Just a quick observation about the congressional investigation of the 1/6 insurrection: it doesn't matter where it's held or who's on the committee. Regardless of whether it's held in the Senate or the House; or whether it's bipartisan or not; the end result was always going to be separate reports. There would be a majority report from the Democrats and a minority report from the Republicans.
So ignore all the fake drama. In a few months we'll get two reports just like we were always going to get. Fox News will spend 90% of its time on three or four paragraphs from the minority report while the rest of us who don't live in Murdochville will read the majority report and, once again, be shocked at what the Republican Party has become.
Note to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: If you want to run for president in 2024—and we all know you do—maybe you should cut out the "Don't Fauci My Florida" crap and listen to the guy instead:
And for those who like to point out that the death rate from COVID-19 is lower than it used to be, that's true. But here's a rerun of the list of "long COVID" nasties that can affect you even if you survive:
Loss of smell or taste
Depression or anxiety
Difficulty breathing or shortness of breath
Tiredness or fatigue
Difficulty thinking or concentrating (sometimes referred to as “brain fog”)
Chest or stomach pain
Erectile dysfunction
Headache
Fast-beating or pounding heart (also known as heart palpitations)
Joint or muscle pain
Pins-and-needles feeling
Diarrhea
Sleep problems
Dizziness on standing (lightheadedness)
Change in smell or taste
Changes in period cycles
Blood clots
Strokes, seizures and Guillain-Barre syndrome
Multiorgan effects or autoimmune conditions
Multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS)
A higher infection rate is no joke. Even if COVID-19 doesn't kill you, it can still make your life pretty miserable.
Many of the wildfires in northern California are started by sparks from PG&E transmission lines crossing national forests. The law says that PG&E is supposed to clear the land around these lines, but for years they didn't bother and even today they aren't keeping up. Today, however, they announced that they were taking more serious action:
PG&E Corp. said Wednesday that it plans to bury 10,000 miles of power lines to reduce wildfire risk throughout Northern California at an estimated cost of up to $20 billion, reversing its earlier stance that doing so would be prohibitively expensive.
....“We know that we have long argued that undergrounding was too expensive,” Chief Executive Patti Poppe said. “This is where we say it’s too expensive not to underground. Lives are on the line.”
That's 10,000 miles out of a total of 20,000 miles of high-voltage lines. It's a good start, though PG&E hasn't announced their schedule for finishing the work.
It's also probably cost effective work, since PG&E has been losing so much money to lawsuits that $20 billion is a pretty good investment for them.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
