What happens when the administration is hinged on the unhinged?

What happens when the administration is hinged on the unhinged?

By Mary Ellen Curtin

Mary Ellen Curtin is an associate professor and director of the American Studies program in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University. She is completing a biography of Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan.

November 26, 2021 at 8:00 a.m. EST

Donald Trump lost his bid for ­reelection in spectacular fashion, ­receiving 7 million fewer popular votes than the winner, Joe Biden. During the five weeks following the election on Nov. 3, Biden’s win withstood more than 60 failed court challenges, and by Dec. 14 each state had certified its final electoral count, thereby confirming Biden’s victory. “The electoral college has spoken,” Sen. Mitch McConnell said. “So today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.” No conceivable formula or legal challenge to the election remained. Biden had beaten Trump. On Jan. 6, Congress would meet to confirm the electoral count, and on Jan. 20, the new president would be sworn in. Everyone ­expected the defeated president to eventually concede, but Donald Trump refused. Instead, as ABC newsman Jonathan Karl explains in “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” Trump chose to launch a violent insurrection that upended the peaceful transfer of power. Karl’s sobering, solid, account of Trump’s last year in office sheds new light on how the man who lost the presidency nearly succeeded in overthrowing the 2020 election. Anyone who thinks that “it can’t happen here,” ought to read this book.

Karl calls this story “Betrayal” for good reason. The early chapters establish a pattern of duplicity directed at supporters, advisers and federal employees who trusted Trump at their peril. As Trump’s second presidential campaign got underway, low and high level political appointees in the Justice and Defense departments and in other agencies were purged by Trump loyalists, often against the wishes of the responsible cabinet members. Lying to the public about the dangers of the coronavirus, Trump betrayed his supporters by blatantly disregarding their physical safety at his super spreader events on the road and at the White House. (“We killed Herman Cain,” admitted one staffer after a Trump rally in Tulsa; Trump loyalists Chris Christie, Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks also fell ill.) Hundreds of thousands of Americans had died of the deadly virus, but when he returned to the White House as he recovered from his own case of covid-19, Trump childishly ­removed his mask for the cameras, defying science and sense. But as Karl suggests, Trump was a knave, not a fool. He engaged in death-defying acts of political theater to intimidate underlings and showcase the supremacy of his own “truth” over reality.

Karl prides himself on his scoops, which have gotten lots of play in the media, but even more valuable is his coolheaded narrative. He explains the divisions within Trump’s camp on election night and the ensuing chaos that resulted when Rudy Giuliani and his entourage — otherwise known by others in the Trump circle as “the crazies” — began alleging a vast global conspiracy of voter fraud that supposedly involved Cuba, China, Spain, Venezuela, George Soros, Germany and CIA Director Gina Haspel, as well as Dominion and Smartmatic, makers of voting systems. Karl shows how these lies, distortions, falsehoods and, in his words, “wacky” conspiracy theories not only lacked merit but were also utterly fantastic. At times, Karl blames this bedlam on the people around Trump rather than the president himself. But it was Trump who abruptly fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper via tweet on Nov. 9, throwing the Pentagon into chaos, and it was Trump who embraced the support of QAnon adherents such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who urged him to fight on. The overwhelming evidence gathered in “Betrayal” is that Trump sought out and promoted the views of incompetent, unqualified and unhinged people because they satisfied his authoritarian impulses and his personal pursuit of power.

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Karl argues that although the seeds of Jan. 6 were planted in 2020, the ultimate betrayal occurred between Dec. 14 and Jan. 6, when an erratic and angry president decided to stay in office, even at the cost of law, human life and physical damage to the United States Capitol. Karl details Trump’s multipronged attempts to subvert the outcome of the electoral vote. Trump met for hours with Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell, who came up with a plan for the president to declare a national emergency and seize voting machines, but the acting secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, refused to comply. Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding that he “find” more votes, and asked Republican legislators in Michigan and Pennsylvania to turn in only his electoral votes. They refused. He threatened to oust acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen unless he agreed to pressure Georgia to overturn Biden’s victory in that state. Confronted with the opposition of his own lawyers and the DOJ, Trump backed down. But now he would do something even more reckless.

In the chilling chapter “Hang Mike Pence,” Karl recounts how Trump betrayed the blind faith of those within his inner circle, including the exceedingly loyal vice president, who believed he would ultimately accept his electoral loss and concede. Instead, Trump bullied and threatened Pence, presenting him with a memo written by Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis detailing the steps Pence could take on Jan. 6 to declare Trump victorious. On the day he was to preside over the final electoral count in Congress, Pence released a statement of his intent to follow the law, and was denounced by Trump before a crowd of thousands. Responding to Trump’s cry to “fight like hell,” Trump supporters marched to the Capitol, where armed insurrectionists were already swarming to do battle. Violence ensued for two solid hours. The riots resulted in five deaths. Marauding mobs viciously threatened members of Congress and attacked hundreds of police officers. When Trump finally called on the rioters to stop, he said, “We love you. You are very special.”

Many people in these pages, including Pence, stood up to Trump, and Karl tells their story well. But when Karl states “the system held. Democracy prevailed,” the image of the raptors in Jurassic Park testing the fences for weaknesses comes to mind. “They remember,” the caretaker says. And as Trump tells Karl, Jan. 6 remains a day he wishes to remember fondly forever. Why shouldn’t he? Only the smallest players have been punished. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other leading Republicans continue Trump’s betrayal of the nation by alleging that voter fraud gave Biden his victory. Unless Congress can reassert its power, investigate the events of Jan. 6, and punish all guilty parties, it is difficult to escape Karl’s conclusion that Trump’s lies about his loss, and the Republicans’ continuing admiration of his authoritarian leadership, will end up destroying the spirit and the conventions of American democracy.

