An elegant case for the conviction of Donald J Trump was laid out before the nation by House impeachment managers. It was at times poignant and painful as they covered the insurrection against Congress whose members only barely escaped execution. They detailed the call to assassinate the Vice President of the United States. There is no protected free speech that can call for and attempt the assassination of a Vice President. The brutal assault on the Capital and DC police was laid bare. The preparation by the traitorous mob was laid out almost exhaustively. There was testimony from multiple participants that they felt called by “their president” to “stop the steal” which was itself a lie. And then finally the complete inaction of the then president to defend the Capitol against assault, in violation of his oath to protect the nation. It‘s an airtight case.
The problem is that over half the Republicans in the jury are co-conspirators in the insurrection. They disseminated The Big Lie. Some continue to hold on to it now, particularly in their home districts. They retweeted the calls to fight. Some amplified the calls for violence. The managers’ points apply equally to these Republican Senators as they do to the Proud Boys and others who stormed the Capitol Building. To convict the former president is to convict themselves. To admit the treason is to call themselves treasonous. But to admit their part is too abhorrent for them to do.
To admit their part is not politically expedient as they see it. For these Republicans are all politicians who want to run for another office in a year or three or five. They have to guard their far right flank. The more aggressive individuals are plowing even further right into the company of their allied radicalized militia. They already sold their souls a long time ago.
The defense has provided a couple of faux off ramps. As the House managers have already previewed, the Senate has already voted to establish that it can hold an impeachment trial after a president is out of office. It is the only body authorized by the Constitution to make the rules about impeachment and it has spoken. It should be mentioned that the former president was impeached before he left office and the trial was only shifted to a later date because of manipulations by Senate leadership itself.
There is the free speech argument that is completely baseless, as the defense will try to hone in on isolated words in the speech on the 6th, not the full breath of Trump’s advocacy of violence, dating back even to the Central Park Five. But Senate Republicans have long landed on words that are nonsensical in context hoping they sound appropriate. They know it works in their Fox News media bubble because their audience is not composed of the most discerning thinkers who grapple with nuance. These Republicans just have to say something often enough, exposing the disdain they carry for their “gullible” supporters. In actuality, these people are not their supporters; they belong only to Agent Orange but they tolerate the tail of politicians who cling to him.
Is there a crevice where one or two Republicans will finally have the courage to jump ship and declare enough is enough? Could it be in the mob’s violence toward the police or the call that nearly assassinated VP Pence, the man most loyal to the president thrown under the bus with escalating tweets from Trump as the melee proceeded? Could it be visualizing their own near misses? Or perhaps the revelation of intention exhibited in 45’s glee while watching the violence and his inaction in violation of his oath of office? Could it be a new found investment in a co-equal branch of government? Or perhaps their realization that they themselves have participated in an intentional treasonous cabal? Maybe, that they enabled 45 by failing to convict him the first time impeachment came around? Possibly but far from likely. Their consciences were scrubbed out a long time ago. The Republican party has so debased itself that there is no path out of hell.
The impeachment trial presents in stark contrast the two visions of America battling it out for ascendancy. One, bequeathed from the Founding Fathers, of the superiority of whiteness. The insurrectionists carried their symbols, the Confederate flag, the swastika and Trump flags. The Confederate flag is a remnant from the war that was supposed to actualize the other vision, a land where all inhabitants are created equal. That it still flies is testimony to a defeat turned into victory when the country tired of the effort to fulfill its promise, establishing Jim Crow and segregation and castigation of Blackness from coast to coast.
The BLM demonstrations of the summer suggested that once again, the many were trying to birth the vision of equality. But it triggered the historic response disseminated directly out of the White House through MAGA rallies encapsulated in the re-raised Confederate flag. January 6th poses the question: how many Americans will choose the dominant white caste over democracy?
The GOP has answered loudly and clearly, officially stamped by the upcoming acquittal of Donald J Trump for inciting sedition. But maybe the Americans who want to fight for the other vision of America are listening and they will remember when those Republicans run for office in a year or three or five. Or, maybe not.
On February 12,1901 Delaware ratified the 13th Amendment abolishing enslavement after initially rejecting it in 1865.
