What Happened Today: June 27, 2023
Wagner was on Russia's payroll; Sweden warms up to nuclear energy; Balaji on the big, bad vaccine debates
The Big Story
President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday confirmed what many have long suspected by detailing how the Russian government funded Wagner, the mercenary army that attempted a failed coup against the Russian military over the weekend. Previously, Putin had claimed for years that Wagner operated as an independent entity. But in his prepared remarks speaking from the Kremlin, Putin reversed course, saying Russia has given Wagner about $1 billion over the past year and an additional nearly $1 billion contract to provide food for the Russian military. “I hope that nobody stole anything, or didn’t steal that much—we will look into all this,” Putin said.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said on Tuesday that Wagner chief and Russia’s most wanted man, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had landed in Belarus, where Lukashenko offered him refuge as part of a negotiated settlement to end his weekend rebellion against Moscow. Prigozhin turned his 25,000-strong mercenary force against Russia’s army on Saturday—after, he claims, the Russian military chiefs with whom he’s had an ongoing war of words attacked some of his camps in a Friday evening air assault, killing 30 Wagner fighters.
In a move to bolster Russia’s internal security, it now appears that the Russian National Guard will be receiving tanks and artillery from Wagner, and that the group may be disbanded soon as part of the negotiated détente. In spite of these dramatic revelations, there is still speculation that the entire “coup” was a ruse by Putin to reposition Wagner forces while distracting the West. Time will tell.
In the Back Pages: The Right Way to Talk About Vaccines
The Rest
→ Number of the Day: 13,082
That’s how many new homes have been approved for construction by the Israeli government in the West Bank, smashing the previous record, with six months still left in the year. The number is almost triple the 4,427 approved last year while the center-left coalition led by Yair Lapid was in power. On Monday, U.S. State Department spokesman Matt Miller told reporters, “Settlements are an impediment to a negotiated two-state solution along 1967 lines, which ultimately we believe is the best way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Some see the approvals, including in the Eli settlement where four Jews were shot dead last week, as a response to that and other recent terror attacks by Palestinians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week after one recent attack, “Our answer to terrorism is to strike it hard and build our country.”
→ On Sunday in the small Sonnenberg district of East Germany, Robert Sesselmann, a member of the right-wing Alternative for Germany Party that has championed an anti-immigration platform and faces accusations of being antisemitic, won his race for district council. It is the first such victory for the party anywhere in Germany, unsettling Berlin’s political elite. A recent national poll shows the party as the second-most popular in Germany, suggesting more wins on the horizon.
→ In 2020, a janitor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute destroyed 20 years of chemical research that might have helped improve solar panel technology when he turned off a deep freezer containing samples when its “annoying alarms” wouldn’t stop beeping. Now the institute is suing his employer, Daigle Cleaning Systems, for $1 million in damages.
In May 2009, NBC News reported on a meeting in New York that was convened by Bill Gates and attended by Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller Sr., Ted Turner, Warren E. Buffett, George Soros, and Michael Bloomberg, at which they supposedly discussed the issue of global overpopulation. Stacy Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, told the United Kingdom’s The Times, “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different—maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal.” Gates has publicly expressed his belief that the global population needs to be capped at 8.3 billion. Apparently, Patricia Q. Stonesifer, the new CEO at The Washington Post, was also in attendance. Stonesifer helped found the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a board member of the Rockefeller Foundation. Of course, her editorial judgment will not be compromised by any of this. We’re certain of it. Keep democracy from dying in darkness, Patricia!
→ In the semiconductor wars, former Samsung executive Choi Jinseog is a regular Lando Calrissian. After leaving Samsung to set up his own consultancy, Jinseog was offered a contract by chipmaker Foxconn and apparently used his past connections to get proprietary information about Samsung’s chip-making plants for Foxconn to use while developing its plant in China. Choi is now sitting in a South Korean jail awaiting trial alongside five of his employees and one from Samsung. Allegedly, Foxconn paid his company an advance of more than $17 million for its work. Choi’s lawyer claims he’s innocent, adding, “What prosecutors allege was stolen has nothing to do with how to design or make chips. For instance, there are public international engineering standards to make cleanrooms and that's not something only Samsung has.”
→ Graph of the Day:
Hollywood may be headed the way of publishing and music as disruptive streaming services and the petite entertainment of video apps like TikTok and Instagram rapidly undercut studio revenues that may never return. According to a new Bloomberg analysis, “Net income at the largest U.S. entertainment companies has declined more than 60% over the last decade.” It’s not that there’s less demand, per say; it’s just that the model has changed so drastically, legacy companies like HBO, Warner Brothers, and Disney may never regain their former glory. If only all the competition could replace the dynamic, focused energy of the old studio system that produced Casablanca, North by Northwest, Jaws, The Godfather, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Goodfellas, Saving Private Ryan, Chicago, and all the other masterpieces they just don’t seem to make anymore.
