"How can the Washington Post say the court decisions on his vaccine or testing mandates were 'out of his control'?"

"Biden and his legal team are supposed to figure out a way to implement his policies that *won’t* get blocked by courts! Those court decisions didn’t happen at random; they happened because judges looked at what the administration did and decided that it didn’t comply with the law."

Writes my son John, at Facebook, commenting on "A year ago, Biden unveiled a 200-page plan to defeat covid. He has struggled to deliver on some key promises" (WaPo).

"Biden and his legal team are supposed to figure out a way to implement his policies that *won’t* get blocked by courts!" — We are all expected to pursue our goals and desires within the limits of the law. But we still can complain about the law that stands in our way and excuse our failure to achieve by pointing at this pesky law.

Sometimes you push the limits of the law and hope to convince judges. With a slightly different configuration of the Supreme Court, the vaccine mandate would have succeeded. Blaming the Court is worth doing to set up judicial appointments as a campaign issue.

And would the implementation of the vaccine mandate have served Biden's interests? Isn't he better off with it failing? He can point to it and say that he tried so hard and not be burdened with the realities of driving so many people out of employment, leaving businesses inadequately staffed, and imposing on the intimate personal bodily autonomy that his Party ordinarily celebrates. 

By the way: "Activists look ahead to what could be the 'last anniversary' for Roe" (NPR).

Speaking of the pending abortion case... did the Texas legislators "figure out a way to implement [their] policies that won’t get blocked by courts"? I'd say they deliberately overreached well-known law because they wanted to convince the Court to change it and, failing that, they wanted political credit for trying.

"It is now indisputable, and almost undisputed, that the year and a quarter of virtual school imposed devastating consequences on the students who endured it."

"Studies have found that virtual school left students nearly half a year behind pace, on average, with the learning loss falling disproportionately on low-income, Latino, and Black students. Perhaps a million students functionally dropped out of school altogether. The social isolation imposed on kids caused a mental health 'state of emergency,' according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The damage to a generation of children’s social development and educational attainment, and particularly to the social mobility prospects of its most marginalized members, will be irrecoverable. It is nearly as clear that these measures did little to contain the pandemic... Progressives were carried along by two predominant impulses. One was a zero-COVID policy that refused to weigh the trade-off of any measure that could even plausibly claim to suppress the pandemic. The other was deference to teachers unions, who were organizing to keep schools closed. Those strands combined into a refusal to acknowledge the scale or importance of losing in-person learning with a moralistic insistence that anybody who disagreed was callous about death or motivated by greed.... 'Parents who advocated for school reopening were repeatedly demonized on social media as racist and mischaracterized as Trump supporters.'...  Most progressives [now]... just want to quietly move on without anybody admitting anybody did anything wrong."

Writes Jonathan Chait in "School Closures Were a Catastrophic Error. Progressives Still Haven’t Reckoned With It. Sometimes you need to own up to an error so it’s not repeated" (NY Magazine).

"The premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality..."

"... which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism. [Ernest Becker, the author of this Pulitzer Prize-winning 1973 book] argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and biology, and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since humanity has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, we are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality by focusing our attention mainly on our symbolic selves, i.e. our culturally-based self esteem, which Becker calls 'heroism': a 'defiant creation of meaning' expressing 'the myth of the significance of human life' as compared to other animals.... Humanity's traditional 'hero-systems,' such as religion, are no longer convincing in the age of reason. Becker argues that the loss of religion leaves humanity with impoverished resources for necessary illusions. Science attempts to serve as an immortality project, something that Becker believes it can never do because it is unable to provide agreeable, absolute meanings to human life. The book states that we need new convincing 'illusions' that enable us to feel heroic in ways that are agreeable...."

From the Wikipedia article, "The Denial of Death," a book title that sprang to mind when I saw the news that the U.S. government is going to stop requiring daily reports of the number of Covid deaths.

This is the book Alvy Singer wanted Annie Hall to read:

"The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers..."

"... dealing a blow to a key element of the White House’s plan to address the pandemic as cases resulting from the Omicron variant are on the rise. But the court allowed a more modest mandate requiring health care workers at facilities receiving federal money to be vaccinated. The vote in the employer mandate case was 6 to 3, with liberal justices in dissent. The vote in the health care case was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joining the liberal justices to form a majority...."

The NYT reports.

Here are the opinions — NFIB v. OSHA and Biden v. Missouri.

