After Donald Trump negotiated our unforced surrender in Afghanistan and Joe Biden delayed implementing it a bit and then carried it out, the idiocy of getting out of Afghanistan has been made clear by the attacks at the Kabul airport yesterday, the bloodiest day since 2011 in our longest but least-bloody war.
Former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta put it bluntly: “Now we’re going to have to go back in and get ISIS.”
This isn’t hard. We’ve left twice the troops we’d need in Afghanistan as a permanent garrison in Korea for SEVENTY YEARS. If anything, stopping ISIS and al-Qaeda is even more important to our security. The only thing that has changed is that pulling the rug out from under the Afghan government and driving the Afghan army into despairing dissolution will now make it harder and bloodier to get back to where we were a couple of years ago.
Trump would have ignored reality and claimed that everything was fine and that he’d done the right thing no matter what the consequences turned out to be. We will now see whether Joe Biden suffered a temporary lapse of judgment in following through on the Trump surrender, and will recognize the mistake and do what our national security and common sense requires despite the isolationist mentality that has seized the nation. If not, the crisis of clueless bad judgment we thought had ended with the defeat of Donald Trump may well continue through another adminstration.
If we’d kept the American people better informed about the fact that in the 48 hours preceding yesterday’s attack we’d lost more American lives to COVID-19 than we had in the entire twenty years of the war in Afghanistan, I have a hunch that public opinion might have taken a different turn. If we stopped to reflect on the consequences of having nowhere at all in the region to use as a base for our own operations against al-Qaeda. ISIS, and their Taliban buddies, yesterday’s tragedy, the ongoing agony of the Afghan people, and the self-inflicted body blow we’ve taken not only to our prestige but to our credibility all over the world due to this bi-partisan blunder could have been avoided.
It’s too late now to save the lives of those who have died due to the combined stupidity of the Trump and Biden bugout obsession. But it’s not too late to stop things from getting worse.
Joe Biden needs to do what Donald Trump could never bring himself to do about anything: admit that he was wrong, bite the bullet, accept responsibilty like a man, and protect our country.
ADDENDUM: Apparently that isn’t going to happen. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says that the military advised President Biden to keep 250,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, a number which might have been enough in a support role to prevent the dissolution of the Afghan army and keep the Taliban and al Quaeda out of power. Mr. Biden denies that.
I see no reason for Gen. Miley to lie. Did the president misunderstand the advice he was given? Did it somehow not sink in? Did he forget it somehow? I’d prefer to think that he isn’t simply doing a Trump and substituting a reality he’d prefer for what actually happened. Even if the malicious claims that the Commander-in-Chief is in his dotage are true, a senile Joe Biden is still more competent than Donald Trump was on his best day. But even so, I’m beginning to about how much of an improvement the foreign policy of the new administration is going to be over the comedy act that preceded it. And I really wish that we had a viable alternative.
That’s the really scary part. Since 2016, we haven’t had a realistic and responsible alternative to the Democrats. The Republicans just aren’t a rational option, and I don’t expect them to become one any time soon. And that puts our nation- and the world, which depends on it far more than contemporary isolationists would like to think- in a difficult bind.
Month: August 2021
If I lived in Ukraine, Estonia, or Taiwan right now…
…I would be very, very nervous.
The United States has a military second to none. Nobody is even close. No country in the world could defeat us- if we had the will to defeat them instead.
It would be difficult right now to make the case that we could summon the will to much of anything. Two consecutive administrations, one of each party, has been naive enough to believe that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are not two sides of the same coin, and that the fall of Afghanistan would not give them once again an entire nation to use as a training and staging-ground from which to attack us. Yes, al-Qaeda is active elsewhere. But since the invasion of Afghanistan they haven’t had a whole country to play with. Today, they have Afghanistan back again.
