Dragged Kicking And Screaming

Drs Walensky and Fauci have been taking heat in recent days over the lack of updates to CDC guidelines due to the rapid improvement in COVID statistics.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky was forced to defend her agency's guidance and even its integrity on Tuesday as Senate Republicans grilled her over CDC messaging on masks and other restrictions, arguing it's frustrating and unreasonable as more Americans get vaccinated.

While the pressure in the Senate came from Republicans, it's more significant that pressure came from Chris Cuomo on CNN yesterday. He rather sharply accused the CDC of "causing delays" and "doing the job too well, playing it too safe" in approving vaccines and updating guidance. Well, when you've lost Chris Cuomo, you've lost the lizard people.

A bigger question is how Fauci managed to wangle things so his boss had to take that interview. The screen shot above shows how well Dr Rachel liked it. The CNN editors who made the screen shot for the promo were doing what they were told as well, we may feel certain.

It's also significant that California Gov Newsom is telegraphing that he'll back off a continuing indoor mask mandate after June 15.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom told Fox 11 Los Angeles that California's mask mandate may end on June 15 when the governor plans to reopen the state economy.

"Are we looking at masks after June 15?" asked Fox anchor Elex Michaelson Tuesday.

"No, only in those settings that are indoor... Only in those massively large settings where people from around the world, not just around the country, are convening and where people are mixing in real dense spaces," Newsom said. "Otherwise we'll make guidance, recommendations but no mandates."

Interestingly, Gov Newsom, faced with a recall, is starting to show some level of awareness that people are impatient with continued controls of all sorts. The problem is now that the unelected expert class has been dragging its feet. The people who run the planet, though, seem to be changing their policy, and the CDC will likely be brought to heel. "Very soon," as Dr Fauci keeps putting it.

The "Continuing" Shell Game

Intrigued by the news of a "trraditionalist" Methodist denominaion breaking away from the UMC, I couldn't help but revisit the experience Anglicans had with the Anglican Church in America, which initially endorsed the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus but in practice actively discouraged parishes that wanted to enter the Catholic Church, and in at least one case, it sued to prevent the exit. What puzzled me was why anyone would accept the promises of an in-group in charge that those who wished to leave the denomination would be given safe passage under some sort of plan yet to be finalized or approved.

I'm especially puzzled given the apparent timeline of Methodist events: in 2019, the UMC appears to have followed established canons whereby its overall governing body voted to retain its traditional definitions of marriage and sexuality. But by 2020, a body, or group of bodies, not constituting the governing body, somehow determined that this was unsatisfactory, and a new plan was proposed whereby those who had foolishly supported the 2019 vote would be allowed to leave the denomination with their parish property if they so chose. (If someone can make this clearer to me, I'll be grateful.)

So the majority somehow became "dissidents", who would nevertheless be treated with generosity once the new normal came to a vote in 2022. Or not, of course. How 2021. I sent for a free brochure from a law firm, Dalton Tomich, advising Methodist parishes on what they need to do to plan for all eventualities, given the likelihood that the next General Conference would make unpredictable moves in 2022 that would likely hurt parishes whatever option they chose.

The law firm's basic advice amounted to saying that that those in control had annouced a new set of policies and procedures that nevertheless wouldn't be enacted or approved until 2022, and certainly with no assurance that what emerged would be anything like what was being promised -- but meanwhile, any expectation that those in control would follow established canons was effectively suspended.

Their advice was basically to hire this law firm to negotiate a set of conditions now that would allow a parish to continue under the circumstances it wished whatever the outcome in 2022. The problem as I see this is that those in control now are pretty clearly not dealing in good faith, and presuming they'll stay in control as of 2022, they won't deal in good faith then, either.

So a parish that chooses this course will pay Dalton Tomich big bucks to negotiate a contract, which those running the UMC will reject in any case, and then they'll get to pay Dalton Tomich or some other law firm even bigger bucks when the situation deteriorates into litigation, which trust me it will.

