Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Martin Luther King, Jr. remembered

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Bob Wachter MD/Twitter:

Some folks are a bit confused about why things are likely to be much safer in a month than now – not why virus will peak & fall (we don’t entirely know) but why the risk to individuals will plummet – & with that, why activities that are unsafe now will be much safer then

 

There are about a dozen factors that go into a risk assessment, and only one of them will fundamentally change: the probability that a person near me is infectious.
Let’s go through the other factors to isolate the one that makes virtually all the difference

Jennifer Taub/Washington Monthly:

Merrick Garland’s Trump Problem—and Ours

The well-meaning attorney general may pursue Trump on narrow charges but is unlikely to take a much-needed broader view, and is almost certain to be too slow to save America.

The prosecution of the former president is on a slower timeline. This includes not only the criminal investigations being pursued in Georgia by the Fulton County district attorney, and in New York by the state attorney general and the Manhattan district attorney, but also any investigations emanating from the U.S. Department of Justice. But that’s okay; Merrick Garland is no longer the problem or the solution.

I came to this conclusion after Attorney General Garland delivered a much-hyped speech commemorating the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. After considering his words, I opened a calendar and did the math. We’ll get to that math in a moment. But first, let’s be clear about what Garland did and didn’t promise.

After watching his talk and then reading the prepared remarks published on the DOJ website, I have this take: I fully trust Garland to prosecute Trump in connection with the events directly leading up to and surrounding the certification of the electoral vote on January 6. But I’m less sure how much Trump mischief that will include.

Tom McKay/Gizmodo:

Spotify Will Never Do Anything About Joe Rogan

The streaming service’s most popular podcaster is apparently above the company’s rules

As Rogan has hundreds of millions of monthly downloads on the Joe Rogan Experience (JRE), that makes him one of the biggest vehicles for rhetoric that is at the very least sympathetic to, and sometimes actively promoting, the antivaxx movement. And his distributor, Spotify, is obviously willing to look the other way to protect their exclusive $100 million deal with him, even if that means letting him promote wild conspiracy theories—like he did last month. On episode #1757 of JRE, Rogan invited a virologist named Dr. Robert Malone to inform listeners that public health responses to the coronavirus, particularly mass vaccination, were inextricably tied in with something called “mass formation psychosis.”

Malone’s credibility is largely based on his claim to have invented MRNA vaccines. Whether that’s true or not—the Atlantic reported he is one of many scientists who published important work on MRNA—more recently his credentials seem to have served the more practical purpose of buoying his darling status in right-wing media and the anti-vaxx movement. Malone claims not to be a vaccine skeptic, but questions the safety and efficacy of the actual MRNA vaccines on the market. Many of his claims have been rated as false by fact-checkers and many other scientists have more or less suggested he’s gone off the rails. Mass formation psychosis, in Malone’s telling, is exactly like what happened in Germany before the rise of the Nazi Party’s Third Reich, during which the public “literally becomes hypnotized and can be led anywhere.” Malone went on to tell Rogan that this is why members of the public trust and are complying with supposedly extreme, totalitarian overreactions like social pressure to get vaccinated.

In reality, mass formation psychosis is not a legitimate scientific idea and, according to specialists in fields like crowd and social psychology, has no credibility. (According to the AP, University of Sussex social psychologist John Drury and Binghamton University psychology professor Steven Jay Lynn described the theory as based on discredited concepts around mob mentality and the power of hypnosis.) But it is convenient culture-war gristle for right-wingers and anti-vaxxers furious at public health measures who want to rebrand just being wrong as enviable possession of forbidden knowledge and label anyone who disagrees as mentally ill sheeple. That’s the main reason the Malone episode went viral.

Linsey Marr is a world class aerosol expert.

Adam Serwer/Atlantic:

The Culture War Has Warped the Supreme Court’s Judgment

Yesterday’s decision hinges on a new and alarming embrace of the right-wing crusade against vaccination.

“COVID-19 can and does spread at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather,” the unsigned opinion reads. “That kind of universal risk is no different from the day-to-day dangers that all face from crime, air pollution, or any number of communicable diseases.”

This is laughable logic. OSHA regulates many, many hazards that are also present outside the workplace. The fact that you can die in a fire in your apartment is not an argument against regulating fire hazards in factories or offices. The mandate applied to firms whose employees have to work indoors, because that’s how the virus spreads. Moreover, unlike attending a sporting event as a spectator, people have to go to work, unless they’re lucky enough to be, say, a Supreme Court justice, in which case you can work remotely.

Milder ≠ mild.

David Rothkopf/Daily beast:

An Aging Vladimir Putin Hopes War Can Make a Sagging Empire Rise Again

Right now, the greatest danger the world faces from such a leader comes from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The 69-year-old Putin has long been seen as a man so insecure about his fading virility that he has engineered sometimes comical macho displays from ill-considered shots of him riding horseback shirtless through the Russian countryside to hockey games in which his side always wins thanks to a tsunami of goal-scoring by a Gretzky-like Vlad.

In some ways the most poignant of all of Putin’s efforts to turn back the clock would be his vain attempts to restore Russia’s place in the world to a status akin to that of the Soviet Union in which he was raised and for which he worked as KGB officer from 1975 until 1991, when he resigned following a coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. Putin has called the collapse of the USSR and its empire “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Michael Hiltzik/LA Times:

A new study calculates the incredible cost of ivermectin stupidity

“That’s not small potatoes,” the lead author of the letter, Kao-Ping Chua of the University of Michigan Medical School, told me. The unit cost of ivermectin pills is low — about $1 to $1.50 per pill — but the volume of wasteful prescriptions adds up.

The $129.7 million spent on wasteful ivermectin, the letter’s authors calculated, is more than the annual Medicare spending on unnecessary imaging for lower back pain, a low-value diagnostic order that has been widely researched. No one has paid much attention to the ivermectin expense, however.

Philip Rotner/Bulwark:

It’s Long Past Time to Prosecute Phony GOP Electors

The individuals who signed and transmitted fraudulent Electoral College ballots claiming their states voted for Donald Trump must be held to account.

Actually, there weren’t just five states in which, despite Biden having won there, Republican pseudo-electors submitted Electoral College certificates in support of Trump. There were seven. The Republicans in two of those states, however, hedged their bets. The New Mexico certificate was submitted “on the understanding that it might later be determined that we are the duly elected and qualified” electors (emphasis added). The Pennsylvania certificate was similarly qualified “on the understanding that if, as a result of a final non-appealable Court Order or other proceeding prescribed by law, we are ultimately recognized as being the duly elected and qualified Electors” (emphasis added).

The submissions from those two states deserve the benefit of the doubt. They can and should be read as contingent, belt-and-suspenders backup plans to make sure that Trump electors were identified in the event, however unlikely, that the courts reversed the election results in their states.

Not so the other five states. The phony Trump electors from each of the other five states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin—certified that they were in fact the “duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America” from their respective states.