Fauci had several TV hits slated for this week, but then he went on Facebook Live w/ @SenDougJones and disputed "Trump's assertions that a lower death rate showed the country's progress against the pandemic." His TV bookings were cancelled, source says ?? https://t.co/duepvmcuG9
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) July 11, 2020
Not for the first time, I really wish the Financial Times had a weekend-only subscription. They’ve made this article free to read, and you should:
I hear Anthony Fauci before I see him. Out of view of our video call, he asks his tech assistant: “Have you wiped down the table?” The assistant, who has already sprayed down the 79-year-old’s chair, hurries to disinfect the desk. The top adviser on the White House’s coronavirus task force cannot afford to fall ill.
Of all the unenviable jobs in this pandemic, Dr Fauci may have the trickiest. He is a leading public health scientist in a world growing suspicious of expertise; an affable self-described humanist in a society where soundbites get more play than sound advice. After 36 years as director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he is facing a challenge that eclipses even the epidemics he has previously battled — Aids and Sars.
Now, Fauci reports to his sixth president: Donald Trump. The president flouts his advice — refusing to wear a mask and holding rallies — and, Fauci tells me, hasn’t even met him for more than a month. Trump appears to me to be preoccupied with polls and economic data, rather than the soaring case counts in the country hardest hit by Covid-19 in terms of confirmed cases and deaths…
“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we have a serious ongoing problem, right now, as we speak,” Fauci says, in an accent tinged by his native Brooklyn. He warned Congress late last month that the number of new cases could rise to 100,000 a day. “What worries me is the slope of the curve,” he explains, using his fingers to draw a chart in the air. “It still looks like it’s exponential.”
The country will not respond well to locking down again, he fears. He thinks health officials need to get the message across to young people in particular that they are not “in a vacuum”, where their disease affects only themselves.
The spreading distrust of experts makes everything harder. “That is a real problem. We can’t run away from it,” he says. Fauci may have developed a fan base that is snapping up Fauci T-shirts, mugs and bobblehead dolls — but he has also been disparaged and even received death threats from people who believe coronavirus is a con.
The US has always valued individual rights, he says, but warns that this could make it hard to tackle the pandemic, even when we have a vaccine. “Our forefathers . . . had the guts to come by boat from Europe and wherever else. That’s the general spirit: you don’t always trust authority,” he says. Now it has been taken to an “extreme”, with a movement against science and authority helping to form “the foundation for the anti-vaccine movement, that we don’t trust what the government is telling us. That is very, very problematic right now.”
Fauci last saw Trump in person at the White House on June 2 — and says he has not briefed the president for at least two months. He tells me this in a matter-of-fact tone, but I suspect that his indifference is feigned. While Trump holds potential superspreader events, Fauci meets with the task force run by the vice-president.
He says he is “sure” that his messages are passed along — but Trump is evidently not listening. On July 4, the president declared that 99 per cent of Covid-19 cases were “harmless”. Stephen Hahn, the US Food and Drug Administration commissioner, refused to tell CNN whether this was right or wrong. So I try Fauci: “Is Trump wrong?”
He chuckles, deflecting by calling it the “famous question”. Fauci tries to account for it as an accidental error, rather than part of a pattern of the president playing down the pandemic. “I’m trying to figure out where the president got that number. What I think happened is that someone told him that the general mortality is about 1 per cent. And he interpreted, therefore, that 99 per cent is not a problem, when that’s obviously not the case,” he says.
In fact, Fauci believes some of the “extreme confusion” about the virus is because it affects people so differently, from the asymptomatic to patients on ventilators. “I have never seen a virus or any pathogen that has such a broad range of manifestations,” he says. “Even if it doesn’t kill you, even if it doesn’t put you in the hospital, it can make you seriously ill.”…
As he heads off to an afternoon coronavirus task force briefing where he expects an “intense” discussion about state surges, he imparts a message that is far from sugar-coated. He wants me to know that this pandemic really is “the big one”. Covid-19 has the worst elements of previous epidemics combined. “You have a random virus jump species from an animal to a human that is spectacularly efficient in spreading from human to human, and has a high degree, relatively speaking, of morbidity and mortality,” he says. “We are living in the perfect storm right now.”
As if their views on epidemiology are somehow equal. https://t.co/rAnkhfpAdb
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 11, 2020
Patricia Kayden
jc
I find that photo infuriating, Trump wagging his finger at Fauci. You can just imagine him lecturing the actual respected expert, and sounding like a total idiot. This is a big part of the perfect storm, the egomaniacal buffoon telling the pro to sit down and zip it.
Brantl
I feel as bad for Fauci as I do for anybody that hasn’t died in this crap storm, it’s like a Shakespearean actor’s gotten an accidental life-time contract on Bozo’s Circus.
trollhattan
John Cornyn brings his Big Cornyn brain after Pete Buttigieg and does about as well as you’d guess.
Texas, you have GOT to do better.
hells littlest angel
Not the world I live in. You know, the real one.
FelonyGovt
It’s one thing for clueless citizens to discount expertise, quite another for “leaders” to do so and instead go with their ignorant guts.
Suzanne
@jc: What I find most infuriating is that a whole bunch of other douchebags who presumably know better stood around and watched and probably didn’t say a word.
Alison Rose
There’s so much here in regard to the disdain for expertise that’s frighteningly similar to the general anti-vax shit (and I’m sure the Venn diagram of people who are anti-vax and people who think COVID is a hoax is pretty much a circle). Especially the example in Nichols’ tweet. It’s like, “Here is what practically every doctor, health professional, scientist, medical association, etc says about vaccines…but Jenny McCarthy did some Googling so hey, OPINIONS DIFFER.”
