The Public Health Establishment Is In Disagreement Over Vacccines

Buried deep in a CNN story about the Michigan COVID surge, I found this:

Though the virus appears to be spreading unchecked in those under age 59, those with a few months of vaccine eligibility (age 60 and up) have an impressively stable (and low) infection rate. This makes Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's plea to President Joe Biden for more vaccines all the more logical though, as the administration pointed out when they rejected Whitmer's request, giving more vaccines to Michigan will mean fewer for the surrounding (and other) states.

This bears out the view expressed by the LA County health department that the vaccines are in fact highly effective. But if, as the story says, Michigan has vaccinated in the neighborhood of 25% of its population, roughly the same as other states, this raises the question of whether Michgan has been vaccinating the right people. California for the first several months of vaccine distribution specifically targeted those most likely to become infected, which showed immediate effects. If Michigan is vaccinating a lot of people -- affluent suburbanites, for instance -- who aren't likely to get sick, it's wasting time and vaccine.

Beyond that is this story at MSN:

The political dynamics have changed markedly in recent weeks as vaccination rates have grown, warmer weather has returned, and the public and business owners have become increasingly vocal about reopening schools and loosening restrictions around social gatherings.

“I think we have a real compliance issue if we try to go back to the sort of restrictions that were in place in March and April of last year,” said Pennsylvania state Rep. Mike Zabel, a Democrat who had supported previous shutdown orders by Gov. Tom Wolf, a fellow Democrat. “I don’t think there’s any appetite for that in Pennsylvania at all.”

. . . Other governors also are staying on course to reopen society as they simultaneously expand vaccine eligibility, potentially complicating President Joe Biden's efforts to conquer the pandemic.

Thus it isn't just states like Texas and Florida that are ignoring the CDC, it's states with continuing surges like Michigan and Pennsylvania. They're becoming more aware, I think, of continuing legal and electoral challenges to strict orders that seem less and less effective.

But this raises another issue, whether the CDC is actually working against solving the problem. There's no question that Drs Walensky and Fauci advocate indefinite masking and social distance, no matter how effective the vaccines prove. A tweet thread by Dr Vinay Prasad of the University of California at San Francisco outlines the problem:

CDC messaging on restrictions post vax has been a mess

The q is not: is there 0% change of spread after vax (ans: almost surely no)

The Q is: do precautions have a reasonable ARR (w/ real compliance) post vac? (ans, also almost surely no)

My sense is that the effectiveness of vaccines, properly targeted, crept up on the CDC in particular. I think it's significant that nobody (UPDATE: Yahoo News finally noticed) has mentioned the case of California, which as far as I can see has been unique in specifically targeting the most vulnerable populations, indeed with incentives to meet quotas in the poorest areas. Doing this in the first months of vaccine distribution had spectacular results.

On the other hand, before the vaccines became available in mid December 2020, even though California had something like 98% compliance with masks and distancing, those measures clearly had no effect on the late 2020 surge there -- as they had no effect anywhere else.

Nor would I rule out the CDC deciding to "pause" all the vaccines, putatively to avoid inevitable bad reactions, but actually to extend the crisis. But I don't think they'd have supprt even among their colleagues.

I think the lack of a united front among the CDC, blue governors, and other health authorities suggests the panic is slowly waning, and the public is losing patience with efforts to extend it. Things will improve when Drs Walensky and Fauci begin to recognize their 15 minutes of fame has expired. Michigan

The Death Of Limbaugh And The 2020 Moral Panic

I've frequently discussed the 2020 dumpster fire here as a "moral panic", an upheaval in public opinion similar to the Salem witch trials or the day-care Satanism wave of the 1980s, a widespread fear that some ill-defined evil threatens the well-being of society. Observers suggest that moral panics stem from underlying social insecurity, with particular issues and "devils" serving only as what an Aristotelian would call efficient or proximate causes, not the underlying reason.

I'm now thinking that the single event that drove the whole 2020 moral panic, before the COVID lockdowns, before the George Floyd riots, was Rush Limbaugh's announcement of his terminal cancer diagnosis. Let me make it plain that, while I often found Limbaugh entertaining, I was never a dittohead, and I think in recent years he'd lost his sharp satirical edge, though he almost never had three hours of material to fill a three-hour show, and it was often padded with predictable bloviation.

