Ruminations On Biden's Vaccine Mandate

The commentary I've seen on yesterday's speech mandating shots for 80 million people in the US has so far missed a key point.

First, the numbers are at best confusing. The UK is one of the countries experiencing a major surge in cases, as shown at right. But according to the Office for National Statistics,

An estimated 94.1% of the adult population in England, 92.0% in Wales, 90.4% in Northern Ireland and 93.6% in Scotland tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies in the week beginning 9 August 2021. The presence of antibodies suggests a person previously had COVID-19 or has been vaccinated.

Estimated vaccination rates continued to increase in the week beginning 2 August 2021. Across the four UK countries, 90.5% to 92.4% had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 76.8% to 82.5% were fully vaccinated.

By contrast, in the US,

At least 208,024,209 people or 63% of the population have received at least one dose.

Overall, 177,104,652 people or 54% of the population have been fully vaccinated.

But the US delta surge. at least for now, appears to be peaking, as shown at right. But even if you say, "Wait, the UK had a peak a month or so ago, but now it's had another surge, why won't this happen in the US. too?" I would simply answer that even if that happens, we'll be seeing exactly the same result with 25% less of the population fully vaccinated.

In other words, there's some reason to expect, based just on numbers, that a best case for Biden (viz, one that justifies his mandate) in the US will be the same result as in the UK no matter how many more people are vaccinated, maximum irritation and expenditure of political capital, with minimum result. But it's also worth pointing out that the performance of individual US states is wildly inconsistent.

Look at California, which experienced a much milder delta peak, which seems, at least for now, to be playing itself out. In contrast, Oregon and Washington had much higher peaks, although both recently appear to be declining, at least for the time being. But again, even if there's a renewed surge as in the UK, it will simply be the same result at much lower vaccination rates.

It seems to me that we actually know so little about COVID and vaccines that predictions and remedies so far have been inaccurate and ineffective, to the point that the public health establishment has been losing credibility. The US administration -- and governments elsewhere as well -- have been losing credibility along with it.

A much better approach -- one that a Donald Trump would probably have pursued at this point -- would be to call in other public health people for a second or third opinion, and then call in Drs Collins, Walensky, and Fauci and, with the second or third opinions in hand, order them to develop a Plan B. Or they're fired, which I think they should be.

The problem is that Joe Biden is clinically incompetent. Given a range of bad options, his record at this point is he'll consistently choose the worst.

"I'm Supposed To Stop And Walk Out Of The Room"

As I noted yesterday, Biden had a very stressful Tuesday, which led to stumbling, gaffes, and fabulation. This continued into yesterday, when according to Fox News

President Biden continued his bizarre habit of implying his handlers call the shots from behind the scenes on Wednesday when he concluded remarks in honor of labor unions by saying what he was "supposed" to do.

"I‘m supposed to stop and walk out of the room," Biden said after finishing prepared comments in the East Room of the White House.

Is this a symptom of cognitive decline? Again, I don't think so. I certainly agree it's bizarre and counterproductive, since it does entitle reasonable observers to conclude he's not in charge and is controlled by his handlers. Not only that, but as the story says, it's become a habit, which is also not good.

But I think the reason for it lies in the parallel I drew yesterday with the disastrously incompetent neurosurgeon Dr Christopher Dentsch. Dentsch exhbited two qualities, a grandiose opinion of his own abilities combined with telling stories of his own accomplishments at utter variance with the truth. Biden has exhibited both in recernt days. On Tuesday,

President Joe Biden grew defensive after residents yelled criticism at him during a visit to New Jersey.

As Biden toured destroyed homes in Manville, New Jersey, caused by flooding, two men were spotted standing in the yard of an area home where a Trump flag was flying.

The pair along with other residents off-camera shouted that Biden should “go home,” “resign,” and expressed their disgust with his lack of leadership in Afghanistan.

. . . But Biden claimed afterward that the protesters were upset about his position on climate change, despite the obvious criticism of his failure in Afghanistan.

“The people who stand on the other side of the fences who don’t live there, who are yelling that we’re talking about interfering with free enterprise by doing something about climate change — they don’t live there,” he said afterward during a speech in New York.

According to another account,

When he later visited Queens with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Joe Biden claimed that everyone had been thanking him where he was touring there. “None of them were shouting or complaining,” Biden said. “Every one of them were thanking me as if it was something special….that I was here.”

This is an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, in which incompetent people don't have the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. So let's put the remarks he makes about how he's "been instructed" not to take questions, or to call only on a specific list of reporters, in context.

I'm more and more convinced that he's saying this with a sneer. Although his handlers, probably including his wife, are mostly effective in telling him what not to do, he resents it, because in his own mind, given full rein over his options, he'd destroy those reporters with his witty rejoinders. For whatever reason, they won't let this happen. As a result, he gets back at them with those little zingers.