Which also contributes to another worry I have, that even once they do develop a reliable vaccine for COVID-19, all the anti-vaxxers are going to refuse to take it or to give it to their kids, so what the fuck is even the point? I mean, yes, they should still be working on it, but it won’t be the savior we might hope if millions of dipshits out there are more worried about autism than about people living. (They also never seem to grasp or care how fucking insulting that is to people with autism.)
Jeffro
It’s July 12th. The time to get schools ready to re-open “normally” or anything close to it this fall was during the March-May lockdowns. We didn’t do that, so parents, teachers, and school staff, please direct your complaints to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Meanwhile, in New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, most of Europe…etc etc etc
Baud
NotMax
What rankles is his habit of couching things in fuzzy terms. Science and precision go hand in hand. Example from above:
Express it clearly and forcefully: It’s malignant, it’s ignorant and most of all it is deadly dangerous.
Jeffro
@Baud: Going out on a limb here but this message of Joe’s may have some appeal to the country, especially seniors.
Then again, my understanding is that trumpov wore a mask yesterday, so oh well game over Joe.
SealDeal
Thanks and love again for the BJ community. I rely so often on finding articles, posts and and links to things that I would not have had the opportunity to find on my own. I love yall so much, lurker that I am.
Native Houstonian here and I’m sitting her infuriated (but so not surprised) at the absolute idiocy of our some of our state leaders. Mayor Turner and County Judge Hildalgo are almost visibly tearing their hair out trying to get dipshit Abbott to shut it down.
BUT, in terms of experience on the ground here in central H-Town…. my weekly grocery shopping, Target, Petco runs….EVERYONE is masked and taking precautions…I had two people look up and move away and apologize for getting too close accidentally.
rikyrah
This thread broke my heart all over again.??
joel hanes
@Alison Rose:
the anti-vaxxers are going to refuse to take it or to give it to their kids, so what the fuck is even the point?
Um, so that those who get vaccinated have immunity themselves, at least for a while?
I mean, I’m really looking forward to the day that my extended family have all been vaccinated so that I can go home for Thanksgiving and hug them. (I had planned to live every other month of this year with my aged mother, who lives alone — but she’s really at risk, and has not been closer than six feet to another living person since late March)
Mary G
Chetan Murthy
@NotMax:
I had a thought about this. I used to work as a troubleshooter for big I/T systems that were on fire. Almost always, it was a bug in my employer’s code. For a good while, it was bugs in the fundamental design of the product, that the architects refused to fix (b/c they thought they were right — and since they never had to face the wrath of the customer (that’s what I was for), they continued in that belief). So when the customer would ask me for my considered beliefs about the product, I would say things like “I can help you to learn how to use the product successfully.” What I did NOT say was “this product is fucking buggy by design, and I sure AF would never use it!” How did I reconcile myself? Well, I told myself “I always tell the truth, and only the truth, but I don’t tell the whole truth”. At crucial moments, I would fall silent, and the sales(wo)man next to me would take over, and THEY would tell the lie required to keep the customer from throwing us out the nearest window.
How is this relevant? Fauci is the technical expert. To ask that he always tell the truth, requires that SOMEBODY next to him does the lying. Because eventually you have to lie, when you’re dealing with a vast and diverse public, being lied-to by all sorts of other actors with nefarious and just selfish motives. But Fauci has no such “honest salesman” (honest, in that he’s looking out for the well-being of the body politic as a whole) to tell the lies. So he has to do both jobs. It’s bad, I know. It’s bad.
[BTW, I fully realize that “not telling the whole truth” is a bad thing. I’m glad I no longer work in enterprise I/T, so I don’t have to make those sorts of decisions. Thing was, it was the only way to have any autonomy in my job. So I did it. I guess I could have quit, come out to California, joined startups ….. and lied out here, instead of back East. Ah, well.]
P.S. I’m well aware that there are limits to this analogy. I’m not offering it as a full explanation, just as a way of looking at a facet of the situation he’s in.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: The same people who have been downplaying this threat since March are now saying that it doesn’t affect children. To me it sounds like more wishful thinking. Like the heat and humidity was going to kill thee virus. Children affected by COVID-19 may not have a high death rate but they may become ill and be saddled with chronic conditions for a life time. Also be carriers. There are over 50 million children in school in the United States.
Sports teams with their resources haven’t been able to contain the virus and we think that public schools can pull this off with just over a month to go?
This is a recipe for an epic disaster.
Bill Arnold
@Alison Rose:
Some might be concerned, or be encouraged to be concerned, about possible long term effects of COVID-19 on their preciousess. Review from a couple of days ago:
Extrapulmonary manifestations of COVID-19 (Nature Medicine, 10 July 2020)
This would be a little more dangerous to weaponize, a reasonably well-grounded speculative paper:
Could SARS‐CoV‐2 affect male fertility? (Rahul Vishvkarma, Singh Rajender, 23 June 2020, free access)
(I loath anti-vaxxers for their perversion of science, and especially despise the creators and purveyors of the sophisticated antivax perversions of science.)
Alison Rose
@joel hanes: I was being extra gloomy there – trust me that I 100% think they should be working on a vaccine and that they should do everything they can to make sure as many people as possible get it. My worry is simply that it won’t be as effective as it could be if we allow all the same dumb exemptions as some places do for other vaccines. I never include people who cannot be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons – I mean the ones who, as I said, think it causes autism or that it’s TOXIC!!! or whatever.
different-church-lady
Redacted due to readng comprehension errors.
dr. bloor
@hells littlest angel:
Unfortunately, the one that has Disney World opening the same weekend that its home state shatters daily case rates is pretty fuckin’ real as well, and the infants in charge show no sign of a course change.
My reaction to the collective magical thinking dictating most of the response to the virus had been one of intellectualized fascination until I stumbled on a piece last night reminding me that my passport ain’t worth shit–no one will take us. Now I’m more than a little frightened as to how this plays out.
mrmoshpotato
Growing suspicious? Growing SUSPICIOUS!?