There is no “Taliban 2.0,” They remain the same brutal outfit we kicked out of power twenty years ago. For all their talk of moderation, we will hear about the mass executions and atrocities again very soon. The Trump administation was naive and feckless and just plain clueless enough to think they could negotiate a deal with them and that they would keep their word. Mike Pompeo and company were so deluded that they even suggested that the Taliban would keep al-Qaeda in line and even fight them if necessary to keep them from using Afghanistan as a base again. But they’ve been using the Taliban-controled areas of Afghanistan as training bases for quite a while. The only reason the Taliban’s alter ego has not been launching terrorist attacks on the West of late is that they’ve been concentrating all their resources on defeating us in Afghanistan. Well, now they have.
The discussion below is between three journalists with extensive experience both in military matters and in counter-terrorism. Tom Jocelyn in particular has forgotten more about Aftghanistan than it would appear a great many of those who have been fashioning our foreign policy and military strategy ever knew. David French is a veteran of the war in Iraq as well as one of the sharpest political columnists we have. Steve Hayes, too, has been covering this stuff for a very long time. You are about to learn things we should have been hearing from the last three presidents. Instead, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have each focused their attention on assuring that this day would come, and that there was no way that it could be prevented. Ever since George W. Bush, the government of the United States has made it clear that its number one objective in Afghanistan was getting out. The objective of the Taliban, on the other hand, was always winning.
Not on a negotiated settlement. Not on power sharing. On winning.
I’ve written before about North Vietnamese Col. Bo Tin’s observation that his government and the Viet Cong planned all along to simply wait the Americans out, because democracies lack the will to stay in a long fight until the end. One of the most interesting parts of the discussion below is French’s explanation of why the Afghan army- and the South Vietnamese army, too- fell apart so completely and so suddenly. President Biden’s insulting statement that it “refused to fight” ignored the 66,000 casualties it had just taken before the collapse.
As French points out, something changes when the United States enters a war. The side we support knows that we’re the toughest kid on the block. They know that are soldiers are trained professionals, let at least in theory by competent officers. They know that they’ll have American air support on their side. The entire dynamic of a war changes. America’s allies believe that because we’re fighting beside them, they can win.
That belief is diminished when it becomes clear, as it did in both Vietnam and Afghanistan, that we aren’t fighting to win, but rather that our objective is simply to get out. As happened with the South Korean army in the face of the Chinese invasion during the Korean War and with the South Vietnamese army a couple of decades later, any army ceases to be an effective fighting force when it ceases to believe that it can and will win. American troops were able to step into the breach and turn the tide in Korea. The ROK army was able to believe again that with us at their side, they could win. The Chinese and the North Koreans were driven back. The war ended in, at worst, a draw.
Not so in Vietnam. Not so in Afghanistan. In neither case was it any secret that the United States was looking for a convenient exit, not for victory. In neither case did this reassure our ally. And there comes a point, as it did just before the fall of Saigon and again just before the fall of Kabul, that it sinks in that we don’t have their backs, that they are on their own, that we’re going to abandon them. And the lose the thing that motivates soldiers, the thing that the very intervention of the mightiest nation on Earth first gave them: hope. And when they lose that, the army collapses. It melts away. And it can all happen in a matter of days.
We remain the mightest nation on the planet. Nobody can match our power, or even come close. But even might as massive as ours is useless without will. And it has been decades since not only the world but thoughtful Americans have had such good reason to doubt America’s will.
We don’t even know how many Americans are in Afghanistan right now. We have told them to go to the airport in Kabul. We have also told them that we cannot guarantee their safety on the trip. And there are Taliban checkpoints everywhere that they will have to get through. Some won’t. And in coming days or weeks or, at most, months, the Taliban will be taking American hostages, and threatening to behead them if we don’t make humiliating concessions.
Having won the war, humiliating the United States will be their next objective. We don’t know yet when the next 9/11 will be attempted.
