Month: July 2021

A Democrat is president, which means it's time for Republicans to once again refuse to raise the debt ceiling. But there's no need to worry just yet.

Technically, we'll breach the debt ceiling sometime this month. But as you may recall from previous Republican versions of this game, this just means the Treasury Secretary has to start swapping around payments to make sure we don't go over the ceiling. That usually buys us two or three months, so the real deadline for raising the debt ceiling is probably around October or so.

Until then, feel free to ignore the whole thing. It's just the children throwing a temper tantrum because no one is paying attention to them.

This is a bright red zinnia at the Hana Field farm.

And I guess that's about it. I don't really have anything more to say about it.

In news that should surprise no one, a team of researchers has concluded that vaccination rates are lower in areas with higher viewership of Fox News:

There are all the usual confounders to deal with here—Fox viewers also tend to be Republican, non-urban, older, etc.—but the authors claim the vaccine effect they isolated is truly due to watching Fox News:

We can verify that this association is causal using exogenous geographical variation in the channel lineup....We can rule out that the effect is due to differences in partisanship, to local health policies, or to local COVID-19 infections or death rates.

For those who don't want to read the paper (i.e., all of you) one of the authors has written a Twitter thread breaking down the main results of their study. You can read it here.

Here is Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times today:

Researchers who study vaccine hesitancy say that social networks play a huge role in the spread of dangerous lies about vaccines.

Hmmm. Clicking the link brings up an article by the authors of one of these studies. Here's what it says:

We found that the use of social media to organise offline action is strongly associated with the perception that vaccinations are unsafe.

That's a rather different claim, so let's take a look at the study itself. Here's the main result:

This requires some unpacking. The authors used a panel of experts to rank countries based on "average people’s use of social media to organise offline action." Each country was ranked from one to five. So what the top red oval tells us is that a difference of one rank (say, between 3 and 4) increases the belief that vaccines are unsafe by 1.437 percentage points. The bottom oval shows R², a statistical measure of how much this explains. In this case, changes in rank explain about a fifth of a country's belief in the safety of vaccines.

That may seem like a fair distance from a "huge role," but wait. It gets worse. The entire study is based on a convenience sample of tweets worldwide. And it's all limited to the years 2018-19, which means it's a measure of generic anti-vaxx sentiment. It has nothing specifically to do with COVID-19 vaccines.

Generally speaking, this study relies on so many different measurements, each with its own drawbacks and error bars, that it strikes me as a bit of a dog's breakfast. Still, it's a decent effort that points the way for future studies. That's not the problem.

The problem is that the authors pretty clearly implied a stronger result than they actually have. Manjoo then took that and exaggerated it even further. What we end up with is a claim that social media plays a "huge role" in vaccine disinformation when the study in question pretty clearly suggests exactly the opposite: a fairly modest effect of—maybe—a few percentage points in public attitudes. Thus are internet legends born.

POSTSCRIPT: The study uses the same methodology to look at foreign disinformation and finds a somewhat stronger effect. However, since this is based on 2018-19 data, it provides no clue about the real-world effect of this on the COVID-19 vaccine. This is why I ignored it.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 20. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

I've been involved this evening in a truly dispiriting discussion of whether the FDA should immediately grant full approval of COVID-19 vaccines. The motivation for this is that many people say they're hesitant to get the vaccine while it's still under "emergency" approval, and we might get some of them to reconsider if only the FDA would grant full approval.

The most dispiriting part of all this is that so many of the critics simply declare that the FDA is unbelievably stupid and there's no reason for not just declaring full approval since we've given the vaccines to millions of people worldwide and it seems to be fine. This despite the fact that not a single one of them seems to have the slightest idea of what the approval process is and why it's in place.

I'm not going to pretend to any special expertise either, but I can at least point out a few things:

• Despite what the Twitterati seem to believe, the folks at the FDA are not idiots. They might be wrong, but they aren't idiots and they're well aware of the benefits of granting full approval.
• There is a documented process for granting full approval. Pfizer and others submitted the data for that approval in May and asked for expedited review. This was granted, of course, which means review will take about six months instead of two years.
• Like it or not, approval is based on actual scientific studies (RCTs), not just the observation that lots of people have already gotten the vaccine and seem to be OK. This is the only reliable way to do things, and that doesn't change just because we'd really, really like it to.
• The FDA, of course, could change the approval process midstream and simply issue a full approval. However, skeptics would rightfully assume that this means the approval is political, not based on science. It would pretty much destroy the FDA's credibility.

This is like a self-parody of glib vaccine Twitter. Is that how we want scientific or legal institutions to operate? We know the answer so just change the procedures or skip them entirely? Can’t imagine what could go wrong…

— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan) July 21, 2021

It's true that the FDA approval process takes a long time. That's why we also have an emergency use approval process that allows drugs to be prescribed in an emergency if they look promising but haven't gotten through the full approval process yet. This makes perfect sense, and it's what we've done.

In addition to all this, I doubt that full approval will make very much real-world difference when it eventually comes. Is it possible that more states would be willing to mandate vaccination if the vaccines had full approval? Maybe, but there's not much evidence for it. And can you imagine the backlash if a state did mandate vaccination based on an obviously rushed and political approval process? It would be a debacle.

This is a young sandpiper examining its reflection in the water. Or maybe it's a stilt? In any case, it genuinely seemed to be mystified every time it looked down and saw itself in the marshy waters.

UPDATE: Yep, it's a black-necked stilt, about a month old.

Yesterday's mystery photo was a trick of sorts: it's just a picture of John Wayne Airport here in Orange County. Here's a wider view from a different angle:

There are lots of conservatives who are willing to criticize Donald Trump and the Trumpification of the Republican Party. OK, maybe not "lots." But a fair number. It's definitely a thing.

But are there any conservatives who are willing to criticize Fox News? There might be! I don't follow every conservative in the country. Can anybody name a dozen or three?

The bullshit just never stops:

So, investors supposedly panicked yesterday about COVID-19 even though there was nothing new going on, and then today they all took a deep breath and decided COVID-19 wasn't so bad after all. Seriously?

I wonder if anyone realizes that this kind of thing makes investors look really stupid? The truth, of course, is that no one knows why the market plunged yesterday and no one knows why it recovered today. But I'd say the unlikeliest explanation is a massive, coordinated, one-day freakout over a coronavirus variant that's been around for months.

I don't have a lot to write about at the moment, so I just want to take this chance to remind everyone that the last time a Republican was president he lowered taxes on corporations and the rich and raised taxes on the middle class. This chart shows the combined effect of the Trump tariffs and the 2017 tax bill:

I used the 2025 estimates for the impact of the 2017 tax bill.