And even Dalton Tomich recognizes that UMC bishops can move preemptively to close parishes that seem likely to cause trouble. Their advice, as far as I can piece it out, is to try to negotiate a contract that keeps the bishop from doing this before the bishop can shut them down. Yeah, that'll work.

Dalton Tomich suggests the current situation, even before a final plan is announced in 2022, is chaos, because the old order is effectively suspended, but nobody knows what to expect next, while the bishops, whom nobody trusts, are in control. According to the brochure, this has already happened among the Presbyterians, who used a similar process to purge traditionalists from the denomination.

Having seen a variation of all this among "continuing" Anglicans, I think this is simply a symptom of being Protestant during the final collapse of Protestantism. The only Protestant solution to the problem, which Dalton Tomich suggests at least as an option in its brochure, is to become an "independent" parish, or for that matter for individuals in a former parish to give up on affiliation except as attendees at "non-denominational" churches.

None of these is a good option for any number of reasons. So far, Catholic evangelism doesn't seem to have recognized this approach. Somebody should.

United Methodist Church To Disunite

Over the past several weeks I've run into occasional references to something called the Global Methodist Church, which Christianity Today recently explained is the object of a proposal now scheduled to be taken up by the United Methodist Church's General Conference in 2022,

Delegates are expected to take up a proposal to split the denomination called the Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace Through Separation.

The proposal, negotiated by 16 United Methodist bishops and advocacy group leaders from across theological divides, would create a new conservative “traditionalist” Methodist denomination—that’s the Global Methodist Church—that would receive $25 million over the next four years. Individual churches and annual conferences could choose to join the new entity; otherwise, they’ll remain in the existing denomination by default.

As might be expected, the potential split reflects differences over marriage and sexuality. The Britannica site says:

In 2019, at a special session of the General Conference, leaders voted to affirm the traditional stance against homosexuality, and a proposal to allow individual churches autonomy in decisions regarding gay clergy and same-sex marriage was voted down. As a result of the significant division within the denomination following this vote, in early 2020 church leaders proposed splitting the church to resolve the debate.

So let me get this straight. In 2019, the UMC as a body voted to support the traditional stance on sexuality and refused autonomy on the decision. But in 2020, UMC leaders who apparently disagreed proposed allowing those who supported the 2019 UMC tion to leave the UMC. So that the actual proposal is that as of 2022, maybe, the UMC will support LGBTQ in contradiction to its 2019 position, but it will allow those who supported the 2019 position to leave. Or do I have this wrong? It positively reeks of doublespeak.

The new GMC website says of itself,

Methodists in Africa, Europe, Eurasia, the Philippines, and the United States have warmly embraced the name. It simultaneously states who we are and who we aspire to be: faithful Christians in the Methodist tradition dedicated to sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with people all around the world.

Well, I spent almost ten years on the old blog looking at proposals like this. It's something like Anglicanorum coetibus meets the Traditional Anglican Communion meets the Anglican Church in North America, and I think it's likely to be just as successful.

The UMC is a result of a series of Methodist mergers, especially a 1939 reunioni of the Southern Methodists with the northerners to resolve a split dating from before the US Civil War. An additional merger resulted in the current UMC in 1968. However, it appears that the UMC is now in the process of unmerging, which of course is unscriptural and unproductive, but it's baked into Protestantism.

This is just a continuation of main line Protestantism's collapse. Protestants in general abandoned the field of marriage and sexuality in the 1960s, attempting to retain prestige by substituting vocal advocacy of leftist and pacifist programs. But the UMC itself knows it has a problem:

That’s according to projections from the denomination’s General Council on Finance and Administration — based on the continuing decline in U.S. membership as much as growth in Africa.

According to the agency’s forecast, total membership in the central conferences — church regions in Africa, the Philippines and Europe — will exceed that of the U.S. jurisdictions in 2020.