→ Last Tuesday, the Swedish parliament made an interesting change to its decarbonization plans. Rather than aiming for “100% renewable” energy, it is now aiming for “100% fossil-free” energy, specifically reopening the door to nuclear power. The state-owned energy utility Vattenfall is considering building at least two new small modular reactors. This seems to reflect a growing sentiment in several nations to embrace nuclear power as the solution we’ve been looking for all along.
→ Malaria is back in the United States, for the first time in 20 years. While a number of Americans bring malaria back from vacation every year, there hasn’t been a case of domestic malaria in two decades. But according to the CDC, in the past two months four people in Florida and one in Texas contracted the disease without traveling. According to the CDC, the strain found in the five cases comes from a species of mosquito less likely to spread severe disease, but the agency nonetheless encourages people to take measures to reduce exposure to the little critters. Amazingly, in its reporting on the story, The Washington Post wrote, “Malaria is treated using medication that is generally widely available in the United States,” but refused to name the medication. Hydroxychloroquine.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Prigozhin Putsch by Vladislav Davidzon
The warlord’s abortive rebellion has exposed the hollowness of the Putin regime
The Biden Administration’s Antisemitism Statement Gets Worse by Armin Rosen
The Jewish communal strategy of looking to the Democratic establishment for protection faces another challenge, as the party embraces CAIR as its partner in fighting Jew-hatred
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The Right Way to Talk About Vaccines
Or we could just go on calling each other Hitler forever
You know who asks questions about vaccines? Students. Teachers. Researchers. Anyone who’s learning about biology asks questions about vaccines. We’re all born with immune systems, but we’re not born knowing how they work.
You know who else asks questions about vaccines? Nazis, supposedly. One must want to deny the Holocaust if you want to understand the evidentiary justification for mandatory injections. At least that is the claim being made by some of the people opposing open debate on vaccines.
Conversely, you know who’s also being called a Nazi? The doctor with a needle. They’re ostensibly the new Mengele. At least according to other people trying to draw an equivalence between U.S. pandemic policies and the Third Reich.
This is the quality of much contemporary discourse around vaccines. It’s low quality. But rather than argumentum ad Hitlerum ad infinitum, let’s take a deep breath, calm down, and think about a constructive path forward.
For now, COVID is over. But people are still arguing about it. Perhaps they should, because the censorship meant they couldn’t really argue during it.
The latest round of politicized tribal skirmishing kicked off earlier this month after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared on the influential Joe Rogan podcast and repeated some of his oft-made claims about the adverse health effects of vaccines. In response, the vaccine scientist Peter Hotez, himself a former guest on Rogan’s podcast, lamented the “awful” appearance and endorsed an article criticizing Spotify, the platform that hosts the show, for failing “to stem Joe Rogan’s vaccine misinformation.”
That’s how the battle lines were drawn by Hotez and his supporters: The good, responsible people are those who support censorship while the bad guys go around spreading ‘misinformation.’
Rogan had been stung by previous attempts to cancel his Spotify deal, so he responded assertively, offering to donate $100,000 to charity if Hotez would come on his show and debate RFK Jr. His donation was matched by dozens of people, including hedge fund magnate Bill Ackman, tech founder Jae Kwon, and venture capitalist Jason Calacanis, till the purse reached a total of $2.6 million — demonstrating a surprising level of counter-elite support for public debate on this topic.
Despite starting this fight, and despite his past appearance on Rogan, Hotez declined to engage. Instead, he retreated to MSNBC to give soundbites on how bad soundbites are. His backers in legacy media outlets likewise wrote pieces discussing how bad it was for non-experts to discuss vaccines outside the confines of a peer-reviewed publication… oblivious to the irony that they themselves were non-experts discussing vaccines outside the confines of a peer-reviewed publication.
So that’s where we’ve landed. Two tribes that just yell at each other from their own redoubts. As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m skeptical that this impasse gets resolved; I think it just gets worse. But let me nevertheless sketch out a way that it could be resolved, if we have the political will to pursue a better path forward.
First, I’m as pro-biotech as it gets. If you want legacy credentials, I have them. I hate listing this stuff, but here goes: I’m a PhD who taught bioinformatics at Stanford, was named to MIT’s TR35, published 20+ papers in genomics, co-founded a successful diagnostics company, and have profitably backed a wide variety of biotech companies from tiny startups to multibillion dollar unicorns.