But I had a sudden moment of epiphany the other night as I watched a TV program on, of all things, Swanson's TV Dinners. One of the analysts made a telling point, that TV Dinners became enormously popular at a time when there were effectively three TV networks that created a cultural consensus, which included the enormous cultural change of people watching television at dinner hour in the family room, eating frozen pre-prepared food off "TV tables". This trend took off like a rocket in the mid to late 1950s, and by 1968, Lyndon Johnson is alleged to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

This is yet another of the remarks LBJ may or may not have uttered, but reflect a perception of cultural trends that suggests that if he didn't say them, he should have. Walter Cronkite was a dinner-hour TV Dinner talking head that somehow reflected a single national consensus, driven by a de facto single national media.

The national media figure who began to undermine that 30-year media consensus in the late 1980s was Rush Limbaugh. By 2009, public exchanges between Limbaugh and Barack Obama cemented Limbaugh's stature, as in presidential remarks equivalent to LBJ's, Obama said, "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," The Guardian at the link noted,

He is the highlight of the rural American lunch hour, and his strong, confident voice can be heard in mechanic's shops, petrol stations and barbershops every day. He is – as he claims – an excellent broadcaster, a shameless and skilful self-promoter and a mover and shaker among the conservative elite.

Note the reference to Limbaugh suggesting, as with Cronkite, a dominant presence at mealtimes and in US culture, as well as a presidential acknowedgement of each figure's importance.

But it's also now recognized that Limbaugh had an impact on media equivalent to the TV Dinner's impact on American eating habits. According to the Poynter Institute,

Rush Limbaugh was more than a talk radio host. He was a key element in the development of the highly partisan journalism and other media that envelop us today.

Limbaugh’s talk radio program was not possible until the Federal Communications Commission relaxed the fairness doctrine. That policy, which began in 1949, was rooted in the idea that radio and TV stations were “public trustees” and as such should serve the entire nation and on the local level serve the communities to which they were licensed. The doctrine required them to air competing views on important issues. The idea was for broadcasters not to take sides.

. . . Along came President Ronald Reagan who, like other conservatives, didn’t like the fairness doctrine. The feeling was that news media lean liberal and the marketplace should determine content. With the support of FCC Commissioner Mark S. Fowler, the commission announced in 1987 that the government would no longer enforce the fairness doctrine. The commission reasoned that with the rise of cable television there were lots of viewpoints available to the public that did not exist when only print and over-the-air broadcasting were the only conduits to the public.

Now of course, pace LBJ, Walter Cronkite wasn't middle American at all. Cronkite's style was stentorian, patrician, Episcopalian, Brooks Brothers. Limbaugh was irreverent, Evangelical, a late-blooming college dropout, former disc jockey and low-level football flack who'd bucked his family tradition of becoming a lawyer. Limbaugh was the middle American, not Cronkite.

When Cronkite met his reward, nobody much cared, he was part of a bygone age by then, predeceased by the likes of John Cameron Swayze, Douglas Edwards, and Chet Huntley. They hadn't changed anything much, since Americans kept watching the nightly news over their TV dinners even as the talking heads changed -- but the talking heads were saying what they were told to say anyhow, which didn't change over that time.

The problem with Limbaugh was that he changed a great deal, and whether he passed away didn't cancel those changes out. He was an early pioneer of independent media, and he simply created a whole new market. When he announced his cancer diagnosis and Trump awarded him the Medal of Freedom during a State of the Union, the lizard people simply woke up and realized that, attack Limbaugh as they might, he'd be gone soon enough, as he was, but he was the guy who'd squeezed the toothpaste out of the tube, and they weren't going to be able to push it back in. He'd given the plebs a voice, not lectured them as their better.

This is the source of the elites' panic and desperation. The nodes of the panic, masks and social distance, riots by the urban underclass threatened by disappearance of the destructive policies that sustain it, and the corporate attempts to restrict speech, are all results of the social uncertainty created by media no longer under elites' complete control.

California Lifts Indoor Church Limits

Yesterday, California lifted all explicit limits on capacity and location of indoor worship in the state, although the state health department continued to say that indoor gatherings are “strongly discouraged" and advised limiting the numbers to the existing percerntages given under the state's color coded tiers. For most of the state, depending on the county, those limits are currently either 25% or 50% capacity.

There is no change to the requirements for social distancing and masks, and choral and congregational singing are also still prohibited. (However, our priests increasingly pat people on the shoulders, and congregational responses are slowly returning. So far, no Karens have intervened.)