Certainly at this point it’s nearly hopeless to think that most of the Afghans who have put their lives on the line for us- the soldiers, the translators, the cooks, the secretaries, the teachers, the clerks- will be saved. Some will. But President Biden has shamefully disclaimed any American obligation to them. The Trump administration thought it could negotiate a peace with monsters who have no honor and whose word was worthless; the Biden administration could have denounced the betrayal, and if it exited at all done so in a deliberate, orderly fashion. Instead, the incompetence of two consecutive American administrations- arguably three- has doomed the people who risked everything to be our friends, and innocent people all over Afghanistan.
By the way, it’s no coincidence that the final Taliban offensive began on May 1. That, after all, was the day President Trump had set for our exit as part of a “negotiated settlement.” Today he praised the Taliban and their courage, claiming-falsely- that they’d been around for “thousands of years.” The plan has been to humilate the United States all along, and their goal was advanced by the fact that they were negotiating with a fool, a sucker.
Already the Chinese state media are tormenting the Taiwanese with the message, “You put your faith in the Americans. Are you watching what’s happening in Afghanistan?” American prestige is not all that has taken a beating from this. Our credibility is at an all-time low. The European Union seems to share in the impression that we have been building all over the world for decades that America simply cannot be trusted, that our word is no good, and that we will always betray our friends. Several European leaders have spoken of the need to make their security arrangements without depending on us. The process of alienating our allies, begun and earnestly pursued by the Trump administration, seems to have been vastly advanced by the Biden administration, and the hope of its friends that the comic-opera incompetence of the Trump administration had been replaced by something better and wiser has been deeply shaken.
No power on Earth can match the military might of the United States. Russia, China, and bad actors all over the globe are given pause by that power, and hesitate to provoke us because they only suspect, and are not entirely sure, that we lack the will to use it and to press our cause to final victory.
They are considerably surer tonight. No, I would not want to be a citizen of Estonia or Ukraine or Taiwan tonight. The realization that melted the hearts of they Afghan army is nagging them. Once again, we have proven to the world that while we have the might to keep our committments, we lack the will, and will always let our allies down. And it’s only a matter of time until Russia or China decide to take the risk and put that theory to the test.
Dispatch Live: Afghanistan from The Dispatch on Vimeo.
A truly warped concept of “freedom-” and ethics
Leaving aside the fact that nowhere in the Constitution, in the history of classic American political theory, in the law, or in any respected ethical or theological tradition is there a right to infect others with a deadly virus as a matter of personal freedom, the time has come to stop coddling people who permit and even excuse things like this.
We need vaccine passports, especially in schools; mask mandates where necessary (certainly including schools in areas of high transmission, if the schools are open at all) and those who find these to be violations of their own sensibilities should be invited to join Tucker Carlson and emigrate to Hungary or other truly authoritarian states. This is what you can expect of the kind of people with enough chutzpah and little enough ability to reason from (a) to (b) that they can claim to simultaniously be disciples of Ayn Rand and of Jesus Christ. What in God’s name have we come to when we value illusory, sociopathic “freedom” to selfishly refuse to take simple, common sense public measures above he lives of human beings? And yes, children can indeed get COVID- and get very sick and even die from it. The Delta variant is just as contagious as chickenpox or Ebola. We were on the verge of eliminating COVID in the United States. And now we’re letting the chance slip between our fingers.
A hard time to be a Cubs fan
My first trip to Wrigley Field, as I recall, was in 1957. I was seven years old. Dad took the whole family to the ball park for a double header with the Phillies which, if I remember right, we split.
Having watched baseball at Wrigley on TV for years (involuntarily; 1957 was the first year it actually caught my interest), I was in awe to see the place I’d watched in black-and-white for so long not only in living color but in person. I got a comparable thrill in my late 50s when the Cub coaches gave a hitting clinic for young fans before a game I attended, and I was allowed to fulfill a lifelong ambition and actually walk around on the field. Well, the outfield, anyway. It was amazing to see the place from the same perspective Billy Williams and “Moose” Moryn and Lee Walls and Andre Dawson had back in the day. When nobody was looking, I swiped a tile from the warning track. The idea was that if I ever proposed to the fanatical Cub fan I was dating back in Iowa, I would have it made into an engagement ring. It never happened, but it was a nice thought. I suspect that my ex-wife, though also a Cub fan, threw it away, still in the plastic sandwich bag I kept it in.