How about “IN A WORLD WITH WAY TOO MANY SCIENCE-DENYING DUMB MOTHERFUCKERS WITH A DEATH WISH?”
FUCK!
HumboldtBlue
Just read some speculation that Trump’s visit to Walter Reed was for scans and they used the visit to the wounded troops as cover.
Ohio Mom
Re: the anti-vaxxers. Once/if there is a vaccine, I wonder if this slaughter we are living through will lead to stricter public school requirements.
Used to be, before enrolling your child in kindergarten, you had to provide documentation from your pediatrician that your kid had be vaccinated for all the childhood diseases.
In recent years, the trend has been for state legislatures to grant ever widening lists of reasons for exemptions from these rules.
Can we hope we’ll see a backlash and all but the most necessary exemptions (for rare conditions) revoked?
In the mean time, as Joel Hanes observes, the rest of us can enjoy immunity. And I will.
Martin
Interview with presidents of UC and Howard university on reopening.
Nice to see Napolitano reiterating one of my critical points.
This reiterates my report opener that it will not be possible to successfully open with the traditional approach of university as sort of caregiver to students. The only way this can work is if the students are as empowered as the administration. We cannot police 30K-40K students per campus, so this has to work without this step. Either the students take equal responsibility or we remove them from the community. They are adults, need to act like adults, and deserve to be treated as adults.
I’m glad she recognizes the need to change the culture of the institutions. That’s probably the most important step.
Reiterated in this Twitter thread from a researcher at UConn.
dmsilev
@Baud:
Seems Biden and his team have been writing this a lot. Hard to blame them, really.
The Moar You Know
Just like Trump is a symptom, the COVID response is a symptom. Not a prime cause.
The cause is Americans. If we wait for Americans to figure this out and do the right thing, and it isn’t hard, there won’t be an America left. And precious few Americans, for that matter.
This country truly is a failed state.
Well, good luck with that. I’m out for the evening, that’s just too depressing.
Martin
This is why reopening schools is important. Schools are the enforcement mechanism for vaccines.
dmsilev
@Ohio Mom: California has been clamping down on vaccination exemptions over the last few years. Look up (State Senator) Richard Pan; he’s been an absolute hero on this front (and has gotten a shit-ton of grief from the anti-vaxxers because of it). Anyway, religious/philosophical exemptions are gone and medical exemptions now have some actual oversight and actual penalties for misbehaving doctors attached to them.
prostratedragon
@Chetan Murthy: Also, Fauci is the head of an agency under HHS. Though that agency is probably funded by Congress until after the next inauguration, there’s still probably a desire to avoid becoming the next tin toy for the toddler.
Gvg
@Alison Rose: Schools can require vaccinations. Employers can too. The military can. Foreign countries can for entry. There is pressure that hasn’t been applied in awhile but several states already revised laws tightening exemptions allowed before Covid came around, because of the measles outbreaks.
It may help to look up the rules now in your state and start bending the ear of your state legislators and candidates if the current office holders are idiots. Prepare the ground.
dmsilev
@Martin:
The story about the frat-party-induced cases at UC Berkeley doesn’t inspire confidence on that front, sad to say.
mrmoshpotato
@Brantl:
That’s a horrible thing to say about Bozo’s Circus. :)
Martin
@dmsilev: We’re also somewhat tough on home schooling (though that’s a very low bar in this country). And I think plans from a few years ago may get dusted off and introduced after this. A few years ago there was a plan in CA that homeschooled students needed to be taught by a certified teacher, requiring parents to get that certification.
I think it’s safe to say approximately zero would get that certification, but we have educational standards in this state, and students deserve to be taught to those standards. That would also help close up that aspect of the vaccination loophole, which I think is going to be critical here.
mrmoshpotato
@FelonyGovt: In your guts, you know Dump’s a putz.
PsiFighter37
@The Moar You Know: The problem is American culture. The “I got mine, fuck you” attitude doesn’t work well with a virus.
trollhattan
@dmsilev:
The court had to put a restraining order on an antivaxxer who was aggressively confronting Senator Pan (my CA senator, I’m proud to say) in public.
I hate those fuckers with the heat of a thousand Sacramento summer suns. Wait, just one will do today.
Uncle Omar
At last, our Republican Overlords have discovered a way to “Save Social Security.” Of course, it involves killing off all the olds, and some of the youngs, but someone has to make the sacrifice. Covid 19 saved Social Security and made Medicare obsolete. Now that money can go to where it belongs, hedge fund managers and CEOs.
Frankensteinbeck
@mrmoshpotato:
I think we’re all Bozos on this bus.
joel hanes
@HumboldtBlue:
Just read some speculation that Trump’s visit to Walter Reed was for scans and they used the visit to the wounded troops as cover.
Seems likely. When else (recently) was Trump going to be given the MoCa cognitive screening test that he crowed about aceing?
Sab
@Uncle Omar: Yes. They love to talk about cutting benefits and raising the age to start, but they never talk about getting rid of that 15.3% tax on most wage earners.
I am okay with the tax so long as working people get the benefits. Very few of my husband’s blue collar friends were physically up to waiting to 70. Cancer, bad backs, bad knees, bad hearts all took their toll and they retire anywhere from 62 to 65/66 if they even last that long.
When Reagan had his glorious income tax cuts in my youth, my doctor father got a huge tax cut. My taxes at the other end of the income scale went up substantially because the social security/medicare taxes doubled.
joel hanes
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think we’re all Bozos on this bus.
My mother was a Bozo-ette in school.
ANNOUNCER: Remember to inflate your shoes before crossing the water. Thank. You.
ballerat
@Jeffro: Where I live the school district sent out a survey to parents a couple weeks ago, asking for suggestions or concerns on reopening safely. I thought, oh shit. It’s, like, July now, man.
