Middleboro Review 2: 05/10/22

Tuesday, May 10, 2022

POLITICO NIGHTLY: 1 million deaths was a choice

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Signage is posted at a Curative Covid-19 test facility at the Larkspur Ferry terminal in Larkspur, Calif. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

’IT WASN’T BY ACCIDENT’ — The U.S. will soon pass a once-unfathomable milestone: 1 million Americans dead from Covid. This staggering figure also comes as the White House warns 100 million Americans could be infected this fall.

The whopping numbers have done little to encourage preparation for the next wave. The path for Covid funding remains murky, as President Joe Biden told lawmakers to pass Ukraine aid separately, and Democrats try to make deals across the aisle to salvage the stalled pandemic package. Without the money, Americans might find it difficult to track down virus essentials like vaccines, tests and treatments as the U.S. faces its next surge.

To talk through this moment, Nightly checked in with Peter Hotez , dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, who is battling a case of Covid himself, to discuss how we got here, what it means and where the pandemic goes next. This conversation has been edited.

1 million deaths. Did you ever think we’d get here?

For me, the big reckoning was the fact that we’ve not really come to a real national dialogue about what happened after May 1, 2021. That was the day the White House announced that there are so many Covid vaccines that any American who wants to get vaccinated can get vaccinated. Yet we lost another 200,000-300,000 Americans after that date. Those who were defiant to vaccines were overwhelmingly in red states, and the redder the county as measured by Trump voters in the 2020 election, the higher the vaccine refusal and the greater the loss of life.

It wasn’t by accident. It was a deliberate effort by members of the House Freedom Caucus, in the House, some U.S. senators, amplified nightly on Fox News.

I don’t even call it misinformation or disinformation anymore. I call it anti-science aggression, to convince millions of Americans not to take a Covid vaccine. And at least 200,000 Americans between May 1 and the end of 2021 died needlessly from Covid because of it. And everyone’s afraid to talk about it because it’s very unpleasant to have to point out that these deaths occurred along such a strict partisan divide. Even the White House won’t talk about it in that way.

So, with an exhausted public, how would you re-engage Americans at this point? Is it by having these “unpleasant” conversations?

You can understand the first wave of deaths in New York in the spring of 2020. You can even start to understand the second wave of deaths in the summer of 2020, in Texas, in the southern U.S. when we’re just trying to understand it. But then as you move forward, you have to start to come to terms with the fact that a majority of the deaths were probably preventable. And certainly just about all of the deaths after May 1 were preventable. And I think that needs to be front and center. That these are not accidental deaths. The people who lost their lives and died after May 1 were themselves victims of anti-science aggression. If you look at the big-picture threats to the U.S. that we spend billions of dollars every year to combat, like global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, or cyberattacks. Anti-science aggression kills more Americans than all those things combined by far. And yet we don’t recognize it as such. That’s critically important to point that out.

Alongside Americans being “done” with the pandemic, there’s also the concern about Covid funding running out if Congress doesn’t act. How important is this money in your view?

We have to recognize that the mRNA boosters are not holding up as well as we’d like. We’re going to have to probably go — unless we come up with a better technology, which I think we should, but that’s a different matter — we’re gonna need to ask the American people to get boosted yet again. And we’re gonna have to provide those vaccines.

And we’re going to need an ongoing amount of Paxlovid, for instance. I mean, why am I talking to you right now? I’m talking to you right now because I’m the beneficiary of Paxlovid, which I’m on right now, and I’m the beneficiary of having my second booster. And even though it’s not ideal to ask Americans to continue to boost, it’s still going to be essential.

The White House is warning we could see 100 million infections this fall. How do you see this fall and winter unfolding?

