Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Get your COVID booster shot if you can

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John Cassidy of The New Yorker writes that even though the interrelated issues with inflation and supply-chains are not President Joe Biden’s fault, Republicans will blame him anyway…just because.

With some economists predicting that the inflation rate could rise even further over the next few months, the Republican onslaught on Biden will only intensify, but it can’t stand unchallenged. Many of the factors contributing to the inflation surge are beyond the immediate control of any President. Sticker shock at the gas pump is primarily a result of a decision by the opec oil cartel to restrict production at a time of rising demand. Higher prices for new and used vehicles, which have been one of the biggest drivers of the rise in the C.P.I., stem largely from a shortage of new cars caused by a lack of computer chips imported from Asia. Higher rental costs, which contributed to the most recent jump, can be traced to spiking real-estate prices and rock-bottom interest rates.

The so-called supply-chain problem, which lies at the heart of the broader inflation surge, is a global phenomenon rooted in a faster rebound from the worldwide coronavirus shutdowns than many people had expected. “As the global recovery gains traction, demand for raw materials, intermediate inputs and logistical services has outstripped available supply leading to rising and volatile prices, and delivery delays,” the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements (B.I.S.)—the central bank of central banks—notes in a new report. Shipping costs have soared, cargo vessels have been forced to queue for days to gain access to ports, and the situation has been made worse by “precautionary hoarding at different stages of the supply chain,” the report goes on.

This global logjam is leading to higher inflation in many countries. In Britain, in August, consumer prices recorded the biggest one-month jump on record. In Germany, the inflation rate topped four per cent, the highest figure since the nineteen-nineties. In the nineteen-country eurozone, the inflation rate in October was 4.1 per cent, according to a preliminary estimate. In Russia, inflation is running at more than eight per cent, while, in Brazil, it’s nearly eleven per cent. These figures bear further inspection. If the Biden Administration’s spending policies have been a major factor in driving prices higher—as Republicans claim—you would expect the inflation rate to have jumped a lot further in the United States than in Europe, say. That hasn’t happened. Between January, 2020, and October, 2021, the U.S. inflation rate increased by approximately 4.7 percentage points, and the eurozone’s inflation rate increased by 3.7 points. The U.S. jump is bigger, but the figures are roughly in the same ballpark.

Akshay Syal, MD writes for NBC News that COVID-19 hospitalizations are now rising for the fully vaccinated but non-boosted.

On Wednesday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reported a decline in vaccine effectiveness among the elderly and residents of long-term care facilities, many of whom were the first to be eligible to be vaccinated last winter.

“Although the highest risk are those people who are unvaccinated, we are seeing an increase in emergency department visits among adults 65 and older, which are now again higher than they are for younger age groups,” Walensky said Wednesday at a White House Covid briefing.

Walensky also pointed to new data on long-term care facilities from the agency’s National Healthcare Safety Network comparing rates of Covid disease between people who are vaccinated with two doses and those who have received extra doses.

“The rate of disease is markedly lower for those who received their booster shot, demonstrating our boosters are working,” she said.

Fauci and Walensky stressed that the majority of hospitalizations and deaths are still among unvaccinated people in the U.S.

Olga Khazan of The Atlantic reports out polling that indicates that for a majority of rural Americans, life is returning to “normal.”

According to a recent Atlantic/Leger poll, compared with people in urban or suburban areas, people in rural areas are most likely to feel like things are “back to normal” where they live—45 percent thought so, compared with 30 percent of urbanites and 36 percent of suburbanites. Rural Americans were also the least likely group to say they wished their neighbors would be more cautious about COVID-19.

People in rural areas are also significantly less likely than the other two groups to wear a mask indoors at restaurants and bars, or at work. They were the least likely group to say that their kids are required to wear masks to school or day care. They are also more likely to socialize with friends indoors without masks on: 68 percent said they now do this, compared with 54 percent of urbanites. A typical worker in D.C. might send his kid to preschool in a mask, ride to work on the Metro in a mask, and meet friends for drinks at an outdoor café, just in case. An hour and a half away, a typical worker in Culpeper, Virginia, might spend her day exactly as she would have in 2019.