I was a Cub fan on the South Side. This was an interesting experience. Nearly all my schoolmates and the kids I played with were Sox fans. The aunt and uncle’s next-door neighbor was the engineer for the WCFL broadcasts of the White Sox games. When we went to visit Uncle Johnny and Aunt May every week, Mr. Swanson and I would always give each other a hard time. He got Dad and me into Comiskey Park one Saturday free to see the Sox play. I got a foul ball on the second pitch, and got to meet Sox owner Bill Veeck after the game. “So, son,” Veeck said. “Are you a Sox fan?” “Hell, no!,” I replied, or words to that effect. He threw back his head and laughed, as my embarassed father explained that he’d grown up across the street from the old Cubs Park on the West Side, where the team played before moving into Wrigley, and that Cub Hall of Fame catcher and manager Gabby Hartnett was a distant cousin of ours. They had a long talk about Veeck’s dad, who had owned the Cubs at one point. It was only later that it dawned on both of us that we’d forgotten to ask him to autograph the ball!
Sox fans hate the Cubs. It’s been said- and in many cases, I think it’s true- that given the choice between the Sox winning and the Cubs losing, Sox fans would prefer the latter. Part of the reason is class warfare. While working-class Chicagoans are divided in their allegience, generally depending on which side of Madison Street they live on, the Cubs have always been the more upscale of the two. There’s a story about a kid on the South Side who went to school one day wearing a Cubs can. “Why are you a Cubs fan?,” his Sox fan teacher asked. “Because my parent are,” he replied. “That’s not a good reason!,” she replied. “If your parents were a drug dealer and a prostitute, what would that make you?”
Without missing a beat, the kid replied, “A Sox fan?”
Wrigleyville is a neighborhood of small theatres, fashionable restaurants, and fern bars. It’s Yuppie heaven. Chicago’s affluent gay community is concenrated in the area of Wrigley Field. On the other hand, there used to be a tee-shirt that said, “I went to a game at Comiskey Park, and all I got was these bullet holes in my tee-shirt.”
Economics aside, Chicago has always been a Cubs town. The Cubs and the Sox have each won three World Series. The Sox have been in a grand total of six. The Cubs, on the other hand, have been in eleven. Historically, the North Siders have been a far more successful team. And of course, when Sox fans brag about having won a larger percentage of the World Series than the Cubs have, we point out that while we may have lost eight World Series, at least we’ve never thrown one.
Yeah. They play hard ball in this rivalry.
When the Sox won the pennant somehow in 1959, I was all set to root for the Dodgers in the Series. My dad talked me out of it. The Sox, he pointed out, were a Chicago team, and we should get behind them. So we rooted for the Sox. They lost.
Sox fans as a group, on the other hand, are traditionally jerks when the Cubs do well, and when the Sox got to the Series again in 1985 I rooted for the Astros. In 2006, when the Cubs played the Florida Marlins for the National League pennant, there were bars on the South Side where the drinks were on the house when the Marlins hit a home run. Sox fans, on the whole, hate the Cubs more than Cub fans hate the Sox. But there is no love lost either way.
I lived in the suburbs of St. Louis during the 1987, 1988, and 1999 seasons. I went to Busch Stadium just about every time the Cubs came to town (clergy get free general admission to Cardinals games). Each team won a division championship during that time, but the Cubs finished ahead of the Cards two of the three years I was there. Having been a Cub fan both on the South Side and in St. Louis, I can definitely say that I would rather be hated than patronized.