Most news reports say that this was in response to the US Supreme Court's injunction this past Friday against Santa Clara County enforcing a ban on any indoor home worship. This was argued by the Center for American Liberty in the case of Tandon v Newsom.

At the crux of the lawsuit was Newsom’s disparate treatment of at-home religious gatherings, which Newsom arbitrarily limited to three households while permitting secular gatherings in other settings to take place in significantly higher numbers.

. . . The Court ruled that California’s regulation of at-home religious gatherings was “not neutral and generally applicable, and therefore trigger[ed] strict scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause.” The Court explained, “California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than at-home religious exercise, permitting hair salons, retail stores, personal care services, movie theaters, private suites at sporting events and concerts, and indoor restaurants to bring together more than three households at a time.”

“Here, in the case of a rule banning different families from gathering in a private home to pray together, the Court recognized that any time the government burdens religious activity with special rules, it must bear the burden of strict scrutiny, and in this case, it could not meet that test. We are grateful that the First Amendment rights of our clients were recognized by the Court in overturning the 9th Circuit,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, CEO of the Center for American Liberty.

However, another pro-religious freedom public-interest law firm, Liberty Counsel, noted that the state's lifting of more general restrictions on indoor worship came as a response to the court's potential action in a different case:

In response to Liberty Counsel’s request for an emergency injunction pending appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of Harvest Rock Church and Harvest International Ministry, Governor Gavin Newsom wrote yesterday that “mandatory limits on attendance are no longer imposed on houses of worship.”

Since this case is still pending and has been active since mid-2020, Liberty Counsel sees the governor's action as a strategic withdrawal in the face of potential appeal in this case as well, given the Supreme Court's consistent recent record of supporting the natural right of freedom to worship in five recent cases. The state's strategy has generally been to try to convince the court not to get involved, since the governor, relaxing the restrictions at issue, makes the case moot -- but then, this enables him simply to reinstate the same restrictions whenever convenient.

Liberty Counsel represents Harvest Rock Church and Harvest International Ministry in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor twice. This case is still pending at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals requesting that the district court ruling be reversed. Unless and until there is a judicial declaration that Governor Newsom has acted unconstitutionally, there is nothing keeping him from changing his mind again, whether in this crisis or any future crisis.

As a result, the governor's action represents a temporary victory, but efforts clearly continue to extend and preserve the right to freedom of worship. Two other Southern California cases now seem to be in limbo, the Grace Community Church case in Sun Valley and the Godspeak Calvary Chapel case in Thousand Oaks. These came up last summer when both churches resumed indoor services with neither mandatory masks nor social distancing, which were at the time (and effectively continue to be) forbidden under state COVID rules, notwithstanding there has been some relaxation of specifics in recent weeks.

The effect of this week's most recent relaxation on these two cases, as well as Harvest Rock in Pasadena, is unclear. It appears that the individual judges have been kicking the can down the road, recognizing that the legal and epidemiological situations are constantly changing and apparently unwilling to create a permanent resolution while the situation is so fluid.

The state's announcement clearly puts some individual churches' and parishes' COVID measures at local option. Our diocesan Catholic parish has been playing things by ear in the wake of recent relaxations. In response to last November's Supreme Court orders, Los Angeles County itself in effect allowed indoor worship but left specific capacity up to parish or church judgment. Our parish continues to hold some masses indoors, some outdoors, and some as drive-ins in the parking lot, with the latter the most popular. The weather has been favorable.

While pews are roped off, the ushers have never specifically counted attendance and kept anyone from entering. A return to full indoor masses will clearly depend as much on the comfort level of individual members as on state restrictions. Our impression is that, especially since Easter, people have been returning to all masses in greater numbers.

Dr Walensky Reveals A Tell

I've been wondering about Michigan now for more than a week, and the COVID surge there is finally getting full media attention. Clearly the state has now emerged as the worst case in the US, with ideas from various quarters on what to do about it:

COVID-19 cases have started spiking in Michigan, which currently has the highest number of positive tests per 100,000 in the nation. The state’s seven-day average is 515 per 100,000. The next closest state is New Jersey, with 300.

. . . In October of 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court stripped Whitmer of the emergency powers she had assumed during the pandemic, declaring the orders an “unlawful delegation of legislative power to the executive branch in violation of the Michigan Constitution.” Now, faced with increasing COVID-19 spread, the governor is powerless to issue the same kind of restrictions she did in the past without the Republican-controlled legislature’s consent. With the friction between the branches caused by her overarching actions earlier in the pandemic, getting back her authority to act is not likely.