They’re having a meeting on July 21 to discuss options. School starts last week of August. They have 5 weeks to decide on and implement and train for ‘safer’ school protocols.
I am just gob-stopped they did not do this in May. They closed the schools in April. They ended the school year early. They knew it could be bad and it wasn’t going away. Why didn’t they meet right after the last day of school and come up with some contingency plans for the next year?
Ms. B and I are looking at options to keep our kids home until they are forced to close schools again. Which we figure will be within 3-5 weeks of starting.
This feels like another disaster looming. It feels doomed to fail. It’s going to be a day late and a dollar short.
Ohio Mom
dmsilev:
That is good news from California. I admit I don’t follow this issue very closely; my autistic kid has been vaccinated for everything, including some diseases I had otherwise never heard of.
HumboldBlue:
Of course! I’d been puzzled about the timing of Trump’s visit to the injured troops. There didn’t seem to be a reason for it — it wasn’t Veteran’s Day, there wasn’t any big anniversary being observed. I mean, why now?
Now it makes sense. Someone doped him up with something to make him relaxed and compliant for the scans, and that in turn allowed someone else to put a mask on his face.
Martin
@dmsilev: That culture is very unevenly applied, even on campuses. There is not a lot of disagreement on our campus which programs treat their students like adults (and are reciprocated in kind) and which do not. And that needs to be reinforced through lateral layers of the campus – housing, etc.
One of the things we are going to have to make clear to students is that we cannot afford for any students to violate public health rules, or else they all get sent home. The key is making small enough communities that the students have a clear responsibility to one another. This is a known sociological problem. Anonymity works against us in public health problems.
But before that, we need to change administrators and faculty attitudes here. To start with, we need to speak with a single voice. And if we try to police, rather than providing infrastructure so students can do that, then we’re going to fail – and that will be every bit as hard a problem to solve. I should know – I’ve been fighting that battle for some time.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
They are talking this bullshyt about children to give cover to Dolt45 with his push to open schools. I see that phuckery a mile away.??
RSA
@Chetan Murthy:
This is an interesting analogy, one I hadn’t thought of. I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s consistent with the distinction between science and policy. My career has been spent on the science and engineering side of things: Here’s what we know, to the best of our understanding. The related question of what to do, based on what we know, is a different domain, and often hugely more constrained. Fauci strikes me as understanding the science side and also realizing that one of the constraints on the policy side is that policy makers are idiots.
Brachiator
@Martin:
Right now, I would have to say that I am skeptical that schools can be opened successfully because the virus has not been sufficiently contained, and because too many people believe that it is not a serious problem. This makes it hard for people to adhere to guidelines.
Colleges may continue to be a special problem. Earlier this week I listened to two sports radio hosts who insisted that if colleges open, college sports, especially football must be played. And they kept hitting on the fallacy that football should be ok because no player can be made to be totally safe and the virus is just another issue that athletes have to suck up and accept.
They also are convinced that college kids can’t be seriously affected by the virus and it should be expected that students will get together, hang out, party and play video games.
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat:
I think they’re not testing children that much, either.
The more we learn about this virus, the more awful and longterm effects it turns out to have for those unlucky enough to have a virulent case.
Do you guys think there are a few strains circulating? Is it mutating? I’d heard it was not mutating much, a few months back, but new science and observations all the time.
RSA
@Alison Rose:
It caught me by surprise to realize, not too long ago, that when the average person says “research” they might be talking about what scientists do, or they might be talking about googling the best price for an Instapot. I hope that they recognize the difference, but I’m not sure.
Kay
Just a rolling catastrophe.
ballerat
@Suzanne: Dr. Deborah Birx immediately comes to mind. Watch that clip where Trump talks about injecting bleach. That did it for me right there. She’s an enabler.
rikyrah
The whole family?
Aleta
@Ohio Mom: Maybe they told him they were shooting the pilot for the President Lone Ranger reality show.
rikyrah
@ballerat:
sHe has no reputation left
Elizabelle
@Brantl:
I loved your comment. We are all trying to survive Bozo’s Circus.
Brachiator
@RSA:
The US and the UK have some of the best medical and health experts and disease specialists in the world, but also two of the worst leaders, both of whom are making decisions that ignore or discount the advice that they have been given.
It should not have to be this way, and there are many examples of national and local leaders who know what they are doing, and who know how to best weigh the advice of their science advisors.
mrmoshpotato
@PsiFighter37:
“Oh. You got the virus? Ok! Fuck me! Keep it all for yourself! (AND WEAR A MASK!)”
rikyrah
@Kay:
unphucking believable??
mrmoshpotato
@Frankensteinbeck: Stop disparaging their good names.
opiejeanne
@Brantl: OT, but are you a descendant of John Freeman, of Freeman’s Farm?
RSA
@Brachiator:
Yes. I think you’ve given a concise explanation of exactly the problem we face. It extends beyond public health to education, economics, foreign policy, and so forth—so many areas where expertise is ignored.
Alison Rose
@RSA:
Spoiler alert: Many of them do not. Many many many of them.
Alison Rose
@Gvg: I live in California, so I’m not concerned about state-level enforcement because my state isn’t run by sadistic dipshits. But even here, people find ways to weasel out of shit, plus with travel in and out of the state…
Brachiator
No shit, Sherlock Department,
Headline from a breaking CNN story
ballerat
@HumboldtBlue: There’s his treason with the russian bounties on our troops, and a publicized visit to vets in a hospital might provide a good look.
Ah, who am I kidding? This is Trump. He wouldn’t give a fuck.
I hope the fucker has covid. Real bad. That might explain the mask. He’s positive. They wouldn’t let him in there without one, would they?
Anne Laurie
Well, if threats of a lawsuit don’t work on the virus, have we tried waving our guns at it?
Another Scott
@Chetan Murthy: Thanks.