I know that’s what the White House is doing, but I don’t quite understand the logic of jumping to fall and winter. We still have two big peaks that are hitting us before fall and winter. We have this current BA.2.12.1, which is now about to become the dominant variant. It’s so transmissible, all you need to do is give a dirty look to that subvariant and you become infected. It’s up there with measles. So that’s issue No. 1. And issue No. 2 is we’ve had a terrible wave of Covid-19 both for the last two summers in Texas in the southern United States. I’m expecting that again. Even before the fall, we’re going to have another wave over the summer from variant TBD, to be determined.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at mward@politico.com, or on Twitter at @MyahWard.

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— Ukraine’s foreign minister rues U.S. delay in providing weapons: Dmytro Kuleba made it clear that he believes if the United States and other Western allies had only trusted Kyiv more — and provided the weapons Kyiv requested in the months prior to Russia’s late February invasion — thousands of lives may have been saved. A senior administration official pushed back on Kuleba’s comments, noting that well before the Russian invasion, the United States provided “as much assistance as possible that they could put to immediate use.”

— Top intel official warns Putin’s invasion could become ‘more unpredictable and potentially escalatory’: Russia’s offensive in Ukraine could enter a more volatile and bloody chapter as the war grinds on over the coming months , the top U.S. intelligence official told lawmakers, warning that Vladimir Putin intends to expand the offensive beyond the eastern Donbas region. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Russia’s refocus on Donbas after failing to capture the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv was likely “only a temporary shift” and assessed that “Putin’s strategic goals have probably not changed.”

More on Russia: Nahal Toosi explores how The White House’s messaging on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has evolved over time, and why “victory” will be challenging for the U.S. to define.

— Yellen: Banning abortion would be ‘very damaging’ to U.S. economy: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen argued today that banning abortion would be “very damaging” for the economy by reducing women’s ability to balance their careers and their families. “I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades,” she said in response to a question at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.

— Gasoline prices spike to all time high, again: Gasoline and diesel fuel prices hit an all-time high today, just two months after the last record-breaking prices were recorded . The nationwide average price for a gallon of regular gas was $4.37, a 17-cent jump just in the past week according to AAA, while diesel clocked in at $5.55 per gallon. That surpasses record high prices from early March, a surge that touched off a wave of talk in Congress about possibly waiving the federal gas tax, and which caused several states to create state-level gas tax holidays.

— Tom Reed resigns, setting up a second special House election in New York: New York Rep. Tom Reed announced his immediate retirement from Congress today, seven months before his final term was due to conclude. The resignation means that New York will soon have two special elections on the ballot for congressional districts that are currently being redrawn. As recently as March 2021, Reed has been a frontrunner for the GOP nomination in the 2022 gubernatorial race. But after he faced allegations of sexual misconduct, he announced he would soon end his political career.

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AROUND THE WORLD

EUROPE TRIES TO GET HUNGARY TO YES — EU officials are considering offering financial compensation to Hungary in an attempt to persuade Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to sign up to the bloc’s proposed sanctions on Russian oil.

According to three EU officials, the money could be channeled to Budapest as part of the bloc’s new energy strategy, which is due to be set out next week, to end its reliance on Russian fossil fuels.

Cutting off the European market for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s oil exports is seen as vital to limiting a lucrative source of revenue that helps him finance his war in Ukraine.

Securing Hungary’s support for the plan to block all EU imports of crude and refined fuels from Russia is essential to maintaining the political objective of strong and united European opposition to Putin’s actions.

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NIGHTLY NUMBER

400 million

The number of Covid-19 vaccine doses destroyed as a result of the lack of standards at Emergent’s Bayview facility in Baltimore , according to an investigation by the key pandemic oversight congressional committees. The company allegedly hid batches with potential quality issues from federal regulators in February 2021 following months of internal communication about the substantial problems at the facility.

STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president’s ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today.

PARTING WORDS

UFO TALK GOES PUBLIC ON THE HILL — A House committee will hold a public hearing on UFOs next Tuesday for the first time in decades, as Congress presses the Pentagon and other national security agencies for more answers on reports of mysterious aircraft violating protected airspace, Bryan Bender writes.