In reponse, although Gov Whitmer has asked for voluntary compliance with new restrictions, the reply from schools and businesses has been that they don't intend to make changes. In response, Gov Whitmer has asked the federal government to increase its supply of COVID vaccines to the state. The Biden administration has so far refused, but the strangest take by far is from Dr Walensky:

“When you have an acute situation, an extraordinary number of cases like we have in Michigan, the answer is not necessarily to give vaccines — in fact, we know the vaccine will have a delayed response,” Walensky said in a briefing with reporters. “The answer to that is to really close things down, to go back to our basics, to go back to where we were last spring, last summer… to flatten the curve, decrease contact with one another, to test to the extent we have available, to contact trace.”

It goes without saying that the question being asked all over independent media is where has this woman been for the past 13 months? She's advocating a new "two weeks to flatten the curve"? But, stripped of her legal authority to impose a new lockdown, this is no longer an option for Gov Whitmer. Her alternative is to ask for more vaccine.

One puzzle for me is what Dr Walensky does all day in her office, and indeed, what her staff does as well, besides run for lattes. Nowhere in any media, beyond that, is anyone asking the big question, what about California? Every US state began receiving allocations of vaccine from mid-December 2020. No state got all the vaccine it wanted. California immediately distributed its limited supply to elder care homes and those over 75, who would benefit most.

Although I questioned this at first, it also began incentivizing vaccine distribution to the poorest zip codes, again on the basis that if cases were highest there, each dose would prevent more new cases. The result was that California turned the late 2020 surge around by mid-January, and the COVID data has continued to fall to the point that the state is now at levels comparable to those a year ago.

Surely a CDC director, charged with following effective epidemiological strategies, is aware of this. I won't even say she ought to be aware of this. She's smart. She's made it to the top of a system with lots of smart people. She knows about this. Why isn't she asking the obvious question, what is California doing that Michigan isn't? But I bet that, since she's smart, she knows the answer.

Instead, she gives the dinosaur brain answer from more than a year ago: Gov Whitmer, just say two weeks to flatten the curve. That'll fix it! From the link above,

White House COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt told Michigan officials to “follow the science.” Science says those 65 and older with comorbidities are at the highest risk for COVID-19-related mortality. One might assume following science would mean getting shots into those individuals as quickly as possible in an identified hotspot.

The implication from the White House is that Michigan hasn't been doing what California has been doing for four months, but it appears that nobody in authority is quite willing to come out and say that. But it's hard to avoid thinking Gov Whitmer and her staff have either been slow-walking effective vaccine distribution or simply incompetent at it, which is resulting in a Canadian situation. And Dr Walensky's public advice is effectively to do the worst possible thing, the one thing that will continue the crisis.

The vaccine isn't the answer -- oh, no, "we know the vaccine will have a delayed response". But "flatten the curve" will have no effect at all!

I think there are two reasons for this. One is that the most powerful wing of the public health establishment, at the Fauci-Walensky level, has never wanted vaccines, which it sees as a Trump program, no matter its clear success in places like California, whose own public health authorities are anything but Trumpist. We see the same downplaying of vaccine in public remarks by Dr Fauci:

White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday advised people who have been vaccinated for COVID-19 to hold off on congregating indoors to eat or drink.

. . . “No, it’s still not OK for the simple reason that the level of infection, the dynamics of infection in the community are still really disturbingly high,” Fauci advised. “Like just yesterday, there were close to 80,000 new infections, and we’ve been hanging around 60,000, 70,000, 75,000.”

These people want a permanent crisis.

The Contrast Continues

The video above shows patrons at a Vancouver, BC restaurant urging health inspectors to leave when they attempted to close it due to what appears to have been a sudden, poorly communicated "red light-green light" closure of provincial indoor dining. Canada continues to experience lockdowns, curfews, and other extraordinary measures in response to a COVID surge that's returning case statisics to late 2020 levels.

In contrast, the US Supreme Court on Friday continued its recent orders confirming the natural right to freedom of worship, ruling that California may not prevent people from gathering in homes for Bible study and prayer meetings. Interestingly, the state argued that the court should not get involved, since improving COVID statistics would remove such restrictions within a week.

The court, clearly aware that last summer, Gov Newsom reversed an equivalent relaxation in another such red light-green light move, nevertheless went ahead and established the principle, issuing the restraining order the plaintiffs requested.

