What Happened Today: March 28, 2022
White House cleans up gaffes in Europe; Adderall prescriptions surging; IS shooting in Israel
The Big Story
President Biden returned to Washington, D.C., last night after his remarks about President Putin, made Saturday during a speech in Poland, unwound some of the progress he had accumulated over several days of meetings last week in Europe—a trip meant to unify NATO leaders into a cohesive block with one message around a shared energy and security agenda. The comment that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” along with earlier comments that Putin was “a butcher,” came from President Biden after he had spent the day with refugees and armed forces in Poland. Biden staff as well as other NATO leaders immediately walked Biden’s comments back by saying that the president wasn’t declaring his ambition to seek a regime change at the Kremlin.
Biden’s poorly worded zealousness was the third instance during his European swing in which White House staffers had to quickly spring into action to clarify what Biden had said, including the president’s assertion during a talk in Brussels on Thursday that Putin’s use of chemical weapons would force the United States to respond “in kind,” which prompted his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, to de-escalate the administration’s rhetoric, clarifying that the United States would not use its chemical weapons but would simply “respond accordingly.” On CNN, Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, dismissed the president’s gaffe about Putin as an inconsequential if “principled human reaction” to the emotional stories that Biden had heard that day in Poland. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz went further by essentially speaking on Biden’s behalf, saying the regime change “is not the aim of NATO, and also not that of the American president.”
In The Back Pages: The CDC Extending the Mask Mandate on Planes Indicates It Wants Permanent Masking
The Rest
→ With only 26% of Americans believing Biden has the capacity to manage a crisis or the military, according to an Associated Press poll taken before he left for Europe last week, Biden’s several gaffes might further erode the United States’ confidence in Biden, just as midterm campaign season picks up in earnest, without Biden having delivered on his campaign promises on national healthcare, progressive taxation, and relief on either student or medical debt. Today, Biden is sending Congress a new budget proposal that includes a $2 billion bump for federal law agencies and $30 billion that would spread out over the next 10 years to expand crime-prevention efforts—a decidedly sharp contrast against the defund-the-police advocates in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that establishment Democrats continue to criticize as toxic, especially for the key rural voters likely to determine both the midterm and 2024 elections. “It’s hard to sink lower than we are right now,” the Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee said recently, about rural sentiments about his party. “You’re almost automatically a pariah in rural areas if you have a D after your name.”
→ To the remaining 160,000 people still in his city, Vadim Boichenko, the mayor of the Ukrainian southern port town of Mariupol, said today residents will need to “completely evacuate” as the Russian forces continue a brutal attack there that began soon after the Russian invasion. Negotiators for both nations are set to resume peace talks in Turkey this week, with a focus on the humanitarian corridors that have failed to remain open long enough for citizens in places like Mariupol to evacuate war zones safely. After earlier reports said an air strike on a theater in Mariupol where some 1,000 residents were seeking shelter hadn’t resulted in significant casualties, Ukraine officials over the weekend put the total number of dead in the attack at around 300 people. The attack on the theater is now widely recognized as a war crime: The building had been marked with the word children in large white letters before it was struck by the Russians (and had been “crammed with families with young children” according to The Washington Post). Today, Boichenko said the city was essentially lost. “Not everything is in our power. … Unfortunately, we are in the hands of the occupiers today.”
→ The venture-capital-accelerated degradation of the healthcare industry continued during the COVID-19 pandemic as relaxed federal regulations on treating patients remotely allowed virtual treatment startup companies like Cerebral to prescribe Adderall and other stimulant prescriptions to tens of thousands of patients, sometimes after video conference visits that lasted only 30 minutes. That push to get stimulants into the hands of Americans asking for it led to a 10% bump in Adderall prescriptions last year, with 41 million Americans now taking the Schedule 2 substance. Cerebral has taken in almost $500 million from various venture capital firms, a massive influx of investor capital that has allowed it to aggressively pursue advertising on social platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where users encounter marketing campaigns that describe ADHD symptoms as “losing track of time” and “mood swings.”
→ If you’re spending dozens of hours a week on TikTok and Instagram but would prefer to use cigarettes to nip those “mood swings” in the bud, you might not be able to get your fix at Walmart for much longer, as the big-box behemoth is removing tobacco products from some of its stores in New Mexico, Florida, California, and Arkansas. Replacing the tobacco shelf space with more self-check out counters and expanded candy offerings, a Walmart spokesperson said today that this will help Walmart “meet our customers needs while still operating an efficient business,” a move that’s less about concern for smoker safety than the fact that cigarette sales require a staff member to access the age-restricted product, an expense of employee time that eats into the profit. Moreover, Walmart is making a big push to compete against retailers like Target that have prioritized healthcare offerings, expanded pharmacies, and clinic screenings, as there’s a great deal of money to be made treating American illness.
→ Readers of Wikipedia are frantically obtaining copies of the Russian-language version of the online encyclopedia, with 105,889 downloading the massive trove of Wiki entries for offline use this month alone—an increase of more than 4,000% compared to downloads in January—amid fears that the Kremlin will censor part or all of Wikipedia as part of its ongoing propaganda effort to drum up support at home for its Ukrainian invasion. Russian officials have previously turned off access to Wiki pages and recently threatened the same with a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation that criticized the entries on the conflict in Ukraine. The foundation plans to keep the pages active regardless, it said in response: “We will not back down in the face of efforts to censor and intimidate.”
