Month: January 2021

The last week was full of events in Washington, D.C., Olympia, WA, and communities all over the nation, events that will, in FDR’s and Chuck Schumer’s words, “live on in infamy.” The dust is only beginning to settle. The stage-setting for the trashing of the U.S. Capitol Building by Confederate flag-waving terrorists has been visible in Eastern Washington and northern Idaho for decades. Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich (R) called out then Representative Matt Shea years ago for Shea’s gun-waving theocratic militia nonsense.  Knezovich warned that a local Republican Party that supported the like of Matt Shea was courting its own disaster. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, nonetheless, played footsie with that local domestic terrorist wing of the Spokane County Republicans. After all, it was good politics for her, the political chameleon with a toothy smile–she needed their votes to stay in the U.S. Congress. She strode in lockstep with Donald Trump for four years. Last Tuesday afternoon she said she would vote the next day with the seditious wing of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives to challenge the Electors from several states. She tried to conceal this pandering to Trump’s siloed base by couching her position as supporting “investigation.” After the trashing of the U.S. Capitol at the instigation of Donald Trump she hurriedly backpedalled, stating she would no longer vote with the insurrectionist representatives. All I can think to ask is “You didn’t see this coming? Where were you?” 

There was a discussion way back in 2016 on whether to take Donald Trump “seriously, but not literally” or “literally but not seriously.” I’ve long suspected that we all should have taken him both seriously and literally, as the Wednesday storming of the Capitol amply demonstrates. The best column I’ve seen on this is by Ezra Klein in the NYTImes on January 7–“Trump Has Always Been a Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing.” I highly recommend it as bedrock material for understanding present events. Trump has always been completely transparent; he has always believed exactly what he said, but what he said was so outrageous many were unable to imagine that he actually meant what he said. 

Today I offer a copy of an email I received yesterday morning from Nicole Bishop, the chair of the Spokane County Democrats, that was sent to members of the local Democratic Party. It does an excellent job of wrapping the local to the national in terms with which I resonate.

Dear Democrats,

Today is a dark day in our country’s history.

The world watched as armed terrorists stormed the U.S. Capitol Building as a means to protest the results and certification of the United States Presidential Election. Governor Inslee’s mansion has now been infiltrated by these domestic terrorists as well. This is a widespread effort.

The term “terrorism“ is used so often in incorrect circumstances that the term has become hackneyed. Terrorism is not a term reserved for peaceful protestors or people of color engaging in the political process, nor is it reserved for foreign extremists. It’s reserved for insurgents who violently take over a government building in an attempted coup. These armed insurgents are domestic terrorists, and will be referred to as such. Today, our country faced a coordinated domestic terrorist attack.

Network and cable news appear shocked that this horrendous and violent coup would take place, but as Democrats, we saw the writing on the wall for quite some time.

Let’s first take a look at Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary:
Sedition (n): Incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority

For months, Republican leaders have been inciting resistance among their supporters. Until today, Cathy McMorris-Rodgers vowed to oppose the Electoral College results. She joined a litany of political leaders who made the same pledge, all while decrying the “stolen election”- the same stolen election, whose results they gladly accepted for their own victories.

It’s easy to blame Trump for this, and certainly Trumpism is a huge part of the problem. But the reality is, this problem existed long before Trump, and will continue long after January 20^th when he ceases to be relevant. The real actors to blame are the Republican politicians who consistently opposed doing the right thing and who repeatedly supported the most extreme voices within the party.

Politicians who are complicit in this need to be held accountable to set a precedent that this cannot happen nor be swept under the rug. Our Democracy is at stake. We cannot accept months, years of language that incites resistance (sedition), and expect that one statement repudiating it to undo the years of destruction their sedition caused. At this point, we are seeing politicians (like CMR) speaking out as a form of damage control. And I appreciate that they finally now have decided to take a stand and do the right thing. But one statement does not reverse years of hostility that incited these insurgents to this point.