Canadian protests also continue in Montreal and Quebec City. especially in response to a reimposition of curfews in much of Quebec. Other protests occurred in Alberta, where authorities closed a church that violated orders to shut down. It's very puzzling that Canada is continuing to experience such a surge in cases with reimpositions of extremely strict controls that counterintuitively have had no perceptible effect on the disease. Meanwhile, the US is steadily relaxing controls, while vaccinations are showing positive results in nearly all regions. As discusssed in The Atlantic,

Canadians have been overwhelmingly compliant with public-health directives, wearing masks, limiting social interactions, washing and sanitizing our hands ’til our fingertips prune. And what do we get? Per capita vaccination numbers lagging behind those of 50 other countries, including Brazil, Chile, Turkey, and much of Europe, according to Johns Hopkins University’s immunization tracker. The country currently has a level-four travel advisory: “Travelers should avoid all travel to Canada,” warns the CDC. In March, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the U.S.-Canada border—closed for nearly a year, since American COVID-19 infection rates began escalating out of control—would remain closed for at least another month.

The Atlantic piece suggests there's no single cause for the extremely slow rollout of vaccine in Canada:

Without much domestic manufacturing capacity to speak of, Canada had to sign advance-purchase deals with international vaccine companies. The country hedged its bet by mostly going with companies funded by Operation Warp Speed, and so far its strategy has been to overbuy doses in the hopes of securing enough to vaccinate all of its citizens. A mounting critique, however, is that perhaps Canada should have been more specific than “first quarter of 2021” in terms of arranging vaccine-delivery timing.

Bu whatever the reason, it's becoming plain that as of 2021, the single most visible and effective response to COVID is vaccine, and in the hands of capable public health authorities and policymakers, the turnaround in hard-hit US states like California has been spectacular. (This doesn't exclude other potential explanations for positive results in places like Texas and Sweden.) But in some important way, Canada and a few US states like Michigan have missed the boat, and the evidence is impossible to ignore that draconian lockdown-style controls and a red light-green light approach are utterly feckless measures that are actually counterproductive.

While the Atlantic piece says "Canadians have been overwhelmingly compliant", it's startmg to sound as though there are limits even to Canadian willingness to comply. Certainly a factor in what's beginning to look like US success in beating the combination of epidemic and moral panic has been the clear willingness of citizens to hold authorities electorally accountable, as well as the cooperation of the court system in clearly enforcing natural rights in the face of open-ended government efforts to curtail them in an "emergency".

More On Why The Elites Want A Chauvin Acquittal

A piece by Joel Kotkin raises some important points on the potential outcome of the Chauvin trial.

No politician in American history owes more to African-American leadership and voters than Joe Biden. His flailing campaign was rescued from the respirator by South Carolina’s heavily black Democratic electorate. African Americans sustained his path through states such as Texas. Since taking office, Biden’s commitment to battling the ‘sting of systemic racism’ and encroaching ‘white supremacy’ has accompanied his early actions and seems to have shaped many of his appointments.

It's not hard to imagine that Biden, shallow, cynical, and impaired, will follow his worst instincts and allow his handlers to write him statements that will foster unrest if the verdict goes against the progressive narrative. The question is whether we'll have a repeat of Rodney King in 1992 or the 2020 riots. Kotkin thinks we will. i'm not sure. Kotkin says late in his essay:

This worry, given the past, is understandable, but legitimate concern over police abuse does not suggest minorities embrace the prevailing narrative. The vast majority of all races, noted a 2018 survey, reject the political correctness increasingly embraced by the billionaire class as well as corporate HR departments. Indeed, the most extreme people on racial issues are not Blacks and Hispanics but radicalised whites, whose Antifa shock troops well represent the lunatic fringe.

The woke may be winning in cyberspace and the corporate suite, but economic factors may prove more decisive in the long run. By 2032, minorities will constitute the majority of the American working class. They did better in terms of income under President Trump than previous administrations from both parties. This was one reason for the shocking move of Latin voters, devastated by the lockdowns, to Trump last year.

. . . Red Guard-like seminars may make money for the practitioners of redress but it is what my friend Sergio Munoz calls ‘the multiculturalism of the streets’ that will save us. The idea of America as a kind of apartheid regime seems surreal in a country where one in 10 babies born in the US has one white and one non-white parent and 12 per cent of all African Americans are now immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Interracial marriage has gone from three per cent in 1967 to roughly one in six now.

