What We're Up Against

I put this up reluctantly because it feels a lot like I'm propagating the kind of bullshit that the deniers are peddling.

But not long a go, I went a few rounds with a Facebook acquaintance about the vaccines, and this lines up almost perfectly with the nonsense she was throwing at me.

So, let me introduce you to Vernon Coleman - nutty like a squirrel turd.

Be advised, you're never going to get your 21 minutes back, and I make no guarantees that you won't come out the other side with a head full of mush, completely hooked on his bullshit.

From a website called Brand NewTube - where, apparently, the oppressed and canceled can go to get their "truth" out there:

Two Weird Things

Cops who kill or maim people because of inappropriate application of force - no matter what their intention was - should face long prison terms and an absolute forever banishment from any job having anything to do with law enforcement.

Also, cops are so fearful of people having guns that they act like they're in mortal danger every second of every shift - operating on the edge, and behaving in a manner far more befitting a post-apocalyptic dystopia than a nation of laws and lawful demeanor.

I put those together and I get common cause - like we should be able to agree that we need to do something about guns and gun culture and the macho bullshit that pervades American society now.

But it seems like all we get is more shitty behavior from everybody - like we're in some kind of dead-end intramural arms race, and the "winner" is the last surviving human. 

And that is nine kinds of fucked up right there.

shit's gotta change, dammit

Jan6

17 requests for backup in 78 minutes

A reconstruction shows how failures of planning and preparation
left police at the Capitol severely disadvantaged on Jan. 6

The question of whether or not we can continue to have dreams of justice in this country hangs in the balance here. And I realize saying it that way makes it sound hyperbolic and more than a little melodramatic.

But we're on the verge of something. We either get back on track towards a more perfect union or we lose ground that we may never regain.

The State Of Disrepair

Five trillion dollars, and something is not quite right.

Of course, not all of the money has actually been spent yet, and we won't know how well these Keynesian efforts have worked.

We do know (also "of course") that the Republicans will be doing their level best to fuck it up so we never quite get a real chance to see how well we can make it all work, because that's the "conservative" project - to go on tearing away at our flagging experiment in democratic self-government in order to replace it with plutocracy.

Here's something of a progress report from WaPo: (pay wall)

In early March, with the weather warming and her day of reckoning with the power company fast approaching, Shawna Brewer slid her bill from the envelope and tried not to cry. She owed $4,242.44.

It was the beginning of another month for Shawna, 38, in which her main goal was survival.

Like millions of Americans, she was not just poor, she was poor in ways that often rendered her unaccounted for by many of the government aid programs and charitable groups that could offer help. Her blighted Zip code had become the sort of place where hundreds of families could lose their electricity; few would complain and no one in a position of power or influence would even notice.

Illinois law prohibited winter cutoffs for nonpayment, but Shawna knew that the disconnections would start again soon, and she knew that she would likely be at the top of the power company’s list. “I’ve got a $4,000 light bill that I have no flipping idea how I’m going to pay,” she said. “As soon as it gets warm, we’re going to get shut off.”

Today, the federal government is in the midst of one of the biggest expansions of the social safety net in U.S. history, committing $5 trillion over the last year to keeping American families afloat. President Biden predicted the flood of aid could cut child poverty in half.

And yet for all its successes, the trillions in aid have often failed to reach the poorest Americans in places like the south end of Peoria. Because many in Shawna’s neighborhood have jobs that paid them in cash and because they didn’t report their income to the government, they were unable to qualify for unemployment insurance. Because they moved frequently, failed to file taxes or owed fines for back child support or past criminal activity, they often didn’t receive their full stimulus checks.

As the pandemic dragged on month after month, hundreds struggled simply to keep the lights on. Last fall, 5.4 percent of all residences in Shawna’s 61605 Zip code — about 300 houses — were cut off for failing to pay their power bill. Another 250 houses in a neighboring Zip code — or about 4 percent of all residences — also lost power.

The disconnections, which were reported to the state government by private utilities, should have been a flashing red light that the social safety net was missing Peoria’s poorest.

And yet the cutoffs throughout Peoria’s south end went largely unnoticed. Local charities with money to help with power bills reported no surge in requests for assistance. City officials speculated that the disconnection statistics must be wrong. “They don’t seem real,” said Ross Black, Peoria’s community development director. “We get calls any time someone loses power. … Our phones would have been ringing off the hook.”

One of those unseen people who lost power last fall was Shawna. After four or five days without electricity or gas, she said she switched the bill to her fiance’s name, leading the power company to believe that she, her 11-year-old son and her fiance were new tenants. Her power was still on when the state’s winter moratorium on disconnections kicked in on Nov. 18.

Now it was spring. Shawna couldn’t remember how much she and Theo Friedrich, her fiance, owed when the power went off; she guessed it was about $2,000. She knew they hadn’t made a payment since October. Still, the $4,242.44 they owed seemed unfathomably large — especially when set against her $300 a week salary washing dishes at a nearby diner.