“Based on trends that have occurred over the last several years, we are annually averaging a decline of 2.0% overall for the jurisdictional membership,” Kevin Dunn, the agency’s director of data services, told the GCFA board at its November meeting.

“We may fall below 6 million (U.S.) members by 2025.”

But even that estimate doesn't take into consideration the potential loss from the new GMC.

Bill Maher, Moral Panic, And The Problem Of Agnostic Collapse

The late-night comedian Bill Maher the other day made one of his routine critiques of politicall;y-correct society:

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher lamented that “woke kids on campus decided to be all the worst parts of a Southern Baptist,” and the left has become “the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go.”

. . . After listing some examples of people on the right being more permissive on sex and drugs, and other examples of the right being morally strict, Maher stated, “We need to restore the natural order of things. I don’t want to live in a world where liberals are the uptight ones and conservatives do drugs and get laid. Once upon a time, the right were the ones offended by everything. They were the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go. Well, now that’s us.

I don't normally follow Maher, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. It turns out that Maher was raised Catholic, but "Owing to his disagreement with the Catholic Church's doctrine about birth control, Maher's father stopped taking Maher and his sister to Catholic church services when Maher was thirteen." Since Maher was born in 1956, he would have been 13 in 1969, when the collap;se of unexamined or agnostic religious faith was well under way.

The incongruous thing about Maher's regular attacks on political correctness is that he's generally aligned with all the elites' received causes. He's been on the board of PETA since 1987, for instance, and he supports legalizing marijuana. In many ways, he's a kind of secular Protestant, substituting private judgment over individual points of liberal doctrine, an agnostic's agnostic. He's decided certain aspects of current cancel culture are moral panic, but he doesn't want to try to tease out the full extent of the panic, or its underlying causes.

So his program is basically a wink and a smirk, which means he's nobody's friend. The underlying reason for the moral panic in polite society, it seems to me, is fear of the plebs, its actual cultural influence as reflected in the popular cable shows, and its growing power at the ballot box -- they ousted Trump in 2020, but they're terrified he'll return in 2024. Maher is clearly just as terrified of this as anyone else in his social stratum.

But this reflects a bigger problem: nain line Protestantism and other mainstream agnostic religious outlooks -- Reform Judaism or Kennedy Catholicsm, for instance -- collapsed beginning in the postwar period. The result has been moral ambiguity and increasing social chaos. These are things that Catholic thinkers from Frederick Kinsman to Paul VI anticipated.

The challenge is to rebuild the social and cultural consensus on a Catholic basis, which hasn't been tried in the modern period. I think this is the project Bp Barron recognizes needs to be undertaken.

Herd Immunity: What Happened In California?

California is currently thouight to be the most-improved US state for COVID, having reversed the late 2020 surge soon after the new year, with no new third surge as happened in the US northeast and Canada. But since Los Angeles County accounts for a quarter of the state's population, much of this success is attributable to LA County's performance. Although Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties are both in the least restrictive "yellow" tier, San Francisco's population is less than a million, while LA County's is over ten million.

The chart above shows cumulative totals for LA County cases and deaths, as well as case mortality rate, since the start of the pandemic. While the numbers, being cumulative, don't go down, they do show how the spread of the disease has been mitigated. More important, the dark curve at the bottom of the graph, reflecting cumulative deaths, shows a much more gradual curve than the light pattern at the top, which is cases. The overall case positivity rate of those tested, accorsding to a May 2 county press release, was More than 6,513,000 individuals tested simnce the start of the pandemic, with 18% of people testing positive. However, the current test positivity rate is well under 1%.

But LA County's statistics raise interesting questions. The first is why the COVID curve reversed so quickly after January 1, as shown at right. Vaccines were distributed only starting im mid-December 2020, supplies were limited, and they were concentrated among health care workers and long term care patients at that time. In addition, people needed two shots spaced over four weeks to be "fully vaccinated", since the J&J vaccine wasn't yet available. But the overall trend reversed within the first immunity waiting period. It's hard to think vaccine was the only explanation.