Betrayal

The Final Act of the Trump Show

By Jonathan Karl

Dutton. 362 pp. $28

'Patience is crucial': Why we won't know for weeks how dangerous Omicron is

'Patience is crucial': Why we won't know for weeks how dangerous Omicron is

Lab tests and patterns of spread will show whether the new SARS-CoV-2 variant's many mutations are a serious threat

27 NOV 2021, 4:35 PM, BY KAI KUPFERSCHMIDT

At 7.30 a.m. on Wednesday, Kristian Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at Scripps Research in San Diego, received a message on Slack: “This variant is completely insane.” Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh was reacting to a new SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence found in three samples collected in Botswana on 11 November and one picked up a week later in a traveler from South Africa to Hong Kong.  

Andersen looked at the data and then replied: “Holy shit—that is quite something. The length of that branch...” A few minutes later he added: “Just had a look at the list of mutations—so nuts.”

They were talking about what is now called Omicron, a new variant of concern, and the long branch Andersen noticed refers to its distance to every other known virus on SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary tree. The variant seemed to have picked up dozens of mutations, many of them known to be important in evading immunity or increasing transmissibility, with no intermediate sequences in the database of millions of viral genomes. On Tuesday, after spotting the odd sequences in a global database, Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London, had already posted his own verdict on GitHub: “This could be of real concern.”

Now, once again, the world is watching as researchers work nights and weekends to learn what a new variant has in store for humanity. Is Omicron more infectious? More deadly? Is it better at re-infecting recovered people? How well does it evade vaccine-induced immunity? And where did it come from? Finding out will take time, warns Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust: “I'm afraid patience is crucial.”

Researchers in South Africa were already on the trail of this new variant. Several teams were independently trying to figure out why cases were spiking in Gauteng, a northern province that includes Johannesburg and Pretoria.  And a private lab called Lancet had noticed that routine PCR tests for SARS-CoV-2 were failing to detect a key target, the S gene, in many samples, a phenomenon previously seen with Alpha, another variant of concern. When Lancet sequenced eight of these viruses, they found out why: The genome was so heavily mutated that the test missed the gene.

Lancet shared the genomes with the Network for Genomics Surveillance in South Africa (NGS-SA), which called an urgent meeting on Tuesday. “We were shocked by the number of mutations," says Tulio de Oliveira, a virologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and NGS-SA 's principal investigator. After the meeting, de Oliveira says, he called  South Africa's Director General of Health and "asked him to inform the minister and president that a potential new variant was emerging." The team sequenced another 100 randomly selected sequences from Gauteng in the next 24 hours. All showed the same pattern. After informing the government, de Oliveira and his colleagues presented their evidence at a press conference on Thursday morning. On Friday, the World Health Organization (WHO) designated the virus a “variant of concern” and christened it Omicron. (Variant names follow the Greek alphabet but WHO skipped the letters Nu and Xi, it said, “because Nu is too easily confounded with 'new' and Xi was not used because it is a common surname.“)

One reason for concern about Omicron is that sequenced samples indicate it has rapidly replaced other variants in South Africa. But that picture might be skewed. For one, sequencing might have been focused on possible cases of the new variant in recent days, which could make it appear more frequent than it is. PCR data provide broader coverage and a less biased view, but there too, samples with the S gene failure indicate a rapid rise of Omicron.

But the rising frequency could still be due in part to chance. In San Diego, a series of superspreading events at a university resulted in an explosion of one particular strain of SARS-CoV-2 earlier this year, Andersen says: "It was thousands of cases and they were all the same virus.” But the virus wasn't notably more infectious. South Africa has seen relatively few cases recently, so a series of superspreading events could have led to the rapid increase of Omicron. “I suspect that a lot of that signal is explained by that and I desperately hope so,” Andersen says. Based on a comparison of different Omicron genomes, Andersen estimates that the virus emerged sometime around late September or early October, which suggests it might be spreading more slowly than it appears to have.

The other reason to be concerned is Omicron's confusing genome. Its spike protein, which latches on to cells on human receptors, has 30 amino acid differences from that of the original Wuhan virus. In addition, amino acids have disappeared in three places and new ones appeared in one place. (Other proteins too, have undergone changes.) Many of the changes in spike are around the receptor binding domain, the part of the protein that makes contact with the human cell. “That is very troubling,” Farrar says. Structural biology mapping last year showed that some of these changes made the virus bind to the receptor much better.

It’s hard to tell how infectious a virus is based on mutations alone, says Aris Katzourakis, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford. “But if we were looking out for mutations that do affect transmissibility, it's got all of them,” he says.

The sequence also suggests the virus could excel at evading human antibodies, says Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The human immune system produces a host of different antibodies that can neutralize SARS-CoV-2, but many of the most important ones fall into three categories that each target a slightly different site on the spike protein of the virus, simply called 1, 2 and 3. A mutation called E484K has long been worrying because it changes the shape of the site that class 2 antibodies recognize, making them less potent. Omicron carries a mutation called E484A in this site and similar changes in the sites for the other two classes of antibodies.

Bloom thinks people who recovered from COVID or were vaccinated are unlikely to completely lose their ability to neutralize the virus. “But I would expect, based on this particular combination of mutations, that the drop in neutralization is larger than for all the other major variants.”

