Don’t Know Much About a Science Book
As I’ve previously noted, Alex Berenson is a bad person. For those of you who are blissfully unaware, Berenson is a guy who has spent pretty much the entire COVID pandemic dining out on his status as a “former New York Times reporter” to make the rounds in right wing media advocating against the COVID vaccine. He was recently at CPAC spreading his nonsense to the applause of the crowd.
Over the weekend, he took to Twitter to breathlessly “report” on how new data out of Israel showed a “total vaccine failure” against COVID:
He attached a series of poorly-cropped photos to, I suppose, aid his point:
So what exactly are we looking at here? Apparently there are currently 100 COVID patients in Israeli hospitals; 34 in what we would call ICU, and 66 in regular wards. Of these, 42% are unvaccinated, 56% are fully vaccinated, and 2% are partially vaccinated. And the daily deaths bounce around between 0 and 2.
So just to get the obvious point out of the way, Israel has a population of nine million people. That they have a mere 100 COVID patients in their hospitals is remarkable. For comparison, New Jersey has a similar population and no COVID outbreak to speak of, and they still have more than 300 COVID patients in their hospitals. And even granting that deaths lag about a month behind cases, two COVID deaths a day — not to sound callous — is nothing to be concerned about in a population of nine million people.
But to his point about this data showing “complete vaccine failure on every level,” that’s just utter nonsense. For one thing, Israel has vaccinated something like 85% of its adult population. Assuming (I think safely) that virtually all hospitalizations are adults, if the vaccine was “a complete failure on every level,” you would expect the hospitalized population to roughly match the vaccinated population. It doesn’t. More than 40% of hospitalizations are coming from the roughly 15% of adults who aren’t vaccinated. That’s quite the correlation. And it’s difficult to say without a demographic breakdown, but it’s probably safe to assume that the vaccinated people who end up in hospitals are likely on the older side of the bell curve.
All that to say, the data that Berenson uses to show a “complete vaccine failure on every level” actually shows the opposite. It shows that the vaccines are quite good at what they’re supposed to do — i.e., keep people out of the hospital and prevent deaths from COVID. But the vaccines are not — and never claimed to be — 100% effective. So-called “breakthrough” infections are to be expected, but — contrary to what Berenson would have you believe — you’re far, far more protected having been vaccinated.
I don’t know Alex Berenson personally, so I can’t speak to whether he’s intentionally dishonest or simply so bent on contrarianism and conspiracy that it leads him into the position of purveying falsehoods. I guess I would rather the latter, because if he’s knowingly lying to people about the effectiveness and safety of a modern medical miracle, he’s simply evil. But I suppose at a certain point, intent is almost irrelevant. Alex Berenson should know better. Whether he doesn’t due to dishonesty or stupidity is almost beside the point. He’s feeding vaccine hesitancy at a time when the vaccines could truly put this pandemic behind us; and I just find that unforgiveable.
Lying Down with Dogs
Trumpist grifting organization Turning Point USA — led by such intellectual heavyweights as Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens — held a conference in Florida over the weekend that was apparently attended by an adult film actress; who they rather publicly forced to leave.
The infighting was swift and delicious:
It’s just so rich, I think it gave me gout.
I would take TPUSA et al’s protestations about the evils of pornography if they hadn’t spent the last five years proudly and vocally supporting a man who has literally been on the cover of Playboy magazine — not to mention his entire tabloid career of [allegedly!] banging all manner of women, and even his relatively recent and public dalliance with another adult film actress while married to his current wife, and his veritable encyclopedia of inappropriate conduct and comments to and about women.
During Donald Trump’s political rise circa 2015, many people lamented that supporting Trump would ruin the credibility and ability of Republicans to make arguments about character and morality — because if you’re willing to support Donald Trump with his long and well-documented litany of moral and ethical failings, there is no discernible standard to which you are willing to hold our elected officials.
Well, now that bill is coming due. If you’ve spent the last half-decade laughing with and cheering on quite possibly the most immoral man to ever hold the presidency, then you’ll have to forgive me if I find your opposition to porn stars attending your conference, well, cute. These are people who had multiple chances over the last several years to make known where they stand on morality in politics, and they made their choices. And now it seems they want to avoid the consequences of those choices, and I’m just not sympathetic. I hope these people think four years of Trump was worth never being taken seriously again.
Trient-Weekly Trivia
Friday’s answer:
Category: American Presidents
Clue: Of our first five presidents, he’s the only one who wasn't from Virginia.
John Adams
Today’s clue:
Category: Baseball
Clue: After the introduction of Wild Card teams into the postseason in 1994, this team, in 1997, became the first Wild Card to win the World Series.
Dispatches from the Homefront
I often think about how my daughter has no idea how great her life is (if I do say so myself). Yesterday, we took her on her first “hike” — which is really more of a walk, but at least the trail is unpaved — and we were rumbling through the woods like a Bedouin caravan; pulling a big plastic wagon, a dog that hasn’t had a bath in six weeks, and a toddler narrating the whole thing. We weren’t sneaking up on anybody, is my point. I thought our odds of seeing any sort of wildlife were pretty minimal.
But then five minutes in, a deer bounds across the path 20 feet in front of us; followed about 10 seconds later by its mother. Then five minutes after that we came to a pond where there were two Great Herons — one blue, one white — going after fish and gliding away.
So that’s just what she thinks hikes are now. There’s no way they can keep living up to such lofty expectations.