This leads to the question of herd immunity. So far, the received wisdom on herd immunity is reflected in this Johns Hopkins piece:

As with any other infection, there are two ways to achieve herd immunity: A large proportion of the population either gets infected or gets a protective vaccine. What we know about coronavirus so far suggests that, if we were really to go back to a pre-pandemic lifestyle, we would need at least 70% of the population to be immune to keep the rate of infection down (“achieve herd immunity”) without restrictions on activities.

The stimate of 70% to "go back to a pre-pandemic lifestyle" is actually at the low end of what we've seen from the public health establishment, with other authorities offering 80% or 90%. But the evidence we see in LA County is at variance with the overall theory in the link. The LA County graph at the top of the post, plus the county press release, gives overall positivity -- in other words, immunity as a result of infection -- at well under 20% of the population. A link in yesterday's polst gives the "fully vaccinated" percentage of LA County's population as 40% -- but that's right now. 40% plus under 20% is less than 60%. But the curve headed downward well before we approached 60%.

Dr Ferrer, the county health director, doesn't really disagree with this conclusion.

Asked why L.A. appears to be outpacing neighboring counties in reducing case rates, Ferrer credited residents and businesses for adhering to health guidelines. But she also said the winter surge in infections is also a contributing factor to the current low case numbers.

“We had a devastating surge here with huge numbers of people that got infected, and many of those people are still carrying around some natural immunity,” she said.

She goes on to warn about the danger of easing off on protective measures, but her own health department has just endorsed the CDC's guidance that it's OK to go without a mask outside, and the "yellow" tier relaxes the guidelines primarily for sports events and outdoor concerts, the sort of things that used to be verboten unless George Floyd was involved.

But the example of Texas, which has never had controls as strict as California, shows that even with greater laxity, it's been possible to show a steady downward trend in infections -- and Texas weather was much colder than California this past winter. But even Dr Ferrer acknowledges that an infection rate well under 20% of the population had a favorable effect on LA County's performance, leaving vaccine aside.

It's hard not to conclude that even with a compliance rate for masking and social distance in LA County generally acknowledged to be over 90%, there was an irreducible level of infections. Court-imposed relaxation on church attendence restrictions had no adverse effect on the pandemic, since people could go back to church roughly when vaccines became available, and increased church attendance has been part of the current COVID environment. (Has anyone in Canada looked at this?)

On one hand, I think the data shows that some level of disease transmission is simply unavoidable no matter what restrictions are imposed. But at the same time, the transmission leads to immunity in any case. Health authorities at this point are severely underestimating both the effect of the vaccine and the benefit of immunity from infection.

California: What Next?

As of this past week, both Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties fell into the state's least restrictive "yellow" tier of COVID restrictrions. The counties currently in "yellow" are otherwise sparsely populated and rural, but LA County alone, with over 10 millon people, accounts for about 25% of the state's population. As I've noted, other counties are likely to follow LA into the "yellow" tier within weeks.

I have lots of questions. The first is that LA County's aggressive vaccination program has led the state, putting a quarter of California's population in the least restrictive tier. But it's done this with about 40% of the county's population "fully vaccinated", two weeks after their final dose. It would seem that LA County, one of the hardest-hit areas of the state, is approaching herd immunity. But received opinion, as in the New York Times, is dismissing such ideas:

“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is,” he said.Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts’ thinking.

“That’s why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense,” he added. “I’m saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down.”

The problem in California is that Gov Newsom's tier system never had a "green" category after "yellow". In fact, for much of the population, the change from "orange" tier to "yellow" means very little. A few days ago, my wife and I left LA County, "yellow" to spend some time in a rural part of Fresno County, "orange". Restaurant restrictions, 50% capacity with social distance, were unchanged. At least you could sit down and have a good meal, depending on what table they'd let you use, and provided they'd checked your mask and your temperature. But at what point will this stop?