→ One male and one female Israeli police officer were killed, and several others wounded, in a shooting attack in Hadera yesterday. The attackers were subsequently shot and killed by nearby restaurant patrons, who law enforcement said in a statement were members of “an Israeli counterterrorism force.” The Islamic State terrorist group took responsibility for the attack, the first for the group in Israel since 2017, just as Yair Lapid, Israel’s foreign minister, was leading a historic summit in southern Israel with four Arab states—United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Egypt—on national security issues. “All the foreign ministers condemned the attack,” Lapid said. “Israel will uncompromisingly fight terrorism, and we will resolutely stand together with our allies against anyone who tries to harm us.”
→ A Virginia judge’s decision last week sided with a group of 12 families that had sued the state for a law that allowed parents of Virginia students to send their kids to schools without masks at their own discretion. Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order in January that allowed the rule to go into effect this month, but the families said the law made school unsafe for their children who suffer from a variety of health conditions that leave them more vulnerable to illness, COVID-19 included. The judge’s decision is temporary, insofar as the injunction only pauses the mask rule for the schools where the students attend while the case continues in Virginia courts. If the parents do win, it’s likely to become a blueprint legal strategy for other states where families of students can challenge mask policies that have left the choice of masks up to parents rather than the school or local officials.
→ Quote of the day: “I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,” Bill Gates said recently while promoting a new book about how to combat climate change. “You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time.”
The CDC Extending the Mask Mandate on Planes Indicates It Wants Permanent Masking
In his Substack, “Unmasked,” Ian Miller asks why the CDC continues to enforce a mask mandate on public transportation and in other public spaces, even as the evidence continues to mount that the policies are based on data that contradicts those very policies. Read the below excerpt from “Unmasked,” printed with permission, and follow below for the complete post.
At this point, I don’t think it’s a secret that the CDC wants permanent masking.
After they disregarded years of pre-pandemic guidance on mask wearing by the general population, the CDC has released increasingly poor studies, supported by the NIH’s disgraceful attempt at science.
In order to defend two years of the unequivocal global failure of masks and mask mandates, they’ve had to resort to desperate justifications for their embrace of pseudoscience.
Recent polling by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee proved how damaging endless COVID-19 policies have become to left leaning politicians:
Unsurprisingly, about two weeks later, the CDC updated their community transmission metrics, which dramatically lowered the perceived risk throughout the United States.
Seemingly overnight, in the CDC’s estimation, the vast majority of the United States went from COVID-19 being seen as a dangerous threat where universal masking was an urgent requirement, to an equally vast majority living in a “low to medium” transmission zone.
Even the CDC’s own press release announcing the change specifically mentioned that 90% of the population lived in a low-medium risk area, according to their own inexplicable metrics.
The Science™ changed, apparently!
Except for in one particular area:
On January 29, 2021, CDC issued an Order that required face masks to be worn by all people while on public transportation (which included all passengers and all personnel operating conveyances) traveling into, within, or out of the United States and U.S. territories. The Order also required all people to wear masks while at transportation hubs (e.g., airports, bus or ferry terminals, train and subway stations, seaports, U.S. ports of entry, and other locations where people board public transportation in the United States and U.S. territories), including both indoor and outdoor areas.
Masks are still required on planes, at airports, and on other forms of public transportation, according to the same CDC that just said that 90% of the U.S. population live in a low-medium risk area for COVID-19.
Here’s how the current community transmission map looks:
A number of states are entirely green—Utah, Colorado, Illinois, New York, Maryland, South Carolina, Washington, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, D.C.
Others have only a few counties in the “medium” risk category—Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, California, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina.
As of March 17, out of over 3,000 counties in the United States, only 60 were currently in “high” transmission zones. And that’s despite the issues with hospital utilization in rural areas (which are so numerous they’ll require an entirely separate post) that render the guidelines essentially useless for many parts of the country.
In any case, those 60 “high” transmission counties make up a grand total of 0.47% of the U.S. population.
Roughly 329,459,235 people are living in counties that are in low-medium risk areas.
Here’s how that disparity looks visually:
And even in the high-risk zones, hospitalizations, which we’re told are the most important metric to focus on in the era of mass vaccination, are often remarkably low.
For example, Colquitt County, Georgia, has 0.70% of inpatient hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients but is classified as a “high” risk county. Also, two counties in Arkansas, Ashley and Chicot, are “high” risk, with 1.70% of inpatient hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 positive patients.
In those counties where 1% to 2% of hospital beds are being used by those with a positive COVID-19 test, the CDC recommends the below mitigation measures.
The left column describes personal “protections,” while the right column are their policy recommendations for local governments.
Yes, you’re reading that correctly; an area with 0.70% of inpatient beds occupied by COVID-19 patients should “implement healthcare surge support as needed” and “maintain improved ventilation in public indoor spaces.”
Oh and, it bears mentioning that several counties in highly vaccinated Maine, such as Washington County, where 81% of the population is vaccinated, are also in “high transmission” zones where the CDC recommends distributing and administering vaccines “to achieve high community vaccination coverage.”
Absurd metrics and policy guidance aside, what is the possible justification for maintaining mask mandates for airplanes and transit when 99.53% of the country is in a low to medium transmission zone?
How can the risk possibly get lower than this?
What are they hoping to accomplish?
Read the rest here:
Your consistent hyper-negative focus on President Biden's handling of the US and global response to Russia's war on Ukraine betrays a bias that I find distortive, frustrating, and frankly disappointing. When he speaks plainly in words not sufficiently politically or diplomatically filtered, manicured, or neutered, you cast him asunder; neglecting to point out his studied, steady, and increasingly effective stewardship of this high stakes, unprecedented situation (yes, nukes are in play). Yellow journalism is easy. Work harder please.