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For the large majority of today’s podcast, our hosts discuss the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan and how it will affect domestic politics in the United States. Perhaps David summed up the conversation around the Afghanistan situation as succinctly as possible, “There’s no way to spin this as anything other than a direct American defeat.” Plus, short conversations about the state of COVID-19 and the new census data.
Show Notes:
I'm sorry I have to completely disagree with Steve's Monologue about presidential "leadership" and the supposed failures of the last three administrations. As much as I may respect President Bush character-wise, his administration was full of failures on foreign policy. It is such a selective memory to claim that he showed great leadership by getting us overextended in unpopular indefinite wars.
And it is very selective to talk about Osama Bin Laden's communications that we were weak because we wouldn't want to stay in a war and that we operate on four year cycles. Well didn't Osama Bin Laden and other Jihadists want us to chew up our resources by extending ourselves into expensive wars? Why isn't that mentioned when he tries to essentially say that the Bush years were the great leadership and everything following was feckless? And also why shouldn't we be willing to flip our foreign policy actions on a 4 year basis?? We aren't a dictatorship and we elect leaders for that precise reason. Joe Biden botched the pullout and everyone knows it. That does not change the fact that he inherited a ridiculous "peace" agreement with a home population that doesn't want the war. There should be no automatic continuation of foreign policy from administration to administration. That may be the way of the Taliban or of countries like China but not of the United States.
Can someone please help me understand something. I’ve heard Sarah say the same thing several times and it’s kind of surprising me. Why does Sarah keep expressing particular concern about how kids under 12 can’t be vaccinated? On this podcast she seems to express true bewilderment at the idea that masks won’t be allowed for 12 and younger Texas. And why doesn’t anyone else answer her with the data we have jn Covid in <12 year olds?
From a personal vantage point, I completely understand the gut wrenching fear and tragedy of young children falling seriously ill; but the facts we have make a very rational case for why children under 12 haven’t been approved for an experimental vaccine, and why not requiring masks isn’t downright cruel.
If you look at the CDC tracker, cases and deaths by age group, the younger you get the smaller the respective area under the curve. In the case of deaths, the graph isn’t even readable the line is so close to zero deaths/capita. (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographicsovertime)
All the data I’ve seen says that children, miraculously, are not even at the same order of magnitude of risk from COVID-19 as the rest of us.
The New England Journal of Medicine’s study of the modern mRNA vaccine in adolescents (12-18), doesn’t investigate effectiveness of the vaccine from infection as as a primary endpoint in the study. Why? From the Discussion section:
“The efficacy analyses were secondary objectives of the trial because of milder Covid-19 disease and a lower disease incidence among adolescents than among adults in the phase 3 trial... The number of documented cases of Covid-19 is too small to generate robust assessments of vaccine efficacy.” https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2109522
Why is it bewildering that young kids, especially receptive and dependent on social cues as they are still developing, not be required to wear masks when they do not seem at risk from the disease that prompted the very question?