Today's Today

Woodstock, Aug 15-18, 1969

Max Yasgur owned the site of the event, and he spoke of how nearly half a million people spent the three days with music and peace on their minds. He stated, "If we join them, we can turn those adversities that are the problems of America today into a hope for a brighter and more peaceful future."

COVID-19 Update

Yesterday, August 13th, 2021

10,156 people were killed by COVID-19

99.996 % of them were not fully vaccinated

World

New Cases:   721,304 (⬆︎ .35%)
New Deaths:    10,156 (⬆︎ .23%)

USA

New Cases:   155,297 (⬆︎ .42%)
New Deaths:         769 (⬆︎ .12%)

USA Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations: 197.1 million (59.4%)
Fully Vaccinated:    167.7 million (50.5%)

I can't help but think, "Yeah, I shot 4 torpedoes into your cruise ship, but I've got life boats for sale right over here."

I want to see Governor Bloodstain's portfolio. If it turns out that prick is invested in either the maker of Regeneron or the big staffing agencies currently trying to fill nursing positions, he needs to be butt raped on live TV by several of the biggest baddest inmates at whatever prison he ends up in.

And if it's a scheme to put money in 45*'s pocket, people better come out of the woodwork to tear that jerk limb from limb.

WaPo:

DeSantis, faced with covid surge, urges Floridians to use Regeneron antibody treatment given to Trump

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is vowing to begin dispensing Regeneron monoclonal antibodies — the treatment given to President Donald Trump when he had the coronavirus — through mobile clinics amid a record-breaking stretch of new cases and hospitalizations that have ravaged the state.

DeSantis said at a news conference in Jacksonville on Thursday that while coronavirus vaccines have been effective at preventing illness and death, more was needed to help curb the spread of the virus in a state that has become the U.S. hotbed of the latest surge of infections. The governor championed Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody cocktail for those who have already gotten sick, saying it is “the most effective treatment that we’ve yet encountered for people who are actually infected with covid-19.”

“Covid’s not going to go away,” DeSantis said. “So the question is how are we going to approach it. You can approach it on the front end by protecting yourself, but of course, if you end up in a situation where you are infected and at high risk, getting in here early, this is the best shot we’ve got right now to keep people out of the hospital and keep them safe.”

The antibody treatment, a cocktail of the monoclonal antibodies casirivimab and imdevimab that is made by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, is designed to prevent infected people from developing severe illness. DeSantis’s promotion of Regeneron, which imitates the body’s natural defenses, is the governor’s latest response to a pandemic in which he has rejected mask mandates and restrictions.

While doctors have noted the treatment’s promise and effectiveness in clinical trials, others have stressed that taking the vaccine remains the most crucial defense to fight the spread of the virus. One physician noted that there is only a small supply, making the Regeneron antibodies “an extremely effective treatment for a limited number of people.”

DeSantis told reporters that the mobile units, which are already operating in parts of the state hit hard by the delta variant, will be expanded throughout Florida. The Trump administration last year initially bought 300,000 doses of Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody treatment, which cost about $1,500 per dose at the time.

A Regeneron spokesperson said in a statement to The Washington Post on Friday that the government has now bought up to 1.5 million doses of the treatment and that it is being made available free to patients. DeSantis did not specify how many Floridians would have access to the shots.

The Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization to Regeneron in November, saying that the treatment may be effective in treating mild to moderate covid in adults and children 12 or older, and is recommended for those at high risk of developing severe illness. The FDA expanded Regeneron’s emergency authorized use last month, enabling the treatment for people exposed to someone who has been infected or for those at high risk of exposure in settings such as prisons or nursing homes.

DeSantis urged people at high risk to get the treatment at the first sign of symptoms, suggesting that Floridians “won’t even necessarily need a prescription from a doctor” to obtain Regeneron. Doctors and health professionals have indicated that people who are severely ill from the coronavirus are less likely to see benefits from monoclonal antibodies.

“I do think this is probably the best thing we can do to reduce the number of people that require hospitalization,” DeSantis said.

The state reported 24,730 new cases on Thursday, bringing its seven-day average to more than 18,000 cases a day, according to data compiled by The Post. With 15,796 people hospitalized for the virus, Florida now accounts for 1 out of every 5 covid hospitalizations in the nation. More than 3,200 people are currently occupying beds in intensive care units, an increase of 17 percent from last week.

DeSantis has opposed implementing pandemic restrictions during the fourth wave of the pandemic. The Republican is in a back-and-forth with school districts that are pushing for mask mandates for children returning to school. That debate is expected to intensify after four educators in Broward County died of the virus within 24 hours, CBS Miami reported.

The Regeneron cocktail is best known as the antibody treatment given to Trump when it was still an investigational drug after he contracted the virus last October. Other high-profile Republicans, such as Rudolph W. Giuliani and Ben Carson, also acknowledged receiving the Regeneron drug.