For the record, I do not place the preponderance of blame on the insurgents who are seizing the Capitol Building. They are scared individuals who have placed their trust in the wrong leaders. These leaders cannot now act as though the step these insurgents took is unimaginable; they’re merely following the implicit orders of the leaders they support.

And unfortunately, this is not new. 

In 2009 when Former-President Obama was inaugurated into office, Mitch McConnell met with other Republican leaders at the time with a single pledge: Do anything in their power to make Obama a one-term president. Fortunately, their efforts failed, but along the way, they dog-whistled their way to the rise of the Tea Party. For eight years, Democrats endured the constant onslaught of Republicans insisting Obama was not born in this country, that he was not a true adherent of the religion he claimed to follow, that his tan suit was an abomination, that he violated the constitution on grounds unknown, that he should be impeached for the four lives lost in Benghazi.

As Obama worked against nearly impenetrable opposition to make improvements to the country, the Tea Party movement grew in equal measure, eventually resulting in the election of Donald Trump.

What we are seeing today did not grow in a vacuum overnight. And we need to hold politicians who led to this moment accountable to their culpability.

When Black Lives Matter protestors used legal means to peacefully protest, they were met with an onslaught of rubber bullets and tear gas and harsh decries from Republicans across the country that their actions are dangerous and unpatriotic.

Today, insurgents charged the Capitol Building and seized control, armed with guns and bombs. The response? Donald Trump told them “I love you.”

The past four years have highlighted all that is broken in our country- and has been broken for a long time. We have much to fix- from the deeply embedded relationship with white nationalism within our bureaucratic systems to the extent to which complicit leaders can produce violence and despotism.

How can we start to fix this incredible brokenness? We start by not forgetting the leaders who incited this violence locally and nationally: Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, Jenny Graham, Loren Culp, Matt Shea- the list goes on.

Their silence was literally violence, and our country’s future depends on us remembering.

In solidarity,
Nicole Bishop | She, Her, Hers
ChairDon’t forget to sign up for RCV 101 (go back to the top 🙂 and

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry

P.S. For a more optimistic take on our present situation nationwide I recommend “The next era starts now.”

“Supply-side economics” has been the economic policy of the Republican Party for the last forty years. Known pejoratively (and more accurately) as “trickle-down economics,” supply-siders subscribe to “the economic proposition that taxes on businesses and the wealthy [the “job creators”] in society should be reduced as a means to stimulate business investment in the short term and benefit society at large in the long term.” [1]

Of course, as a guiding principle for enactment of policy, trickle-down economics can be a tough sell. The trickle-down pill needs a sugar coating to make it palatable to the voting public. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, eastern Washington’s representative to the U.S. House (Congressional District 5), applied the sugar coating to one of the biggest Republican trickle-down triumphs in the last forty years, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Tax Cuts and Jobs mostly benefitted corporations and wealthy taxpayers, but every time McMorris Rodgers spoke of the bill in public, you were guaranteed to hear that she was proud of her vote for this bill that would put “money in your pocket.” That sugar coating was meant to direct the average taxpayer’s attention to the small tax break for the average guy contained in the bill in the hope that voters would ignore the huge tax breaks the bill contained for corporations and the already wealthy–and the huge expansion of the national debt. If she thought at all beyond the “money in your pocket” slogan she never let on. But as a good Republican she probably justified “money in your pocket” as a necessary subterfuge to put in motion the magic of trickle-down economic expansion. Indeed, the broad economy expanded and the stock market roared in response to the extra money at the top. Before the pandemic the average family might be pardoned if they felt their prospects brightened as their tiny boat rose with the tide as “all boats were lifted.” 

But the pandemic–and McMorris Rodgers voting record in response to the pandemic–lay bare the fallacy of trickle-down economics. A yawning chasm has opened in the American economy between the wealthiest of the wealthy (think Amazon and Jeff Bezos) and the folks trying to pay their rent, take care if their children and put food on the table. Yes, the stock market is roaring again–and the bank accounts of the wealthy have not shrunk–but the 45% of Americans who own no stocks whatsoever (and many of the 55% who do have a small stake in the market) see their boats taking on water–even as the wealthy float high–and invest in ever-larger boats.

