The real reason unvaccinated Americans are dying in hospital beds and claiming they love 'freedom'
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new report showing the dominant delta variant of the coronavirus is now making vaccines against catching it less effective. Before delta, they were 91 percent effective. After delta, they are 66 percent effective. The United Kingdom and Israel have reported similar findings. Vaccines are still preventative, the CDC said, and booster shots were already in the works. The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to sign off on a booster campaign set to begin Sept. 20, according to Bloomberg.
The spread of the delta variant is why the nation's top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, went on CNN to say getting the covid pandemic under control might not happen until spring of next year. "As we get into the spring, we could start getting back to a degree of normality, namely resuming the things that we were hoping we could do — restaurants, theaters, that kind of thing," he said. This news, according to CNN's Stephen Collinson, came as a "severe jolt to a weary nation" that elected Joe Biden to take care of this problem.
Collinson's argument is that the delta variant poses a great danger to the president's domestic agenda, but especially his party's majorities in the United States Congress. "The pandemic that he was elected to end could drag on deep into a midterm election year, with all the political and economic destruction that could bring." Collinson added that Fauci's statement "meant that Biden's best-laid plans of triumphing over the pandemic and riding an economic wave into the campaign for congressional election results in November next year now look at risk."
I'll get back to Collinson's piece and the delta variant in a moment. But first I want to bring in a theme I've been writing about this week: bad faith. In a nutshell, the Washington press corps is not biased in the ways that the Republicans Party says it is. It is not liberal. It does not have an agenda (other than the normal ones, like informing the citizenry or turning a profit). But the Republicans are right in one very important way. It is biased to the extent that it tolerates endless bad faith. Moreover, it tolerates bullshit knowing it's bullshit. On the infrequent occasion when reporters do demonstrate "liberal bias," it's when they demonstrate unwillingness to tolerate Republican bad faith.
What does this have to do with the delta variant? First, it's the reason the pandemic isn't over yet. And the reason for delta's dominance is pretty clear. As Collinson himself says: "The latest surge of the virus, powered by the more infectious Delta variant, was able to take hold because Americans in more conservative, southern states — deeply skeptical of government advice and science — declined in larger numbers than their more liberal compatriots to get vaccinated. If such skepticism, fanned by conservative political leaders and conspiracy fueled right-wing media, were to ultimately boost Republicans in next year's congressional polls it would be a bitter irony for the President."
So when it comes to the question of why the president hasn't done what he said he was going to do, we have to take into account, if we're being honest with ourselves and others, that Biden isn't alone here. There are 50 states in the union, each with their own leaders who make choices they think are best for their constituents. Moreover, you could say, again in all honesty, that the president's plan to get the country back on its feet depended on "more conservative, southern states" doing their part in what is and must be a united effort to overcome a disease that will kill a million Americans before it's over.
Again, honestly, they failed to do their part. Those of us who did are going to suffer. Delta's spread means vaccines are now less effective. As I said last week, this minority is stealing the majority's freedom.
Even this might not be so bad if not for the suggestion, illustrated by Collinson's piece, that voters might punish Biden for failing to control the pandemic while at the same time saying in plain English that the reason it's not under control is because "conservative, southern states — deeply skeptical of government advice and science" have put that objective even farther out of reach. A moral press would make it clear to the citizenry who's to blame. An anti-moral press, one that's hostile toward the obligations of the truth, will make-believe it's hard to say.
I said the press corps often tolerates bullshit knowing it's bullshit, but it often does not. Collinson isn't alone in this. He said southern states are "deeply skeptical of government advice and science." Another variation of this that's echoed by the press corps is that residents of southern states fear losing their freedoms. Residents fear it so much they're willing to put their lives on the line. They'll refuse to get vaccinated. They'll refuse to wear masks. They'll defy "government tyranny." This is the conclusion drawn by the Times' Alexander Stockton and Lucy King in a searing new video op-ed. They went to the Ozarks to better understand anti-vaxers. Over and over, they were told they don't want to be told what to do. Living in America means living free! What Stockton and King don't know is it's all bad faith.
The people Stockton and King interview, including the white men literally dying in hospital beds, do not fear losing their freedoms. That it is a put-on. They're hiding what they truly fear, which is humiliation. Authoritarian-minded people — which is to say, those who determine politics in southern states — live in daily fear of being humiliated. By what? You name it. Living in a diverse, democratic and capitalist republic offers opportunities aplenty to be humiliated for those who identify strongly with top-down social control. Anything threatening that threatens them. Since the pandemic started as "a hoax," it is a hoax. Buh Gawd, they'll die before being wrong. And they do.