From the OSHA case:

This is no “everyday exercise of federal power.” In re MCP No. 165, 20 F. 4th, at 272 (Sutton, C. J., dissenting). It is instead a significant encroachment into the lives—and health—of a vast number of employees. “We expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of vast economic and political significance.” Alabama Assn. of Realtors v. Department of Health and Human Servs., 594 U. S. ___, ___ (2021) (per curiam) (slip op., at 6) (internal quotation marks omitted). There can be little doubt that OSHA’s mandate qualifies as an exercise of such authority. 

The question, then, is whether the Act plainly authorizes the Secretary’s mandate. It does not. The Act empowers the Secretary to set workplace safety standards, not broad public health measures. See 29 U. S. C. §655(b) (directing the Secretary to set “occupational safety and health standards” (emphasis added)); §655(c)(1) (authorizing the Secretary to impose emergency temporary standards necessary to protect “employees” from grave danger in the workplace)....

From Biden v. Missouri:

[H]ealthcare facilities that wish to participate in Medicare and Medicaid have always been obligated to satisfy a host of conditions that address the safe and effective provision of healthcare.... [T]he Secretary routinely imposes conditions of participation that relate to the qualifications and duties of healthcare workers themselves.... Of course the vaccine mandate goes further than what the Secretary has done in the past to implement infection control. But he has never had to address an infection problem of this scale and scope before.... Vaccination requirements are a common feature of the provision of healthcare in America: Healthcare workers around the country are ordinarily required to be vaccinated for diseases such as hepatitis B, influenza, and measles, mumps, and rubella....

We accordingly conclude that the Secretary did not exceed his statutory authority in requiring that, in order to remain eligible for Medicare and Medicaid dollars, the facilities covered by the interim rule must ensure that their employees be vaccinated against COVID–19.

From the dissent in the Biden case. This is by Justice Thomas (joined by Justices Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett):

“We expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of vast economic and political significance.” Alabama Assn. of Realtors v. Department of Health and Human Servs., 594 U. S. ___, ___ (2021) (per curiam) (slip op., at 6) (internal quotation marks omitted). And we expect Congress to use “exceedingly clear language if it wishes to significantly alter the balance between state and federal power.” Ibid. (internal quotation marks omitted). The omnibus rule is undoubtedly significant—it requires millions of healthcare workers to choose between losing their livelihoods and acquiescing to a vaccine they have rejected for months. Vaccine mandates also fall squarely within a State’s police power, see Zucht v. King, 260 U. S. 174, 176 (1922), and, until now, only rarely have been a tool of the Federal Government. If Congress had wanted to grant CMS authority to impose a nationwide vaccine mandate, and consequently alter the state-federal balance, it would have said so clearly. It did not.

"I’m well aware of the stereotypes of white parents choosing the private-school option when the going gets tough at public schools."

"I told myself that prioritizing being a 'good leftist' at the expense of my son’s well-being wasn’t good parenting, but as a red-diaper baby myself, the white guilt dies hard... Sending my kid to private school was accompanied by a lot of angst....  The pandemic, and the school-reopening debate in particular, has thrown me into an ideological mid-life crisis, questioning all my prior political assumptions. I’m still attempting to hold onto the progressive label while calling out the policies I see as antithetical to it, but the longer fellow progressives support new school closures and other policies that restrict kids’ lives in order to allay the anxieties of adults, and have been shown to cause far more harm than benefit, the more alienated I feel."

From "How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics/I’ve never felt more alienated from the liberal Democratic circles I usually call home" by Rebecca Bodenheimer (Politico).

Trump does a 15-minute interview with NPR.

Full text here. It begins on the subject of covid: 

The vaccines, I recommend taking them, but I think that has to be an individual choice. I mean, it's got to be individual, but I recommend taking them. Many people recommend them. And if some people don't want, they shouldn't have to take them. They can't be mandated, as the expression goes. And I think that's very important. Personally, I feel very comfortable having taken them. I've had absolutely no reverberation....

But then it's all about the 2020 election results, with Trump sticking to his attack on the election and the interviewer, Steve Inskeep, pressuring him until  Trump cuts it off. A few highlights:

Why did Republican officials in Arizona accept the results then?

Because they're RINOs, and frankly, a lot of people are questioning that....
It is not true that there were far more votes than voters [in Philadelphia]. There was an early count. I've noticed you've talked about this in rallies and you've said, reportedly, this is true. I think even you know that that was an early report that was corrected later.