So where is McMorris Rodgers’ allegiance? Is she still convinced that the way to help her constituents pay their bills and put food on the table is to pour money in at the top so it trickles down? In March, along with 419 of her 433 House colleagues she voted “Aye” on the CARES Act. It wasn’t a controversial vote–nor should it have been. Most citizens remember CARES for the $1,200 tax rebate it provided. Some others remember CARES for its extension of unemployment benefits. But, in fact, three quarters of the roughly two trillion dollars in CARES went out to a complex mix of large corporations, small businesses, and local and state governments. All of that money was doled out via fragmented and complex application and grant procedures of which most hourly and even salaried wage earners were oblivious. [2]

Two months later, in May 2020 McMorris Rodgers must have gotten over the idea that “money in your pocket” for the average person was in the country’s  best interests, the slogan she’d pushed with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Instead, that May she quietly voted “Nay” on a second stimulus bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, the HEROES Act. The pandemic economic downturn continued in spite of Trump’s rosy predictions. People were hurting, evictions were on the rise. HEROES offered another $1200 payment to individuals, extended unemployment benefits, offered help with utilities payments, and expanded SNAP benefits [3]. The bill targeted much more of its aid to struggling workers and working families than did the CARES Act. (See Stipulations.) HEROES passed the Democratically-controlled House but it was blocked from a vote (like so much other legislation) by Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell in the Senate. HEROES was blocked because it was anathema to Republican trickle-down dogma. Deficit spending was fine as long as the deficit was expanded by cutting taxes on the wealthy (as in Tax Cuts and Jobs), but not fine if it merely shored up the average American struggling in the pandemic economy.

McMorris Rodgers was faced with one more test of trickle-down devotion, a test she surely had hoped to dodge. In December 2020 the latest round of coronavirus relief, in the amount of 900 billion dollars, was wrapped up in H.R.133 – the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, the last minute 2.2 trillion dollar bill to fund the government. McMorris Rodgers voted “yea” on December 21. She could hardly vote otherwise. To vote against this massive piece of last minute legislation might have shut down the government (and certainly would have kept legislators in Washington, D.C. even longer.) She must have breathed a sigh of relief when H.R. 133 was sent to President Trump for his signature. Despite strong voices for a greater amount, Republicans had managed to limit direct payments to Americans to only $600, rather than the $1200 others had proposed. (These $600 payments only represent 7% of the spending authorized in the H.R.133. However, the $600 number got a lot of press because it was a number to which the average voter could relate. It was, after all, the one direct “money in your pocket” piece of the whole Act.) 

But then Donald Trump threw the whole tidy political triumph in disarray. After taking a mostly hands-off approach to H.R. 133 negotiations, he lashed out at Congress by demanding the $600 payment be expanded to $2000–while threatening to veto (or pocket veto) the bill if he didn’t get his way. In response, the Caring for Americans with Supplemental Help Act (CASH Act), was immediately presented in the House of Representatives to increase the payment to $2000. How would McMorris Rodgers vote? Only one time in the last four years had she voted against the will of Donald Trump (on a bill that would have weakened the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) a law of intense personal interest to her as a mother of a child with Down Syndrome). But now: Drama! Consternation! An up and down vote on the choice between trickle-down dogma and offering $2000 of direct help to struggling citizens. The choice was made worse by her lame duck leader, a man for whom a majority of her constituents had voted in November. How she must have wished to dodge this vote…

Her allegiance was clear. She voted against the CASH Act, explaining her “Nay” vote by writing “Unfortunately, the CASH Act would add $464 billion to our national debt. I believe assistance should be more targeted.” She had just voted for a 900 billion dollar coronavirus stimulus as part of H.R. 133, only $166 billion would go to direct checks. She had enthusiastically voted in 2017 to fuel the deficit by cutting taxes, but now, suddenly, oh, my, the national debt! We cannot raise the national debt by actually helping people at the bottom directly! Too much!

