Prime

I want to expand on what I mentioned in Morning Memo about some really good work from the Just Security guys on better understanding the delay in the deployment of the National Guard.

From the get-go, TPM’s coverage has been more circumspect about the decision to involve the military in the response to the attack.

Why?

The last few weeks have been abnormally bleak and bizarre, even for pandemic times. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) put a bushel over Democrats’ hopes of legislating this year. Kyle Rittenhouse was celebrated as a hero at a conservative youth conference in Arizona. More and more Democrats are bending to the impending-consequences of partisan gerrymandering and retiring ahead of the Midterms. Omicron is very literally everywhere (including inside this writer’s lungs ?).

But today we were struck by a smattering of relatively positive (?) news developments. We’ll take what we can get.

Back on December 9th we discussed the quickening hunt for a Sarbecovirus vaccine. This is basically a vaccine that wouldn’t target this or that variant but the whole class of SARS-related coronaviruses. Basically the idea is you go upstream in the viral family tree to cover the whole class of contagions and potential future ones. Last night Army researchers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research say they’ve developed just such a vaccine, or at least one that cover all current and potential variants of COVID19.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has effectively doomed President Biden’s hopes of passing his most meaningful legislative package this year. Things aren’t looking any better for Democratic efforts on voting rights (also largely Manchin’s fault). While the administration has made significant advances in getting the country vaccinated this year, Omicron has brought pandemic-ending progress to a standstill for now.

But the Biden administration, with the help of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), has quietly made some progress on one major pillar of Biden’s presidency: confirming judges.

These numbers almost beggar belief. But here they are. According to a Monday CDC report, 73% of COVID infections in the US are now Omicron. Specifically, that was the percentage for the week ending December 18th. The rate of growth of new cases in the New York City metropolitan area has been mind-boggling. So extremely high percentages of Omicron here don’t surprise me at all. (I’ve heard informally that the rates here are roughly 90%.) But nationwide it almost beggars belief, even though we’ve seen comparable trajectories in the UK and Denmark.

Here’s the chart from the CDC …

Fox News host Tucker Carlson used his recent appearance at a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix as a barely-veiled soft pitch for his new “documentary” about Jan. 6, a highly produced mashup that nods toward nearly every conspiracy theory about that day festering in the far-right corners of the internet.

Carlson gave a speech at the conservative youth event, regaling the audience with a colorful anecdote about 26th U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt’s proclivity for going out to the White House lawn to speak with American citizens during his presidency … 120 years ago.

We’re getting a bit more sense here of the final blow up that led to the demise of the BBB. Apparently the real blow up was that the White House put out a statement last week in which the President said he believed he was making progress on finalizing a Build Back Better deal with Joe Manchin. The key apparently was that he named Manchin specifically rather than Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema or Manchin and the rest of the caucus or whatever else.

There will be various efforts to organize votes on individual parts of the BBB as demonstration votes. Yes, Manchin did say “this” legislation. So there will be various efforts to interpret this as a prelude to other possibilities or just another step in the process. But let’s not. This is no. That means the Build Back Better bill cannot and will not pass. I’ll note that Manchin decided to make this announcement on Fox News. And according to Ryan Lizza, who would know, he didn’t even personally inform the President or Chuck Schumer of what he was about to do. He had an aide make the call. That’s just cowardly, low class.

Keep an eye on an emerging discussion about the apparent peak of infections in Gauteng province in South Africa. That is the region where Omicron was first discovered and where its spread first caught fire. (We don’t actually know where it originated.) I don’t want to characterize what this means because I know nothing. But even the people who know a lot don’t appear to have a clear idea what it means. I note it here because even though it’s not clear what it means it does seem to be different enough to what was expected to require some explanation. And that explanation could deepen or change our understanding of what Omicron is.

Professor Shabir Madhi of University of the Witwatersrand notes that Omicron crested after 4 weeks compared to 8 weeks for the earlier two waves. In his thread Madhi provides other tentative but encouraging numbers on disease severity. But it’s the apparent plateau that seems to have people scratching their heads. Others, including Tulio de Oliveira who did the first lab work on Omicron, suggests caution, pointing to population shifts in Gauteng at this time of year.