Experiments in the laboratory will have to show whether he is right. Alex Sigal, an infectious disease researcher at the Africa Health Research Institute, says he received swabs with Omicron on Wednesday and has started to grow the virus. Producing enough of it to test against sera from vaccinated and recovered individuals will take a week or two, he says. Other researchers will test viruses genetically engineered to carry just the spike protein of Omicron, a process that is faster than growing the variant itself but a bit further removed from what happens in real life.

As such studies take place, it's crucial to closely monitor any shifts in the pandemic, Farrar says. “Do you see cases increasing not just in South Africa but the broader South African region?” The virus has already been picked up in Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Israel, Farrar points out, and will probably be found elsewhere as well. “Do you see transmission increasing in other parts of the world around presumed index cases?” Epidemiologists will also watch for changes in disease severity—how many people are hospitalized and die. All that will take time.

In the meantime, the European Union, the United States, and many other countries have restricted travel to and from southern Africa in a bid to protect themselves. Travel restrictions are unlikely to stop the variant, Farrar says, but they can buy some time. “The question is what you then do with the time.”

Travel restrictions come with an economic and social cost, which could be a disincentive to report new variants. “I've heard through the grapevine that countries didn't push sequences out very quickly [in the past] because they were worried about travel bans,” says Emma Hodcroft, a virologist at the University of Bern. “This is the opposite of what we want.”

Such considerations did not stop South African researchers, de Oliveira says. “We do risk a massive backlash in case [Omicron] does not cause a massive wave of infection and can be controlled,“ he wrote in a message. "But this is a risk that I am comfortable to live with as the pandemic has caused so many deaths and suffering. [Our] hope is that our early identification will help the world.“

The hypocrisy argument on the filibuster is itself phony

The hypocrisy argument on the filibuster is itself phony

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

Columnist|

Yesterday at 9:00 a.m. EST

With the Senate facing a do-or-die moment on whether it will protect the right to vote and honest counts in elections, opponents of much-needed reforms want to shift the topic to whether liberals are hypocrites about filibuster rules.

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Their desire to change the subject is understandable. Opponents of the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act prefer not to explain why a Republican Party that once embraced voting rights bills now echoes segregationist Democrats of old in defending “states’ rights” over federal voting guarantees.

And they would rather not be pressed on why they want to roll back the advances that made voting easier in 2020. More mail and early voting, drop boxes, less cumbersome registration and a slew of other changes led to record-breaking turnout.

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The Freedom to Vote Act is all about such access. No political consultant would advise a client to explain opposition to it with a “Let’s Make Voting Harder Again” speech.

Enter the Senate’s filibuster rules. Because every Republican senator voted against the Freedom to Vote Act last month — and all but one opposed even debating the John Lewis voting rights bill this month — no bill that would do anything worthwhile can reach the 60-vote threshold required to overcome the filibuster.

Reforming the filibuster is the only way Democrats can pass the voting guarantees favored by civil rights groups and democracy advocates. It’s the only way they can undo the voter suppression and election subversion laws that have been passed in more than a dozen GOP-controlled states since 2020. It’s the only way to dismantle wildly partisan gerrymanders.

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This is where the hypocrisy charges come in. It is true that Democrats have used the filibuster to kill Republican bills in the past. It’s true that many Democrats once defended the filibuster. And conservatives can quickly unearth lots of quotations from Democratic senators asserting, well, the opposite of what many Democrats are saying now.

As Rolling Stone’s Andy Kroll pointed out in a thoughtful piece on changing Democratic views of the filibuster, 29 Democratic senators signed a bipartisan letter in 2017 urging Senate leaders to maintain the filibuster and “preserve existing rules, practices, and traditions.” Yes, that was just four years ago, when Democrats were filled with dread over what Donald Trump and a Republican Congress might do — or undo.

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But beyond the fact that the retreat to procedural arguments dodges the substance of the rights at stake, the hypocrisy charge fails on the most basic level: No Democrat or progressive who has flipped on the filibuster is pretending they didn’t. They are quite clear in saying versions of what the Senate arch-traditionalist Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) said in 1979: Rules that seemed appropriate in the past “must be changed to reflect changed circumstances.”

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And if consistency on the filibuster is your standard, good luck in finding many purists. The loudest critic of changing filibuster rules now, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), was happy to junk the filibuster in 2017 in his quest to pack the Supreme Court with conservatives. Seems pretty hypocritical to me.

There are two big reasons why senators should vote to reform the filibuster, no matter their past views. The first is institutional: What started out as an unusual practice to extend debate has become a routine method for blocking the will of the majority. To put it starkly: Abuse of the filibuster is wrecking the Senate.

A 2020 report from the Brennan Center for Justice nicely summarized just how radical the shift has been on the use and abuse of the filibuster. “There have been as many cloture motions in the last 10 years (959),” wrote senior fellow Caroline Fredrickson, “as there were during the 60-year period from 1947 to 2006 (960).”

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Her essay, and another earlier this month by Fred Wertheimer, president of the political reform group Democracy 21, underscore how often the Senate has changed its rules, and how the filibuster, established almost by accident in 1806, has no constitutional standing.

But the core reason the filibuster must be reformed is the moral imperative of passing bills to defend democracy. It confronts multiple challenges: to the right to vote; the right to have votes counted without political interference; and the right of voters to select their representatives — and not have politicians do it by drawing wildly partisan district boundaries.

Should Democrats, including President Biden, allow these things to happen by claiming that the filibuster renders them powerless, they will be guilty of a more profound hypocrisy.

If it fails to act, the party that won power in 2020 as the bulwark of democracy and civil rights will be saying that these commitments matter less than fealty to an outdated, dysfunctional practice that has been altered repeatedly in pursuit of far less noble goals.

What happens when the administration is hinged on the unhinged?

