Kevin Drum

There was a period during the climate change debate—largely gone these days, I think—where skeptics were constantly coming up with new, scientific-sounding arguments against the idea of manmade warming. Typically, the claims were just technical enough that it was hard for lay readers like me to evaluate them, which meant they hung around in the air (and Fox News) until some climatologist took a break from real work to dive in and figure out what was going on. Almost without exception, these quasi-scientific arguments turned out to be wrong, usually egregiously so.

I wonder if we're entering a similar stage with proponents of the lab leak hypothesis? In the Wall Street Journal today, a pair of scientists argue that there's a specific location in the coronavirus genome that's often used in gain-of-function research. In this location, researchers splice in a code that generates two arginine amino acids in a row. There are six codes for arginine and therefore 35 possible combinations that will produce two in a row, and in the CoV-2 genome the combination turns out to be the rarest and least likely to occur in nature (a "double CGG"). It is, however, the most common in gain-of-function research because it's handy and easily available.

Is this true? How would I know? There are, of course, reasons to be cautious:

• This seems like fairly obvious stuff to a virologist. Surely someone would have mentioned this before if it were genuinely suspicious.
• The authors of the piece are a retired physicist and a physician/author who's been leading the lab leak hypothesis for a long time. No virologists signed onto this.
• The piece was published on the op-ed page, not the news pages.

So . . . there's probably nothing to this. But it will now swirl around among conservatives until it's conclusively debunked, and probably even after that. In any case, someone needs to get cracking on this.

You really can't say this enough. Tell your friends!

Today, we crossed 300 Million doses administered

Of which nearly 290 Million doses are mRNA vaccines (Moderna, Pfizer)

The safety profile of these vaccines is extraordinary

I can't think of anything else we've given nearly 300M doses of -- with so few untoward effects

— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) June 5, 2021

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 5. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Over the past few decades voting laws have become progressively looser. In the early '70s, nearly all voting was done on Election Day, with only 3-4% done via absentee ballot. That number rose slowly for the next 20 years and then skyrocketed beginning in the early '90s:

By 2016 nearly 40% of the electorate voted early. About half of this was accounted for by mail ballots and the other half by early voting during extended hours at polling places. Early in-person voting increased from zero in 1992 to about 19% of all ballots in 2016.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 4. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The new case rate in the US is going down steadily and is now lower than it's been since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. If this keeps up, our mortality rate should keep dropping too. We just need to get our vaccination rate back up for a while and we should be very close to finally crushing the virus for good, although we still have at least a year of work, maybe more, to inoculate the rest of the world as well.

Every year the Department of Housing and Urban Development performs a Point in Time count of the homeless. On a single day, usually in winter, teams fan out across the country to count the homeless everywhere at the same time. Here are the PIT counts since they began:

Roughly speaking, this total can be broken into three pieces:

• One-third are individuals who are sheltered.
• One-third are individuals who aren't sheltered.
• One-third are families, nearly all of whom are sheltered.

There are issues with how PIT counts are done, which means these figures are not unanimously agreed on among advocates for the homeless. They are, however, the closest thing we have to a reliable count across time.

The PIT count is also broken down by cities, which are referred to by the obscurely bureaucratic label "Continuum of Care." Don't ask why. Here are the top five cities in the US:

As you can see, New York and Los Angeles are in a class by themselves, accounting for a quarter of all homeless between them.

Every once in a while an invader cat wanders into our backyard during the night and Hopper goes nuts. She starts yowling at terrific volume and attacking the sliding glass door as if this cat was about to steal her food dish. The cat runs away as soon as we open the door to go out, and that's that.

Until last week, that is, when Hopper suddenly went nuts one morning. We went out and discovered a brown tabby just hanging out next door. He seemed to have no interest in Hopper at all, and eventually she fled. I, of course, went back for my camera and got a picture. Behold the invader cat.

The American economy gained 559,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate fell to 5.8 percent.

There's nothing special to report about the May numbers. The size of the civilian labor force stayed roughly the same and about half a million people transitioned from unemployed to employed. That's a decent number, though not overwhelming. We still have more than 7 million jobs to go before we reach pre-pandemic levels, so we should do better over the next few months.

Average hourly earnings were up in May by about 3% after you account for inflation. That's good!

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 3. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

How much do various Republican efforts to suppress the vote actually end up suppressing the vote? The evidence suggests that the answer is "not much," and a recent study provides more confirmation of this. It comes from Kyle Raze of the University of Oregon, who took a look at the effect of Shelby vs. Holder, the Supreme Court decision that overturned parts of the Voting Rights Act and opened the door for states to pass new voting laws without first getting them precleared.

What you'd expect is that in states that previously required preclearance two things would happen. First, they'd rush to pass laws designed to affect Black voting. That happened just as you'd think. Second, Black turnout would therefore decline compared to white turnout. That didn't happen:

This is a little complicated, but here's what the chart shows. In red you have the states that previously required preclearance and were therefore affected by Shelby. In presidential elections, the gap between white and Black turnout did indeed increase by about five points after Shelby was handed down, but it turns out this is no smoking gun. In other states (green), which weren't affected by Shelby, the gap increased even more.

In midterm elections, the gap decreased in states that were affected by Shelby. The gap also decreased in other states, but not as much.

In other words, Black turnout relative to white turnout improved more in Shelby states than in non-Shelby states. All the effort that the Shelby states put into changing their voting laws didn't help them. In fact, it backfired.

As usual, this is one study that takes one particular approach to the data, and it might not be correct. But the methodology seems reasonable and other studies have come to similar conclusions. This is why I'm not all that concerned about the general voting restrictions that red states have been pounding into place ever since the 2020 election. Republicans are doing this in a panic, and they have no idea what will work and what won't. For the most part, they're accomplishing little except pissing off Black voters and encouraging them to turn out in greater numbers.

Unfortunately, the new hotness in red states is to pass laws that allow Republican legislatures to replace election officials if they feel that ballot counting isn't going the way they'd like. That's genuinely banana republic territory, and it's the thing we need to shine a spotlight on.