Cub fans tend to patronize Sox fans. We’ve certainly done a great job of patronizing them since 2015. Alas, while Theo Epstein managed to build our first world champion since my dad lived across the street from the old Cubs Park in 1908, he proved unable to maintain his success. I don’t know how much influence the financial fortunes of the Ricketts family had on his behavior, but we never did get a center fielder or a leadoff man to replace the departed Dexter Fowler after 2016. Gaping holes in the team went unaddressed for years; some of them have been there ever since. One of Theo’s personal rules was that the worst time to make a trade is when you have to, because it’s hard to negotiate well out of desperation.
It’s hard to object too hard about the one-year rental of closer Aroldis Chapman in 2016 even at the expense of prize prospect and future All-Star Gleyber Torres. After all, it’s doubtful whether we would have won the Series that year without Chapman. But when we sent Elroy Jiminez and Dylan Cease to the Sox for the mediocre Jose Quintana in a moment of desperation… well, in retrospect, there was no excuse. We squandered our impressive farm system without managing to repair the holes, and what we thought was going to be a dynasty turned out to be a one-and-done.
What remained of thr 2016 team was inconsistent and streaky. They struck out alot. They managed to win several division championships, but never got any further. And the Ricketts family was either unwilling or unable to spend the money to sign the available free agents, plug those holes, and get us back to the Series.
I’ve realized for a number of years that what happened this past week was necessary. The only way back to glory was to re-stock the farm system with prospects, and as much as Cub fans hate to admit this, the only way to get value in a trade is to give value. Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, and Javy Baez are among the most beloved players in Cub history. But each of them demanded more money in their new contracts than they were worth, money nobody is going to give them. That’s especially the case after the huge financial hit the Ricketts family took in their hotel business and other investments due to the COVID pandemic.
I love those guys, and I hate to lose them. I’ve actually had a couple of nightmares about the trades the last few nights. Like most Cub fans, I have a hole in my heart right now. I comfort myself with the strong chance that once he realizes that he isn’t going to get what he’s asking for elsewhere at least Rizzo will come back to the Cubs over the winter.
It hurts. But it was necessary. In place of the strikeout-prone El Mago, our shortstop will now be contact-hitter Nico Hoerner. As a result of the Kimbrel trade, we will have high-average contact hitter Nick Madrigal at second. These are exactly the kind of players the Cubs need. They will give us what Baez and Bryant did not: consistency. Future star Brenden Davis, an outfielder, will be coming up from Iowa to play at Wrigley next year. Pete Crow-Armstrong, the former first-round draft choice of the Mets who we got in the Baez deal, is another highly talented outfield prospect, as is Alexander Canario, a low-strikeout hitter whose mediocre batting average masks a stellar OBP. The Cubs have been addressing an area Theo neglected in the last rebuild- pitching- in recent years, and have a number of high-quality hurlers in the pipe. They got a couple more in this week’s trades. And Jason Heyward, who despite his defensive prowess has never lived up to his potential at the plate, will doubtless be gone after next year, taking his huge contract with him.
The wild-card in all of this is the improving financial situation of the Ricketts family and the amount of money they will save as a result of unloading Bryant, Baez, and Rizzo, and soon, Heyward. For the first time in years, the Cubs will be in a position to sign some free agents, perhaps including Rizzo. And taking that into consideration, given the improved look of the organization it won’t be many years before the Cubs are back on top. This rebuild will not take the ten years the last one did, or anything close to it. And this time, it won’t simply a matter of building a talented team. It will be a team built around contact hitters and offensive consistency, the very thing the Bryant/Baez era Cubs so conspicuously lacked.
In short, as depressed as Cub fans are right now, this had to happen. Perhaps it’s almost overdue. The remnants of the 2016 world champions were not going to win another world championship. Now the Cubs are doing what they have to do to build a team that can, and I truly don’t think it’s going to take that long.
But then, there’s the other thing.
I’ve never been exactly a fan of either New York team, but I’m still pulling for Rizzo and Baez. I have nothing in particular against the Giants; that rivalry cooled off decades before I was born. But I’m actively rooting for Kris Bryant. I doubt that more than one of them will be back, and I both expect and hope that it will be Rizzo.