What happens when the administration is hinged on the unhinged?

By Mary Ellen Curtin

November 26 at 10:00 PM GMT+09:00

Donald Trump lost his bid for ­reelection in spectacular fashion, ­receiving 7 million fewer popular votes than the winner, Joe Biden. During the five weeks following the election on Nov. 3, Biden’s win withstood more than 60 failed court challenges, and by Dec. 14 each state had certified its final electoral count, thereby confirming Biden’s victory. “The electoral college has spoken,” Sen. Mitch McConnell said. “So today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.” No conceivable formula or legal challenge to the election remained. Biden had beaten Trump. On Jan. 6, Congress would meet to confirm the electoral count, and on Jan. 20, the new president would be sworn in. Everyone ­expected the defeated president to eventually concede, but Donald Trump refused. Instead, as ABC newsman Jonathan Karl explains in “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” Trump chose to launch a violent insurrection that upended the peaceful transfer of power. Karl’s sobering, solid, account of Trump’s last year in office sheds new light on how the man who lost the presidency nearly succeeded in overthrowing the 2020 election. Anyone who thinks that “it can’t happen here,” ought to read this book.

Karl calls this story “Betrayal” for good reason. The early chapters establish a pattern of duplicity directed at supporters, advisers and federal employees who trusted Trump at their peril. As Trump’s second presidential campaign got underway, low and high level political appointees in the Justice and Defense departments and in other agencies were purged by Trump loyalists, often against the wishes of the responsible cabinet members. Lying to the public about the dangers of the coronavirus, Trump betrayed his supporters by blatantly disregarding their physical safety at his super spreader events on the road and at the White House. (“We killed Herman Cain,” admitted one staffer after a Trump rally in Tulsa; Trump loyalists Chris Christie, Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks also fell ill.) Hundreds of thousands of Americans had died of the deadly virus, but when he returned to the White House as he recovered from his own case of covid-19, Trump childishly ­removed his mask for the cameras, defying science and sense. But as Karl suggests, Trump was a knave, not a fool. He engaged in death-defying acts of political theater to intimidate underlings and showcase the supremacy of his own “truth” over reality.

Karl prides himself on his scoops, which have gotten lots of play in the media, but even more valuable is his coolheaded narrative. He explains the divisions within Trump’s camp on election night and the ensuing chaos that resulted when Rudy Giuliani and his entourage — otherwise known by others in the Trump circle as “the crazies” — began alleging a vast global conspiracy of voter fraud that supposedly involved Cuba, China, Spain, Venezuela, George Soros, Germany and CIA Director Gina Haspel, as well as Dominion and Smartmatic, makers of voting systems. Karl shows how these lies, distortions, falsehoods and, in his words, “wacky” conspiracy theories not only lacked merit but were also utterly fantastic. At times, Karl blames this bedlam on the people around Trump rather than the president himself. But it was Trump who abruptly fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper via tweet on Nov. 9, throwing the Pentagon into chaos, and it was Trump who embraced the support of QAnon adherents such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who urged him to fight on. The overwhelming evidence gathered in “Betrayal” is that Trump sought out and promoted the views of incompetent, unqualified and unhinged people because they satisfied his authoritarian impulses and his personal pursuit of power.

Karl argues that although the seeds of Jan. 6 were planted in 2020, the ultimate betrayal occurred between Dec. 14 and Jan. 6, when an erratic and angry president decided to stay in office, even at the cost of law, human life and physical damage to the United States Capitol. Karl details Trump’s multipronged attempts to subvert the outcome of the electoral vote. Trump met for hours with Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell, who came up with a plan for the president to declare a national emergency and seize voting machines, but the acting secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, refused to comply. Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding that he “find” more votes, and asked Republican legislators in Michigan and Pennsylvania to turn in only his electoral votes. They refused. He threatened to oust acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen unless he agreed to pressure Georgia to overturn Biden’s victory in that state. Confronted with the opposition of his own lawyers and the DOJ, Trump backed down. But now he would do something even more reckless.

In the chilling chapter “Hang Mike Pence,” Karl recounts how Trump betrayed the blind faith of those within his inner circle, including the exceedingly loyal vice president, who believed he would ultimately accept his electoral loss and concede. Instead, Trump bullied and threatened Pence, presenting him with a memo written by Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis detailing the steps Pence could take on Jan. 6 to declare Trump victorious. On the day he was to preside over the final electoral count in Congress, Pence released a statement of his intent to follow the law, and was denounced by Trump before a crowd of thousands. Responding to Trump’s cry to “fight like hell,” Trump supporters marched to the Capitol, where armed insurrectionists were already swarming to do battle. Violence ensued for two solid hours. The riots resulted in five deaths. Marauding mobs viciously threatened members of Congress and attacked hundreds of police officers. When Trump finally called on the rioters to stop, he said, “We love you. You are very special.”

Many people in these pages, including Pence, stood up to Trump, and Karl tells their story well. But when Karl states “the system held. Democracy prevailed,” the image of the raptors in Jurassic Park testing the fences for weaknesses comes to mind. “They remember,” the caretaker says. And as Trump tells Karl, Jan. 6 remains a day he wishes to remember fondly forever. Why shouldn’t he? Only the smallest players have been punished. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other leading Republicans continue Trump’s betrayal of the nation by alleging that voter fraud gave Biden his victory. Unless Congress can reassert its power, investigate the events of Jan. 6, and punish all guilty parties, it is difficult to escape Karl’s conclusion that Trump’s lies about his loss, and the Republicans’ continuing admiration of his authoritarian leadership, will end up destroying the spirit and the conventions of American democracy.