The way I look at it is:
1) Fauci has been in his job a very, very long time. He’s a well-known and well-respected expert for good reasons – he knows the science, and he can give clear, short sound bites for radio and TV and press interviews.
2) This is a novel virus and a new disease. He knows that we don’t know an awful lot about it, and he knows that what we think we do know will likely need to be modified over time. To explain what is known, the dangers, what needs to be done at this early stage will of course have errors in hindsight.
3) He knows that Donnie is a disaster who is breaking the federal response and killing people. But he also knows that only the federal government can create a national solution to the COVID-19 problem. So, he bites his tongue, and does what he can to keep moving the federal response forward as best he can.
Our demand for explanations of complex topics in 3 sentences is biting us again and Fauci is being crucified over it.
Donnie and his minions will try to underbus Fauci because nothing else has worked to move the target off his back yet. They’re already trying to keep him from Donnie and from talking to the press. But they’re probably afraid of the push-back (and lack of reward) if they ultimately underbus him. So they’ll keep sniping and whispering, hoping to get him to resign.
191 days, 14+ hours to go…
Cheers,
Scott.
ballerat
@Martin: Is this why republicans want to sabotage safe reopening?
They can harm public education and boost their christianist antivaxxer base at the same time.
Mike in NC
@ballerat: Always assumed that Doctors Birx & Fauci were prosperous physicians who voted Republican their entire adult lives, and wouldn’t dare say a syllable to offend Fat Bastard.
Jeffro
@ballerat: Most school divisions have had plenty of time to plan and consider options…(and wait to see if the feds might get their act together)…throwing it out to the parents any earlier than about now would have resulted in even more conflict and problems.
I know (as someone dealing with the effects professionally as well as being a parent of a high schooler) that this is a mess. But there is no magic solution, and the least-bad solution would have required trumpov & Co to get off their collective asses and a) do something and b) commit massive amounts of $$$ for testing, PPE, and more staff.
That didn’t happen, so…I sure hope everyone lays off their local school board, admins, and teachers and lays the blame squarely where it belongs. 16-hundred P-A.
Geoduck
@HumboldtBlue: Be aware that “The Shiatgibbon has Dementia” is pretty much Tom Joseph’s whole Twitter schtick. Not saying he’s wrong or right, just know where he’s coming from.
Kropacetic
It’s like my flat-earther sister or my Trumpist friend who spends all his time scouring the bowels of the internets for dumb memes. The latter says he reads “everything from both sides” and holds up the volume of information he consumes as proof that he’s more knowledgeable about relevant political issues than I am.
But critical thinking matters and standards of proof and understanding the nature of sources. It doesn’t matter how much “research” you do. If you come away thinking, among other things, that the 3/5 compromise was not part of the original Constitution, that Obama wasn’t the cause of the job losses his first year of office (they started before he took office), the difference between per capita and total CO2 emissions and the US’s outsize role in climate change, and just so many other things; you aren’t applying the information you get correctly.
mrmoshpotato
@Anne Laurie: Has Dump called the virus a total loser on Twitter yet and sent an army of Sergei-bots after it?
Anne Laurie
It’s certainly Betsy deVos’ motivation. She literally doesn’t believe public schools should exist (great choice for head of the Department of Education). If (when) there’s waves of death following a too-early reopening of public schools, that’s an excuse to pull all federal funding and pass it over to the ‘worthy’ private / religious institutions Betsy deVos and her wealthy Talibangelical clan supports.
A heaven-sent opportunity, as she no doubt sees it!
Jeffro
These are two separate and kind of opposing problems that, in the face of ZERO leadership from the WH, will continue to have us all limping along for at least the next six months.
Schools can’t be opened safely until the virus’ spread is way, way down. We can’t get the spread down until most everyone understands that it’s a serious problem and knows what to do. For the latter, I actually DO think the vast majority of Americans both a) know what’s required and b) are willing to do it, but it will take a ‘call to action’ that trumpov & Co have thus far been unwilling to make (because the president* is a fucking loon, mostly)
This is not rocket surgery anywhere but in America, somehow. Wait until more and more people hear that Europe is operating mostly normally…that they’re playing baseball in Taiwan…that they’re hanging out in bars in New Zealand. Sad!
Martin
@ballerat: I don’t think so. I think it’s just simple ‘governing is hard’. So long as schools are closed, it’s a problem they need to solve. As soon as they open, they’re off the hook. It’s that simple. They are that lazy.
What’s novel here is that normally they can trust the free market to do that for them. Sure, Home Depot will open, no problem. Health care is hard, but Anthem will do it for us. But schools are also government with some autonomy, and we’re not willing to just absolve them of their responsibility. They are struggling with this concept, with this even very low level of accountability.
NotMax
@Chetan Murthy
A primary difference being that in this case succumbing to pressure to shade the truth (and force those paying closest attention to read between the lines) can – and will – result in additional deaths.
Jeffro
@Kay: Which just astounds me…who do the landlords think will replace these folks as rent-paying tenants?
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Brachiator:
Ya think?
1. He doesn’t have dementia. He is the purest distillation of the worst cultural defects of the white majority.
2. He’s lazy, incurious and disinterested in the act of governing, but he lives the trappings.
hotshoe
@Ohio Mom:
I think about a policy of removing children from any parents who are antivax: being antivax should be seen as child endangerment and grounds for loss of parental rights.
Yeah, there are lots of problems with this idea. CPS offices are a bloody mess in many jurisdictions, foster care can be awful , and there’s a good argument that since the unvaccinated kids almost always live through their parents’ medical neglect, it’s a lot less urgent than physically-abused or abandoned children who should take priority for limited space “in the system”. So, maybe as a society we’re not ready to make antivax a CPS issue.
But at minimum, no vaccination should automatically mean no public school for those kids.