Well, you take a look at it. You take a look at Detroit. In fact, they even had a hard time getting people to sign off on it because it was so out of balance. They called it out of balance. So you take a look at it. You know the real truth, Steve, and this election was a rigged election.

Why is it that you think that the vast majority of your allies in the United States Senate are not standing behind you?...

Because Mitch McConnell is a loser. And frankly, Mitch McConnell, if he were on the other side and if Schumer were put in his position, he would have been fighting this like you've never seen before. He would have been fighting this, because when you look at it, and this is long — is a long way from over.... 

Let me ask you this question. How come Biden couldn't attract 20 people for a crowd? How come when he went to speak in different locations, nobody came to watch, but all of a sudden he got 80 million votes? Nobody believes that, Steve. Nobody believes that.

If you'll forgive me, maybe because the election was about you.... 

Who wins and who loses if the political divide on Covid breaks down — as it seems to be breaking down because of Omicron?

I'm reading "Why More Americans Are Saying They’re ‘Vaxxed and Done’/COVID has always divided Americans. The Omicron wave is even dividing the vaccinated" (The Atlantic).

Some 2022 Democrats are sounding like 2020 Republicans. In spring 2020, many Republicans, including President Donald Trump, insisted that COVID was hardly worse than the flu; that its fatality risk was comparable to an everyday activity, like driving in a car; and that an obsessive focus on cases wouldn’t give an accurate picture of what was going on in the pandemic.

That's not exactly how I remember it (and I watched Trump's Covid show every day). I accept the use of "comparable" but not "hardly worse." But those who loathed Trump agonized over every comparison to the flu because it seemed he wasn't taking things seriously enough. I think he was trying to steel us for the fight and avert panic, but anti-Trump people were already in a panic over Trump and — in that election year — they wanted Trump to fail. So I see why people split politically over something that wasn't inherently political.

In the current Omicron wave, these Republican talking points seem to have mostly come true—for most vaccinated non-senior adults, who are disproportionately Democrats....

You can see right there that the Atlantic writer — Derek Thompson — is going to say that the Democrats have changed their beliefs because the facts have changed. But the political landscape also has changed: The Democrats are in power, they're in charge of the long hard fight, and they're the ones who stand to lose in elections coming up later in the year. That's reason to act like we'll be fine, we can make it. Keep calm and tough it out.

The messiness of Omicron data—record-high cases! but much milder illness!—has deepened our COVID Rashomon, in which different communities are telling themselves different stories about what’s going on, and coming to different conclusions about how to lead their lives. That’s true even within populations that, a year ago, were united in their desire to take the pandemic seriously and were outraged by those who refused to do so....

The article-writer doesn't go anywhere with the political analysis he sets up. He doesn't even see the political question I put in my post title, which I wrote when I was a quarter of the way through his piece. So let me try to answer my own question. 

Here's why the breakdown of the political divide could help Democrats. If fighting Omicron is a losing game, the perception that it's not a fight anymore keeps the Democrats, who are in charge, from looking like losers. If Omicron is accepted — relatively benign, unstoppably fast-moving — then there's less expectation that the government will take forcible actions and displace private decision-making. 

You might think, that's what Democrats do — take forcible actions and displace private decision-making — that's their brand. But they could take forcible actions and displace private decision-making about something other than Covid, something where their failures won't rack up so quickly and obviously.

Enough about politicians. What about ordinary people? What should you do about Omicron and should it have a damned thing to do with politics? Should you keep making demands of other people, or should you look to your own health and the health of your family? If the answer to that question is political — and I'm afraid it is! — then it's time for me to type the last word of this post and hit publish.

"Omicron Makes Biden’s Vaccine Mandates Obsolete/There is no evidence so far that vaccines are reducing infections from the fast-spreading variant."

Commentary by Luc Montagnier and Jed Rubenfeld (in The Wall Street Journal)("Dr. Montagnier was a winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the human immunodeficiency virus. Mr. Rubenfeld is a constitutional scholar").

It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here.

The government's mandates came out when the concern was Delta, not Omicron, and therefore its "findings are now obsolete."

The Supreme Court held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) that the right to refuse medical treatment could be overcome when society needs to curb the spread of a contagious epidemic. At Friday’s oral argument, all the justices acknowledged that the federal mandates rest on this rationale. 

But mandating a vaccine to stop the spread of a disease requires evidence that the vaccines will prevent infection or transmission (rather than efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalization or death).... For Omicron, there is as yet no such evidence.