The session before the House Intelligence Committee’s Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee comes five months after the National Defense Authorization Act required the military to establish a permanent UFO research office and take a series of other steps to collect and investigate reports of “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

“The American people expect and deserve their leaders in government and intelligence to seriously evaluate and respond to any potential national security risks — especially those we do not fully understand,” the panel chair, Rep. André Carson, said in a statement today. “Since coming to Congress, I’ve been focused on the issue of unidentified aerial phenomena as both a national security threat and an interest of great importance to the American public.”

Testifying before the panel will be Ronald Moultrie, the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, and Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence.

A message from Save American Solar Jobs:

The Biden administration’s Commerce Department is threatening to implement massive tariffs of up to 250% on solar panel components imported by American solar manufacturers for assembly in the U.S. This tariff threat is devastating the American solar industry, costing U.S. jobs, hurting domestic manufacturing, raising inflation and undermining efforts to address climate change.

There is a better solution already on the table. Congress should pass the clean energy tax credits and incentives that have been stalled since last year. These policies will drive the expansion of domestic solar panel component manufacturing and ensure we have the infrastructure needed to fight climate change and create jobs.

President Biden: Tell Your Commerce Department to Stop Undermining U.S. Solar Manufacturing.

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Charts: “Massive Buyers’ Strike” for Tech; Bitcoin as an Inflation Hedge Exposed as a Bad Joke; Megabanks in Freefall

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 10, 2022 ~

Last October 6, Bloomberg News had a prominent headline on their digital front page that read: “Citi Says Banks Are In, Tech Is Out Ahead of Rates Lift-Off.”

The thrust of the article was this:

“In the race to find the best hedges against higher rates and inflation, Citigroup Inc.’s chief global equity strategist is moving with the tide toward global financial stocks.

“Like a growing number of his peers, Robert Buckland expects value stocks to provide a degree of protection against the market turbulence brought about by rising bond yields.”

There’s a sleight of hand in that phrasing, somehow transporting the riskiest megabanks and their trillions of dollars in opaque derivatives into “value stocks.” A global bank is to a value stock what a loaded grenade is to a box of granola. There is zero correlation. (See our warning about this back on October 6.)

If you had followed Buckland’s advice and bought global bank stocks on October 6, this is what your portfolio might look like today:

U.S. megabanks have not held up either, with the largest bank in the United States — JPMorgan Chase — which perpetually brags about its “fortress balance sheet,” outpacing the losses at its competitors.

The tech wreck, however, has been worse. Yesterday, Jefferies tech analyst Brent Thill appeared on CNBC and shared the misery taking place on the company’s tech trading desk. Thill said:

“This has taken on more negativity than we could have imagined. We have no buyers on our desk. There’s max pain and it’s darker than I’ve seen in the last decade in covering many of these names.”

A little later in the interview, Thill added this: “I can tell you with high conviction that the biggest names on Wall Street right now are sitting out this and waiting…there’s a massive buyers’ strike right now.”

(As the market has continued to melt down, we have been turning on CNBC at lunchtime to keep tabs on what kind of advice is being doled out to the investing public.)

The truth is that things are going to get a lot worse for the tech heavy Nasdaq Composite Index, which is a market-capitalization weighted index, and where technology stocks represent just over half the Index. As the chart below shows, on a year-to-date basis through yesterday, May 9, the FAANG stocks have taken a beating but more serious pain is highly likely in the cards. That’s because Apple has been performing in lockstep with the S&P 500 rather than with its peer tech stocks. As of yesterday’s close, Apple’s market cap is still $2.46 trillion. (Yes, trillion.) That has helped hide the scale of the real deterioration that has been taking place in the Nasdaq. (See our report of December 28, 2021: A Tale of Two Markets: S&P 500 Notches Its 69th Record Close as the Bottom Falls Out of the Nasdaq.)

The wheels are also coming off the nutty myth that Bitcoin would function as an inflation hedge. Instead, it’s functioning just as Warren Buffet suggested: as “rat poison squared.” From a high of $69,355 last November, Bitcoin futures closed yesterday at $30,930, a decline of 55 percent.