Absolutely no exemptions for “religion” or “philosophical reasons”. And medical exemptions should be issued only after examination by a county or state medical board to prevent the corruption CA (and other states?) see where private doctors sell vaccine exemptions.
Lyrebird
Gee, gather people in the least-concerned age group from spots all over the country and put them into buildings together, what could go wrong? And staff, why would they matter?
–signed, grumpy fellow traveler
Lyrebird
I guess this goes back to “if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog” . I know lots of BJ readers have strong and opposing views on Mattis and others, but I think both Mattis & Fauci did hang on / have been hanging on to reduce death and disaster. Fauci has been sidelined but not yet fired, so of course he’s gonna choose his words carefully.
One More Red Nightmare
@SealDeal: Word!
Lurkers de-cloak!
catclub
@The Moar You Know:
oy. and global warming will wipe out the the human species. right.
If precious few means 97% of the population before covid.
Eolirin
@Kay: We do not have the infrastructure to deal with that kind of surge in homelessness.
This is going to break a lot of things.
Kay
@Jeffro:
Good question.
It’s not just the size. It’s the speed of the thing. It’s like a train coming. The foreclosure crisis happened over 4 years. This is 6 months.
Everywhere you look it’s a disaster. I’m a tax and spend liberal as much as the next gal but I can’t imagine where all this bailout money is going to come from. States, schools ( both K-12 and higher ed), the entire tourism and travel industry, most of the entertainment industry including restaurants…
The Trump tax cut is looking dumber every minute. We need A LOT of money. Fast.
prostratedragon
@Jeffro: With no tenants, sale or abandonment become more remunerative options. Another way of slowly assembling parcels of urbanized land.
Eolirin
@Kay: We print it. Doesn’t need to come from anywhere. After the fact we’d need to raise taxes and try to get to a budget surplus, mostly to stave off runaway inflation and prevent a psychological tipping point with our overall debt. But we really don’t need to worry too much about how much stuff costs right now.
And since most of the things we need to do are one time, or at least temporary measures, getting to a surplus after the fact won’t be as hard as it sounds, even if we need to, say, throw 6 trillion dollars at the problem.
Kay
@Anne Laurie:
I cannot even describe how bad Betsy DeVos has been. An example- 2 weeks ago she announced a contest where rural high schools were supposed to compete for 600k for “innovation”.
Rural high schools, like all high schools, are frantically scrambling TO OPEN. Either that or putting their entire high school online in places where 50% of families don’t have home internet. The idea that they can take 1 of their 2 managers and spend weeks applying for her stupid fucking contest in the midst of a catastrophe – that all the Trump people sat around in a room and thought that up and released it- just shows they have no idea what’s going on. They just fundamentally don’t get it. No help there. Forget it. Don’t waste your time.
Kay
@Eolirin:
I’m on board but I’ve never been comfortable with it. I would like a solvent country :)
The debt makes me nervous. I’ve never really been able to put it into a different frame than household debt or small business debt. But i’m not important! Borrow away. We need it. :)
Maybe we can have a “jubilee” and just forgive all of it for everyone and start over. If it’s all theoretical I don’t know why not.
catclub
The only place it CAN come from is the federal government. It is becoming more and more obvious that with interest rates at zero, the Government can spend HUGE amounts and will never have problems paying it off. So we might as well spend at will.
It sure looks like all the GOP politicians are against this. The only explanation I can give is that they expect Trump to lose and they want the nation in even worse shape than it has to be when Democrats come into office.
Martin
@Lyrebird: Ok, I’m getting this from multiple directions, as Yglesias just stated a similar sentiment, and now I’m pissed off. Not at anyone personally (you’re good Lyrbird) because this seems very generational. So, to my fellow genxers and boomers:
You and I went off to college with the goal of getting away from mom and dad to drink beer and get laid for a few grand a year. Yes, there are students today that do that, but not many. Here are a few things to know about students today:
That said, students do still want to do all of the same things we did in college. However, they are also much more aware of the consequences of doing those things. College students do not live in a vacuum. I know there are stories of young people having covid parties and whatnot. But at the same time, they aren’t attending Trump rallies and going to Disneyland. All evidence is that young people are far more compliant with covid precautions than people older than them, because almost none of them see it as a political issue.
These hot takes piss me off because they assert that young people are incapable of altering their behavior – the same people that are paying thousands and thousands of dollars for the privilege of being your nurse, kids teacher, bridge designer, and everything else. We trust them to learn how to not kill us in their future profession, but we don’t trust them to not kill us along the way, because of course every college student in 2020 is identical to a college student in 1985 when the only fear any of them had was, well, nothing. Everything was fucking great in 1985 by comparison. But today, it’s fucking terrible, but in our boomer mindset we can’t bring ourselves to acknowledge that somehow they might be different, or possibly even better than we were because circumstances are so much different today.
If you want to assure that they not care about us and how their actions might affect us, the best way is to declare to the world that they are all irresponsible little shits who don’t care about us and how their actions might affect us.
Give them some credit.
ballerat
@Jeffro: Oh, I know it all comes down to one particular motherfucking orange fat bastard.
There are some really good science people here, but we live in a very trumpist community. Lots of hardcore jeebus too. They don’t support public schools much. Science even less. Our district people, admins and teachers are doing what they can with what they have.
catclub
I have doubts that we will ever need to pay it off. as long as debt payments are manageable ( and they are with interest rates so low)
there is no need to ‘balance the budget’ to pay it off.
Brachiator
@Jeffro:
The UK and the US are fighting to see who can be the worst with respect to dealing with the pandemic. Sweden is trying to recover from early ghastly mistakes.
Other countries will experience outbreaks, but so far they seem to be ready to deal with it much better than Trump or Boris Johnson.