She and Theo sat together at their dining room table and tried to figure out what had happened.

“They are trying to raise up prices to compensate for their losses during the pandemic,” Theo said. A roach scampered across the dining room table and Shawna flicked it away.

“Ain’t we on some kind of payment plan with them?” she asked.

But Theo ignored her. He was too immersed in the bill. “Distribution delivery charge, customer charge, qualifying infrastructure plant surcharge,” he read.

“They hate it when you call and question them,” Shawna said. “They just hang up on you.”

Overwhelmed by the decay that afflicted Peoria’s south end, government officials often struggled to see the suffering or dreams of people living there. Residents assumed that their problems were a low priority or a product of their own failings and didn’t seek help even when it was available.

The dynamic rendered them essentially invisible.

The cutoffs, however, did catch the eye of Steve Cicala, an economist at Tufts University, who was searching for a real-time indicator of how the poorest families in America were weathering the pandemic recession. Cicala knew that the recession’s pain wasn’t being shared equally. Wealthier Americans who could work from home and owned stocks were getting richer. Even many poorer Americans saw their savings grow last year thanks to generous unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, according to banking and credit card data.

Cicala knew such financial data often missed the country’s most impoverished citizens who don’t have credit cards or bank accounts. Electricity captured everyone.

“If you want to know where the holes in the safety net are — if people are falling through the cracks and being pushed to the limits of poverty — [electricity] data are more valuable,” Cicala said. In Illinois, the state regulatory commission required utilities to report monthly numbers on arrearages, late fees and disconnections for every Zip code, making it a perfect test case.

Cicala was stunned at what he found. Close to 1 percent of all residences in Illinois were cut off for nonpayment in October 2020. “That 1 percent comes from a whole bunch of zeros, and a really severe shock in concentrated areas,” Cicala said. “There are some places where the pain is really extraordinary.”

Before resuming disconnections, the Illinois Commerce Commission had struck a deal with the power companies that was supposed to protect the most vulnerable customers from disconnection. Those who had lost income because of the pandemic simply had to call the power company and ask for more time to pay their bill. “No written proof is necessary, but you must make the phone call,” the commission wrote in a news release.

Still, about 72,000 families in Illinois, including Shawna’s, lost power last fall. Some said they didn’t call because they didn’t believe that the electricity company would give them more time. Others called but didn’t say the right words or were connected to customer service representatives who didn’t understand the new policy.

Customers in majority Black and Hispanic Zip codes were about four times more likely to be disconnected for nonpayment, according to Cicala. “These results highlight that people who were already in poverty are suffering tremendously,” Cicala said.

They also suggest a broader problem. “The regulator’s goal was zero disconnections. The local safety net [in Peoria] didn’t register a crisis,” he continued. “That would suggest that our social safety net is in grave need of repair.”

Cicala was working temporarily in Zurich and teaching remotely when he published his research. He’d never actually been to Peoria. His paper — “The Incidence of Extreme Economic Stress: Evidence from Utility Disconnections” — offered one view of the recession.

Life on the south end of Peoria provided a more visceral and human view. Shawna was drinking her morning coffee last fall before work when the power company came for her. She spotted the white truck through her glass storm door. By the time she reached the front yard, one of the power company workers was climbing the wood pole on her corner, across the street from a house that had been boarded up for at least a decade.

“You have some f---ing nerve shutting us off during a pandemic!” she screamed.

Inside, Seth was playing video games. “Why are they turning off the power?” he asked Theo, who Seth had come to think of as his father.

“Because we don’t have the money to pay the bill,” Seth remembered him saying.

Soon Shawna’s neighbors were gathering and asking if she was going to be okay. “Another day in the life of Shawna Brewer,” she recalled thinking.

The same scene was playing out all across the south end. A cabdriver returned from her 12-hour overnight shift to find that there was no electricity. She owed $535.17. An out-of-work truck driver woke up and noticed that his bathroom light was off. “That’s weird,” he recalled thinking. “I know I left it on.” It took him three weeks to raise the $513 he needed to get his power back.

Some turned to neighborhood Facebook groups for assistance. “REACHING OUT FOR HELP! IT IS URGENT!” a 40-year-old former nurse who was rebuilding her life after opioid addiction and a divorce wrote on a community page. She owed $1,038 and had tried unsuccessfully to apply for federal low-income heating assistance aid. “Since I do not have my 14-month-old’s social security card they cannot help me,” she continued. “I can afford a hotel room for tonight, but that’s it. Please please please! Any resources would be greatly appreciated!” After about a week with no lights, she got help from a local charity.

A few miles away, a laid-off teacher’s aide called the power company, which wanted a partial payment of at least $170 to restore services to his house. “Lady, you’re not listening,” he recalled telling the power company representative. “I do not have any money right now. I can’t pay my car note or my rent.”

