Category Archives: News to use

Useful news for all to advance knowledge of the world and how it works

A Master Class in Victim Blaming: White House Accuses Gretchen Whitmer of ‘Sowing Division’ for Criticizing White Supremacists

umhdfmioj8j98fsb8qux.jpg

In a press conference Thursday afternoon, Gretchen Whitmer responded to a right-wing militia’s plot to kidnap her by calling her alleged kidnappers by their titles, white supremacists. She directed her speech to the supremacist in chief, who has been stoking racist enclaves throughout his time in office who and has…

Read more…

The Monochrome Experience: Mirage – Lluís Bussé

Rainwater brings us the open door of liquid mirrors. When you reflect in its waters is easy to run the risk of existential vertigo, enjoy the relativistic abyss, and the slight tickling of time in a significantly deceptive space. Celebrate with me the flipped photograph of the rider. I waited a bit and this portal of reality occurred in front of my astonished gaze. Source: The Monochrome Experience: Mirage – Lluís Bussé

Trump Claims He Could’ve Gotten COVID-19 from Gold Star Families – (Slamming veterans again…)

Timothy Davis, the president and CEO of the Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation, said in a statement that all Gold Star Family attendees were tested by the White House ahead of the event, and, like the Supreme Court event, all tested negative for coronavirus. The rapid antigen tests administered by the White House are known to deliver a high rate of false negatives.

“Considering it has been 12-days since the event, All Gold Star family are all doing well and exhibit no symptoms of Covid-19,” Davis said in the statement, adding that the group is providing a “daily update” to the White House Office of Public Liaison.

Source: Trump Claims He Could’ve Gotten COVID-19 from Gold Star Families

Dr. Fauci: Earliest We’ll Be “Back to Normal” Is the End of 2021

A few weeks ago during the Q&A session after his lecture for MIT’s online biology class about the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci shared his expert opinion on when things might return to “normal” in the US. Here was my paraphrased tweet about it:

With a very effective vaccine ready in Nov/Dec, distributed widely, and if lots of people take it (i.e. the best case scenario), the earliest we could return to “normal life” in the world is the end of 2021.

At the New Yorker Festival earlier in the week, Michael Specter asked him about a return to normalcy and Fauci elaborated a bit more on this timeline (starts ~10:22 in the video).

When are we gonna get back to something that closely resembles, or is in fact, normal as we knew it?

We’re already making doses, tens and hundreds of millions of doses to be ready, first at least, in graded numbers at the end of the year in November/December. By the time we get to April, we likely will have doses to be able to vaccinate anybody who needs to be vaccinated. But logistically by the time you get everybody vaccinated, it likely will not be until the third or even the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2021.

So let’s say we get a 70% effective vaccine, which I hope we will get, but only 60% of the people get vaccinated. There are going to be a lot of vulnerable people out there, which means that the vaccine will greatly help us to pull back a bit on the restrictions that we have now to maintain good public health, but it’s not going to eliminate things like mask wearing and avoiding crowds and things like that.

So I think we can approach normality, but I don’t think we’re going to be back to normal until the end of 2021. We may do better than that; I hope so but I don’t think so.

Leaving aside what “normal” might mean and who it actually applies to,1 there’s some good news and bad news in there. The good news is, they’re already producing doses of the vaccine to be ready if and when the phase 3 trials are successful. Ramping up production before the trials conclude isn’t usually done because it’s a waste of money if the trials fail, but these vaccines are so critical to saving lives that they’re spending that money to save time. That’s great news.

The bad news is that we’re not even halfway through the pandemic in the best case scenario. We’re going to be wearing masks in public for at least another year (and probably longer than that). Large gatherings of people (especially indoors) will continue to be problematic — you know: movie theaters, concerts, clubs, bars, restaurants, schools, and churches — and folks staying within small pods of trusted folks will likely be the safest course of action.

A change in national leadership in both the executive branch and Senate could change the outlook for the better. We could get some normalcy back even without a vaccine through measures like a national mask mandate/distribution, a real national testing & tracing effort, taking aerosol transmission seriously, and easing the economic pressure to “open back up” prematurely. We’re never going to do as well as Vietnam or Taiwan, but I’d settle for Greece or Norway.

  1. It’s America. If we know anything by now about this country, it’s that access to healthcare and economic opportunity is going to apply unevenly to the people who live here. For instance, it’s likely that Black & brown communities, which have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, may face difficulty in getting access to vaccines compared to wealthier, predominantly white communities.

Tags: Anthony Fauci   COVID-19   medicine   Michael Specter   science   USA   vaccines   video