Eolirin
@catclub: We don’t need to pay it off, no. But injecting trillions of dollars into the economy without some sort of sink could be very inflationary, and you can raise taxes to head some of that off by sucking money back out of the economy, and there is a tipping point where people start getting nervous with regard to debt to GDP ratios. That surplus doesn’t need to actually pay off the debt, in any meaningful sense, it just needs to keep people believing in the creditworthiness of the US. And since you want to raise taxes anyway, two birds one stone there.
To be clear, I’m suggesting there may be a need for that sort of thing in the context of something along a 30% increase in our overall debt, in a single year.
catclub
That has not been apparent to me. maybe 18 year olds are better behaved than 35 year olds. I would doubt they are better behaved than 70 years olds. I would be interested in all this evidence.
Martin
@Kay: But, I don’t understand why it needs to be a crisis. There’s no point foreclosing on everyone, because the bank will never get that money back. If you have a crisis like this, you tweak the obvious variable – time. You put every loan and lease on pause. For every month you are paused, you add a month to the loan/lease. Everyone will get paid, just not today. Individual tenants pass the problem to landlords, but landlords pass the problem to banks. And the job of the Fed is to take care of the banks. They do that now to the tune of trillions of dollars, so tell the banks to just sit tight. The land isn’t going away, after all.
Rent seeking isn’t like other forms of economic work. It’s just finance. Will new buildings go up without that income? No, but they shouldn’t be going up anyway. Just pause that part. All the money will still come, just x months down the road.
Eolirin
@Brachiator: Brazil probably has us beat, honestly. India’s also looking very bad, and when you factor the way they’re definitely underreporting numbers Russia’s up there too.
The UK is very bad, sure, but mostly by European standards. I don’t think they’re that close to us.
ballerat
@Anne Laurie: Exactly.
We know they have a long, long history of trying to do this. One has to stop seeing it as only incompetence and start seeing it as enemy action. It’s an attack. And the fuck-ups only help them by letting it happen on purpose.
I have this same perspective on the pandemic response. It’s not only incompetence, it’s also malevolence. It’s a covert LIHOP genocide under the cover of a pandemic.
Martin
@catclub: Study
Certainly on par with boomers, and better than millennials and gen z. And understand that they are wearing masks despite the still common thinking that it will not kill them. Boomers are wearing them out of a clear sense of self-preservation, but a lot of young people are wearing them out of a sense of collective benefit.
Young people get this. Treat them as though they get this.
Searcher
@Anne Laurie:
Kropacetic
Sounds like a B-list supervillain’s scheme.
Eolirin
@Martin: The money only comes later if incomes are restored. There’s no indication that they will be for a very long time without government intervention. That’s a bigger issue for rental because you can’t just tack money onto the backend.
I don’t think the landlords view the loss of their rental income as just a thing that can get pushed onto the banks either; that’s also a loss of profit for those months. Sure, they shouldn’t have to risk losing the properties, but they’re also not making money. They can have other bills they need that money to pay for that aren’t related to the rentals themselves. We really need rental forgiveness with the federal government providing at least some backstop to those losses. Or at least consistent cash payments to everyone, so that they can make up for the income losses.
Brachiator
@Martin:
There are two big problems facing colleges being able to open successfully. The federal government has not done enough to get infections down. This puts a larger burden on business and schools.
Human beings have a hard time altering their behavior, even when they try their best. We are social animals, and we have seen problems with community spread as we have re-opened. I don’t single out younger people. It just doesn’t take much to undo good practice.
A third problem is the bad faith efforts of the president and some right wing idiots to undermine reasonable guidelines.
However, you make a good point that students will likely try their best to make this work. We shall see what happens.
Kropacetic
It doesn’t matter if young* people get the virus** dontchaknow?
*Definition required
**Citation needed
Eolirin
@Martin: I wonder if some of that difference is the effect that school shootings and school shooting drills have had on that population.
Jay Noble
@Martin: When the drinking age is lowered to 18, get back to us about college students being treated as adults. Or credit/car rental restrictions or . . .
Brachiator
@Eolirin:
This is a very bad club to belong to. But the UK and US are right in the thick of it.
Boris Johnson rivals Trump in terms of arrogance and incompetence. Johnson has also deferred to much to his political advisor Dominic Cummings, who early on convinced Johnson to simply let people be exposed to the virus and let herd immunity develop. Their test and track procedures are woefully inadequate. And Scotland and Wales have their doubts about England. A recent comment from the Scottish First Minister.
There are political pressures to prevent Scotland from blocking entry from England, but Johnson’s haphazard decisions are creating an unnecessary crisis.
Martin
@Brachiator: I think whether students do their best depends a lot on how the institutions approach this. I wanted to point out Napolitanos comment there because I think it’s key. Treat students like a problem, and they will become a problem. Treat students like a solution, and they will become a solution.
Brachiator
Not good. LA County figures
Los Angeles County health officials reported 3,322 new cases of COVID-19 and 18 more deaths Sunday, bringing the county’s totals to 133,549 cases and 3,809 fatalities.
Hospitalizations continue to rise, with 2,093 people currently hospitalized, 26% of them in intensive care units and 19% on ventilators. Those numbers remain substantially higher than the 1,350 to 1,450 daily hospitalizations seen four weeks ago, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
Testing results were available for more than 1.3 million people, with 9% testing positive.
The average daily positivity rate over the past seven days was at 10% as of Friday. That number is up from the 8.4% rate of about a week ago, but slightly below the 11.6% rate it reached earlier this week.
Of the 18 deaths reported Sunday, 14 people were over the age of 65.
On Thursday, [Barbara Ferrer, the county’s director of public health] again warned that younger residents continue to drive the increasing numbers of infections, and those people can easily pass the infection to people more vulnerable to serious complications or death.
“Younger people infect everybody else,” she said. “… They don’t just get to choose, I’m only going to infect a low-risk person that I know is going to be able to tolerate COVID-19. That’s not how it works. As a young person, you inadvertently, unknowingly could be infecting people even in your age cohort who then go on and infect somebody else who’s at risk and actually may even die.”