As I've been saying, the moral panic of 2020 has been based not just on a virus. The lockdowns were one symptom; the riots were another, and both come from a single cause, a basic insecurity about social change, which observers suggest is a factor in all moral panics. A big part of this particular change is a sense that the political alignment that began in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson is alleged to have remarked "I’ll have those [bleep] voting Democratic for 200 years", isn't likely to last anywhere near that long.

The riots, and the election of Biden as a senile puppet of backstage progressives, are signs that the elites who thrived under the LBJ arrangement are losing their grip. We simply don,'t know how the Chauvin trial will come out, but I have a feeling the results won't be quite what anyone predicts. People are simply tired of 2020.

The Lizard People Want A Chauvin Acquittal

As I've said, I'm interested in what Alan Dershowitz has to say about the Derek Chauvin trial ongoing in Minneapolis, but he hasn't had a great deal to say about it. So instead, I've been following the commentary of criminal defense attorneys on blogs and YouTube. What I'm beginning to realize is that Dershowitiz is a law professor and an appellate attorney, as well as a media figure, and he's coming at the case from a completely different perspective fron the criminal defense attorneys. In fact, as a media figure, Dershowitz is a bit off key and a bit out of touch.

The YouTube video above dates from this past Monday, April 5, and it's based on the trial as of last week. It's plain that his view as of then was that, although Chauvin is not guilty of outright murder, he's got to be guilty of something, maybe manslaughter. But he does see some possibility of either an acquittal or a hung jury. In the video below, although it dates from yesterday, it refers to the testimony of Dr Martin Tobin on April 8.

Here he's coming at the case as a law professor and an appellate attorney. But in a very backhanded way, he's saynig that the prosecution's srongest expert witness, Dr Tobin, who as another YouTube commentator says, not only wrote the book on lungs but actually invented them, was not effective -- if only from an appellate attorney's point of view. Dr Tobin said there was only one cause of George Floyd's death, the pressure of Chauvin's knee on Floyd's neck (or "neck area"). But Dershowitz says this contradicts what we see every day; thousands of people are restrained this way and almost none die.

This is, I think, a very roundabout way for Dershowitz to be expressing his doubts about the case. The criminal defense attorneys I've been following are more open. The problem for the prosecution is that their own expert witnesses wind up agreeing very calmly with the questions Eric Nelson, Chauvin's attorney, puts to them on cross examination. They wind up sounding like defense witnesses, not prosecution.

For instance, in yesterday's testimony, Dr. Andrew Baker, the county medical examiner who performed Floyd's autopsy, listed a number of contributing causes for the death on the autopsy report, including drugs in Floyd's system and a serious heart condition. This contradicted Tobin's testimony the day before. Baker and another prosecution expert yesterday also told Nelson that there is "no safe level" of methamphetamine in the blood.

All of this continues to raise questions of reasonable doubt as to the cause of Floyd's death, irrespective of Tobin's opinion -- and this is before the defense calls its own experts. My wife thinks Nelson is an extremely competent attorney. What I find remarkable is how effective he's been at getting most of the prosecution expert witnesses to like him, trust him, and expand volubly on medical opinions that undermine the prosecution's case.

The bottom line is becoming that the possibility of either an acquittal or a hung jury in the Chauvin trial is looking better than remote. The question is, what the people who run the planet, whom I characterize for convenience as the "lizard people", are doing to anticipate this. A story in the Washington Examiner gives a hint:

[T]his trial involves determining the cause and manner of Floyd's death. If the drugs combined with his severe heart condition killed him, the defense argues, Chauvin isn't guilty of murder.

MSNBC's in-house race hustler Al Sharpton further fanned the flames on Friday, declaring, "I mean, if we can’t get some justice here, I don’t know what it takes."

By "some justice," Sharpton means a murder conviction, because, well, duh, Chauvin is guilty! Give the reverend a piece of that justice! Give him some!

There's a clear consensus that if in fact there's any outcome to the trial than a conviction for Chauvin, there will be another round of George Floyd riots. Dershowtiz shakes his head in disbelief, referring to the Rodney King riots of almost 30 years ago as being in "a different world". But Prof Dershowitz, if there's such a sense that this could happen again, how is this a different world? Rodney King was a long time ago, but there were far worse riots over George Floyd just last year.

The people this benefits are the media and the established elites. The media get fear-porn and disaster clickbait just when Trump has faded and COVID will be cured. The elites get the "different world" of the Rodney King riots and the tired old political formulas resuscitated one more time.