Most of those who were cut off scrambled to get the power back on in a week or two. They opened accounts in a relative’s or partner’s name, like Shawna, or borrowed from friends or family. A few received funds from aid programs.

Others tried to ride out the outages in the cold and the dark. Deion Lutz, 24, a cook earning $10 an hour, made it until January. “I’d cuddle up with my dogs under three blankets,” he said. Then the temperatures plunged below zero and Lutz, worried that he might freeze to death, moved into his sister’s basement. “It was kind of embarrassing,” he said. “I was down on my ass and I’ve never been that way before.” Shortly after he left, someone broke out the front windows and ransacked his home. Today, the floor in the front room is covered with trash, feces and what’s left of Lutz’s possessions.

“I don’t even want my s--- now,” Lutz said. “It’s beyond disgusting.” He’s planning to move to Florida. In all likelihood his former home will have to be boarded up. Another little piece of Peoria will die.

The last few months have been difficult for Shawna too. At a time when the government was offering trillions in aid to those struggling through the pandemic recession and billions to those behind on their power bills, Shawna and the federal government often failed to connect.

In November the governor halted indoor dining, and Shawna was furloughed from the restaurant for two months. She didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits of as much as $440 a week because her job paid cash and she didn’t report her modest income to the federal government. As far as the state and federal government were concerned, she hadn’t been working.

Her fiance, who works at a junkyard towing wrecked cars and stripping parts, lost income as well. Stay-at-home orders and shuttered offices had cut into the number of cars on the road, and he said his pay had slipped from about $1,500 a month to as little as $500 a month. He didn’t receive most of his stimulus money because he owed back child support.

The money Shawna and Theo did get went to pay the water bill, which was costing them about $190 a month because of a leak that they couldn’t seem to find. They spent another $600-$700 in February to replace their home’s broken furnace. The owner let them stay for free in the crumbling two-bedroom house, which had gaping holes in the living room walls, in exchange for a promise that they would help fix it up.

The hardest blow for Shawna came this winter when a gunfight broke out on Shawna’s block and someone fired three bullets that lodged into her home’s siding.

Seth was playing inside just feet from where the bullets struck the house’s facade. He took a painting of a snow-covered mountain cabin that he had fished from the garbage and hung it over the spot in the interior wall where police had dug to dislodge one of the rounds. Two weeks later he moved in with his 20-year-old sister, 10 miles away in Pekin, telling his mother that he was too afraid to stay in the house. Losing her son left her depressed and made it hard to sleep or think about anything else. “I just can’t look forward to the future right now because my son isn’t living with me,” Shawna said.

About a week after she opened the massive power bill, Shawna was getting ready for her dishwashing job. She was determined to feel better about herself despite another sleepless night, the headache that radiated down the back of her skull, and the fear that she was failing the person who meant the most to her in the world: her 11-year-old son.

So before she headed off to work, she decided to put on some of the makeup that she had bought a few days earlier at the dollar store. She dabbed her cheeks with concealer and drew the eyeliner pencil above her lashes.

“I don’t know,” she said, exhaling. “I’m not really feeling it.”

As they did almost every morning, Shawna and Theo stopped on the way to work to buy cigarettes and lottery scratch-offs, which they played together at the end of the day.

“It’s kind of our original thing,” she said of the $10-$20 a day habit.

“Maybe one of these days we’ll win enough to take a day off,” Theo said as he pulled up in front of the restaurant where Shawna had worked since September. She kissed him goodbye and rushed inside.

The Garden Street Cafe traced the history of Peoria and so many other struggling Rust Belt cities. Peoria began as a whiskey town, and the cafe’s founder had worked at the Hiram Walker distillery, once the largest in the world, before it closed in 1981. He opened the diner down the street one year later.

In its early days the restaurant drew a steady stream of shoppers from Szold’s department store — now the City of Refuge Worship Center — across the street. Bankers in suits and ties came in for lunch. So too did workers from Caterpillar Inc., which was based in Peoria and sold mining and manufacturing equipment worldwide. When the wind was right, the smell of fresh loaves from the Butternut Bread Company, a half-mile away, filled the air.

The Butternut factory closed in 2012, a loss of 130 jobs. Six years later, Caterpillar moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago, complaining that it couldn’t lure top-flight executives to Peoria. In the early 1990s, nearly 1 in 4 jobs in Peoria was in manufacturing. Today, it’s 1 in 8.

Shawna’s father, who worked as a mechanic and in machine shops, battled alcoholism. Her mother found a job at a now-shuttered hot dog stand. One of Shawna’s most vivid childhood memories is being evicted from their house when her parents couldn’t come up with the rent.

The sheriff deputies left their possessions piled up on the sidewalk. Shawna and her brother moved into a room in her aunt’s house, while her parents dragged a mattress into the garage and nailed insulation to the walls to keep out the winter cold. By 13, Shawna had stopped going to school. By 18, she had given birth to two daughters and was struggling with an addiction to methamphetamines.