I’m going to have a tougher time rooting for Kimbrel and Tempera. They weren’t part of the 2016 team, of course, and didn’t occupy the same place in our hearts Rizzo and KB and El Mago did. And they are, after all, playing for… that other team.
The shoe is on the other foot now. The Sox are well-situated for a run at another world championship, and will be for several years. The Cubs will be also-rans for at least a few years. That will be a hard to take as losing the Big Three this past week has been.
I’d find it easier to pull for the Sox if their fans weren’t such jerks about the Cubs. As it is, we’ll see what we will see. In the meantime. the Sox deserve their due. They’re a hell of a team, and despite their occasional obnoxiousness their fans deserve their turn to howl.
But before you know it, we’ll be back. The White Sox ascendency will only stoke the fire in our guts. So far, Chicago has only seen one Subway Series, in 1906. The Sox won that one in six games.
Here’s to a rematch sometime in the next five years. And a different outcome.
At this point, it’s a self-inflicted pandemic
Way back when the pandemic was first gathering steam, The Federalist ran a bizarre article by a doctor (a non-practicing, currently unlicensed dermatologist, as I recall) advocating the recruitment of young, healthy adults to voluntarily become infected with COVID-19 so as to defeat the virus via natural herd immunity– i.e., by getting a large enough percentage of the population infected, recovered, and theoretically immune that that virus couldn’t retain a footload in the population. The headline went further and actually advocated “chicken pox parties” such as parents often schedule to get their kids exposed to that harmless childhood disease! Clearly, the staff at The Federalist had no idea what they were talking about when addressing the subject of COVID-19! And they still don’t.
Neither, it seems obvious, does the Republican Party or the far right in general.
The article was so outrageous that Twitter temporarily suspended The Federalist’s account.While I suppose the guy who wrote it deserves points for thinking outside the box, it was a ridiculous idea because it overlooked three things.
First, while the death rate for COVID-19 isn’t huge (currently 1.8% in the United States, largely though not entirely restricted to the elderly, the obese, and those with underlying health conditions such as heart disease or diabetes), it was already one of the most contagious viruses we’d encountered from its very first iteration. It has become significantly more contagious with each mutation; the currently endemic Delta variant is about 50% more contagious than the Alpha varient, which in turn was about 50% more contagious than the original. The contageon of the Delta variant of the virus is approximately the same as that of chicken pox. In that sense, if in no other, the article in The Federalist corresponds to reality.
Fewer than two deaths out of a hundred doesn’t sound like much. But while the COVID minimizers have been so fixated on the mortality rate that they haven’t noticed it, COVID-19 has infected 34,672,690 Americans at last count, and killed more Americans than died in both world wars in only two years. The COVID pandemic (613,223 American deaths) is closing in on the 1918 Spanish Flu (675,000 American deaths) and perhaps even the the Civil War (likely 750,000, though only 620,000 are documented) as the deadliest event in American history, and in half the time it took the Civil War to get there!
BTW, the same system is used in computing deaths due to COVID as has always been used in gathering such statistics. Only where a person who had multiple causes of death would probably not have died except for their having COVID is it given as a “cause of death.” The lie to the contrary has been spread very widely and continues to be widely repeated.
But still, the radical right doesn’t see the problem. It’s still ignoring- and slandering- the CDC and people like Dr. Fauci. It points out that their advice keeps changing, apparently unable to follow the rather obvious point that the best available advice changes as we learn more about this new virus.
Only a few months ago, we seemed to be on the verge of having COVID on the run, at least in the United States. But human stupidity- and yes, sometimes simply a lack of information, or the bad habit many of us have formed of listening to crackpots rather than the experts- has torpedoed that. We spent all that time and effort “flattening the curve” until a vaccine was available. With the original virus, if we got to the point where 70% of the population had either been vaccinated or had the disease, we might well have reached herd immunity- the point at which there were not enough vulnerable people left for the virus to survive.