Betrayal

The Final Act of the Trump Show

By Jonathan Karl

Dutton. 362 pp. $28

The problem with anti-vaxxers is what to do about them

The problem with anti-vaxxers is what to do about them

Every anti-vaxxer is a symptom. For some it’s a symptom of institutional mistrust, built over years or even generations; for some it’s misinformation-fueled mania, and a loss of the connection to reality. There’s always a reason.

The problem is what to do about them. Canada’s anti-vaccine population isn’t big, but it’s big enough to cause problems. There have been local incidents across the country: the harassment of restaurants, health-care workers, public health officials, hospitals, and most recently, Chapman’s Ice Cream. It’s a list of things we should value, right? But it’s not funny.

“I’m worried about the increased violent rhetoric coming from the anti-vaxx crowd lately, and I don’t know if giving it oxygen is the right idea, but it’s also making me a little uneasy,” says Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor at Queen’s University who specializes in the study of extremism. He referred specifically to the QAnon radical who has called for her followers to kill those who vaccinate children.

We haven’t seen escalation yet. But when I was in Brazil for the Olympics locals would say of street violence in Rio, things are OK until they’re not. That’s what this movement feels like.

“I mean, even farcical people, you know, they have fists and can carry baseball bats, right?” says Amarasingam. “It doesn’t matter that they’re morons. It’s a question of what’s their propensity for violence? And how do we secure the environment enough that they can be taken down if needed? This is where that whole notion of like stochastic terrorism comes into play, if you turn up the temperature enough for a large segment of the population, the odds go up that at least one of them will do something.”

The rhetoric has risen as vaccination has expanded, the widespread vaccination of five-to-11-year-olds is a big reason. For so many parents it is a relief; some still have questions, which is OK. They’re your kids.

But the truly anti-vaccine crowd is not just persistently and urgently misinformed; it has a feral element that is antithetical to a civil society. Storming the mall food court without a mask, or the Eaton Centre, or a Tim Hortons feels like a child playing D-Day, with a child’s imaginary heroic purpose, refusing to surrender. It can feel sad.

But the anger at the root is real, and whether it is mere propagandistic brain poisoning or merely the rage of someone in a world they can’t quite process, it’s there. In Windsor a young man allegedly put a homemade bomb in an assembly plant where he worked after he was suspended for not complying with a workplace vaccine mandate. The local failed People’s Party of Canada candidate, Victor Green — it is only mildly comforting that every PPC candidate was a failed People’s Party of Canada candidate — encouraged his followers to book children’s vaccine appointments and then not show up. Green claimed he had been hacked. Among other repellent ideas, the PPC is animated by anti-vaccine activism. It got 800,000 votes.

Public health had already faced threats and harassment throughout the pandemic. The city of Toronto created a specific and detailed security plan for each of its 500 clinics, and other public health units have, too: extraction plans, escalating scenarios, security. But you can’t put a cop at every clinic.

As with PPC voters, it’s like finding zombies in your midst. Public health officials wonder if there are COVID cases we’re not seeing because of how anti-vaccine citizens act.

“I think everyone has and that it is undercounted because of how hard they are to deal with,” said one Ontario public health official. “You have the garden variety unvaccinated person who is otherwise a normal member of society. They get COVID and the vaccine stops it from going everywhere. You get it in a ‘the vaccine is evil’ crowd, and their contacts are all unvaccinated. It’s similar but different to the religious communities, like Mennonites, where someone gets diagnosed on hospitalization, but then you hit a wall of silence.”

Anti-vaxxers they don’t answer the phone, or if they do, they won’t answer questions from contact tracers. They lie about onset dates, symptoms, or contacts, and some tracers look up the contacts while still on the call to see if they can determine if they’re real. Some anti-vaxxers deny having COVID, even as their breathing becomes laboured, even as the public health nurse on the other end calls 911 to send an ambulance.

“It’s cult thinking,” said one contact tracer, a public health nurse who works in the Hamilton region. “There’s no reasoning with some of them. They’re victims. It’s the only way to think of them if you want to have any empathy when you come out the other side. It’s sad. They’re scared and the emotion you see is anger.”

Symptoms. Meanwhile, again, the province keeps signaling sympathy to anti-vaxxers, starting with Premier Doug Ford. At some point, he should explain, in detail, why.

So what do we do? How do we live with people who are fundamentally anti-society, and don’t share the same reality? The United States is currently a handbook for what can happen if you can’t. Appropriate law enforcement, and more enforcement of public health regulations, should be a start.

“I think quietly vaccinating people who want to be vaccinated and moving on with our lives is kind of the best way to go about it,” says Amarasingam. “Changing minds ... I don’t think it happens on Twitter. I don’t think it happens by making fun of them. I don’t think it happens by counter protests. You know, nothing like that ever has worked and will never work here either. It has to happen interpersonally, with you and your doctor. It happens as they see people that they trust getting the vaccine and nothing happening to them, or their children getting the vaccine and nothing happening to them.”

Maybe, but unreality is a stubborn virus on its own. Every anti-vaxxer is a symptom: something broke and they were lost, but they are a part of our society, too. And it’s hard to know what to do about that.

It’s been a tense year of infighting for Democrats. And this might be as good as it gets.

It’s been a tense year of infighting for Democrats. And this might be as good as it gets.

Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) is one of eight House Democrats so far who have announced they will retire rather than run for reelection in 2022. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

By Ben Terris

November 12, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EST

Of all the Democrats retiring from the House of Representatives, Rep. John Yarmuth almost certainly does the most drinking on the job.