“My childhood wasn’t very nice, but it is what it is,” she said.

Today, the 61605 Zip code is among the poorest in the country. The area is home to four liquor stores and zero supermarkets. A Kroger and a Save A Lot both shut down in the last three years, leaving behind only corner stores that sell milk for $4 a gallon, twice the price of a grocery store. The Garden Street Cafe is the only restaurant on the south end — fast food or otherwise — with tables.

For Shawna, landing the six-day-a-week dishwashing job was a bright spot in an otherwise bleak year. Rick Burr, the cafe's owner, recently encouraged Shawna to get her food handling license so she could help with cooking and serving. Shawna took it as an exciting sign. “I think it shows he likes my work,” she said.

A television propped on a cardboard box in the restaurant’s kitchen was playing daytime talk shows that revolved around promiscuous teens and paternity tests. “That ain’t my baby. She’s a ho!” someone was screaming on “Maury.” Shawna kept one ear on the action as she washed dishes.

Most of the cafe’s customers were regulars. “How you doing Kenny?” she asked as she cleared a table. He came in every day for a to-go box of fried shrimp that he washed down with a bucket of five beers at the bar next door.

“Still breathing,” Kenny replied.

“Well, that’s a good thing,” Shawna said.

A woman with a poof of white hair, whom Shawna had known since childhood and referred to as her “aunt,” occupied a corner table. Shawna’s favorite customers were Delores and her daughter Chris, who had spent 41 years working at Caterpillar before taking early retirement in 2009. Her last job was as a personal assistant to the company’s chief operating officer. The women lingered over bowls of oatmeal.

“They talk to you because they want to,” Shawna said, “not because you work here.”

Shawna had set up informed delivery on her phone, which gave her a daily, digital preview of the letters bound for her mailbox. She checked her account every few hours, hoping for her latest stimulus check, due to arrive any day. At $2,800, the March check was going to be the biggest one yet. A little after noon, she spotted a letter that looked like it was from the federal government.

Around 2:30 p.m. she raced home to check her mailbox. Empty. Either the mail was late or, she worried, someone had stolen her check. “It’s like the universe is against me,” she groaned.

She spotted a little girl playing in her front yard. “Kai Kai!” she called. “Can you ask your mom if the mail has come yet?” The puzzled girl didn’t answer.

“Hey, Frog!” she yelled to a neighbor up the street. But he couldn’t hear her over the rap music blaring from his car.

She stopped three girls in matching school uniforms strolling up the sidewalk. One was carrying an envelope. “Letter from school,” the girl told her without breaking stride.

When the postal worker finally arrived, Shawna raced to the front door and flung it open, startling him. “Oh, for the love of God!” he exclaimed.

Shawna tore open the letter from the IRS. No check, just blocks of bureaucratic prose: “The U.S. Department of the Treasury issued you a second economic impact payment (EIP2) as provided by the COVID-related Tax Relief Act of 2020.”

Shawna had received only half of the $1,200 she was entitled to in January because she had filed her taxes incorrectly. The form letter seemed to be saying that the rest of her money was on its way.

Wouldn’t it be crazy if you got all your checks on the same day?” one of Shawna’s co-workers at the cafe asked her. Her $600 check was set to arrive in a matter of days. As part of the American Rescue Plan, she was due the $2,800 stimulus as well as a $250-a-month child tax credit that would start in July and net her about $3,000 over the next 12 months.

The prospect of all that money was enough to spur her dreams.

Sometimes she talked about using the money to pay off $825 in fines so that she could get her driver’s license back and land a better job. A Caterpillar subcontractor was paying $12-$15 an hour plus overtime, but the warehouse wasn’t on a bus line.

Sometimes she and Theo talked about trying to fix up the house. Black mold climbed the wall in the kitchen where the wallpaper had peeled away. There were holes in the linoleum floor and in the walls in the living room.

More than anything Shawna wanted to bring home her son, who had been living with his 20-year-old sister, Haylee Creamer, since February.

In mid-March, Haylee took him on a week-long trip to visit family in Georgia. Shawna tried to call him at least once a day. “Once we get this stimulus check, what do you think about Mommy and you going back to Georgia to visit?” she asked on one of her calls. “We’ll take care of the bills and see what’s left.”

Then there was the $4,242.44 power bill.

The stimulus package passed in March included $4.5 billion in funding for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helped with utility bills. But the pandemic, which forced families to navigate the application process online, was making it harder for people to get the aid. When Shawna was cut off last fall, the bill was in her eldest daughter Samantha Creamer’s name, further complicating matters.

Even as arrearages and late fees soared in 2020, the number of low-income families in Illinois taking part in the utility assistance program fell to 221,000 households, 30,000 fewer than in 2019, according to state officials. Only about 18 percent of eligible families received the aid in Illinois last year.