The little data we have suggest the opposite. One preprint study found that after 30 days the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines no longer had any statistically significant positive effect against Omicron infection, and after 90 days, their effect went negative—i.e., vaccinated people were more susceptible to Omicron infection....

According to the CDC, the overwhelming majority of symptomatic U.S. Omicron cases have been mild. The best policy might be to let Omicron run its course while protecting the most vulnerable, naturally immunizing the vast majority against Covid through infection by a relatively benign strain....

It is axiomatic in U.S. law that courts don’t uphold agency directives when the agency has entirely failed to consider facts crucial to the problem....

The WaPo Fact Checker gives Sonia Sotomayor 4 Pinocchios!

She said, "Those numbers show that omicron is as deadly and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as delta did. … We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”

She left some major weasel room: What does "serious" mean? She didn't say 100,000 children were on ventilators, just that "many" were. So I'm surprised Glenn Kessler went the whole 4 Pinocchios on her.

Let's read:

That’s wildly incorrect, assuming she is referring to hospitalizations, given the reference to ventilators. According to HHS data, as of Jan. 8 there are about 5,000 children hospitalized in a pediatric bed, either with suspected covid or a confirmed laboratory test. This figure includes patients in observation beds. So Sotomayor’s number is at least 20 times higher than reality, even before you determine how many are in “serious condition.”

Kessler notes the special importance of accuracy for Supreme Court Justices. This isn't a place to show special respect. And her number was "absurdly high." So, "She earns Four Pinocchios."

By the way, Kessler also absolves Justice Gorsuch off the accusation that he got a number absurdly wrong. The official court transcript has him saying: “Flu kills — I believe — hundreds of thousands of people every year.” Kessler listened to the audio verifies that Gorsuch said, “flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year.” Wow. Correct the transcript, people. Or is correcting the transcript a dangerous, endless exercise?

"I’d see the entire city of Newark unemployed before I allowed one single teacher’s aide to die needlessly."

Said John Abeigon, the Newark Teachers Union president, quoted in "As More Teachers’ Unions Push for Remote Schooling, Parents Worry. So Do Democrats. Chicago teachers have voted to go remote. Other unions are agitating for change. For Democrats, who promised to keep schools open, the tensions are a distinctly unwelcome development" (NYT).

Labor officials say that many of their critics are acting in bad faith, exploiting parents’ pandemic-related frustrations to advance longstanding political goals, like discrediting unions and expanding private-school vouchers....

If periods of remote learning this winter hurt the Democratic Party, “that’s a question for the consultants and the brain trusts to figure out,” said Mr. Abeigon, the Newark union president. “But that it’s the right thing to do? There’s no question in my mind.”

You can't open the schools without the teachers, and Democrats can't win without teachers. 

"Historically, and almost definitionally, a gridlocked Congress that cannot pass laws tends to be better for conservative reactionaries than progressive activists."

"Lawmakers also lack the mastery of esoteric issues, say soil runoff, that civil servants can master. When the courts force Congress to expressly decide, usually either nothing happens — or lobbyists sit in the driver’s seat. Pushing decision-making to Congress from the civil service, or what Trump disdainfully called the 'deep state,' is a goal of the conservative legal project shared by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.... The reality is, even if they tried, the Democratic-controlled Congress probably couldn’t cobble together the votes to pass a mandate like OSHA’s. Ten Republicans in the Senate wouldn’t cross over to break a filibuster. Republicans are emboldened because they think opposition to vaccine mandates in the off-year Virginia elections helped win all three statewide races and flip the House of Delegates."

From "How blocking Biden’s vaccine mandate would be a Supreme Court gift to Trump" by James Hohmann (WaPo).

The Biden administration is relying on general language in a statute passed over a half century ago as it tries to do something that we know Congress won't do on its own, even though Congress has been able to see the problem to be solved for at least half a year. The administration's mandate is such an aggressive imposition on people, and the position of Congress is, essentially, to spare us. It looks as though the Supreme Court is about to make Congress's answer — no mandate — the final answer. 

Isn't that the most democratic — small "d" democratic — resolution of the lawmaking conundrum?

"For the fourth day in a row, Wisconsin on Friday recorded a record-breaking number of new COVID-19 cases driven by the highly contagious but milder omicron variant."