“My default bourbon is Woodford Reserve,” the Kentucky congressman said, pouring himself a Dixie cup full of whiskey during a 2:30 p.m. interview in his Capitol Hill office. “But if I had one drink of bourbon left in my life, it would be Elijah Craig 23.”

Back when Donald Trump was president, “I used to say cocktail hour in Washington began at 11:30 a.m.,” said Yarmuth, who serves as chairman of the House Budget Committee and also co-chairs the House bourbon caucus.

These days, Yarmuth has an easier time making it until afternoon. But the fragile state of American democracy has him “freaked out” and having to work alongside MAGA provocateur Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) on the Budget Committee has been dispiriting. “She’s a nutjob,” he says.

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Meanwhile, resentments within Yarmuth’s party have reached collar-tugging temperatures. Democrats have spent the balance of President Biden’s first term fuming at Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who have used their positions at the choke point of the party’s narrow Senate majority to (thus far) thwart the passage of liberal policy proposals such as lowering the cost of prescription drugs, implementing a new paid family leave program and moving away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy.

The climate in the House, where Democrats also “enjoy” a slim majority, has also made tempers short. Recently, Yarmuth says he watched as Rep. John Garamendi, a moderate Democrat from California, and Rep. Mark Pocan, a liberal Democrat from Wisconsin, “nearly came to blows” over the party’s struggles to pass Biden’s agenda.

“John was basically telling Mark to get his head out of his ass,” Yarmuth said, paraphrasing. “He was saying, ‘You’re not accomplishing anything, you’re stupid.’ ”

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(“It was a passing moment,” Garamendi told The Washington Post, saying that he and Pocan “remain very close friends.”)

Still, “it was scary,” said Yarmuth.

There are a couple of ways members of Congress can cope with a bad work environment. They can drink — Yarmuth has tried that one. They can also simply leave, which is what he’s trying next.

It’s not just him. Eight Democrats have chosen not to run for reelection in 2022, with more probably on the way. Announcements tend to pick up “usually after Thanksgiving and Christmas,” says Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), who made her own retirement announcement in April.

Bustos told The Post she can’t even count on her two hands the number of her colleagues who have said they wished they were retiring. Yarmuth said he knows of members quietly planning their exits — and “assumes” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi might be one of them. (“She hasn’t said anything to anyone,” he added. In a statement to The Post, Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill neither confirmed nor denied Yarmuth’s assumption, saying simply: “The Speaker is not on a shift. The Speaker is on a mission.”)

What to make of the impending Democratic departures? In some ways, it’s part of a natural cycle. There are retirements in every session, usually around 22 of them when you include both parties. (Currently there are four Republicans who say they won’t be running again.) Some members had planned on retiring after 2016 but put it off because of Trump’s win. And many of them are from districts that will safely remain in Democratic hands.

Still, members of Congress — especially speakers, or in Yarmuth's case, chairmen of powerful committees— don't usually leave their jobs unless they are pushed out by voters, or feel like they are about to be relegated to permanent minority status. Like a Waffle House closing ahead of a hurricane, the Retiree Index can be a sign for Congress watchers — along with ominous polling and a surprise loss in what was supposed to be a safe election (in this case, Democrat Terry McAuliffe's defeat in the Virginia governor's race) — that the majority is about to get walloped. Some members may be getting out before their work situations go from intense to intolerable.

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Not that any of the retiring Democrats were willing to go there. Those who spoke to The Post said they want to spend more time with their families, not that they were eager to spend less time with their fellow lawmakers. In any case, the returns on being a sitting Democrat in Congress seem poised to diminish in a hurry; those who stay on may soon pine for screaming matches over what bills to pass.

“If what happened in Virginia were to play out nationally we would lose 44 seats,” Bustos said, citing a tweet from David Wasserman, a senior editor at the Cook Political Report and an expert on congressional elections. “And that’s even before redistricting.”

“The prospect of being in the minority with Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House and Jason Smith as chairman of the Budget Committee — God, I could go down the list — is horrible,” said Yarmuth, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

A Democratic minority might feel especially helpless — even with one of their own in the White House. Democrats fear a Republican Congress would continue to court pro-Trump extremists, indulge paranoid theories about the former president’s political adversaries and tolerate attacks on democratic norms. Certainly, there would be no more hope of passing a federal voting-rights bill, a top priority for Democrats.

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“Democracy isn’t exactly on the march,” said Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.) who is retiring next year after three nonconsecutive decades of service.

As co-chairman of the House Democracy Partnership, Price has spent a lot of time working with other countries to help promote effective government. In recent years, the moral high ground has gotten a bit shaky. In 2019, he spent a few days in Ukraine, meeting with leaders of the country. At his elbow for most of that visit: U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who (unbeknown to Price) was soon to be a witness in the first impeachment trial of Trump.

With all that’s happened since then — the election falsehoods, the Jan. 6 insurrection, the second impeachment and acquittal — “Trumpism prevailing” and Republicans retaking control of Congress is “a very alarming prospect for the country,” Price told The Post.

With so much hanging in the balance, why leave?

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“It’s not very complicated for me,” said Price, who turned 81 in August. “I’m not getting any younger.”

“I’ll be 75 when my term ends,” said Yarmuth. “I don’t know how much time I have left.”

“My wife, Susan, and I have been empty-nesters for quite a while now,” said Rep. Mike Doyle, 68, a retiring Democrat from Pittsburgh. “I’m down here four days a week, and she’s back in Pittsburgh by herself. So we’ve been planning this exit. Susan has been planning it a lot earlier than I’ve been planning it.”

Price, Yarmuth and Doyle all considered retiring after the 2017-2019 term to spend more time with their families, assuming their farewells would coincide with a Hillary Clinton presidency.