Rural Americans are returning back to normal even though they are less likely to say that most adults they know are vaccinated: 48 percent of rural respondents answered “yes” to this question, compared with 68 percent of suburbanites and 63 percent of urbanites. (To be fair, 24 percent of rural respondents said they weren’t sure, compared with about 15 percent of the other two groups.) This result mirrors the lower vaccination rate among rural adults found in other research.

Very little COVID-19 to see in rural America, I guess!

Elizabeth Wellington of the Philadelphia Inquirer reports on a group of black pastors now traveling to Georgia to hold a prayer vigil in defiance of defense attorney Kevin Gough, who said “we don’t want any more black pastors coming here” in open court.

Now, some African American pastors from this area and other states are traveling to Georgia for a prayer vigil Thursday on the steps of the Glynn County Courthouse. The Rev. Mark Tyler of the historic Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church left Wednesday morning on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Bishop Dwayne D. Royster, the executive director of Power, which represents 50 Pennsylvania congregations, was scheduled to fly out Wednesday evening.

“Not only did this happen once, it’s happened twice now because they also went after Rev. [Jesse] Jackson yesterday for being there. It’s deeply disturbing,” Royster told me. “You can’t call out the Black church for doing its work — and our work is to provide comfort for families in very difficult situations and to be present for them. We also need to bear witness to injustice.”

They follow in the rich tradition of Black ministers who not only minister to the souls of their congregants but other aspects of their lives as well. They have every right to be there.

“You can’t really find a moment in American history where Black folk moved the needle forward where the Black church and Black preachers were not a part of it,” Tyler said.

Sikivu Hutchinson of the Los Angeles Times says that California’s ethnic studies programs need to include a LGBTQ component.

Thus, simply requiring ethnic studies courses in schools will not redress institutional racism in classrooms or school communities, much as an LGBTQ education mandate didn’t erase heterosexism or transphobia. For ethnic studies to succeed, it must be part of a broader approach to teaching, learning and social-emotional support for students, taking into account the overlap of racial, gender and sexual identities.

Recently, for example, a Black student told me that their parent threatened to kick them out of the house because they identified as queer. Their experiences were virtually identical to those of another student who told me years earlier that she faced religious hostility and the threat of eviction from her mother when she came out. She was told that being bisexual was against God, Blackness and respectable womanhood. Both youth were victimized at the intersections of misogynoir (a term for anti-Black misogyny) and homophobia. These factors contribute to high rates of homelessness and incarceration among Black queer youth. According to a 2019 Human Rights Campaign report, only 26% of Black youth reported family involvement in LGBTQ issues or the LGBTQ community.

For Black queer youth, bigotry at home is compounded by in-school bullying and harassment and high rates of school discipline. A 2020 report by the National Black Justice Coalition and GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) concluded: “The majority of Black LGBTQ students experienced harassment in school…because of their sexual orientation, gender expression, or race/ethnicity.”

Mathew Ingram of the Columbia Journalism Review writes about a report that seeks to address and find solutions to society’s “information disorder.”

The Aspen report notes that “there is an incentive system in place that manufactures information disorder, and we will not address the problem if we do not take on that system.” Some of the major players in that incentive system, according to the group, are large tech platforms such as Facebook, which it says have “abused customers’ trust, obfuscated important data, and blocked research.” The commission mentions one example CJR has also highlighted: the decision by Facebook to shut down a research project run by scientists from New York University by turning off their access to the social network. “Critical research on disinformation—whether it be the efficacy of digital ads or the various online content moderation policies—is undercut by a lack of access to data and processes,” the report states. Several of its recommendations are aimed at solving this problem, including one that asks the government to require platforms to “disclose certain categories of private data to qualified academic researchers, so long as that research respects user privacy, does not endanger platform integrity, and remains in the public interest.”

