Yesterday, I reaffirmed my conviction that the pandemic will be effectively over in the US by early this spring. Today, I’ll share the one caveat about which I remain deeply worried.

First, it is tragic what has been unfolding in the UK as the B.1.1.7 variant has spread there; however, I’ve yet to hear any argument that that variant is either more deadly, or that it has evolved such that existing vaccines (or infection-acquired immunity) would not be effective against it. (That is, immunological escape by this, or other variants, of SARS-CoV-2 has thus far appeared an unlikely eventuality.) It is wreaking havoc because it is just as deadly as other strands, but far more infectious, so spreading more rapidly, and thus killing and hospitalizing a larger number of people than less infectious strains would have in the same amount of time.

Shortly after sending out yesterday’s newsletter, though, I listened to this podcast episode from the New England Journal of Medicine featuring “South African infectious disease physician Salim Abdool Karim”; long-short, Dr. Karim explains that, while until recently, evolutions of SARS-CoV-2 observed by his team had been modest and gradual, the recently-emerged variant that has been spreading rapidly in South Africa appears to have undergone a large number of mutations at once, including some which bear on the structure of key viral proteins, and that there is some risk that this could lead to immunological escape. He further speculates that these mutations could have been the result of the virus passing from humans into a non-human species and then back again. Be the case as it may, were a new and highly-infectious variant to actually undergo escape, all bets would be off, and it would put us back where we started (or almost, as I have to imagine that all the vaccine progress to date would further speed the creation of still newer vaccines to address new mutant viral strains), confronted with the necessity of controlling a novel pathogen for which no cure or vaccine exists.

Here’s hoping that it never comes to that. That this risk highlights the need to vaccinate rapidly, and otherwise control the spread of COVID-19, not just in rich countries, but all over the world, should go without saying.

In anger, on Thanksgiving Day, I wrote: “A month ago, 1,000 people a day were dying in this country of COVID-19, and that came to feel routine; now, it is 2,000, but wasn’t it higher in the spring? By the end of December, look for it to be three or four.” According to the NYT, yesterday, the number of COVID-19 deaths in the US was 4,406 (and we’ve been averaging 3,000+ COVID deaths per day in recent weeks). That is an awful human tragedy. Given that the IFR for COVID-19 seems to be roughly 0.5% – meaning that 1 in 200 infected individuals dies from the disease – it also suggests that nearly a million people a day were likely being infected with SARS-CoV-2 between Thanksgiving and Christmas in the US. So much for all that holiday travel.

On December 17th, I predicted that roughly 2/3 of the US population would enjoy some form of immunity (either via infection or vaccination) by February or March, and that the pandemic was likely to be effectively over in the US by March or April. I’d planned to revisit those predictions today in some detail, but as it turns out, my math is all coming out about the same as it did a month ago, with the caveat that it now looks extremely unlikely that the US will successfully vaccinate 100MM people by the end of February; however – given that, in recent days, the US has been vaccinating half a million+ people a dayx (perhaps even closer to a million on certain days, though lags in reporting and differences across publicly-available trackers make it a little hard to say with confidence), and that that number will likely cross a million per day in the coming weeks, and perhaps two million per day by sometime in February – I think it is likely that the US vaccinates 100MM+ people by the end of March.

Meanwhile, this very dense research paper published last week in Science concludes: “[O]ur data show immune memory in at least three immunological compartments was measurable in ~95% of subjects 5 to 8 months PSO, indicating that durable immunity against secondary COVID-19 disease is a possibility in most individuals.” Basically, the vast majority of people who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 experience some form of lasting immunity (and, as is noted elsewhere in the paper, symptomatic reinfection is extremely rare).

With that in mind – even accounting for the small fraction of people who do not enjoy immunity after infection, and the fact that many vaccinated people will have previously been infected – the 100MM+ people who have already been infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the US today (and, even more, the ~130MM+ people who will likely have been infected by the end of March) gets us to the “roughly 2/3 of the US population would enjoy some form of immunity” by the spring mentioned above. The herd immunity threshold for COVID-19 remains unknown, but it is probably somewhere between 70% and 90%; however, given that many of us will continue masking and taking other precautions, a lower percentage will likely suffice to break epidemic transmission; thereafter, I think we can expect scattered outbreaks through the spring (a la the 2014-2015 Disney measles situation brought to us by rich, Disney-loving anti-vaxxers), but no further explosive community spread until full herd immunity is reached.