Fears of the virus spreading among young people are particularly acute this weekend, with a heat wave driving up temperatures and leading to larger crowds at Southland beaches.
ballerat
@Martin: They will devote oodles of energy to lining up a grift. They will work toward that. They will work to get re-elected. They do not see getting any backlash on this. They think it will fall on the district people and the admins and the teachers — the very people who often have opposed their attempts to destroy public schools.
What’s the worst case scenario? Some one else’s kids die? So what. It’s China’s fault.
They have to close the schools again? Well shucks, they told you these kind of schools are unworkable.
Staff and teachers will sicken and no small number will die? Hah. They have never given a shit about the welfare of our teachers. Seems like it could weaken the union — force a bunch into retirement out of fear, then literally kill no small number of the ones that remain and make the rest rebel about going back to work when they force the schools to re-open again. Then pull a Regean on them and fire them when they refuse, union or no.
They are not going to bust their asses to make this work. Because it makes them look bad. Public schools are supposed to fail. They’ve been pitching that for decades.
There are a lot of upsides for them not to exert themselves in making sure schools open safely. Lazy doesn’t explain it all.
Martin
@Eolirin: Part of it. But I think more of it is that in the past you could kind of fuck off through college and do okay. Hell, Wall Street was mostly guys you pledged with. And you could work at the mill and do okay.
Not like that now. And they know it. Most don’t expect to ever buy a house. Many don’t drive because they don’t want the expense. Steady relationships among high school students are now relatively rare, and even uncommon among college students. For my son’s HS prom the two female drum majors paired students up to attend the prom, because almost nobody knew who to go with. I think maybe 10% of the band students had someone.
We’ve taught them they can’t fuck up. They have to get As. They have to take all their APs. They have to study hard in a major that will lead to a career. And even if they do all of that, they’ll have to roll the dice to get a decent job, and be in debt for the next decade or so. Nothing is like it was when we were in college.
I work at a relatively high ranked public, that most people have never heard of. We have one school on campus that gets the same number of applications as MIT for the same number of freshman seats as MIT. It’s harder to get into than Harvard was in the 80s. This is a public university. They don’t get to fuck off. They have to grind through.
Shootings are just one part of it.
KsSteve
That picture of Fauci and Desantis is like me and my beagle arguing that chicken bones are bad for dogs.
ballerat
@Chetan Murthy: Dood. It’s an integrity thing.
Example: Fauci and Brix know how epidemics work. At crucial moments they fall silent and let Trump do the lying.
They know it’s a lie. It’s worse than that. They are complicit. They are the technical experts. What are they there for? For knowing what no one else does. They know the truth. But they have lent their credibility to a lie.
No eventually you do not have to lie. You tell the truth. You resign or you get fired or you lose the promotion or your boss yells at you for being stupid and losing a client. Then you go find another, better place to work. It’s an integrity thing.
Or you just might find you get commended and respect from your boss. Your boss turns to you for advice. It’s an integrity thing.
My father-in-law before he passed told me after Trump was elected he realized that our greatest national crisis, the greatest challenge facing our society is corruption, specifically the widespread lying.
I have always thought that Trump is a symptom not the disease. As he did. I didn’t understand then; now I think I see what he was getting at. Truth and the value of truth is fundamental to any successful society. Lying is at the root of all corruption. It is the very root. Like fraud and graft and adultery, Trumpism begins with a lie.
When enough people believe that eventually you gotta lie, then integrity is relative. It’s negotiable. It can be rationalized. It becomes flexible. Then a Trump presidency becomes possible.
Another Scott
@Martin: You generally make good points in a lot of areas, but you also can go off into hugely broad brushstrokes that undercut your points.
I’m a boomer. The kids I went to college and grad school with didn’t fuck off in school and get jobs on Wall Street. They worked and sweated and pulled all-nighters and sometimes ended up delivering pizzas for months after graduation because their mid-80s graduate engineering degree was in such demand…
I see public school kids (grade school to high school) in my NoVA neighborhood every day riding their bikes and going to the pool and piling into the 7-11 and having a normal summer. And 99% of them don’t distance and 99% don’t wear masks. It’s not the schools that are going to change that behavior – at least not by itself – it’s the parents.
tl;dr – Easy with the broad brush.
Cheers,
Scott.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The problem is Trump can fire the two of them and Trump is dumb enough to do it. So they have to smile and nod to Grandpa Pants on the Ground and do what they can do out of the Media’s eye.
NotMax
@ballerat
On top of the points you bring up, dancing around the known science like water on a hot griddle serves as acquiescence to the mutation of the CDC from an agency crafting policy in service of facts to the polar opposite – tasked with molding facts to fit policy.
James E Powell
@ballerat:
And I don’t mean to be a dick, but Fauci is 79, Birx is 64. It’s not like there is some great future they are giving up if they refuse to go along with an unpopular president who is doing horrible things.
Brachiator
I had not really been looking at the details of Trump going after Fauci. Then I ran across a CNN report and this.
So, Trump let people die needlessly, but it’s still all about him and what makes him feel good.
And Trump is surrounded by people who care more about the president’s ego than they care about the country.
Nothing changes with these people, no matter how much damage they cause.
And from the president down, none of them can admit fault or error.
What is even sadder is that I ran across a comment to a news clip where a person essentially said that he supports the Republicans because they are doing the best they can.
Delusional Death Cult
joel hanes
@Brachiator:
students will likely try their best to make this work
Most students will.
The rule of thumb is that 80% will. I’ll bow to Martin and assume that students these days are better, and that over 90% will try their best.
The problem is that with pandemic incidence of a very infectious airborne disease, the remaining 5% can cause recurrent outbreaks. Which is what I expect.