An example of this attitude is in his August 26 press conference:

"Ladies and gentlemen, they gave me a list here. The first person I was instructed to call on was Kelly O'Donnell from NBC," Biden kicked off the press conference.

. . . Biden then appeared to go off-script by calling on NPR correspondent Franco Ordoñez, RealClearNews reporter Philip Wegmann and he even sparred with Fox News' Peter Doocy.

He prefaced that off-script exchange by calling Doocy "the most interesting guy that I know in thr press", I think feeling he'd been killing it so far, and he'd dispose of Doocy as the cherry on the sundae. Instead, the result was the iconic cringe that may well serve as the defining image of his presidency. Probably his wife was the only one who could tell him, "We told you so," but since then, although he's kept putting out the zingers, he's stayed much more on script. That probably won't last.

On one hand, to have a US president as a case study for clinical incompetence is not a reassuring thing. On the other, there are many agenda items that the Democrats expected to get from his election, but it's looking more and more as if he won't be competent to accomplish them.

Again, What's Biden's Problem?

My family lived, for a time, in the Washington, DC area, where my mother worked for the Republican National Committee. (She's pictured on the left in the photo with then-President Nixon and a co-worker). One of her jobs was to, escort visiting Republican constituents through the Capitol to greet their elected representatives.

According to my mother, one problem issue was Sen Everett Dirksen, at the time the Republican Minority Leader. Dirksen had a permanent mint julep in his hand. She was told to explain to the constituents at every meet-and-greet that the glass was in fact iced tea. President Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, not long after Dirksen's death in 1969. A senator with a drink in his hand all day would have been part of the culture then, if it's not in fact still like that.

This bit of information popped into my head as I thought again about my principal theory of Biden's bumbling, which I outlined on August 27, that his patterns of speech are consistent with alcohol impairment. The problem is that some drunks, like perhaps Sen Dirksen, are capable of functioning at higher levels than others, like perhaps President Biden.

But this isn't my only theory of why Biden is the way he is. A true crime fan, the other night I watched a show about Dr Christopher Duntsch,.

Unfortunately, of the 38 surgeries that Duntsch performed over the course of two years, he botched all but three. He left his patients in excruciating pain and with multiple health conditions. Two surgeries even led to the deaths of Floella Brown and Kelli Martin.

What I noticed in clips of his interrogations and various other vignettes were both his extreme self-confidence and his blithe fabrications. Confronted with a patient whom he'd left half paralyzed, in pain, and permanently disabled after tearing his spinal cord, Duntsch insisted to his interrogator that the man had recovered 95% of his function, had returned to work, and anyhow, the risk was covered in his consent statement.

This echoed the sorts of things Biden routinely says, and something in this seems to be part of Biden's nature. The program interviewed Michelle Shughart, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Duntsch, who clearly struggled with the question of whether Duntsch was more than just disastrously incompetent, but whether he actually meant to inflict harm. Looking at the decisions made in the Afghanistan withdrawal, which seem to have been consistently the worst possible out of many alternatives in case after case, it's hard to avoid this problem with Biden as well.

Considering the range of problems he now confronts, his handlers have clearly increased his schedule. In this short week alone, he's visited New Jersey to find hecklers and wander off teleprompter to say they don't call tornadoes that any more. Today, he delivers remarks about labor and receives a COVID briefing. Tomorrow he outlines his new six-pronged COVID strategy, and Friday he campaigns for Newsom in California.

In fact, yesterday's schedule looks like one of his busiest ever. I count 20 separate arrivals, departures, tours, and remarks between 9:50 AM and 7:15 PM. People who work for a living, of course, normally get days like this, but he's had nothing equivalent, I would imagine, for much of his life. Clearly his handlers see the need for greater visible activity.

Add to this the increasing challenges to his competence, some of them coming from previously friendly sources. The opinions I've seen from time to time suggest he's not so far out of it that he does't hear this, and given his nature, it rankles.

So he's going to be doing more, under greater stress. His handlers are doing all they can to put him in situations that can be tightly scripted, but even among his staff, there's an increasing fear that a script isn't always an effective solution. According to Politico -- and keep in mind,. this is a friendly source:

Joe Biden often thinks he’s his own best messenger. Many people in his own White House don’t always agree.

When Biden gives public remarks, some White House staffers will either mute him or turn off his remarks, according to White House officials.

. . . To this day, Biden seems almost delighted by the prospect of tussling with the reporters that often gather in front of him, such as when he challenged Fox News’ Peter Doocy to contemplate alternative drawdown scenarios for Afghanistan.

So we're looking at sublime self-confidence in his abilities, combined with what I think is habitual consumption of alcohol that impairs his speech and judgment, in circumstances that now increase his stress and fatigue. We'll have to see how this plays out.

