the better way to frame it is the vaccine is going to make every single activity the person does safer,” Richterman said. And while scientists can measure risk and come up with tactics to reduce it, they can’t determine how much risk is tolerable. That’s a value judgment people have to make as individuals.
Vaccines are certainly a major risk-reducer, arguably the largest when it comes to Covid-19. The risk of infection and transmission doesn’t drop to zero with a pair of shots, but when combined with other measures like wearing face masks, they become a firewall against transmission. Right now, though, in the context of uncontrolled spread of Covid-19, even a reduced risk of transmission could still lead to problematic levels of new infection.
And there’s still a long way to go. Even though upward of one-third of the US population may have already been exposed to the virus, we don’t fully know who has had it because there are so many asymptomatic cases and because of gaps in testing. It’s also not clear how long immunity lasts after infection and how well it will hold up against new SARS-CoV-2 variants, although early evidence shows immunity does last at least a few months and that prior infections offer some degree of shielding against newer versions of the virus. So the transmission aspect of the pandemic is going to remain a major issue for some time.
“My biggest concern right now in the short term is getting people to make sure they’re not easing up on the precautions they need to take, given the current situation and the lack of vaccine availability,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University.
One of the most delicate times in the pandemic will be the period between its worst throes and widespread immunity. That’s when there will be large groups of people who are vaccinated as well as those who are not vaccinated interacting in the same public spaces but with very different risk exposures.
Though some groups have broached the idea of using vaccine passports to identify the immune, there is no easy way to tell whether someone is protected just by looking at them, so across-the-board pandemic restrictions will likely have to remain in place. That may prove frustrating for people who survived the pandemic and went through the trouble of getting immunized but still can’t relax.
The message to those vaccinated people in this twilight period of the pandemic must be that they are duty-bound to keep up precautions like wearing masks in order to protect others as an act of social solidarity.
But what’s the best way to frame this? Are we in the home stretch of the pandemic, or are we still mired in the worst phase? Should health officials emphasize how vaccines will return everyone to normal or highlight the unknowns and counsel caution? Should the vaccinated be scolded if they start to hang out with friends and travel?
Rasmussen noted that with the uncertainties around the Covid-19 vaccines, as impressive as they are, there is a fear of overpromising and underdelivering. The final results could reveal that vaccines may not block transmission as much as hoped, so if they’re overhyped, trust in public health officials could erode and lead to more vaccine hesitancy.
On the other hand, as groups of people get vaccinated, they might be able to relax around each other as their collective risk declines. Members of a household, neighbors, or people living in long-term care facilities may be able to share the company of others who are also immune.
But even vaccines, masks, and social distancing together won’t stop spread due to reckless behavior, just as airbags, seatbelts, and crumple zones don’t mean that it’s safe to drive inebriated over the speed limit. Vaccines are not a license to resume crowded indoor gatherings since the overall vaccination rate is still low and the spread of the virus is still high.
“You can potentially get together with your parents that you haven’t seen in a long time if all of you have been vaccinated,” Rasmussen said. “What you should not do is get together with a bunch of your vaccinated friends and go hit the bars.”
Gandhi agreed that precautions will be necessary in many circumstances for people who receive vaccines.
“My risk tolerance is I will wear a mask around those who are unvaccinated,” Gandhi said. “I think many doctors will take off their mask around vaccinated people. And only vaccinated people.”
However, she argued that the messaging emphasis should be on how vaccines will speed up the return to a world outside the pandemic. Belaboring the blank spaces in our understanding of them when there is so much good news could also create hesitancy and undermine progress. Without a sense of progress and an achievable goal, it may get harder to keep up precautions until there is widespread immunity.
“It’s very helpful to tell the public that someday the masks will come off,” Gandhi said. “You can say it will be longer [to get to the end of the pandemic], and it will be, but please keep giving people hope.”
How can we tell we’ve crossed the finish line?
The main benchmark for ending the pandemic and the goalposts of a vaccination campaign should be to reduce fatality rates. “We should go all-in for mortality. The first thing we should see is a substantial, substantial reduction in mortality in the population,” said Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. “Even if we don’t find out that there is reduction in transmission, if enough people are protected and mortality goes down drastically ... even if it’s just individual effects, that’s a good way of returning to normal.”
Such a scenario would downgrade Covid-19 from a lethal public health threat to a moderate concern, and perhaps even a nuisance. Until there is a dramatic decline in fatality rates, however, face masks and social distancing will still be a part of everyone’s life, including those who are vaccinated.
After that, measures of transmission, such as the fraction of Covid-19 tests that yield positive results, could be used as an indicator of how much spread is still occurring.
The US may have to contend with sporadic outbreaks and even vaccine boosters, as immunity declines and new variants of the virus emerge. But widespread immunization creates a scenario where many of the most onerous burdens of the pandemic can be lifted.
Given the pace of progress in vaccinations, that could happen later this year.
“If there are no crazy variants, we can be in a situation where in fall things are more normal,” Omer said. “Maybe not fully normal, but better.”
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