But that’s water under the bridge. With the emergence of the Delta variant and its vastly increased contageon, it would probably take 80%-90%. And that would be doable- if we could get 80% to 90% of the population vaccinated.
But after an initially positive response, the rate at which Americans are being vaccinated has hit a brick wall. The Biden Administration had hoped to have 80% of the country vaccinated by this point, effectively ending the pandemic at least in the United States. Instead, 49.8% of us are fully vaccinated, and 57.7% have had even one dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.
There is some good news. 77.8% of those over 75 have been vaccinated, as have 81.8% of those aged 65-74. 67.3 of those 50-64% are protected. But only 57.8% of those in their 40s have had both shots, but only 48.7% of those 25-39 have gotten the vaccine, as have only 48.3% of those 18-24.
Those most at risk of death because of age are mostly protected, though a significant minority remains vulnerable. We have no statistics to tell us how many of those suffering from health conditions ranging from obesity through diabetes through heart disease and compromised immune systems remain unvaccinated. We know that age and underlying medical conditions generally- though by no means always- are contributing factors in COVID deaths, so it isn’t surprising that immunization rates drop with age.
But that brings us to the second fatal flaw in the argument made by The Federalist article, one that seemingly has yet to sink in on the radical right: it is not only impossible but simply absurd to think of isolating either the unvaccinated elderly or the unvaccinated younger population from each other. It simply can’t be done. As long as fewer than 80-90% have either natural immunity or have been vaccinated, the virus will continue to circulate in the unvaccinated population and will continue to mutate into still more contageous forms.
The current outbreak of the Delta variant, which is more deadly as well as significantly more contageous, is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. I can’t quite bring myself to adopt the attitude many people with an otherwise rational attitude toward the virus have embraced that because it is almost exclusively the unvaccinated who are going to die, the next phase of the pandemic is “natural seletion in action,” killing only those whose own foolishness has left them vulnerable. For one thing, that isn’t true; there are many people who haven’t been vaccinated for logistical reasons, and a huge percentage of the unvaccinated publication has been confused by the propaganda and misinformation being spread by irresponsible people and media like The Federalist, Fox News, Breitbart, Newsmax, OAN, and the far-right blogosphere. Vaccine hesitancy is my no means the exclusive domain of the willfully ignorant. People who have been deceived by extremists do not deserve to die for it, or even to get sick.
A great deal of vaccine hesitency seems to be based on the fact that the CDC has only granted emergency authorization to the vaccines. For some inexplicable reason it has not yet permanently and definitively certified them as safe. That fact is hard to understand. At this point the evidence that the vaccines are safe is overwhelming. Not only have huge clinical trials been conducted with favorable results (contrary to the propaganda of #TeamVirus), but close to half of the American people have received them, almost entirely without ill-effects and with overwhelming evidence of their extreme effectiveness. Experts estimate that the Pfizer vaccine, for example, while over 90% effective against previous iterations of the virus, is still 88% effective against the Delta variant. But in actual practice, the “breakthrough cases” in which fully vaccinated people come down with even mild cases of COVID represent fewer than one-tenth of one percent of the vaccinated population. And even among those cases, death or serious illness is vanishingly rare. Clearly full approval of the vaccines is being held up by bureaucratic red tape, not by actual concerns about their safety or effectiveness. Up to a third of the unvaccinated population says that it would consider being vaccinated in full approval was given. There is no excuse for the delay. The CDC needs to get its case together and issue that approval. It is a public health necessity, and again, there is no reasonable doubt that it would be justified.
And while children rarely die from COVID, some do. Fewer than 15% of those under 18 have been fully vaccinated. Of course, the CDC has yet to approve the vaccination of children, either, although that approval is supposed to be close.