Yet Another New COVID Narrative

Up until a point a few weeks ago, the COVID narrative had been the vaccines are highly effective, and if the pandemic continues at all, it's because too many people are unwilling to be vaccinated. However, the CDC itself began to undermine this by announcing that vaccinated people could still transmit the virus and endorsing indoor masks again, although masks had proven ineffective throughout 2020.

Now the narrative has shifted yet again, and the story now is the vaccines aren't as effective as we'd been saying, and now we need a booster. I noted in Sunday's post that Dr Scott Gottlieb has reversed his previous prediction on the delta variant, is now saying New York and Connecticut will have a big surge, and he's on board with the booster.

Dr Fauci is saying this as well, as of the latest Sunday talks:

Sunday, during an appearance on CNN, Biden medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci offered the possibility that a three-dose regimen may be the proper regimen for immunization against the coronavirus.

Fauci told CNN’s Jim Acosta that the goal continues to be more vaccinations.

“Well, to some extent, that’s indirect,” he explained. “We need the boost because ultimately it may turn out, Jim, that the ultimate proper immunization regimen is a three-dose regimen. Remember, we made it a two-dose regimen. We were dealing with an emergent situation. . ."

The problem is that they'd been saying two shots, but now they mean three. When will they get to four? And what about the J&J vaccine, where one was enough? Do those people need two? Or three? Each time they change the story, they lose credibility. For me, going through the two-shot regimen, having to hassle two appointments, going through the highly stressful cattle pen routine twice, and then a couple days of feeling woozy with the side effects, was bad enough. Now all of a sudden I have to do it again.

And I'm not the only one:

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said on Sunday that his administration is getting “mixed messagings” from the Biden White House when it comes to COVID-19 booster shots.

“I mean we're getting some mixed messagings out of the administration, out of the CDC, the FDA and the White House and, you know we need clear guidance on these booster shots because it undermines the credibility of it,” Hogan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

. . . The Biden administration had initially signaled that individuals who had received both doses of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine would be eligible for a booster shot starting in September.

. . . However, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walenksy and Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), reportedly met White House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients to say that only some people who received the Pfizer vaccine may now only be eligible currently for the third shot of the COVID-19 vaccine.

It's becoming clearer that the confusion is a result of the public health establishment's need to coordinate with the Biden administration's political message, as the failure of successive COVID narratives has been another driver of Biden's sinking popularity. According to Politico,

Now, frustration with the disease’s resurgence — coming at the same time as the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan — appears to be a factor softening Biden’s previously stable approval ratings and adding to Democrats’ worries about retaining their slim majority in the House and Senate after the 2022 congressional elections.

The months ahead will undoubtedly be a mix of advances and setbacks. The political challenge for Biden and the public health system will be to communicate a sense of progress and momentum even without the benefit of a clear “turning point.”

The overall theme of the piece is that Biden campaigned in 2020 as someone who would solve COVID, but COVID isn't being solved. In effect, the problem for Biden, Fauci, and Walensky is to change the narrative so people don't expect a solution.

“People are still in denial,” said Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at NYU and Bellevue Hospital, who advised the Biden transition team. “The sooner people accept the changes in the way we live… the sooner we can get to the new normal.”

The problem is that nobody currently running the show -- any show around Biden -- knows what they're doing. What's that "new normal" going to be? If it changes from week to week, how can we accept it?

The COVID Narrative Will Be Next To Collapse

I've mentioned Dr Scott Gottlieb, former FDA Commissioner, several times here as a voice of relative stability vis-a-vis the shifting explanations of Drs Fauci and Walensky. Most recently, I've noted that he predicted the current delta wave would peak by mid-September, which seems to be the case.

But suddenly, he's now with the program.

Maybe the curve that seems to be peaking now isn't the real delta surge, he now says.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb on Friday predicted Northeastern states, including New York and Connecticut, will experience another jump in Covid cases tied to the highly transmissible delta variant.

“I think there’s sort of a perception that we’re sort of through this delta wave here in the Northeast because we’ve seen delta cases go up and go down in places like the New York metropolitan region. We’re also seeing [test] positive come down,” the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“I don’t think that that was the true delta wave. I think that that was a delta warning. I think our true delta wave is going to start to build after Labor Day here in the Northeast and the northern part of the country,” added Gottlieb, who now serves on the board of Covid vaccine maker Pfizer.

So his own remarks a month ago about delta peaking after Labor Day are now inoperative? Well, fine. Let's say he's right this time, and New York ain't seen nothin' yet. But the percent of New Yorkers with at least one vaccine dose is 67.9%, those with two doses is 60.6%, about as high as any US state. Even so, it sounds like he has little confidence this will prevent a "true delta wave" after Labor Day. And remember, the public health establishment was telling us the vaccines are effective against variants, at least up to a couple months ago.