Between immunity from vaccination and immunity from infection, the pandemic will likely be largely over in the United States by the spring. In hard hit places like New York City (where something like 30-40% of the population probably already has immunity via infection), we may reach the end of the pandemic still sooner if our elected officials can just get their shit together and run a vaccination campaign. These are real reasons for hope, as well as for appreciation for the people, like my friend Naman, who are out there making sure that vaccinations happen.

Postscript: Although there’s always the more infectious variant to worry about…

At the end of Ridley Scott’s (mediocre) Alien prequel, Prometheus, there’s a scene where an ingenuous human manages to trick a giant humanoid and an alien (both of which are intent on killing her) into combat with one another. I’m not optimistic that this is what’s happening now in US politics – as my friend Dan summed up the hopeful take, “if neither the neoliberal/state forces or the neofascist/trump forces can defeat the other then they both are weakened/distracted which [may turn out to be] a net positive” – but it is at least instructive to recognize that neither the neoliberal establishment, nor the insurgent neofascists have the human interests of the majority of the population at heart.

As my mom put it, “I have trouble with having absolutely no good guys to turn to”; unfortunately for my mom, and all the rest of us, that is our predicament, roughly, at least with respect to the two major parties and the existing major US power bases. Too often, the urge is to identify – as if the Democrats and Republicans were sports franchises – with irrational/libidinal fervor with ‘our team,’ but now, more than ever the call is to be working towards a better and different world that breaks our current, tragic impasse.

White Guy Leftist Roundup

In the past, Matt Stoller has embraced Josh Hawley on the grounds that the senator is a strong advocate of Federal anti-monopoly action; I think Stoller got it very wrong in backing this charismatic and ambitious budding fascist, but he has a good piece out in response to the storming of the Capitol – and Big Tech response to it – that includes this contextualizing excerpt: “So here’s the profile of a rioter, a working class person who went overseas eight times in military service, including two combat zones, who then tried her hand at a small business where financial predators and monopolists lurked. She then fell in with conspiratorial social media, and turned into a violent rioter who, like most of the rioters, thought she was defending America by overturning an election.” He goes on to say that none of this justifies her actions, but that it is helpful to understand how our political economy shapes our politics.

I think Glenn Greenwald was wrong to downplay the threat from armed white supremacists in the US – generally on the grounds that the Deep State is the real threat, and that, anyway, the threat of fascism is much more serious in Brazil where he now lives, than in the US, where he grew up; with armed white supremacist demonstrations planned for every state capital and DC in the coming weeks, the threat seems pretty real, but Greenwald has been right, and courageously so, about a lot of things for a long time, and – in spite of the fact that he’s noticeably modulated his emphasis since leaving The Intercept in what seems a clear attempt to attract more right-wing/libertarian readers to subscribe to his Substack – I appreciated his analysis of the mainstream liberal response to Big Tech’s banning of Parler, the key line of which was: “[T]he dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism.” One is reminded of the breathtaking pivot of the Democratic Party establishment to crush the Sanders campaign in early 2020.

I’ll give the last white-guy-leftist word to Mike Davis (and thanks to Dan for sharing this piece): “But an open civil war amongst Republicans may only provide short-term advantages to Democrats, whose own divisions have been rubbed raw by Biden’s refusal to share power with progressives. Freed from Trump’s electronic fatwas, moreover, some of the younger Republican senators may prove to be much more formidable competitors for the white college-educated suburban vote than centrist Democrats realize.”

On the Pandemic

I’ll spare you another one of my home-made graphs, but looking at the trends between COVID-19 vaccine doses distributed in the US versus doses administered, it seems reasonably likely that the latter will start to catch up with the former in the next few weeks/month, as doses distributed are increasing in a more linear fashion, while doses administered are now appear to be increasing more exponentially (although there is obviously a ceiling to that increase). In spite of our plodding and bungled vaccine rollout, I continue to think we’ll see the pandemic effectively end in the US by the spring.

Also, my mom (hi mom!) shared more than grim political texts with me today, and I highly recommend this video interview with Shane Crotty on mRNA vaccines.

On Climate Crisis

There is authentic good news with respect to climate crisis, but it is not – as David Dayen grimly joked – that “Greenhouse gas emissions fell significantly in 2020. We’re just a few shelter-in-place catastrophes from saving the planet, I guess.”

