Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of December 6, 2021
The Lead
We don’t need universal booster shots. We need to reach the unvaccinated.
This is putting into words what I can’t seem to be able to express (h/t Stadler). The thing that’s important that we’ve lost track of is preventing hospitalizations, not just getting the disease. Still though, if the booster is an option, I don’t think it’s bad to take that option (as I will as well). There are just more important things
Given that protection against serious illness is still strong from the original two doses of the mRNA vaccines, the data simply does not show that every healthy adult should get a booster. Indeed, the push for boosters for everyone could actually prolong the pandemic: The campaign includes exaggerated accounts of the waning efficacy of the vaccines, giving the public — including the vaccine-hesitant — reason to think that the shots are less effective than originally advertised. And promoting and distributing booster shots distracts officials and health-care providers from the far more important task of reaching vaccine holdouts and vaccinating children. It’s striking, for instance, that the new nine-step White House plan responding to the omicron variant emphasizes “boosters for all adults” — it’s in the No. 1 position — but includes no explicit step to improve immunization rates among unvaccinated American adults.
The fact is that existing vaccines are extraordinarily effective, even over time. During the last few months, studies in New York and North Carolina, which together included more than 17 million adults, found that recipients of mRNA vaccines — specifically Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech — maintained protection of about 90 percent against moderate to severe disease or hospitalization even six to eight months after vaccination. This is consistent with other data showing that the vaccines induce strong memory immune responses that contribute to long-term protection. Effectiveness against any symptomatic disease (that is, mostly mild) after two doses in both studies remained around 70 percent for the Pfizer vaccine and 80 percent for the Moderna vaccine. (After five months, the effectiveness of the single-dose Johnson and Johnson vaccine was lower than that of the mRNA vaccines but, at about 65 percent, was still similar to the results reported in the original effectiveness studies.)
So what should we aim for?
The only strategy that will defeat the coronavirus is vaccinating the unvaccinated, wherever they live. The current focus on boosting can interfere with implementing that strategy even in wealthy countries, and it delays vaccination of people in lower-income countries. Those who have not yet been vaccinated remain unvaccinated for different reasons, and it’s wrong to assume that they are all unreachable. The doses contemplated for use as boosters surely would do far more good if they were used to immunize unvaccinated, vulnerable people, whether in the United States or abroad. [Washington Post]
Good journalism/Cool shit
Democrats’ Bill Would Go Far Toward ‘Patching the Holes’ in Health Coverage
Medicaid expansion! Larger marketplace subsidies! More Medicaid to mothers! This is good. [New York Times]
Omicron’s Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios
Some actual positivity instead of just straight fearmongering:
Given that this enemy cannot be vanquished, we’d all stand a better chance at survival if it were armed with a slingshot rather than a cannon. Doctors from South Africa and Israel have said that cases of Omicron seem to be less serious than Delta, so far. Zero severe cases or deaths have been reported among the nearly 60 confirmed cases in the European Union. But the data are very limited and prone to bias. Fewer than 250 cases have been reported worldwide, and the plurality of them are from South Africa, where a younger-than-average populace might be less susceptible to COVID complications in general.
If Omicron continues to show signs of being milder than Delta, that’s good news, of course. But if it also turns out to spread more quickly than Delta, that could be great news. When two variants are circulating, the one that infects more people more quickly will tend to dominate, said Samuel Scarpino, of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. That variant could win out either because it replicates more quickly in its human hosts and spreads more efficiently between them—that is, it’s more transmissible—or because it more deftly evades the immunity we already have. [The Atlantic]
Sports hot takes
How Soccer Lost America (Then Got It Back)
So good from Phillips on the fall and rise of American soccer:
In a real sense, then, world football was the place where America encountered the horizon of its own influence. It is unsettling, if you are the king, to see the mountain where your kingdom ends; I think that’s how soccer felt to many Americans. Past this line you do not call the shots. Maybe you’ve noticed that nationalism has a way of translating masculine insecurity into aggression; maybe you’ve noticed that sports tends to be the venue where masculine insecurity goes to protect and reassure itself. For a certain type of American man—say, the type who would very much like to get the attention of a roomful of eighth-grade boys by barking “All right, girls, listen up”; the type that drove almost all sports coverage before the internet, and still drives maybe two-thirds of it—it became necessary to define soccer as a contemptible other. Soccer had to be not just un-American, but un-American in ways that revealed the inherent superiority of American-ness, the untrustworthiness and effeminacy and shiftless, beret-wearing, welfare-state prissiness of the rest of the world.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate what a bizzaro-town reading of the sport this was at a time when soccer hooligans were sucking out each other’s eyeballs, right-wing populist groups were actively recruiting at English soccer grounds, bougie middle-class Europeans wanted nothing to do with a game they saw as violent and déclassé, piss-filled balloons routinely splashed down on traveling supporters, and Roy Keane existed.
And on the return:
Do you remember this era? It wasn’t that long ago. I guess it ended around 2006, though for a long time after that, and even to this day, tendrils of anti-soccer sentiment would sometimes unfurl in the more goateed corners of the discourse. At some point, those millions of soccer-playing kids started to grow up, MLS convinced people it wasn’t going away, Fever Pitch made it safe for rich people to like Arsenal, and improved communication technology made it easier to watch international games. The sport started to seem young and cool rather than alien and crypto-socialist. (Socialism also started to seem young and cool.) It became possible to support both the troops and Manchester United. The world turned, and if your boomer relatives continued to complain about Neymar, you could take it in stride, knowing that millions of hardcore soccer fans, on multiple continents, were complaining about Neymar at all times.
And the between years:
Things got better. But before then? Oh my God, the nonsense we endured. I speak as a fan; also as someone who used to go to an auto-repair place that played Jim Rome in the waiting room. They were good, honest mechanics and, I believe, had simply lost the remote. Anyway, it was carnage. Every sports columnist in America used to wake up twice a year and phone in a lazy, pandering anti-soccer rant, the main takeaway of which was always “I love leaving work at 2:30.”…
Hands. Are what separate us. From the animal kingdom. I cannot tell you how many writers made this argument during the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years. Thousands. Friends, I implore you. Here is a game that several billion people think is fun and exciting. Do not be tempted to learn about it. Respect the essential difference between yourself and a giraffe.
But really, you should read all of it. [The Ringer]
I still hate him. [NY Mag]
OK Computers: A Formal Apology to College Football’s Biggest Scapegoat
Sports heavy week! This time a retrospective on the BCS. [The Ringer]
Recipe of the Week
Black sesame mochi muffins! Mine were not nearly as pretty, but they’re still pretty tasty. Hint: don’t use cupcake/muffin wrappers, they don’t work! Second hint: maybe remember that you don’t have a food processor so that you don’t decide to hand grind all the seeds in a mortar and pestle….