"The Wisconsin Department of Health Services reported 12,293 new confirmed cases, the highest single-day case count of the entire pandemic. The previous record was set Thursday when 11,547 new cases were reported.... Friday’s seven-day average was more than double what it was just two weeks ago, the health department said. At 7,637 cases, the average was also the highest of the pandemic. Deaths are lower than they were this time last year, with 12 new COVID-19 deaths reported Friday, according to the department. Last year, 32 new deaths were added on Jan. 7. But the seven-day average for COVID-19 deaths is comparable. Friday’s seven-day average was 20 deaths per day, the health department reported. Last year at this time that number was 22 deaths per day.... The number of ICU patients — 472 — was just shy of the pandemic all-time high of 475 reached on Thursday, according to the association."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports.

The strange case of Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff, who have now both died (of Covid).

 

Here's the NYT obituary for the twins. 

"Conservative Supreme Court justices on Friday appeared skeptical that the Biden administration has legal authority to impose a broad vaccination-or-testing requirement on large employers."

"They seemed more in agreement with private businesses and Republican-led states that such policies need to be approved by Congress or implemented by state governments than a federal agency — in this case, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was among the conservative justices, who make up a majority of the court, to wonder whether Congress had given authority for agencies 'to enact such a broad regulation.' The Biden administration’s solicitor general, Elizabeth B. Prelogar, said Congress had given just such a power for the agency to enact emergency standards to protect workers in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic."

WaPo reports.

I listened to much of the oral argument, and I thought Prelogar was superhumanly great. I don't think I have ever heard someone speak so quickly for so long without sacrificing any lucidity, terseness, or enunciation. Here's her Wikipedia page. I see that she was Miss Idaho in 2004, she's fluent in Russian, and she has sons who are named Blaise and Beckett (which I'm just guessing is a tribute to Blaise Pascal and Samuel Beckett). 

"Throughout the pandemic, Democrats have been eager to style themselves as the ones that 'take the virus seriously,' which is shorthand, at least in the bluest states and cities..."

"... for endorsing the most extreme interventions. By questioning the wisdom of school closures—and taking our child out of public school—I found myself going against the party line. And when I tried to speak out on social media, I was shouted down and abused, accused of being a Trumper who didn’t care if teachers died. On Twitter, mothers who had been enlisted as unpaid essential workers were mocked, often in highly misogynistic terms. I saw multiple versions of 'they’re just mad they’re missing yoga and brunch.' Twitter is a cesspool full of unreasonable people. But the kind of moralizing and self-righteousness that I saw there came to characterize lefty COVID discourse to a harmful degree. As reported in this magazine, the parents in deep-blue Somerville, Massachusetts, who advocated for faster school reopening last spring were derided as 'fucking white parents' in a virtual public meeting. The interests of children and the health of public education were both treated as minor concerns, if these subjects were broached at all.... Beyond the infuriating nonresponse to school closures—'kids are resilient'—the discussion regarding masks has also been oblivious at times.... None of this has shaken my support for the Democratic agenda, which I still endorse wholesale. What I’ve lost is my trust that the party is truly motivated to act in the interests of those they claim to serve. How can I get excited about universal pre-K proposals, for example, when K–12 is in shambles?"

Writes Angie Schmitt in "Why I Soured on the Democrats/COVID school policies set me adrift from my tribe" (The Atlantic).

Oklahoma Supreme Court allows Trump rally to proceed as planned; Tulsa mayor rescinds curfew

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Friday ruled that President Trump’s upcoming rally in Tulsa can go ahead as planned despite concerns about coronavirus -- just as Trump announced that a curfew in the city had been lifted for the rally.

“I just spoke to the highly respected Mayor of Tulsa, G.T. Bynum, who informed me there will be no curfew tonight or tomorrow for our many supporters attending the #MAGA Rally. Enjoy yourselves - thank you to Mayor Bynum!” the president tweeted.

TRUMP WARNS 'ANARCHISTS' NOT TO DISRUPT TULSA RALLY, AFTER THREAT PROMPTS EMERGENCY ORDER

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

I just spoke to the highly respected Mayor of Tulsa, G.T. Bynum, who informed me there will be no curfew tonight or tomorrow for our many supporters attending the #MAGA Rally. Enjoy yourselves - thank you to Mayor Bynum! @gtbynum

111K

2:09 AM - Jun 20, 2020

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45.9K people are talking about this

Bynum on Friday issued a statement and said he was "told the curfew is no longer necessary."