To quote from an excellent Nature Climate Change article, entitled “Current and future global climate impacts resulting from COVID-19“: “[W]e estimate that the direct effect of the pandemic-driven response will be negligible, with a cooling of around 0.01 ± 0.005 °C by 2030 compared to a baseline scenario that follows current national policies. In contrast, with an economic recovery tilted towards green stimulus and reductions in fossil fuel investments, it is possible to avoid future warming of 0.3 °C by 2050.” The good news is that, if we get together and fight for a better future, we can change the course of (geo)history.

Even better news is that which has been making the rounds in recent weeks with respect to a major shift in climate-science consensus on locked-in future planetary heating. In short, to quote Michael Mann from this Guardian piece – entitled “Global heating could stabilize if net zero emissions achieved, scientists say” – if net zero emissions are reached globally (a monumental challenge), “surface temperatures stop warming and warming stabilizes within a couple decades.” Like most other climate activists, I’d been under the impression until quite recently that significant warming was locked in for centuries to come, so if this shift in consensus turns out to reflect the climate realities, it is very good news for our future prospects.

The narrative about pandemics (or other human catastrophes) being climate boons, however, needs to die.

Postscript: I know the difference between the Alien vs. Predator films and Ridley Scott’s oeuvre. I’m sorry for referencing both in a single post.

Amongst those agreed that the storming by white supremacist QAnon fanatics of the US Capitol last Wednesday – and, more, the movement underpinning that storming – represent a danger to the future of our flawed, but still vibrant, democracy, a divide of opinion has emerged with respect to the appropriate response, a divide which can be boiled down to the following opposition: Neo-fascist white supremacists pose a threat to US democracy, but so does the ever-growing authoritarianism of the US ruling class (call it the Wall Street-DC-Silicon Valley nexus, or the Deep State, for ease).

Sometimes, when a person develops cancer, the only available treatment – given our current state of technomedical advancement – is chemotherapy, and sometimes, even when treated with chemotherapeutical agents, a person afflicted with cancer dies. (Anyone whose seen/experienced the ravages of these drugs on a human body understands the obscenity of calling them “therapeutic” at all.) Analogies are very often imperfect, and yet they can also be instructive. In this instance, with respect to cancer prevention, it is best that a person not be immersed in a comprehensively toxified environment (and that a person avoids harmful habits, though so often habits are dictated by that same environment and its toxicity), and – in the instance that someone is cured of cancer – it is best that that fortunate person then take every possible step to avoid exposure to risk factors that could lead to a recurrence of the disease.

With respect to our politics, white supremacy is a cancer, and a congenital one at that, for the United States was born with and founded in this ideology. It would have been better to find less catastrophic means of extirpating it (especially after the Civil War, and I’ve appreciated and learned from the explosion of attention paid in recent years to the Federal betrayal of the Reconstruction project in the US South), but we live in the present and face the urgent, contemporary impasse at which we’ve arrived in real time. Relying on the Deep State to rid our body politic (another problematic but useful metaphor) of white supremacy in the name of democracy is both dodgy in principle – given how steeped that Deep State itself has long been in the white supremacist project of the United States – and risky, existentially, given that the Deep State, especially post-9/11, has posed, year by year, an every greater threat to our civil liberties.

Unfortunately, I see no other option in the near term but to count on an enraged establishment to lash out and take vengeance on those who so humiliated it. (Of course, given the utter lack of any attempt to prevent the rioters from looting the Capitol, there is also a scenario in which this outcome was allowed to unfold so as to empower – through public shock and outrage – those very forces in the Deep State that have been back-footed by Trumpism.) As the arrests proliferate, and further light is shed on Wednesday’s grotesqueries (the man who died of a heart attack after inadvertently tasing his own genitals; the woman trampled to death by her fellow looters; the Capitol Police officer who was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher by rioters; the other officer who evidently committed suicide); as a second-round of impeachment proceedings against the President kick-off (on the same day that the second-round of the PPP opens for applications from small businesses hammered by the pandemic to which the President has done next-to-nothing to respond); as calls for the resignations of Senators Cruz and Hawley mount, I agree with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who was featured on this morning’s Democracy Now!: “If there are not severe consequences for every lawmaker & Trump […] official who backed this, every member of the Capitol Police who collaborated with them, this ‘strategy of disruption’ will escalate in 2021.”

Clearly, we should not be relying on tech monopolies to police the public sphere, anymore than we should be lionizing an FBI that has a long history of infiltrating and crushing movements for justice, but this is the impasse we now confront: Die from cancer? Or risk the chemo and face the long road to recovery if we survive?