After he was released from the hospital, Trump inaccurately described the Regeneron cocktail as a “cure” and pressed the FDA to quickly clear the medication. While demand was expected to surge when Trump made a laudatory video in which he promised to make the antibody treatments free to patients needing them, officials acknowledged that many patients and doctors did not know much about the medicine and were not asking for it.

Still, Regeneron announced this week in its quarterly earnings report that it had $2.59 billion in sales for its antibody drug, an increase of 163 percent compared to this time last year.

DeSantis on Thursday promoted Regeneron as achieving a “70 percent reduction in hospitalization and death for covid patients” in clinical trials, referencing an announcement by the company in the spring. But Dushyantha Jayaweera, a clinical professor at the University of Miami Medical School, told WPLG that the decrease in hospitalizations was more like a “relative risk reduction.”

“So he’s kind of giving the more optimistic, more flowery view,” Jayaweera said. “But the reality is that it is much less.”

Kami Kim, director of the division of infectious-disease and international medicine with the University of South Florida Health Morsani College of Medicine, told the Orlando Sentinel that while Regeneron could help those who have been infected, other options remain easier for helping to address the Sunshine State’s surge.

“The number one strategy is probably going back to social distancing again and wearing masks,” Kim said. “And obviously, Governor DeSantis has his view on that, which most public health people would not entirely agree with.”

Those who choose to get the Regeneron treatment at the Jacksonville site will be given the option of either getting four shots in the stomach, or two in the stomach and two in the arm, according to WTLV. Those patients will then be observed for an hour inside an air-conditioned tent.

In announcing the treatment, DeSantis claimed that the Regeneron treatment should “become part of the standard of care” for Floridians moving forward.

“This is going to be with us for a long time,” he said.

Today's Reddit

The worms have crossed her blood-brain barrier.

 

Today's Deep Thought

Cops are quitting because of a vaccine requirement.

This seems like an elegant solution for a different problem.

@PaulCogan

Today's Prayer

God grant me the serenity to accept that Trump supporters are morons, the courage to tell Trump supporters they're morons, and the wisdom not to be a Trump-supporting moron.

@middleageriot

Eat The Rich

I'm totally uninterested in sob stories about how badly the obscenely wealthy are being treated.

Not when Jeff Bezos could end poverty and homelessness in this country all by himself, and still have more wealth than over 99% of us.

Elizabeth Warren, in WaPo: (pay wall)

Now that the Senate has passed a budget resolution, we’re one step closer to realizing President Biden’s transformational agenda: a once-in-a-generation investment in child care and Medicare, combating climate change and other efforts that would actually make our government work for families. The other half of the package — how to pay for these investments — is equally important.

The already huge gap between the 0.1 percent and everyone else is just getting wider. Billionaire wealth surged by $1.8 trillion from the early days of the pandemic through last month. The 400 richest Americans had more total wealth, as of 2019, than all 10 million Black American households, plus a quarter of Latino households, combined. Yet the ultrarich pay only 3.2 percent of that wealth in taxes, while 99 percent of families pay 7.2 percent. And scores of giant U.S. corporations pay zero.

I’ve proposed measures that would raise more than $5 trillion in revenue — far more than we need to enact the Biden plan. Though not every Democrat agrees with every one of my ideas, Biden campaigned aggressively on a suite of progressive tax policies, and voters embraced these changes at the ballot box. No matter how loudly Washington lobbyists bleat otherwise, progressive tax policies are wildly popular. Americans understand that our tax system has been rigged to reward the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else. So let’s fix it.

First, it’s time to start taxing wealth, not just income. When Jeff Bezos takes a joyride to space, he isn’t paying for it with his declared income of $80,000. Bezos, who owns The Post, and lots of other billionaires have gamed the system so they have plenty of spending money and close to zero tax obligations. The best option to stop that is a two-cent wealth tax that applies only to the wealthiest 100,000 U.S. households — with a few cents more for the billionaires. Such a wealth tax would raise roughly $3 trillion in revenue over the next decade, without raising taxes on 99.95 percent of Americans. It’s supported by 68 percent of the country, including a majority of Republicans. And there are lots of ways to advance this principle — including a one-time wealth tax that would raise over $1 trillion.

Second, let’s turn to highly profitable giant corporations. In the three years following the 2017 Republican tax cuts, 39 megacorporations, including Amazon and FedEx, reported more than $122 billion in profits to their shareholders while using loopholes, deductions and exemptions to pay zero in federal income taxes.

These companies boosted their stock prices and increased CEO pay by telling their shareholders they raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, while simultaneously telling the Internal Revenue Service that they don’t owe any taxes. The president supports taxing the profits that large companies report to their shareholders. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and I have a plan that mirrors this. We would require any company that earns more than $100 million in profits to pay a 7 percent tax on every dollar earned above that amount. Only about 1,300 public companies would pay the tax, raising nearly $700 billion over 10 years.

Finally, rules don’t mean anything if nobody enforces them, so let’s enforce the law. Currently, the top 1 percent of Americans fail to report more than a fifth of their income. The difference between taxes owed and taxes actually paid exceeds an estimated $1 trillion annually.