The report recommends government support for local journalism, including the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which proposes that federal tax credits be provided as a way to subsidize local news subscriptions. The commissioners also argue that the industry needs to “adjust journalistic norms to avoid false equivalencies between lies and empirical fact in the pursuit of ‘both sides’ and ‘objectivity,’” a topic CJR has also covered in-depth both in the magazine and through our Galley discussion platform. In addition, the report notes that cable news, podcasts, YouTube, and talk radio “all play a unique role in inflaming disinformation and too often fail to hold accountable those who spread false statements on-air,” and that there continues to be a tension in the media between “the drive to maximize profit and the imperative to serve the public good.”

The Aspen Institute’s final report is here.

Mujtaba Rahman of POLITICO Europe reports that French president Emmanuel Macron seems to be taking a more “pragmatic approach” to the EU in the context of his reelection campaign by running away from it.

Macron believes that he can boast a reasonably good record in European affairs — especially after his success last year in persuading Germany to approve a €750 billion plan to rebuild the pandemic-weakened economies of its 27 members. He is also keen to point to the crises afflicting post-Brexit Britain as proof of the EU’s overlooked benefits that France and the bloc’s other 26 countries draw from achievements like the single market.

Complicating matters for Macron, however, is that earlier this month, the Polish constitutional court decided to reject the primacy of the Court of Justice of the European Union. This Brussels-Warsaw confrontation threatens to reopen an old argument in France, which recalls the debate over national “control” that helped to shape the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU in 2016.

Indeed, ever since the decision, a series of French presidential contenders — ranging from the far right and the center right to the euroskeptic left — have all sided, to various degrees, with Warsaw. They have called for France to assert the primacy of its own constitution, or even its own individual laws, over European legislation — something that would imperil the existence of the single market and even the EU itself.

Although opinion polls suggest that France is broadly tolerant of EU membership, much of the population only has a foggy notion of the union’s history, its legal basis and how it functions — something, officials say, Macron is aware of.

Leonid Ragozin of AlJazeera covers all of the angles of the border crisis affecting Poland, Belarus, and Russia with a little bit of Ukraine thrown in.

Belarus is the closest ally of Russia and officially a part of an entity known as the Union of Russia and Belarus. The latter exists largely on paper, but it does provide for a common defence policy and free movement between the two countries, which means the Belarusian border with Poland and the two Baltic states is effectively Russia’s external frontier separating its security zone from the realm of NATO. Therefore, any conflict at this border by extension becomes a conflict between Russia and NATO, which is exactly how the far-right government in Poland is now trying to frame it.

[…]

…many hawkish commentators in the West and Eastern Europe have pointed a finger at Moscow as the instigator of the border crisis and claimed that Lukashenko’s threats must have been sanctioned by the Kremlin. Simultaneously, senior US officials made radical claims about Russia building up troops with the view of invading Ukraine.

The logic of these accusations is hard to fathom. Russia finds itself in the middle of a four-month period, during which the German energy regulator should certify Nord Stream 2 – a pipeline that will deliver gas to the EU directly, bypassing Ukraine and Belarus. On Tuesday, news came in that Germany is suspending the certification process on technical grounds – a move that will further delay the project and will be interpreted by the Kremlin as a deliberately hostile act.

Finally today, Linda Geddes of the Guardian reports on a study indicating that grandmothers are more connected to their grandchildren than their own children.

Since the 1960s, researchers have posited that one reason women tend to live decades past their reproductive years is that it increases the chances of their grandchildren surviving, through the physical support they often provide – the grandmother hypothesis. More recent evidence has suggested that children’s wellbeing and educational performance is also boosted by the presence of engaged grandparents.

To better understand the biological underpinnings of this connection, Prof James Rilling, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and colleagues recruited 50 women with at least one biological grandchild aged between three and 12, and used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan their brains as they looked at photos of that child, the child’s parents, and images of an unrelated child and adult.

“What really jumps out is the activation in areas of the brain associated with emotional empathy,” Rilling said. “That suggests that grandmothers are geared toward feeling what their grandchildren are feeling when they interact with them. If their grandchild is smiling, they’re feeling the child’s joy. And if their grandchild is crying, they’re feeling the child’s pain and distress.”

They really spent money on a study of this issue? Most grandchildren, I would think, would say this, right?

The why is interesting, though.

Everyone have a great day!