I’ve written enough on these issues elsewhere – including in recent days on the riot itself, in all its tragicomedy, and the prospect of a second civil war in the US (tl;dr: its clickbait for the corporate media) – so I’ll end here by just pointing out, as my friend Evan did yesterday, that perhaps lawmakers (some of whom came remarkably close to being executed on Facebook livestream); police officers (many of whom aren’t white supremacists and may now be imagining themselves on the losing end of another such incident); executives (many of whom had been all-too-comfortable to live in complicity with neofascism until about five days ago); and a great many others will now, at last, decide to confront the issue of white supremacist neofascism with the seriousness that it demands.

That, however, is not an agenda for radical change, and as the pivot to security intensifies (Axios reports: “D.C. lockdown for inauguration to start Wednesday”), we’d do well to remember that one doesn’t continue taking chemotherapy after the cancer is cleared, and to prevent recurrence – or malignancy in the first place – one does best in creating conditions conducive to health and human thriving. It is not a coincidence that the rise of neoliberalism (with its assault on working people, organized labor, social welfare, and public goods) has been accompanied by a rise in authoritarianism (embodied, in the US, by the emergence of a unitary executive in the form of our increasingly imperial presidency). Our democracy is sick. Much of the morbidity dates back to our country’s founding (white supremacy, settler colonialism, etc., etc.), while other aspects of our unwellness are of more recent provenance. We need secure voting rights for all; checks on the power of money in politics; and robust anti-trust enforcement, and that’s before getting into the question of Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. (Or of the military-industrial-intelligence complex. Or of statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. Or of independence for Puerto Rico and, perhaps, the rest of the US territories. Or of term limits for Federal judges. Etc. Etc.)

I wish this wasn’t our predicament, but it is. Here’s hoping the cure isn’t worse than the disease. We have our work cut out for us, but we also have the opportunity – as I wrote in March, as on other occasions – to rise to the occasion and make this a transformative decade for which future generations will thank us, and for which we’ll be able to thank ourselves.

Tl-dr: No, not for now, but it makes great click-bait. Most of the post that follows will explore my thinking on this question, but first, a couple of brief updates on recent posts.

On Thursday, I wrote about New York’s thus-far-bungled vaccination efforts and proposed shifting to a regulated first-come-first-vaccinated approach; however, I also guessed “that vaccine distribution will start to scale up pretty dramatically in the coming weeks and months regardless of what approach is taken,” and based on Governor Cuomo’s (unlinkable) COVID newsletter, as of yesterday, January 8th: “New York has administered approximately 479,000 vaccine doses. Hospitals have increased the number of doses administered over the past several weeks, starting with 33,709 doses administered during Week 1 and reaching approximately 195,078 by the end of Week 4. While the uptick is welcome, it is still not enough and we have more work to do.” On that final point, I agree with the Governor; the Tableau Public dashboard shows more than 1.3 million vaccine doses have been “allocated” (that is, already delivered) to NYS (with just shy of 600,000 of those coming to NYC) which yields a Percentage of Distributed Administered” rate for NYS of only 36%.

A week ago, I wrote about the struggle to grapple publicly with quantitative data with respect to the pandemic. That struggle continues, for while we’ve heard consistently that the US has less than 5% of the world’s population, but accounts for more than a quarter of all global COVID-19 deaths and confirmed cases, I’ve yet to hear any media or public figure point out that the US has less than 5% of the world’s population, but currently accounts nearly 40% of the world’s cumulative COVID vaccinations, and yet this latter point is also true. Just as the disproportionate COVID caseload and death count in the US can be explained both by our dismal pandemic response, and by the relative excellence of our scientific, medical, and public health system, as well as by our democratic political culture, so too can our relative vaccine successes, limited as they thus far are, be explained by the wealth and power of the US, and by our country’s remarkable ability to leverage staggering public resources in combination with world-leading private research capacity. People often aren’t good at holding two seemingly contradictory but equally true statements in their minds.

Coming to the point, though: Is the US on the verge of a second civil war? To follow the liberal/corporate media since Wednesday (January 6th, a day that will live in infamy…), one might believe we were, but does that proposition actually make sense? Not really. As I wrote on Wednesday: “A Few Thousand Idiots Can’t Topple the Most Powerful Government on Earth…”.

An analogy: Say the world’s best basketball player loses to a five-year-old. Does a reasonable observer now assume that that five-year-old is the new best basketball player in the world? Or does that observer conclude that the adult gracefully let the child win, but could have easily crushed the child at will?

