Kevin Drum

So what's the deal with the AstraZeneca vaccine? It's been given to nearly 20 million people around the world with no reported efficacy problems, and after a brief panic it appears that it doesn't cause blood clots either. On Monday, AZ issued a press release describing the results of its US testing, which it said were very good.

But then a funny thing happened: NIH issued a statement saying that the agency that oversees test results in the US informed it that AZ's test data "may have included outdated information from that trial, which may have provided an incomplete view of the efficacy data." Shazam!

Tony Fauci talking about this now on @GMA:
DSMB "wrote a rather harsh note to them and with a copy to me saying that in fact they felt that the data that was in the press release, were somewhat outdated and might in fact be misleading a bit, and wanted them to straighten it out."

— Kai Kupferschmidt (@kakape) March 23, 2021

Fauci: “It really is unfortunate that this happened. You know this is really what you call an unforced error, because the fact is, this is very likely a very good vaccine and this kind of thing does as you say do nothing, but really cast some doubt about the vaccines …"

— Kai Kupferschmidt (@kakape) March 23, 2021

But what's the unforced error? That AZ issued a press release that might be slightly wrong? Or that NIH decided to publicly call out something that could easily have been handled internally within a day or two? [UPDATE: Fauci's full quote makes it clear he blames AZ.]

I feel like there must be something going on behind the scenes that we're not privy to. NIH issued its statement after midnight, which certainly suggests someone was in a helluva rush to reprimand AZ publicly. Someone with sources should try to report this out. Is there ongoing bad blood between AZ and NIH? Is AZ a serial bad actor? Or what?

My prediction: AZ will update the data and it will make only the slightest difference. At that point, the NIH statement will look a little shabby. It could be that NIH felt like they needed to issue a strong statement in order to send a message to the entire vaccine community, but it still seems shortsighted. Why cast even more doubt on the AZ vaccine when it would take only a day or two to find out if there's really a problem?

Alternatively, I suppose it might turn out that AZ really was deliberately fudging the data for public consumption and deserves everything it gets in return. I can hardly imagine why they'd bother since the official report data is going to have all the detailed test information, but who knows? I guess we'll find out shortly.

Germany is ordering new coronavirus lockdowns:

"We are in a very, very serious situation" due to the spread of coronavirus variants in the country, Merkel told the press conference.

"What we have is essentially a new pandemic," she said. The new virus is "significantly more deadly, significantly more infectious."

"It really makes you a bit wistful about what we could have already achieved," Merkel said. She added that the mutated virus has now "basically eaten up" earlier gains.

Here's the situation in Germany:

That might not look like much when it's spread out like that, but it represents about a 60% increase since March 1. Europe as a whole is up about 25% over the same period.

Unfortunately, this is partly a result of Germany's own self-centered—but typical—response to concerns over the AstraZeneca vaccine. Without bothering to coordinate or even investigate the true risks, they suspended use of the AZ vaccine a week ago thanks to a panic over supposed blood clotting side-effects. Other countries then felt compelled to follow suit lest they appear to be less vigilant than Germany. Four days later the whole thing evaporated in a puff of smoke. It took no more than a cursory investigation to demonstrate that the AZ vaccine was perfectly safe.

But I imagine the damage was done. Now everyone is suspicious of the AZ jab, and that's likely to reduce its use all over Europe. This is devastating on a continent that's already suffering from a horribly botched vaccine rollout.

Every country puts itself first, so it's nothing against Germany that they do the same. But it sure seems like they overdo things on this front. From their response to the Great Recession to the elimination of nuclear plants so they could keep burning coal; from the admission of millions of refugees with no regard to its effect on European politics to their insistence on building a direct gas pipeline to Russia; and finally to this latest fiasco, they seem to have no regard at all for the rest of Europe.

I don't know if this is typical of Germany or typical of Angela Merkel. A bit of both, I suppose, but it's one reason I've never been able to join in the praise of Merkel as one of the world's great leaders. Generally speaking, I think she's been something of a disaster.

POSTSCRIPT: Just in case I have to acknowledge the obvious, the United States is no great shakes on this score either. That doesn't change Merkel's record, though.

I kind of love this exchange:

Q: Do you want to see firsthand what’s going on in those facilities?

THE PRESIDENT: I know what’s going on in those facilities.

Personal visits to the border are just PR. And that's fair enough: politics is all about PR. But the idea that the president might be underinformed about something unless he personally sees it is ridiculous. Good for Biden for being blunt about that.

Yesterday I tweeted this:

Twitter would be so much better if we all resolved to ignore critical tweets from random people with <1000 followers.

— Kevin Drum (@kdrum) March 21, 2021

Naturally this brought accusations of elitism. Just because someone doesn't have a lot of followers doesn't mean they aren't worth listening to! You blue-check people are too full of yourselves.

Fair enough. But the context for this—which no one knew because I never mentioned it—was Twitter mobs. In particular, I had just read about a Twitter mob that had driven Emily Oster out of social media, along with yet another Twitter user who had offered up one of the now familiar reeducation camp style apologies for something she had tweeted a decade ago.