Until recently, there has been national silence on an essential tool to fight a viral infection that is spread primarily through asymptomatic transmission. The Biden administration has announced 2 initiatives to increase the supply of rapid primarily self administered tests. The core of the problem is identification of people not simply infected but simultaneously capable of infecting others. These are not the same thing; people are infectious early in the course of the disease, then lose the ability to transmit the virus later in the course. The infectious interval is almost surprisingly short.
Once coronavirus invades a victim, the virus must replicate in sufficient numbers to be emitted into the atmosphere for others to inhale. The replication rate is fairly rapid, so a person can become infectious quickly, 2- 3 days before they develop symptoms if they are destined to do so. The mechanism that determines who becomes ill and the many more who don’t is not yet well understood. Viral load, or the number of organisms capable of infecting others, will decline over time, but the virus will remain detectable by PCR tests for a tail perhaps as long as a month.
The exquisite sensitivity of the PCR test, as well as the technical difficulty in performing it, makes it ill suited for the task of rapidly identifying people capable of transmitting infection. The test’s expense and requirements for specialized equipment, reagents and proficiency limit it to specialized settings, the largest of which are the commercial labs of which there are primarily two, Quest and Labcorps. Overwhelmed by the constant demand, which must be met in the context of all the other medical tests they perform routinely, huge backlogs and delays are the anticipated results. Such delays make testing meaningless; if the virus is transmitted in the first 72 hours and spent after a week, a 3-5 day turnaround time has missed the infectious period. Add to that the limited availability of testing; by the time a nasal swab is tested, the victim has spent their days in general circulation in the community spreading infection, diminishing the impact of isolation after testing. By the time a positive result notification is delivered, the patient is no longer contagious.
Other aspects of the spread of coronavirus infection remain mysterious. While most people infect only one or two others, a few infect dozens to hundreds, i.e. superspreaders. The former president was probably not a superspreader, but someone on the White House staff may have been. Still not clear is whether superspreader events are the result of the circumstances or the presence of specific individuals within the crowd. Some of the effect may be attributed to the patterns of interactions in these days when many people remain wary of interactions with others and restrict interactions to a limited number of people. But there must be other factors at play that have not yet been uncovered.
Throughout the year since COVID-19 was first detected, the lack of a testing strategy has facilitated its explosive spread across the US. It was wrong from the moment the CDC decided to develop its own test. The agency’s idea was to manage the bulk of the testing, a wrong headed vision that failed to see the enormity of the numbers that would be involved and how logistically expansive the need would be. Nothing seems to have changed much; even the Biden administration seemed to have conceded that adequate population testing is beyond the country’s capacity or at least a proposal seemed to be missing from the flurry of Biden initiatives. And yet, the lack of extensive testing coupled with the absence of a national database that includes all of the testing done hampers our understanding of who has actually been infected. The estimated 30% of the population is almost certainly a gross underestimate. The country is flying blind as the testing desert expands.
Big corporate entities have demonstrated that infection can be contained with frequent testing surveillance, among them the W/NBA, MLB, the entertainment industry as it resumes films and TV production and professional tennis. Their arrangements have allowed athletes to have prolonged intimate contact mixing body fluids, without wearing masks even with loud vocal exclamations known to intensify viral aerosolization. In contrast, choir practices have become superspreader events. These entities have used a combination of isolation bubbles, testing and quarantine. Colleges have also been relatively successful at holding a lid on infections if not completely stopping them; college football and basketball have been less successful, probably because of schools’ insistence on live audiences, but have soldiered on, to the possible detriment of student athletes.
Conversely, food processors, large retailers like Amazon and Walmart, grocers like Krogers have opted out of protecting their workforce, in turn putting the general public at risk. They too could institute widespread workforce testing but the testing would obligate them to provide sick leave pay to insure that workers testing positive could stay isolated. That is not an investment they have any interest in making, deferring to the federal government to provide the benefits they refuse to while they pay negligible amounts into the tax kitty to support them. Their capital has doubly released them from any contribution to the public good, no matter how many ads they put out about their charitable community activity.
Add to that, even semi government entities like the postal service have not instituted routine testing at least for the parts of its workforce that routinely interact with the public.