The answer is we don't know. Gov Newsom is still figuring this out. He says the tier system will go away next month, but I don't think for a moment this means he'll make us like Texas and lift everything. He'll just substitute some other control and we'll keep on with masks, social distance, and so forth.

Just yesterday, the CDC changed its guidance on how COVID is spread:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday updated its public health guidance about how COVID-19 spreads, acknowledging that the virus is airborne. It's an important change from previous guidance, which claimed the virus was spread by "close contact, not airborne transmission."

. . . "Current evidence strongly suggests transmission from contaminated surfaces does not contribute substantially to new infections," the CDC states.

Wait a moment. Does this mean the constant business of wiping down restaurant tables and chairs, church pews, barber chairs, and everything else between uses is just a big "never mind"? Just like the masks outdoors thing? Sure sounds like it.

There's a strong faction that wants to continue a new normal. The good news is that, with states like Texas and Florida showing it's possible to come all the way out of this mess, it will be harder and harder to maintain these controls.

No Dancing At Weddings In DC

The other day, Washington, DC Mayor Bowser imposed a new control as part of her "reopening" protocols: no dancing at weddings. Two things immediately struck me. First, her poorest constituents, those who keep her in office, tend not to have weddings at all. Second, those who most notably do dance at weddings are the Jews. Thus do decrees cut across the social order.

We actually know next to nothing about how COVID is transmitted, and banning dancing may have no effect. There must now be plenty of Jewish weddings in Texas and Florida, and I read of no new outbreaks there. But this actually illustrates another of the points Edward Feser makes in the essay I linked Wednesday:

Gnostic moral practice veers between the extremes of puritanism and libertinism. Initially this might seem puzzling, but it makes perfect sense given the Gnostic’s other commitments. On the one hand, given the Gnostic hatred of the created order and of conventional moral and social life, what the normal person takes to be permissible or even necessary to ordinary life is prissily condemned. Hence, Gnostic heretical movements over the centuries famously emphasized vegetarianism, pacifism, the purported evil of capital punishment, and similarly utopian attitudes, pitting the “mercy” of a Gnosticized interpretation of Jesus against what they regarded as the sinister Old Testament God of justice. On the other hand, since the material world is taken by the Gnostic to have no value, nothing that happens within it ultimately matters, and the most licentious behavior can be excused. Hence, sexual immorality was often tolerated in practice – as long as it was not associated with marriage and procreation, which would tie us to the ordinary material and social order.

Forced by court decisions to allow church and synagogue services, Mayor Bowser nevertheless now makes a special effort to inhibit wedding celebrations -- indeed, Jewish weddings in particular. But I've noted here several times that the curfews still imposed in some countries are implicit bans on fornication, and the detailed codes of conduct imposed on bars in even some US jurisdictions seem to have a similar intent. For instance, in California

If you're like, wait my neighborhood bar has been open this whole time that's because breweries and wineries that serve food are technically restaurants (it's confusing). And restaurants have are [sic] allowed to be open outdoors in the purple tier, which we are currently in.

As far as indoor service at breweries and wineries – that won't be allowed until counties reach the "orange" tier.

Ok, now that we've got that cleared up, let's talk about bars.

Bars will still be closed until a county makes it to the "orange" tier. But when they do, they'll be allowed to reopen outdoors.

Bars won't be allowed to reopen indoors until a county reaches the least restrictive "yellow" tier.

This explanation, which places LA in the most restrictive "purple" tier, dates from March and has been overtaken by events. LA, now in the least restrictive "yellow" tier, nevertheless still restricts bars to 25% indoor capacity and I believe no counter seating, whereas breweries and wineries can operate at 50%. The assumption seems to be that higher-class customers will behave with greater discretion, or something like that.

But in places like Texas and Florida, nobody cares. The gnostics are out of office there.