All analogies are imperfect, and given that basketball is generally not played to the death, and that adults don’t generally kill children over losses in low-stakes sports matches, I’ll simply point out that – while one might posit that as the adult aged, and perhaps after 10 or 15 years had passed (such that the former greatest basketball player in the world had moved past prime, while the child had grown into a strapping young adult), that it would be perfectly reasonable to imagine that the once-child might then surpass the former-greatest in basketball skill – to suppose that the child was the greatest at age five is absurd, and if the adult feared the child might someday usurp that title (the Greatest), the adult could simply kill the child as it is said upstart Roman emperors used to kill the children and relatives of those fallen rulers they’d overthrown to foreclose any future possibility of familial blood-feud-style retribution.

Hopefully those are vivid enough images to make the point: As the militarized response to BLM demonstrations in DC over the summer made abundantly clear, there are ample Federal, state, and local law enforcement/military “resources” in Greater DC to stop not just a few thousand disorganized, lightly-armed, conspiracy-theorizing, amateur wannabes (especially when these wannabes did what haphazard organizing they did do in public view on the Internet), but an actual invading army. The failure to respond was a political one and its roots can be traced back to the current occupant of the White House.

Is there a risk that – left unchecked for years or decades to come – this current iteration of white supremacist insurgency might emerge as a viable threat to the US Government itself? Certainly, and I’ve been writing about that fact for more than a decade. (Here’s an excellent piece from Albert Wenger on lessons to be learned, on that same front, from German history.)

Is this current iteration of white supremacist insurgency an existential threat, at present, to the US Government? No, not really. The US ruling class has reacted, almost with one voice, against this movement; Corporate America (including Wall Street and Silicon Valley), the Deep State (which is a thing, and was always, until recently, a Left conceptualization of what is alternately called the Military-Industrial Complex or the Defense Establishment), and the media writ large have all come out with full-throated condemnations of the events of the 6th. Yes, a disconcerting number of Republican elected officials at the highest levels of government have backed the farcical coup attempt, and there is a long-tail risk that the QAnon fanatics, etc. who were the protagonists of the vandalism and breaking-and-entry at the US Capitol combine with the significant fraction of law enforcement and active-duty military personnel who are white supremacists to launch an all out civil war in an attempt to seize power. I’d say it’s very-long-tail though.

Much more likely, however, is that we see murders (including political assassinations), acts of sabotage, and spectacular acts of “domestic terrorism” a la the recent Nashville suicide bombing or the 1995 Oklahoma City attack, and that the state responds with the same type of crushing force it has generally brought to bear on such outright challenges to its authority over most of this country’s history. That a disproportionate amount of (domestic) state violence has been directed at Left movements and movements for the liberation of people of color goes without saying, and to see that there is a real risk that the events of the 6th will be mobilized to justify a reaction which seeks to further limit rights of assembly, protest, and freedom of speech, one need look no further back than the response to 9/11 and the justification for the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act under which we still live. (Remember the eco-terrorism clauses of the PATRIOT Act?)

I grew up in Idaho in the ’80s and ’90s. The politics that many in the ruling class find so startling today have been my political reality since childhood, and so it is hard for me to take seriously the sudden mainstream liberal hysteria. The threat from white supremacy and growing fascism is very real, but that threat, for now, is not particularly about armed domestic conflict. It is about our country’s long history of genocide, slavery, and racial terror; our country’s caustic role globally; and the slow erosion of our liberties at home, that has roots deeper than 9/11, but any analysis of which most be rooted in an understanding of the reaction to/aftermath of that event.

I’ll end by referencing what John Cusack called “the best one liner of the entire pandemic” while taking care to try to give proper attribution: “Due to travel restrictions, this year the United States had to organize the coup at home.”

Exactly. White supremacist chickens are coming home to roost. Owing to historical context from which it is impossible to extricate ourselves, we now face the unenviable predicament of relying on our authoritarian, anti-democratic Establishment – in the form of the FBI, most especially, but the whole apparatus of domestic law enforcement and the judiciary – to crush an authoritarian, antidemocratic, but also fascist movement. In the near-term, perhaps there is no alternative but to hope that the FBI does to manifold cornily-named white supremacist outfits what it has done, in the past, to organized crime families, Black Panthers, and Branch Davidians alike. In the near, medium, and long term, though, we have to be fighting to forge a new, sane, and just political consensus in the ruins of neoliberalism, lest our current impasse give way to a neofascist future.