As long as we remain below the 90% threshold required for herd immunity, the pandemic will continue, even though its worst ravages will be restricted to those who have voluntarily refused the vaccine. They are correct in saying that they have every right to continue to refuse. But as the saying goes, one person’s right to swing his fist ends at the point of another person’s nose. There is no right to spread a deadly disease, or to put others at risk.
The third thing The Federalist article missed is that there is precedent for the sensible steps the government has taken to protect us from COVID, and that unlike “chickenpox parties,” they are actually known to work. Ever since George Washington ordered the compulsory vaccination of the Continental Army against smallpox, the armed forces have required their members to receive mandatory vaccinations against a range of diseases. And every school child has to be vaccinated against a great many viruses already. The same is true of private employers. There is nothing new about vaccine mandates, and it’s not only silly but intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise. There is no constitutional issue here; the matter is one of long-established precedent.
Quarrantines and lockdowns have a long history in America and other Western nations. They are reasonable and necssary public health measures which violate nobody’s rights. The ignorant may question their necessity, but when the evidence justifies them the government’s only responsible course is to issue them. And by the same logic, the government has every right and even the duty to require that people who can transmit a potentially deadly virus- and we now know that even vaccinated people who have mild break-through cases, as rare as they are, can do that- wear masks in close quarters indoors.
The CDC has recommended that due to the Delta variant outbreak spurred by the large percentage of Americans who have remained unvaccinated and made possible by their prevention of herd immunity, we all go back to wearing masks in such circumstances. We are mostly ignoring that advice. That is a tragic blunder that will cost lives. We are all sick and tired of this pandemic. But precisely for that reason, wouldn’t it make sense to engage in behavior that will get it over and done with rather than ignoring reasonable precautions and keeping it going?
For the same reason that quarantines and lockdowns are both constitutional and reasonable, so are “vaccine passports.” In my view, the government would be remiss in not making proof of vaccination mandatory for especially large gatherings of people, and especially for those who chose not to wear a mask. Again, there simply is no right to endanger somebody else’s life or health.
Finally, I recently came across a proposal that I think deserves serious consideration. It will, of course, be opposed by isolationists and “America First” types. Yet it is a perfect example of why that philosophy is not only misguided and foolish but hopelessly out of date. In the modern era, those two oceans no longer protect us from the rest of the world. Decry globalization as loudly as you want, but it’s an unavoidable consequence of modern technology.
The Third World is almost completely unvaccinated. There has been an outcry over the way the developed nations are “hogging” the vaccine for their own use. Certainly, any government has the health and safety of its own population as its first responsibility. But although I recognize that it would be hugely expensive and that we really can’t afford it, a strong case can be made that the United States should pay for vaccinating the world’s underdeveloped nations. I would argue that this is in our best interest for two reasons.
First, from a purely selfish point of view, as long as this virus is spreading and mutating unchecked anywhere in the world, it will continue to grow more deadly and more contageous. It doesn’t take much in the way of imagination to see the distinct possibility that a strain might develop against which our vacines are ineffective. In that case, only a fool would imagine that despite any and all precautions we might take, sooner or later it will manage to get into the United States. We will not be completely safe from this virus as long as it continues to spread and mutate anywhere,
Secondly, the international prestige of the United States s close to being at an all-time low. Though it increased somewhat with the election of President Biden, the damage to it done by his predecessor was massive and well-nigh incalculable. Though the Cold War is behind us, we remain in a struggle for world leadership and for the future of the planet with China, and to a lesser extent with Russia and with radical Islam.
I can think of nothing that would restore American prestige and strike a greater blow against the international influence of our enemies than saving the underdeveloped world from COVID. I don’t know whether do ing so would be practical and I do know that there are powerful economic arguments against it. But I also wonder how many aircraft carriers, sixth-generation fighters, and missiles we’d have to build at how great a cost to add as much to our national safety and security.
Good-will can be as powerful a weapon as the most advanced weaponry. We knew that once. Maybe it’s time to create some, if only because it’s in our own best interest.
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