These votes of McMorris Rodgers need to be remembered. In this “Nay” vote on the CASH Act, McMorris Rodgers has once again declared her devotion to trickle-down economics–the bogus Reaganite economic idea that everyone benefits by cutting the taxes of the wealthy. While Spokane families can’t come up with the money to pay their utility bills, McMorris Rodgers wants to “target” money elsewhere. 

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry

[1] Supply-side, aka trickle-down, economics follows directly on economic principles current in the Gilded Age (approx.1870-1900), a time of glaring income and wealth inequality not unlike our own. Those principles were derided at the time as “horse and sparrow economics,” the idea that oats fed into the horse (the wealthy, “job-creator” class) would offer undigested grain in their manure for the sparrows (the working class) who would pick over. The income and wealth disparity of the Gilded Age fueled the labor movement of the early 20th century. 

[2] Note that Republicans had no difficulty with the broad tax cuts for corporations and upper income taxpayers in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Republican rhetoric revolves around “not picking winners and losers” and “the magic of the free market,” but when it comes right down to it offering money to struggling Americans with no strings attached isn’t palatable to them. After all, those lazy common people given $1200 or $2000 won’t use it to pay their bills or stay economically afloat, would they? Giving those folks “money in the their pocket” in times like these will just be a disincentive for these lazy people to get back to work, won’t it?

[3] SNAP is  the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program”–the U.S. Department of Agriculture program once characterized as “Welfare” or “Food Stamps”–a program on which, in 2018, 40 million low income Americans depended). (Read “Let’s Talk About Food Stamps” for some perspective on this assistance.)

In the study of Covid-19 we are learning as we go. Since it has only been a year (is that possible?) that this plague has been upon us, one thing we cannot yet know is the duration of immunity to re-infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.  Other coronaviruses (several of which cause versions of the common cold) stimulate an immune responses in their hosts that last only a matter of a few months, so it is logical to worry that our immune response to SARS-CoV-2 (or even our immune response to a fancy vaccine) might also wane over a few months. That’s worrisome to consider. 

In the December 23, 2020, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) a large and (to me) fascinating study was published entitled “Antibody Status and Incidence of SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Health Care Workers.” This work provides an interim answer to the question of durability of the immune response to SARS-CoV-2. It is a great example of how modern science works. I love this stuff and I have read such articles for years, but with all the jargon I still find it challenging to digest the details. 

Here is the study conclusion: “The presence of anti-spike or anti-nucleocapsid IgG antibodies was associated with a substantially reduced risk of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection in the ensuing 6 months.” Dang. That’s really dry and unexciting. That conclusion barely made the news, even though this is a peer-reviewed study involving 32 authors, 12,541 participants, a huge effort and cost (funded by the government of the United Kingdom) that was published in one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world. Dry and unexciting it might be, but this is the stuff of which scientific truth is made.

Let me re-phrase and expand on the study’s conclusions and implications. If your blood shows anti-spike antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, whether as a result of asymptomatic or symptomatic Covid-19 disease, then, at least for six months, it appears that your protection against re-infection is really, really good. We didn’t know that. Instead, what we’ve seen in the news and on social media is the occasional worrisome anecdote, “Joe Blow was sick with Covid-19 in April and, OMG, he’s suffering with it again!” Basic details in these anecdotes are usually lacking. Was Mr. Blow PCR test positive in April? Was his first illness really Covid or something else? How often does this happen?

The results of this study make the Joe Blow anecdote doubtful–or at least suggest Mr. Blow’s experience is very rare. The study enrolled a special group of participants, 12,541 health care workers at Oxford University Hospitals in the United Kingdom, a relatively captive audience with more exposure to Covid-19 than most. All participants were tested for the presence of two different and very specific antibodies in their blood: anti-spike and anti-nucleocapsid IgG (immunoglobulin of “class” G). [1]  This special group of participants (called a cohort) was assembled back in April, 2020. (How’s that for forethought?) Of the 12,541 participants, 11,364 had no detected anti-spike antibodies when first tested on enrollment in the study, whereas 1177 did have anti-spike antibodies. 