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“At that point I would have felt confident about the way things were going,” Yarmuth said. Also: “It didn’t look like there was any prospect of being in the governing majority.”

When Trump won, they decided to stick around to fight. Yarmuth says he’s glad he did. As budget chairman, he’s getting his name on one, possibly two, of the most expensive spending bills in the history of this country. And so, once again with little prospect of being the majority, the decision to go out on top is easy.

It helps that he and Price leave behind safe blue seats for new members with fresh legs. The same cannot be said for Bustos, the fifth-term moderate who hails from Republican-leaning turf on the Illinois side of the Quad Cities and was one of only seven Democrats to win in a district that went for Trump last election. She, too, feels the urgency of this political moment: “Democracy is on the line,” she told The Post. “We have to stay and fight.” And yet her resignation means forfeiting any advantage she might have as an incumbent as Democrats try to hang on to her seat in 2022.

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“I don’t think I’m the only one who can win it,” Bustos said, waving away the notion that her retirement could make Democrats even more vulnerable than they already are. “I think you’re pretty full of yourself if you think that.”

In 2019, on the heels of the Democrats’ reconquest of the House, the party elected Bustos to lead the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on the promise that she could help her party maintain, or even grow, its majority because she knew how to win over Trump voters.

Then came the coronavirus. Then came the murder of George Floyd and the ubiquitous protests against police brutality. Political energy flowed to the Democrats’ activist wing, where there were passionate discussions about the persistence of racism and the need to shake things up at the systemic level.

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The lurch leftward put Bustos, 60, in a hard spot with all those ­middle-of-the-road voters she was supposed to be winning over.

“I got accused of being for defunding the police, and I’m married to the sheriff of our county,” she said. “I never said it, don’t believe it. But I got accused of that and it stuck.”

She is leaving Congress, among other reasons, because she just doesn’t like the job anymore.

“It’s important for me to love what I do,” she said. “The last two years were really, really hard.”

The coming years could be harder. Even as Democrats begin to notch some legislative accomplishments — such as this month's long-awaited bipartisan infrastructure bill, which will provide a trillion dollars for roads and bridges, broadband access, clean energy and public works — they remain haunted by a sense of inevitability about 2022.

The pandemic has persisted, as have complex disruptions to the global supply chain and the U.S. labor market that have confused and irritated consumers. Inflation is up, Biden’s popularity is down and monthly jobs reports have been up and down (currently: up). This volatility does not bode well for the party in power, especially one elected to bring a sense of calm. Much can change before next November, of course, but Democrats still will be contending with the possibility of newly gerrymandered districts, plus the drag first-term presidents tend to have on their party in the midterms.

In theory, the House retirees would like to believe voters would be so turned off by the Republican Party’s conduct that Democrats could hold the line.

And yet . . .

“You feel sometimes like it’s almost independent of their performance,” Price said of how voters evaluate the GOP.

The retiring Democrats do have some notes on their own colleagues’ performances to date.

“Where did we get the idea that, ‘If I don’t get my way, I bring the house down’?” said Price, who worries about his party’s ability to compromise.

Bustos called the “internal fighting” in their party “so counterproductive.”

Doyle lamented the obsession with social media. He thinks it has coarsened discourse in the Capitol.

Yarmuth said there are members of his party who “seem to be totally occupied with brand management.”

“That’s frustrating,” he said, “for someone who came here because he was interested in the legislative process.”

He’s leaving, eight terms later, as someone who is not uninterested in having a drink in the middle of the day, whether his party is in power or not.

“It’s my brand,” he said.

Yarmuth said he hopes he’ll be remembered as more than the whiskey caucus chairman with the well-stocked liquor cabinet, but also a lawmaker who helped get things done in Congress. That includes March’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that sent direct payments and unemployment benefits to people in a bid to stimulate the pandemic economy; and may eventually include another raft of Democratic spending in a reconciliation bill later this year.

Alas, matters of memory, history and legacy will not be his to decide. There is only so much a sitting congressman can control, let alone a retired one.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Rep. Cheri Bustos is in her fourth term in Congress. She is in her fifth term. This version has been updated.

New omicron variant stokes world fears, triggers travel bans

New omicron variant stokes world fears, triggers travel bans

People line up to get on the Air France flight to Paris at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, South Africa, Friday Nov. 26, 2021. A slew of nations moved to stop air travel from southern Africa on Friday in reaction to news of a new, potentially more transmissible COVID-19 variant that has been detected in South Africa. Scientists say it is a concern because of its high number of mutations and rapid spread among young people in Gauteng, the country's most populous province. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

BRUSSELS (AP) — The discovery of a new coronavirus variant sent a chill through much of the world Friday as nations raced to halt air travel, markets fell sharply and scientists held emergency meetings to weigh the exact risks, which were largely unknown.

A World Health Organization panel named the variant “omicron” and classified it as a highly transmissible virus of concern, the same category that includes the delta variant. The WHO suggested omicron could pose greater risks than delta, which is the world’s most prevalent variant and has fueled relentless waves of infection on every continent.

Early evidence suggests an increased risk of reinfection compared with other highly transmissible variants, the WHO said. That means people who contracted COVID-19 and recovered could be subject to catching it again.

In response, the United States and Canada joined the European Union and several other countries in instituting travel restrictions on visitors from southern Africa, where the variant brought on a fresh surge of infections and is thought to have originated.

The White House said the U.S. will restrict travel from South Africa and seven other countries in the region beginning Monday. It did not give immediate details except to say the restrictions will not apply to returning U.S. citizens or permanent residents, who will continue to be required to test negative before their travel.