Cuts over the last decade to the number of social workers made connecting even harder. A decade ago, the Peoria County Health Administrator received a list each month of households that lost power and could dispatch a case manager to help them apply for assistance. But the health department stopped requesting the monthly list when it eliminated many of its case workers.

The cuts left Shawna largely unknown to the agencies that might have been able to help her.

The pressure also weighed heavily on Shawna’s daughter Haylee, who had committed to raising her 11-year-old brother.

Shawna was 18 and struggling with a drug addiction when Haylee, who was raised by her grandparents, was born. In high school, Haylee had posted her grades each semester on her Facebook page and insisted that she was going to attend Harvard University. In 2018, she graduated 10th in her high school class and, instead of Harvard, headed off to community college.

Today she works 12-hour shifts as a certified nursing assistant and was recently accepted into Illinois Central College’s nursing school. She and her fiance were determined to raise Seth, who struggled with learning disabilities and had missed stretches of classes during the pandemic.

“Trying to do [online] school with him is a struggle,” Haylee said. “It’s rough but it’s worth it.”

Sometimes she, too, felt unseen. She was doing all the right things — going to school, working long hours, paying her bills — but no one was rushing to help her. “I am out here busting my ass at work,” she said. “Sometimes, I feel like I’m barely making it. It seems like no one cares when you are doing something.”

In late March, Shawna was still waiting for her stimulus check to come in the mail; still hoping she could find a home that would be fit for Seth; still wondering where she and Theo would go if their power was disconnected again.

On a warm spring day, she finished her shift at the restaurant and started walking home past shuttered businesses and recently abandoned homes, satellite TV dishes hanging forlornly off their worn siding. She had been looking online at a small house for sale in Yates City, Ill., even though she knew the $13,000 down payment was well beyond her means.

“Right now, Seth is going to stay at his sister’s house until a miracle happens,” she said, “because that’s what we need.”

She pushed open the door to her home. Family pictures hung crooked on walls coated with a brown film from thousands of cigarettes. There were holes in the drywall. Old circuit boards that she and Theo recycled to pick up extra cash littered the floor. The television cast a dim blue glow.

In January, Shawna had used part of her stimulus check to sign up for cable but had to let it go after only a few weeks to pay other bills. She half-jokingly told Theo that she left the TV on hoping that it would motivate him to find some way to restore the service — to provide a flicker of entertainment in their lives. For now, though, there was no picture. No sound. All that remained was a message from the cable company in white, block letters: “Something is not quite right.”

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   837,751 (⬆︎ .60%)
New Deaths:    13,895 (⬆︎ .46%)

USA

New Cases:    74, 479 (⬆︎ .23%)
New Deaths:         895 (⬆︎ .15%)

Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations:           125.8 million (⬆︎ 1.53%)
Total Eligible Population:    47.1%
Total Population:                 37.9%

So, we're starting to get a fair handle on the numbers. The public discussion of the vaccines has turned momentarily back towards the issue of safety and efficacy, and we're finding out some interesting little quirks.

We were told that the vaccines, on average, would afford us protection at about the 85% level. ie: there would be roughly a 15% chance that a vaccinated person would develop a case of COVID-19 that included the usual symptoms.

(ie: cough, some level of breathing trouble, inflammation, fever, etc)

Turns out they were off by a bit.

There have been 5,800 cases of COVID-19 reported post-vax (not necessarily symptomatic, just COVID-positive).

In one important way, that works out to vaccination being about 99.9954% effective at preventing COVID-19.

Not bad for government work.

Today's Video

Let's try this one again.

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:  811,899 (⬆︎ .59%)
New Deaths:    13,551 (⬆︎ .46%)

USA

New Cases:   78,876 (⬆︎ .25%)
New Deaths:       921 (⬆︎ .16%)

Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations:           123.9 million (⬆︎ 1.31%)
Total Eligible Population:   46.4%
Total Population:                37.3%

People are trying to look forward to better times. We can hope they're not all ignoring the dangers of the right here right now.

NYT:

How Epidemiologists Are Planning to Vacation With Their Unvaccinated Kids

The pandemic has made it tough for families to figure out safe travel options. So we asked some experts what they’re doing this summer.

Families are facing a dilemma this year: They’re itching to take a summer vacation, but their kids aren’t vaccinated. What to do?

The mental gymnastics involved in answering this question are exhausting. Our decision-making is clouded by unanswered questions about immunity, virus mutations and what case numbers will look like in the summer.

The most conservative approach would be to wait awhile longer and see how things shake out. But people are burned out from lockdowns, and vacation venues are selling out. At this point, all we really want to know is: What can we do this summer?

So we asked epidemiologists and other public health experts — a pretty cautious group — what they’re planning for their own summer vacations. Here are a few takeaways.

First, figure out what feels safe to you.

Does the thought of getting on a plane make you feel queasy? Or are you itching to be 35,000 feet in the air? Each family must figure out its own appetite for risk, the experts said.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser for Covid-19, said in an interview on Monday that he is hoping to have “a little family reunion” in the summer with his adult daughters, after everyone gets vaccinated, “if things calm down the way I think they will.”