Now he's saying, in the same interview, "The first two doses were provided so close together that they probably really served as two primes. . . . This third dose is probably going to serve as a true booster in terms of inducing immune memory and. . . a more durable response".

In other words, The Science changes from week to week, depending on what didn't turn out to be true last week. The Babylon Bee is spot on: To Defeat Delta Variant, Experts Recommend Doing All The Things That Didn't Work The First Time

"We are going to lock down, wear masks, and social distance, all of which didn't work, but hey. It's worth trying again," said Dr. Anthony Fauci in a television interview this morning. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. That's what they taught us in science school. Look at my lab coat. It's white. Do you like it? It has pockets."

. . . At publishing time, experts had clarified that while we're going to be doing the same things that didn't work over and over again, we're going to be doing them harder this time.

In fact, a major component of the official response all along has been to blame the public for not doing the things that don't work hard enough, while the elites continue to disregard them. Most recently, Samantha Power, about as close to a lizard person as you can get, was photographed on Amtrak miswearing her mask. If she weren't a lizard person, the conductor would eject her from the train at the next stop.

Federal law requires all customers and employees to wear a mask at all times while onboard trains and in stations, regardless of vaccination status or state or local laws. Refusing to wear a mask is a violation of federal law; passengers may be subject to penalties under federal law, denied boarding, removed from the train and banned from future travel in the event of noncompliance.

That is, unless you're Samantha Power. (A novelist couldn't get away with giving her that name.) Yet again, if the elites seriously believed masks, vaccinations, lockdowns, and whatever else had any effect on their risks of contracting COVID, they'd adhere to those measures. Clearly they don't.

We need a new approach. Biden's gonna give a big address on COVID after the holiday. One thing we won't hear from him is anything new, it will almost certainly contain just a new round of scolding and harangue about masks and vax.

Isn't the narrative beginning to acquire a certain mythic element? The nation is sick. It must be healed. What is the uncleanliness that has brought this disease upon us? It's the plebs, the dirty, racist plebs, who refuse the vax and the mask.

This isn't working.

Biden's Current Problem

Biden's handlers are clearly taking note of recent polls, and I assume other internal surverys are showing a perception that he's isolated and out of touch. So we see him getting out of the White House, in this photo with sleeves rolled up and jacketless (and I assume his greeters were informed of this dress code prior to his arrival), on the go.

The problem is that when he does this kind of thing, there's always the off key note -- in this case, the cheat sheets in his back pocket, in the Delaware dignified transfer op, the compulsive watch checking. And his eyes are always just slits.

He has Hillary's problem, the more people saw of her, the less there was to like. In his statements from the White House over the past week, he's been angry and callous, mostly refusing to answer questions. Apparently next week, he's going to start haranguing us about COVID again.

It isn't enough just to make him more visible when even the photo ops go wrong.

In early August, I was noticing that nothing was happening, maybe because everyone was on vacation. That changed in a hurry. Over the past few days, I've noticed we've been back to nothing happening again. I don't think I should get too comfortable with that.

Kabuki

Pardon me if, in the current atmosphere of false narrative piled on false narrative, I'm just the least bit skeptical of what's going on. We're being told via The Hill:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said Democrats should hit "pause" on President Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending package, firing a significant warning shot at his party’s top legislative priority.

Manchin, during remarks this week at a West Virginia Chamber of Commerce event pointed to concerns about “runaway inflation,” the delta variant of the coronavirus and a botched withdrawal in Afghanistan to float slowing down what is the centerpiece of Biden's economic agenda.

. . . "I know they're going to go nuts right now ... because what I said is going to all my caucus in Washington," Manchin added, referring to his Democratic colleagues. "But I'm thinking of it from the standpoint of where we are as a nation today."

He restated these views in, of all places, a Wall Street Journal op-ed. But he already knows "they're going to go nuts right now."

And AOC predictably went nuts:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York slammed Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia after he came out against the price tag of a $3.5 trillion social spending bill and urged Democrats to slow down its passage.

The congresswoman tweeted that "'bipartisan corruption" and "fossil fuel bills" are "killing people."

But a web search this morning suggests that Speaker Pelosi has had nothong direct to say, and Sen Schumer is vague:

Speaking Thursday from a New York City where hours before rainwater had poured into subway tunnels and paralyzed public transit, Schumer called it “imperative” to pass the infrastructure and climate bills.

That story also says,

Democrats have also appeared to acknowledge they will need to write a bill smaller than $3.5 trillion in order to push it through the Senate. Lawmakers have said they want to hike taxes on corporations and the wealthy and increase IRS enforcement of existing tax rates, among other measures, to offset the spending.

I don't trust anyone. If Manchin were really not with the program, he'd simply switch parties. He's getting far more baksheesh playing the role he's got. That goes for AOC and the Squad as well.