"Last night, I enacted a curfew at the request of Tulsa Police Chief Wendell Franklin, following consultation with the United States Secret Service based on intelligence they had received,” he said in a news release, the Tulsa World reported. “Today, we were told the curfew is no longer necessary so I am rescinding it.”

Bynum, a Republican, had declared a civil emergency and announced a curfew near the arena where Trump plans to hold a campaign rally on Saturday.

Bynum, in his order, said “in the interest of national security” he would establish a “federal exclusion zone” in the vicinity of the rally. He cited “crowds in excess of 100,000” and opposition protests as well as recent “civil unrest” -- referring to protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd that in the early days escalated into looting and violence in some cities. Additionally, he had warned that he had information that organized groups known for violence were traveling to the city “for the purposes of causing unrest in and around the rally.”

"Patients with underlying conditions were 12 times as likely to die of covid-19 as otherwise healthy people, CDC finds."

A WaPo headline, quoted along with substantial text from the article by my son John at Facebook, where I expressed surprise that the factor was so low and asked:

Did they count obesity as a "condition" when they did that calculation?

Then:

I looked at the CDC report, and I see it only counted "severe obesity (body mass index ≥40 kg/m2)" as a condition. I'm a 5'5" woman, and I would need to weigh more than 240 pounds — more than 100 pounds over normal weight — to enter that BMI range.

Obesity begins at a 30 BMI, which would be 180 pounds for my height. That's 60 pounds less than the weight the CDC counted as a "condition" when it did its calculation. It wouldn't be 12 times as likely but what? — 100 times? — if they'd included the merely obese. And what if they'd counted the overweight but not obese? That would go all the way down to 150 for my height. It would be useful to know, because we have some power over our own weight!

ADDED: My son questions my observation. The factor should be lower if they included less severe conditions. I agree with him. I'm thinking in terms of being less likely to die. When you're trying to figure out how dangerous the illness is to you, you consider how likely it is for a person in your condition to die if they get the disease. Perhaps it's the case that 99.9% of those who died of the disease were obese. Of course, that's not the same as saying if you get the disease and you're obese, you have a 99.9% chance of dying. But if the overall percentage of those who get the disease and die is 0.1%, then I'd like to know what's the percentage for those who get the disease but are not obese? Is it 0.01%? That would be extremely useful information! For one thing, it would give people something to do to protect themselves: lose weight. But also, it would show us who should continue the more extreme form of social distancing and who should feel free to get out and about.

"... without barely a wimpier..."

Interesting how ANTIFA and other Far Left militant groups can take over a city without barely a wimpier from soft Do Nothing Democrat leadership, yet these same weak leaders become RADICAL when it comes to shutting down a state or city and its hard working, tax paying citizens!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 14, 2020

"So dogmatic was the dictate that we all stay at home that any attempt to question or even balance it... was deemed immoral."

"Those who questioned state-mandated lockdown and stay-at-home orders, let alone left their homes to actually protest against them, were condemned as sociopaths who were willing to sacrifice the lives of old people for economic prosperity or the trivial, troglodyte desire to go to Applebees. Oftentimes those protesting lockdowns were vilified as white nationalists or at least driven by white racialist sentiments.... How is it remotely within the scope of the expertise of epidemiologists to pick and choose which political protests should be permitted and/or encouraged and which ones banned and/or denounced? Those are plainly political judgments, not scientific ones, and the shoddy, glaring conflation of them is nothing less than a manipulation, an abuse, of public health credentials. For scientists to purport to dictate which citizens can and cannot safely choose to leave their house — based not on health judgments but on their political ideology — is repressive, and certain to erode the credibility of their profession. Yet this is exactly what they are doing: explicitly and shamelessly.... At the very least, it is vital that we have the same health and legal standards apply to all citizens and all political ideologies when it comes to the right to leave one’s home, protest or engage in other legal activities. And at least as importantly, we need to understand whether public health experts were too restrictive in their advocated measures at the start of the pandemic, are being too lax now, or somehow can reconcile the radical shift in their posture on scientific rather than political grounds."

From "The Abrupt, Radical Reversal in How Public Health Experts Now Speak About the Coronavirus and Mass Gatherings" by Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept).

"On 'Morning Joe,' they are talking about coronavirus all the time again."

I said, after listening to the show on the car radio in 2 4-minute stretches on the way out and back from the sunrise run.

"What does that tell you?" Meade asks.

"It says the ratings came in."