“One of them I haven’t seen in over a year, the others I haven’t seen in almost a year. I think that’s going to be my big plan in July,” Dr. Fauci said.

Even among experts, there is some uncertainty about the summer.

Jennifer Nuzzo, the lead epidemiologist for the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, is planning to travel domestically this year with her family — though they’ve held off on picking a spot as they gather information on what locales might pose more or less danger of exposure.

In her “exposure budget” she said she was prioritizing risks that had a clear benefit to the health and development of her kids, who are 4 and 7, such as visits with extended family.

The health of your family members is also a big consideration.

“We are very conservative as far as our risk level,” said Tara C. Smith, a professor of epidemiology at the Kent State University College of Public Health, in Ohio, who will be vacationing with younger relatives who aren’t yet eligible for vaccination and have health conditions. It’s not clear why some kids get very sick from Covid and others don’t, she said, and the possibility of a coronavirus infection is “not something that I want to deal with just because we tried to go and have some fun.”

Is it safe to travel?

Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has spent the better part of a year discouraging nonessential travel to prevent further virus transmission, last week the agency announced that fully vaccinated people can now travel safely on mass transportation, including planes, in the United States.

But at a White House news conference announcing the new guidance, C.D.C. officials hedged, saying that they would prefer that people avoid travel because of the rising number of coronavirus cases, even though domestic travel is considered “low-risk” for those who are fully vaccinated. Most of the experts we spoke with plan to drive to their destinations, in part because their children are not vaccinated.

Sadie Costello, an occupational and environmental epidemiologist at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, has two road trips planned — a camping trip with friends where the adults are vaccinated and the kids are not, and a family trip to a rental vacation house with a private pool.

“It’s a balance between Covid safety and mental health,” said Dr. Costello, who has two children, ages 10 and 14.

If your family does decide to fly, take precautions to lower the risk of getting infected. While traveling, make sure that everyone in your group 2 and older wears a mask, stay six feet from people outside your household, avoid crowds and wash your hands frequently or use hand sanitizer.

The C.D.C. recommends that all unvaccinated people get a coronavirus test one to three days before any trip and again three to five days after it’s over. They should also self-quarantine for seven days after a trip if they get tested and for 10 days if they do not get tested, the agency said.

Shorter flights where passengers remove their masks less often for snacks or drinks are most likely safer, the experts said.

“The few instances of documented transmission on airplanes were long flights,” said Dr. Arthur L. Reingold, the head of the epidemiology division at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health.

The experts we spoke with are not planning to travel abroad, in part because cases continue to surge in many part of the world, and because there are strict protocols for re-entering the United States.

Where should we stay?

You don’t necessarily need to sequester in your hometown, go camping or rent a house with a private pool like you might have done last year — although those are all fine, lower-risk options. Hotels or resorts can be safe for families, too, provided that you ask yourself a crucial question: Can you take the right precautions and keep distance between your family and other people while you’re there?

Think about the various spots within a hotel or its surroundings where you or your family would be most likely to get infected, suggested Dr. Abraar Karan, an internal medicine physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

It might be in a crowded elevator, an indoor restaurant or the lobby. If you are traveling with people who aren’t fully vaccinated, try to avoid these areas as much as possible, he said.

Whitney R. Robinson, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is hoping to vacation in South Carolina this summer with relatives she hasn’t seen for more than a year — provided that case numbers are low.

She plans to do mostly outdoor activities during the trip, and said she and her kids, who are 2 and 6, will avoid indoor dining or long, lingering meals.

But Dr. Robinson has already started imagining other potential scenarios: If it rains, for example, they can gather indoors but will open all the windows. When indoors, “I’ll probably try to wear masks and have my kids wear masks,” she said.

If you’re staying at a resort and plan to use a kids club that provides child care and organized activities, be sure to ask a lot of questions beforehand, the experts advised. Ideally you’d want the kids to wear masks, play in small groups at least six feet apart from one another and spend most of the time outdoors.

“It’s similar to a school environment — but with the big difference that it’s bringing together people from totally different networks from all around the world,” Dr. Robinson said. “Personally, it’d be a ‘no’ from me.”

Do we need masks while vacationing outdoors?

If you’re outdoors in a crowded place where your family cannot maintain six feet of distance from people outside your household, wearing a mask is still a good idea for your kids and yourself, too, even if you’re fully vaccinated.

But if you are outdoors and can maintain distance from other people, the risk of infection is very low if you choose not to wear a mask outdoors, regardless of whether you’re vaccinated or not, the experts said.

“If you’re more than six feet from somebody outdoors, I don’t think your mask is going to make that much of a marginal difference at that point, because the risk is already so low,” Dr. Karan said.

