Bad news. The day before yesterday, we had confirmation of 3 new variants of concern in the US. As of yesterday, we now have 4. Three of the 4 variants have just been confirmed in the last month. The new one yesterday is the South African variant.

What does this mean for

Americans?
1. If you have been lucky and been able to get away with being in gatherings and not wearing a mask up until now, your luck is about to run out. It’s time to take the public health guidance seriously and don’t get in large gatherings, especially indoors, and you need
to wear a mask.
2. We need to slow down the transmission of this virus or we are going to get yet more variants. I have fought against the suggestions by some that we should lock up the elderly & high risk individuals at home & then let everyone get back to normal and spread the
virus to get herd immunity for a year. It is a dangerous proposal and the proliferation of new variants is a consequence.
3. We need to get as many people vaccinated as soon as possible.
4. There are discussions that since schools have operated safely in the past (by and large,
they have), we should now bring students back for full in-person classes. This is a mistake for several reasons. First, our data that these decisions and the recent CDC report were based on was with the majority of schools in hybrid. The first rule of interpreting scientific
studies is that you can’t take the findings of one study under certain conditions and then say based on that we can expect the same results under completely different conditions. Full in-person classes will reduce distancing below the recommendation of any public health
organization in the world. Further, that data was based on the transmission characteristics of the D614 and D614G variants. The CDC predicts that in March, the B.1.1.7 variant will be dominant. Does that matter? Yes, we only have to look at the U.K. Though it is early and we
haven’t had the opportunity to study this new variant to the degree we would like, the U.K. Is telling us that distancing is even more important than with the prior strains. This is not the time for American schools to cut distancing in half. Further, the transmission
characteristics appear to be significantly different and there is some evidence that while previously schools did not contribute to community spread, with B.1.1.7, they may very well do so.

More from Government

This is a good piece on fissures within the GOP but I think it mischaracterizes the Trump presidency as “populist” & repeats a story about how conservatives & the GOP expelled the far-right in the mid-1960s that is actually far more complicated. /1

I don’t think the sharp opposition between “hard-edge populism” & “conservative orthodoxy” holds. Many of the Trump administration’s achievements were boilerplate conservatism. Its own website trumpets things like “massive deregulation,” tax cuts, etc. /2

https://t.co/N97v85Bb79


The claim that Buckley and “key GOP politicians banded together to marginalize anti-Communist extremism and conspiracy-mongering” of the JBS has been widely repeated lately but the history is more complicated. /3


This tweet by @ThePlumLineGS citing a paper by @sam_rosenfeld and @daschloz on the "porous" boundary between conservatives, the GOP and the far-right is relevant in this context.


This is a separate point but I find it interesting that Gaetz, like Roy Moore did In his failed Senate campaign, disses McConnell. What are their actual policy differences? MM supported taking health care away from millions, a tax cut for the rich, conservative judges, etc. /5

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