Clearly the manufacture of rapid testing and equally important home testing has been retarded by the failure of the FDA to authorize these types of tests. Only one home test has been approved for the market and it’s cost over $100 makes it prohibitive for many. The principal barrier is the use of PCR as the gold standard for sensitivity and specificity, the very thing that makes PCR inappropriate to zero in on the individuals who are capable of transmitting the virus. What rapid testing sacrifices in accuracy is compensated for by frequency; essentially, the more often it’s performed, the more accurate the assessment of viral load. More frequent testing also provides a better indication of when infection occurred and if it is accompanied by contact tracing, it can narrow the scope of investigations. Until the FDA modifies its approach, inexpensive, widely available, rapid home coronavirus testing will not be in our future. Home testing which requires the compliance of a positive tester to quarantine can only be effective if some entity, probably the government as the system is currently structured, provides the resources for working people to stay out of the workplace until no longer infectious.
The need for extensive population testing has been accentuated by the rise of new viral variants as dominant strains has exposed the inadequacy of viral genomic testing. With new cases still rampant, the virus has open ended opportunities to amplify the genetic variants that are a routine part of its replication into better adapted forms to allow the virus to thrive. To our detriment, it is survival of the fittest at its best. The UK has been doing random population testing for some time and the availability of those samples have made it possible for health authorities to better understand the path of its namesake strain to prominence in the population. The amount of genomic analysis being done in the US is paltry and facilities would likely be overwhelmed by any increase in routine population testing samples. It goes without saying that to be able to get a handle on variants will likely require significant investment in viral genomic technology which will almost certainly have to come from government funding as well. The knowledge gained may not actually lead to any different course of action, but it can perhaps tweak or better target particular strategies.
While the public health basics are still our best defense, the advantage of the new vaccine technology is that it can be modified to respond to viral variants in a relatively short time. But as we have seen, the jump to mass production and mass immunization is dependent on collaboration with many other social, business, logistic, commercial and governmental entities. We are in the midst of a demonstration of how screwed up that can be.
Intensive testing could provide a way back to normal long before the infamous herd immunity is achieved. Public schools could reopen safely, with the confidence of teachers, students and parents, if only rapid testing were available to reassure them. Home testing would allow parents to isolate their families before ever getting to school. If only school systems had access to the funding and the political will existed across all communities. Instead Republican run governments are so invested in maintaining pandemic denial that they want schools to simply reopen, community spread high or low. If only a semi-rational approach that responded to community needs dominated politics. We’d probably have to wander back to perhaps the 1950s to find that nonpartisan philosophical approach to governance. Ah the good ole days!
And then there is that other nut, the fantasists who live in La-La-Land, where coronavirus is a hoax dreamed up to attack their fearless leader. No doubt, testing will be construed as a government conspiracy that tramples on the freedom to remain stupid or provides government surveillance data even as their cell phone data tracks everywhere they go and who they interact with and their web search history. Seems they feel safer that ginormous commercial entities like Apple and Google and Amazon have their data and sell it to almost any Tom, Dick and Harry with the bucks. Go figure.
Imagine Super Bowl Sunday with rapid home testing among those patriots who believe in a country for everyone not one where only white men rule. Recalling that no test is 100%, people could have gathered, almost certain that they could not transmit COVID19 to their friends as they nosh on nachos and chicken wings, high fiving their victories or drowning their sorrows in beer. There would be no subsequent spike in coronavirus cases and deaths over the next month, running neck and neck with the pace of vaccinations and new variants. What a different world for those of us who live in the real one.
For American History Month, James McCune Smith M.D became the first university trained African American physician to practice in the US. After being rejected from American medical schools, he graduated from University of Glasgow in 1837. He was the only practicing university trained Black doctor in the country for over a decade. He served as physician for the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York. He was the first Black author of a scientific paper and to publish in a medical journal. Smith pioneered statistical techniques and research methods including the use of a control group for statistical comparison, now the standard for evidence based research. With his research done in the antebellum period, he was the first to propose “race” was a social rather than biological category that served only to support enslavement. His arguments foreshadowed by over 150 years current ideas about race as a social construct that creates the circumstances for disparities in health status grounded in socioeconomic circumstances resulting from systemic racial bias.
oleblacklady 