“The pool is a question mark,” said Dr. Smith, who said most of her vacation will be spent at the beach. “If it’s very crowded we won’t be going into it.”

What if we need to change our minds?

All the experts we spoke with said you should be prepared to pivot if infections are on the rise.

“Surges may result in more restrictions,” which could be local or more widespread, and could affect mass transit, said Karen Edwards, chairwoman of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, Irvine.

“If you are set on travel that would include flying to specific destinations, including international destinations, then I would be prepared to change those plans and have a backup that would still give you and your family a much-needed break and change of scenery,” she added.

Dr. Nuzzo agreed that everyone should be aware of the possibility of a fourth surge, but she remained optimistic.

“My mental picture of the summer is that we’re going to be in a much better place than we are now,” she said.

There's reason to be cautiously optimistic, because we're kinda in the back stretch as vaccinations start to overtake the spread, but there's even greater reason for prudence because the idiocracy is always with us. So -

DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

JUST DON'T GET STOOPID

Announcement

Google says they're dropping the Follow-By-eMail gizmo as of July 2021.

And like a dope, I went in to edit it - which it wouldn't let me do - and I ended up deleting it.

Sorry 'bout that.

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   735,558 (⬆︎ .54%)
New Deaths:    12,882 (⬆︎ .43%)

USA

New Cases:   77,720 (⬆︎ .24%)
New Deaths:       819 (⬆︎ .14%)

Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations:           122.3 million (⬆︎ 1.24%)
Total Eligible Population:    45.8%
Total Population:                 36.8%

I can't say I don't care - even about a buncha whiny-butt pussies who piss-n-moan about "lockdowns", and then refuse to do the one thing that gets us all out of lockdown mode.

But I'm really really really sick of having to babysit these assholes. Learn yourself up or fuck the fuck off.

Early 1970s - the Ford Pinto had an annoying tendency to explode when crashed into from behind. Nobody freaked out and told us they'd never drive any car ever again.

Airliners crash once in a while - usually killing everyone on board. We still fly commercial.

Every year, we see over 100,000 gun casualties, with 30,000 dead. And you know there's a big overlap between ammosexuals and anti-vaxxers - how many of these fucking idiots are also swearing off guns?

WaPo:

Vaccine pause threatens to worsen ‘hesitancy’ problem

The pause in distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine this week threatens to create a significant hurdle to President Biden’s campaign to combat “vaccine hesitancy,” just as the administration approaches a critical point in its efforts to persuade Americans wary of getting vaccinated.

Many of those eager for a coronavirus vaccine have now received one, and officials are increasingly focused on rural and minority communities suspicious of the vaccines’ safety. Officials’ decision to halt distribution of a vaccine, however cautionary, following potentially serious side effects, however rare, could set back those efforts, public health experts said.

Compounding the challenge, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been central to Biden officials’ strategy for inoculating skeptical and hard-to-reach populations. Unlike other authorized vaccines, Johnson & Johnson’s version does not need to be stored at ultracold temperatures and, crucially, it requires only one dose.

“This is devastating,” said Frank Luntz, a longtime GOP pollster who has been working to win over vaccine-hesitant Republicans. “At the very moment that conservatives were starting to reconsider their hesitancy, they are told that their fears are real and justified. Right now, there are thousands of people saying, ‘See, I told you so.’ ”

Biden officials were quick to minimize the impact of the pause, which was enacted as authorities reviewed reports of six U.S. cases of a rare but severe type of blood clot among the approximately 7 million people who received the shot.

They noted that only a small fraction of Americans have received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and stressed that the administration remains on track to meet its inoculation goals even without it, given the ample supplies of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

“This announcement will not have a significant impact on our vaccination program,” Jeffrey Zients, Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, said in a hastily arranged appearance in the White House briefing room on Tuesday, adding that the country has “more than enough” of the other vaccines to continue the current rate of 3 million shots a day.

Later in the day, Biden added that the need for a pause reaffirmed his strategy to acquire extra doses for the federal program and to hold on to them even as pressure has built to send supply abroad.

“I made sure we have 600 million doses,” Biden told reporters in the Oval Office, referring to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. “So there’s enough vaccine that is basically 100 percent unquestionable for every single, solitary American.”

But in a tacit recognition of the need to address constituencies already skeptical of the coronavirus vaccines, Biden officials fanned out talk to target audiences.

Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy was booked to appear Tuesday night on TV programs run by the right-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group and Gray Television to discuss the Johnson & Johnson safety review. The two news organization have programming in many local media markets.

José Montero, a top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, went on Univision and Telemundo to reach Latino audiences.

Members of Biden’s coronavirus response team also held a call with more than 2,300 members of their “community corps,” a group the White House has collected of “trusted messengers.” Senior administration officials briefed prominent Black physicians. Top CDC and Food and Drug Administration officials reached out to key members of Congress. And the CDC held a call with top doctors and plans to brief clinicians on their decision, the White House said.