During the study 88 of those who did not have antibodies at baseline “seroconverted,” that is, they developed anti-spike antibodies during the followup period and were then counted in the anti-spike antibody positive group, bringing the number of seropositive participants up to 1265. 

Of those 1265 people anti-spike antibody seropositive participants not a single one developed symptomatic Covid-19 in the following six months. Even more encouraging (and striking), of those 1265 participants only 2 turned up with a positive PCR test for the virus in routine followup testing. Since anti-spike antibodies are the same type of antibody produced in response to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines it seems likely that immunity induced by these vaccines will be similarly durable.

Of course, the lack of symptomatic Covid-19 in the antibody positive participants would be meaningless if those folks had no exposure to the disease during the followup period, so reporting the results among the antibody negative participants (the “control group”) is critically important. Among the 11,364 originally antibody negative participants, 223 had one or more positive PCR tests for Covid-19 during followup. Of those 223 with a positive PCR test 106 experienced symptomatic disease. (PCR=”polymerase chain reaction” test, the standard, highly sensitive, test for presence of a virus particle or part of a virus particle in the nose.) [2] 

After adjustments for total days followed in the study the ratio between the risk of having a positive PCR test for a person with anti-spike antibodies over six months is 0.11, i.e. 1 in 10, of the risk of having a positive PCR test for a person without baseline antibodies. Moreover, in this study, speaking only of symptomatic Covid-19, the risk ratio is zero. The takeaway is that immunity is durable at least up to six months once one demonstrates anti-spike antibodies in one’s blood. 

Keep to the high ground,
Jerry

[1] The anti-spike IgG antibody is produced in response to Covid-19 infection but it is also the antibody type our immune systems are asked to produce in response to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. In contrast, the anti-nucleocapsid IgG antibody (the other antibody tested in this Oxford study) is not produced in response to the two currently approved vaccines. That suggests that anti-nucleocapsid antibodies can be thought of as a marker for actual infection with Covid-19. That offers a possible means of determining whether a individual’s immunity is based on a response Covid-19 disease or a response to the vaccine.(The “spike protein” is the corona of the coronavirus. It is essential to the binding of the virus to the surface of our cells. The “nucleocapsid” is the genetic material of the virus particle contained in the particle’s interior. It consists of the virus’ nucleic acids (in this case it’s RNA) and associated enveloping and associated proteins, its “capsid”) 

[2] Notice that only 26 of the 88 participants who seroconverted during the study (developed anti-spike antibodies) ever demonstrated a positive PCR test for the presence of virus. Message: unless one is tested very frequently (more than once every two weeks) the testing may miss a brief period of viral shedding–or maybe some folks never shed virus in their noses). Also notice that only 26 of the 233 originally seronegative folks who then had a positive PCR test went on to seroconvert (and be counted among the 88). Tantalizing (but not nearly statistically significant) is the fact that among 24 originally seronegative participants who had had a positive PCR test for the virus (and symptoms) before enrollment, none of them had another positive PCR test during the study (and 5 of those 24 seroconverted during the study). That raises some small hope that some folks with symptoms and a positive PCR even without seroconversion (at least to the threshold titer used in this study) may be more immune than this study otherwise suggests. 

P.S. Asymptomatic infection: Of the 1177 participants with anti-spike antibodies at baseline, 864 (68%) recalled having had symptoms consistent with Covid-19, that is, 32% recalled no symptoms. (This is consistent with current estimates that about 40% of those infected never have symptoms.)

P.P.S. One final note on the scientific endeavor. Immunity is complex. Other studies have been a bit worrisome because antibody titers (concentration of antibodies in the blood) naturally wane with time, but the immune system tends to keep a record of the threat and the antibody response to that threat in the form of “memory cells” of various kinds (T and B). This Oxford Study is, at this time, unique in providing us with actual data of viral shedding and re-infection–not just measurement of waning titers of antibodies. (It turns out that the assays for immune memory are expensive, challenging, and not always predictive. That’s why most of what gets quoted in the media are studies that worry us by reporting antibody titers alone as a proxy for immunity–and that can be misleading.)