Medical experts, including the WHO, warned against any overreaction before the variant was better understood. But a jittery world feared the worst nearly two years after COVID-19 emerged and triggered a pandemic that has killed more than 5 million people around the globe.

“We must move quickly and at the earliest possible moment,” British Health Secretary Sajid Javid told lawmakers.

Omicron has now been seen in travelers to Belgium, Hong Kong and Israel as well as in southern Africa.

There was no immediate indication whether the variant causes more severe disease. As with other variants, some infected people display no symptoms, South African experts said. The WHO panel drew from the Greek alphabet in naming the variant omicron, as it has done with earlier, major variants of the virus.

Even though some of the genetic changes appear worrisome, it was unclear how much of a public health threat it posed. Some previous variants, like the beta variant, initially concerned scientists but did not spread very far.

The 27-nation European Union suspended air travel from southern Africa, and stocks tumbled in Asia, Europe and the United States. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 1,000 points before an afternoon uptick. The S&P 500 index was down 2.3%, on pace for its worst day since February. The price of oil plunged nearly 12%.

“The last thing we need is to bring in a new variant that will cause even more problems,” German Health Minister Jens Spahn said. The member nations of the EU have experienced a massive spike in cases recently.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said flights will have to “be suspended until we have a clear understanding about the danger posed by this new variant, and travelers returning from this region should respect strict quarantine rules.”

She warned that “mutations could lead to the emergence and spread of even more concerning variants of the virus that could spread worldwide within a few months.”

Belgium became the first European Union country to announce a case of the variant.

“It’s a suspicious variant,” Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke said. “We don’t know if it’s a very dangerous variant.”

It has yet to be detected in the United States, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease expert. Abroad, the variant “seems to be spreading at a reasonably rapid rate,” he told CNN. And although it may be more transmissible and resistant to vaccines than other variants, “we don’t know that for sure right now.”

President Joe Biden said the new variant “should make clearer than ever why this pandemic will not end until we have global vaccinations.” He called anew for unvaccinated Americans to get their widely available doses and for governments to waive intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines so they can be more rapidly manufactured around the world.

Showing how complicated the spread of a variant can be, the Belgian case involved a traveler who returned to Belgium from Egypt on Nov. 11 but did not became sick with mild symptoms until Monday, according to professor Marc Van Ranst, who works for the scientific group overseeing the Belgian government’s COVID-19 response.

Israel, one of the world’s most vaccinated countries, announced Friday that it also detected its first case of the new variant in a traveler who returned from Malawi. The traveler and two other suspected cases were placed in isolation. Israel said all three were vaccinated, but officials were looking into the travelers’ exact vaccination status.

After a 10-hour overnight trip, passengers aboard KLM Flight 598 from Capetown, South Africa, to Amsterdam were held on the edge of the runway Friday morning at Schiphol airport for four hours pending special testing. Passengers aboard a flight from Johannesburg were also being isolated and tested.

“It’s ridiculous. If we didn’t catch the dreaded bug before, we’re catching it now,” said passenger Francesca de’ Medici, a Rome-based art consultant who was on the flight.

Some experts said the variant’s emergence illustrated how rich countries’ hoarding of vaccines threatens to prolong the pandemic.

Fewer than 6% of people in Africa have been fully immunized against COVID-19, and millions of health workers and vulnerable populations have yet to receive a single dose. Those conditions can speed up spread of the virus, offering more opportunities for it to evolve into a dangerous variant.

“This is one of the consequences of the inequity in vaccine rollouts and why the grabbing of surplus vaccines by richer countries will inevitably rebound on us all at some point,” said Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at Britain’s University of Southampton. He urged Group of 20 leaders “to go beyond vague promises and actually deliver on their commitments to share doses.”

The new variant added to investor anxiety that months of progress containing COVID-19 could be reversed.

“Investors are likely to shoot first and ask questions later until more is known,” said Jeffrey Halley of foreign exchange broker Oanda.

In a sign of how concerned Wall Street has become, the market’s so-called fear gauge known as the VIX jumped 48% to a reading of 26.91. That’s the highest reading for the volatility index since January, before vaccines were widely distributed.

The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discouraged any travel bans on countries that reported the new variant. It said past experience shows that such travel bans have “not yielded a meaningful outcome.”

Yet much of the world moved to shut down or severely restrict contact with travelers from southern Africa.

The U.S. restrictions will apply to visitors from South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique, and Malawi. The White House suggested the restrictions will mirror an earlier pandemic policy that banned entry of any foreigners who had traveled over the previous two weeks in the designated regions.

The U.K. banned flights from South Africa and five other southern African countries at noon on Friday and announced that anyone who had recently arrived from those countries would be asked to take a coronavirus test.

Canada banned the entry of all foreigners who have traveled to southern Africa in the last two weeks.

The Japanese government announced that Japanese nationals traveling from Eswatini, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Lesotho will have to quarantine at government-dedicated accommodations for 10 days and take three COVID-19 tests during that time. Japan has not yet opened up to foreign nationals. Russia announced travel restrictions effective Sunday.

The WHO’s technical working group says coronavirus infections jumped 11% in the past week in Europe, the only region in the world where COVID-19 continues to rise.

The WHO’s Europe director, Dr. Hans Kluge, warned that without urgent measures, the continent could see an additional 700,000 deaths by the spring.

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Associated Press writers Lorne Cook in Brussels, Colleen Barry in Milan, Pan Pylas in London, Jamey Keaten in Geneva, Mike Corder in The Hague, Dave McHugh in Frankfurt, Carley Petesch in Dakar, Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg and Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.