“People are very eager to see how we react to this. Do we put the data out? Do we try to sweep it under the rug? Do we contextualize it?” said Andy Slavitt, the White House’s senior adviser for the coronavirus response. “The approach we’ve chosen to take is one that is very much fact-based, very much conversation-based and very much ‘give people the real information.’ I think that’s all you can do.”

Various groups of Americans are reluctant to take the coronavirus vaccine for different reasons.

Many African Americans remember the decades of mistreatment of Black patients at the hands of the medical profession. Some conservatives are wary of any government-sponsored push aimed at influencing Americans’ behavior. Others worry that the coronavirus vaccines were approved too quickly. Still others subscribe to unfounded conspiracy theories about the vaccines’ purpose.

Tuesday’s announcement could play into all of those anxieties, public health experts said.

“We’re very concerned that this announcement for very rare side effects could have a disproportionate impact in triggering and bringing fears to the surface,” said Douglas Kriner, a government professor at Cornell University who has studied vaccine hesitancy.

Kriner said survey respondents had raised questions about coronavirus vaccines that ranged from understandable to improbable. “Four percent of people volunteered in an open-ended question that death was a common side effect” of getting vaccinated, Kriner said.

The dilemma now facing U.S. officials parallels a problem that European leaders grappled with last month, after regulators paused AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine for safety reviews, prompted by similar reports of rare blood clots.

The European Medicines Agency, the continent’s top regulator of pharmaceuticals, ultimately reaffirmed that the AstraZeneca vaccine was safe and effective. But polls found that public trust in the shot significantly declined in Europe after the episode.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French Prime Minister Jean Castex and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier all publicly received AstraZeneca shots in subsequent days as officials rushed to shore up confidence in the vaccine.

But because so many American leaders — including Biden, Vice President Harris and former president Donald Trump — have already been vaccinated, it is not clear whether American officials can use a similar strategy.

Slavitt cited significant differences between the European situation and the current pause. In many parts of Europe, he said, the AstraZeneca vaccine was the sole shot available, and the message from European authorities was sometimes contradictory.

“It just got confusing,” Slavitt said. “Confusion hurts you in this kind of situation, and I think if we avoid that we will minimize unnecessary damage.”

Leslie Francis, a medical ethicist at the University of Utah, agreed that being clear and transparent about a rare vaccine side effect is what public health officials should be doing. She said she believes a key reason officials are pausing the vaccine is for general public messaging.

“People want to make super sure no one has a reason to be suspicious of vaccination,” Francis said. “I think that reason is a really strong reason. It’s so important to seem trustworthy and to be trustworthy. It’s about bending over backwards about vaccines.”

Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, played down the impact of the announcement on groups hesitant to get a vaccine.

He noted that about 120 million Americans have received shots, and that the majority were made by Pfizer or Moderna.

“There have been no red-flag signals from those,” Fauci said. “So you’re talking about tens and tens and tens of millions of people who receive vaccine with no adverse effect. This is a really rare event.”

When the pause was announced Tuesday morning, it prompted an immediate round of questions from governors who were participating in a regularly scheduled Tuesday call with the White House coronavirus response team.

Several of them raised concerns about whether it would damage their efforts to combat vaccine hesitancy. “Folks came in pretty hot,” said one person who was on the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private conversation.

Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts (R), who was on the call, said he pushed the White House officials to keep the pause as brief as possible. “Your chance of dying from covid is much greater than the one in a million chance of developing this thrombosis from the vaccine,” Ricketts said.

He added that many in his rural state prefer the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because it only requires one dose and because it is more easily stored.

Trump weighed in with a statement decrying the decision to suspend distribution of the Johnson & Johnson product, saying it had proved “extraordinary” and warned that its “reputation will be permanently damaged” by the action.

He also predicted that those who have already taken the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will now be “up in arms” and suggested, without any evidence, that the pause was a political decision designed to help Pfizer, a company that Trump has railed against for failing to produce a vaccine ahead of the November election.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was authorized for emergency use in late February.

A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about a delicate situation, said the episode shows the strength of the system, not its weakness.

The clinical trials for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine included tens of thousands of people, the official said, but it would not necessarily have detected a problem that could be as rare as one in a million.

“If you’re on an airplane, the gold standard doesn’t mean you don’t run into turbulence,” the official added. “The gold standard means that you have practices and tools for dealing with situations that occur and minimize the damage.”

Some public health experts backed up this contention.

“This should add to our confidence, not shake it — even for six cases, the Biden administration made the decision to prioritize safety,” said Brian Castrucci, an epidemiologist who leads the de Beaumont Foundation, a public health organization. “What concerns me most is how this moment, these data, will be weaponized by those interested in sowing seeds of doubt in the vaccine.”

I really do care about you though - it's just that sometimes I show my love by poking you with a sharp stick.

What to do if you’ve received the J & J vaccine

Taking A Shot At It

Trae Crowder, suggesting a little reverse psychology.