Stockton and King don't have the insight necessary for seeing what they truly fear, but they do something I haven't seen from other members of the pundit corps. They take "fearing the loss of their freedoms" and superimpose the claims over images of imminent death, as if to suggest that freedom to die from the covid is no freedom at all. At one point the narrator says: "This is what freedom looks like in America today." I have never seen a simpler and more powerful way of rejecting GOP bad faith. It's something we all of us need to see more.
Recalculating Nancy Pelosi’s big win
The preliminary win to advance Joe Biden's huge social services spending bill is being depicted as a parliamentary victory for Speaker Nancy Pelosi over a small group of would-be Democratic spoilers. A day or more later, what looks more the case are two things:
It's our American obsession with winning rather than focusing on the basics.
As The New York Times summarized, "For now, the deal that Ms. Pelosi struck amounted to a precarious détente for Democrats that did nothing to resolve tensions between the moderate and liberal flanks or end the jockeying for political leverage."
It's an important distinction because there is no bill yet for infrastructure spending—small, medium, or huge—in place yet, and, other than general support for the substance over the timing of votes, there are lots of ways that this discussion about investing in our next 10 years still can go south.
As it stands, this contested vote essentially only lays the groundwork for Democrats to force through both a $1 trillion bill to fix roads, bridges, airports and a lot of rural broadband wiring and the three-times larger bill to address spending on "human infrastructure" that includes an array of improvements to universal pre-K education, health and prescription drug access and pricing, expanded Medicare coverage, child-care tax write-offs, paid leave and tax increases for the wealthy and corporations.
It's an important step, of course, but what we should remember is that Pelosi was forced to deal with a handful of "moderates" who basically don't support the full package.
What Pelosi Did
In case you were living your life and managed to avoid worrying about Congress, the group of nine moderates wanted an immediate vote on the already Senate-passed bipartisan hard infrastructure bill. Pelosi wanted to twin the two spending packages. What happed was, according to a variety of press reports and congressional statements, was extended legislative negotiation.
Pelosi's particular way out was to link all the spending under a singular "rule" vote that would set a Sept. 27 deadline for a vote on the roads bill, setting up the possibility for House committees to vet the social services programs and price them for a simultaneous vote. She won the day, but, obviously, there's not a lot of time to assess both the actual cost of these sprawling programs and to ensure the politics for passage.
Basically, Democrats want to use the so-called "budget reconciliation" rules to cram all the spending together in bills that can be passed by as little as a single-vote majority – something that is a real prospect in the Senate. In the House, there was an eight-vote majority for this measure, which is likely the maximum it can achieve in an up-and-down vote for final approval.
Politico and others have attempted to revisit all the back-and-forth conversations and late-night haggling between Pelosi and her closest minions and the group of nine, headed by Rep. Jeff Gottheimer (D-NY). It was a serious enough effort to force delay, and to put the outcome in doubt.
To summarize, it turns out that Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Mad.) and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) were able to separate and exploit individual concerns among the nine and to persuade them that they all need to pull in a single direction. We'll never know if there were individual promises.
Afterward, Pelosi praised the rebel group for its "enthusiasm" while announcing her commitment to pass the infrastructure bill it had opposed.
Topping off the 220-212 vote on the eventual spending bill was approval for a voting rights measure that the House passed soon after.
Our Focus
This House showdown reminds us of the power of just a handful of people to hold up approval of legislation – or court decisions, or even who's giving advice within the White House.
We keep thinking that we go to the polls every two or four years with the idea of setting an understandable direction for our democracy. But then we keep tripping up over those one- or two- or even nine-vote groups that decide that they are smarter than the rest of us.
We will go through this same discussion over what constitutes a fitting social services safety net for America when this big Biden spending package comes back to the Senate, and we must depend on the peculiar waverings of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, and Krysten Sinema, D-Ariz.
We think we're voting for an agenda when we cast ballots for Biden or Donald Trump only to re-discover daily that there always is a single vote over in the corner of the House or Senate that insists on standing in the way of popular support, whether the issue is more gun control, abortion, environmental rules, or economic issues.
It's bad enough that we have gridlock resulting from near-equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. It seems worse when one side or the other can't line up its own folks – or free them from party commitments to specific legislative agendas. We expect that democracy is messy, but not daily.