I don't even know precisely what either of these squabbles was about, but sight unseen I'd trust Oster over a Twitter mob. Her mistake, however, was that she apparently tried to engage with them under the mistaken assumption that (a) they mattered, and (b) they were arguing in good faith. Neither is generally true of Twitter mobs.

Thus my tweet. I've said this before, but I'll say it again as loudly as I can:

Twitter mobs are completely meaningless.

That's it. Are there occasional gems of criticism within the mobs? Sure. Is it worth your mental health to read the rest of the crap looking for them? Absolutely not.

Twitter is not the real world and Twitter mobs aren't real mobs. They usually start with one superspreader, if you will, and the rest of the mob is just following along without even bothering to read any of the original material. After all, why bother? It's fun to shitpost the normies, and it only takes five or ten seconds to do it.

Thus my advice: Ignore Twitter, dammit. It means nothing, and Twitter mobs mean less than nothing. Until and unless an online mob can prove that it represents something of size in the real world, it should be assumed to be nothing more than kids in their basements doing it for the lulz.

As for the mobsters with more than 1000 followers, you might need to respond briefly and calmly to them, just to have your view on record. But @butthead3487? Nah.

David Roberts tweets an eternal truth:

Pols who genuinely cared about energy independence would be going gangbusters for renewables (& building domestic battery supply chains). But the ones who say it most are the fossil fuel shills, which shows they care about the FF industry, not independence. Shocker.

— David Roberts (@drvolts) March 22, 2021

Even if you think climate change is just a progressive hoax, there's really no reason to oppose renewable energy. At the very least, it produces fewer air pollutants than fossil fuels, which everyone can agree is a good thing. And the industry as a whole would provide as many jobs as the fossil fuel industry if it were the same size. So why not support the hell out of it?

What you'd expect under normal circumstances is that senators from big coal and oil states might oppose renewable energy for purely parochial reasons, but that's a small fraction of all senators. And anyway, if this were truly about protecting the fossil fuel industry, conservatives would oppose nuclear power too. But they don't. They're all for it.

When you put this all together, what you have is this: Republicans oppose wind and solar; support nuclear; and support coal and oil. What kind of sense can you make of this?

Only one: they oppose whatever liberals support and support whatever liberals oppose. Rolling coal, baby. That's it. Own the libs. Welcome to the modern GOP.

Hooray! Spring is here, and with it our bird feeder is once again filled with birds. What kind of birds? Well, um, little brown ones. And yellow ones. Maybe finches? Or sparrows? You know, one of the little varieties.

UPDATE: We have an answer! "That particular mob is a group of Bushtits (Psaltriparus minimus), a kind of long-tailed tit, of which there are eleven species worldwide (the Bushtit is the only one in the New World). They were long thought to be closely related to chickadees and titmice, but have recently been discovered to be only distant cousins."

This weekend we had two days above 3 million. That's terrific performance:

As you can see, I've finally admitted defeat on the original trendline and redrawn it. There's no guarantee that this one will be any better than the old one, but as vaccine production goes up and more people are approved to get it, I wouldn't be at all surprised if we reach 4 million weekend jabs by the middle of next month.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 21. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Was Robert Aaron Long motivated by anti-Asian racism when he went on his killing rampage in Atlanta last week? Six of his eight victims were Asian massage parlor workers, so at first the answer seemed pretty obvious: Of course he was.

But then things got more complicated. Racist mass shooters are usually proud to acknowledge their racism, but Long said he didn't care about race. Others who knew him confirmed this. And unlike most racist attackers, he didn't have a Facebook page full of racial fulminations or a Twitter feed that retweeted anti-Asian hate speech. At a conscious level, at least, Long really did seem to be motivated mostly by misogyny and sex obsessions.

And yet, there's still the blunt fact that six of his eight victims were Asian, and Long carried out his rampage at a time when anti-Asian hate crimes had been all over the news. Is it really plausible that this was just a coincidence?

That's debatable, but the bare facts nonetheless suggest that anti-Asian racism really wasn't a major factor in the shootings. I accept this, more or less, and yet I've come to realize that I don't care. Since I'm normally committed to facts above all else, what explains this?

I've been pondering this, and the best I can come up with is a twofold explanation. First, we really don't know anything for sure. And since it was Asian women who Long used to satisfy his reviled sex obsession, it hardly seems plausible that anti-Asian sentiment wasn't swirling around somewhere in his diseased mind.

Second, there is still the bare fact that regardless of anything else, it was Asian women who were primarily Long's victims and he did carry out his killings at a time when anti-Asian hate crimes were on the rise and getting lots of news coverage. All by itself, that seems like enough justification to use the killings as a very high profile way of bringing attention to anti-Asian violence. That's just fundamentally more important than playing angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin over Long's precise mental state.

I realize how inadequate this seems. But for better or worse, it's where I find myself right now.

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