The superrich get away with not paying their taxes because decades of politically motivated budget cuts have hollowed out the IRS. Since 2010, the agency’s enforcement budget has declined by more than 20 percent, and it has lost one-third of its enforcers. It’s no surprise that audit rates for taxpayers making more than $10 million have plummeted. This should enrage every American who plays by the rules. That’s why over 70 percent of Americans support giving the IRS more resources to make sure the wealthy and corporations aren’t evading taxes.

Biden has proposed giving the IRS about $8 billion in additional annual funding. I’ve suggested a step further: $31.5 billion in permanent annual funding to track down wealthy and corporate tax cheats. The IRS also needs better reporting from banks and other financial institutions so it can sniff out the hidden cash of the ultrarich. These changes could raise as much as $1.75 trillion from tax cheats.

I’ve put these three proposals — a wealth tax, a tax on real corporate profits and closing the tax gap — on the table. There are other ideas worthy of consideration, but the standard should be writing rules that target wealthy freeloaders and corporate grifters and then enforcing those rules. American workers and families don’t want handouts. They want everybody to play by the same rules. The Democrats’ infrastructure plan is about investments and tax fairness — changes that would help build a strong future for not only a handful of people at the top but for everyone. This is what we were sent here to do. It’s time for us to do it.

COVID-19 Update

Yesterday, August 12th, 2021

10,379 people were killed by COVID-19

99.996 % of them were not fully vaccinated

World

New Cases:   712,590 (⬆︎ .35%)
New Deaths:    10,351 (⬆︎ .24%)

USA

New Cases:   143,537 (⬆︎ .39%)
New Deaths:        660 (⬆︎ .10%)

USA Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations: 196.5 million (59.2%)
Fully Vaccinated:    167.4 million (50.4%)

I guess I have to ask: Why would you not be willing to face up to your fears, and take actions that are so obviously low risk and of minor inconvenience in service to the people of this country?

By behaving like short-sighted selfish bratty children, which puts their families and their friends and their neighbors in danger, "conservatives" are showing us just how shallow and phony their "patriotism" is.

WaPo:

The United States is averaging about half a million new coronavirus vaccinations per day for the first time since June, officials with the White House covid-19 response team said Thursday.

During an afternoon news briefing, the team praised the nation’s vaccination progress. Task force head Jeffrey Zients noted that the average number of 12-to-17-year-olds getting the shots has doubled in the past month as students return to classrooms.

States with the highest virus case rates have made the greatest strides in increasing immunizations, he said. The average number of shots given per day has nearly tripled in Arkansas and quadrupled in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi in the past month.

“We’re getting more shots in arms in the places that need them the most,” Zients said. “That’s what it’s going to take to end this pandemic: more vaccinations, more Americans doing their part and rolling up their sleeve.”

The vaccination news comes as the nation continues to experience an increase in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Ninety percent of U.S. counties are now experiencing substantial or high transmission of the virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said.

“Those at highest risk remain people who have not yet been vaccinated,” she noted.

- more -

Little Sure-Shot

"When a man makes a difficult shot, they call it marksmanship.

When a woman makes the same shot, they call it a trick."

Annie Oakley (born Phoebe Ann Mosey; August 13, 1860 – November 3, 1926)

Because of poverty following her father's death, Annie did not regularly attend school as a child, although she did attend later in childhood and in adulthood. On March 15, 1870, at age nine, she was admitted to the Darke County Infirmary along with her sister Sarah Ellen. According to her autobiography, she was put in the care of the infirmary's superintendent, Samuel Crawford Edington, and his wife Nancy, who taught her to sew and decorate.

Beginning in the spring of 1870, she was "bound out" to a local family to help care for their infant son, on the false promise of fifty cents per week (equivalent to $10 in 2020) and an education. The couple had originally wanted someone who could pump water, cook, and who was bigger. She spent about two years in near slavery to them, enduring mental and physical abuse. One time, the wife put Annie out in the freezing cold without shoes, as a punishment because she had fallen asleep over some darning. Annie referred to them as "the wolves". Even in her autobiography, she never revealed the couple's real names.

- snip -

Annie began trapping before the age of seven, and shooting and hunting by age eight, to support her siblings and her widowed mother. She sold the hunted game to locals in Greenville, such as shopkeepers Charles and G. Anthony Katzenberger, who shipped it to hotels in Cincinnati and other cities. She also sold the game to restaurants and hotels in northern Ohio. Her skill paid off the mortgage on her mother's farm when Annie was 15.

- more -

Today's BTC

Brian Tyler Cohen on why "overturning the election and reinstating Trump" is not the point of the big lie.

Today's Tweet

Some folks really are beyond hope.

A reader sent me this sign from the Protest outside the Pulaski County Board of Education today #Spellcheck pic.twitter.com/PY5aDInh3a

— Matt Jones (@KySportsRadio) August 11, 2021