Moreover, I was sticking my neck out to raise the alarm on COVID back in early 2020 when establishment journalists were appealing to authority and calling anyone who even mentioned it paranoid racists. I was calling for funding vaccines before most people even saw the coronavirus as a problem. And I believe that the mRNA vaccines used for COVID are an incredible technical achievement.
BUT, after three years of official misinformation, I completely understand why people are distrustful of the U.S. establishment on the pandemic. We’ve just seen too many Orwellian U-turns — from insisting that masks don't work to making them mandatory, from claiming the lab leak theory was crazy to admitting it’s possible — to take any assertion on faith at this point.
In God we trust; all others must bring data. Otherwise we’re in thrall to the other big thing Eisenhower warned about—not just the military-industrial complex, but the scientific-technological elite:
In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
After all, most people aren’t card-carrying scientists, but they are now very directly downstream of scientists making decisions on their behalf. It’s completely reasonable to ask questions before taking a mandatory injection — what happened to my body, my choice? And if you can’t question the decisions of professors that you didn’t elect, who have career tenure, and who can’t be fired…is that really a democracy?
Thing is, contrary to the caricature, much vaccine resistance in the U.S. came from ordinary people. For example, many of the vaccine-hesitant early on were African Americans, who have long criticized the health system, and who saw the shadow of Tuskegee in the COVID shot. And almost 50% of civil servants were hesitant to take the vaccine at one point. This shows how deep the skepticism was. Whatever the establishment did left millions of people unconvinced.
Again, I think this is an irreparable cleavage that has more to do with tribes than vaccines, but let’s pretend it’s a scientific issue. How could we address it?
There are at least three approaches.
The first is to just do whatever the establishment says. To call anyone with questions a conspiracy theorist. To refuse debate. To demonize them as individuals. This is called “trusting the science.”
The second approach is to do the opposite of whatever the establishment says. If they say that a virus causes disease, well, by tarnation, you’re against the germ theory of disease itself. This is Carl Sagan’s demon-haunted world: where people conclude that because so many establishment scientists have been corrupted, that we must distrust science itself.
The third approach isn’t to blindly “trust the science” nor to distrust science, but to replicate the science. Here’s what an imaginary vaccine debate might look like, between a vaccine proponent and skeptic, from the perspective of a proponent.
First, review the so-called observational studies. These are population level studies where you compare the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated people across different cohorts (by age, gender, ethnicity, vaccine type, virus strain, and the like) and see what the graphs look like. The data should show better outcomes for vaccinated people relative to the non-vaccinated. It should be explained in the simplest possible language. And all raw data should be made publicly available for re-analysis, perhaps with suitable anonymization which is actually supposed to already be scientific convention.
Then, if people still disagree, maybe you can conduct what’s called a challenge trial, where group A opts in to being exposed to live virus and group B to getting the vaccine. Of course, this involves risk, but (a) this is actually what science is [namely controlled experiments] and (b) this is already being done de facto at the level of society as a whole, with millions of people exposing themselves to a live virus. So for those who truly believe that exposure to the vaccine is worse than exposure to COVID itself, this would be the experiment to resolve it. Just as military volunteers take calculated risks for society’s defense, the people volunteering for a challenge trial would take a risk for the benefit of society’s health.
Finally, it’s a bit sci-fi, but maybe you can eventually do something with what are called “organoids,” where you don’t need to expose an individual to either live virus or vaccine right away. The idea is that you take a tissue sample, use it to establish a patient-derived organoid, and test your drugs on that — like taking a microscopic bit of skin and using it as a proxy for the patient themselves.
I know this is getting technical, but that’s good. It starts putting us into the realm of scientific discussion, as befits a serious matter of public health. Of course, others might propose a different debate structure and that’s fine too.
So, why don’t we try an approach like this? Don’t let anyone tell you it’s because of science, as if denouncing Joe Rogan for clicks was more scientific than running experiments. Rather, it’s because everything is tribal warfare now and every issue is politicized. Even if it should be positive-sum, like a dispassionate matter of public health, the issue is made negative-sum. Yet the genuinely scientific option is still on the table — the respectful discussion and the reproducible experiment.
Or, you know, everyone can just call each other Hitler forever.
Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) is an angel investor, tech founder, and WSJ bestselling author of The Network State.
Very interesting take by Balaji - though at the outset I was hoping this might have been a guide to having vaccine efficacy debates in our personal lives, and the here and now. I think this is where most conflict about the topic actually lives and marinates in this „post-Covid“, let’s-all-pretend-this-never-really-split-our-society-and-families time. Instead, Balaji shared what I think is a wise recipe for scientific communications in future crises, if their aim is to truly persuade - and to persuade through truth, nonetheless.
MRNA had never been used in humans prior to the Covid vaccine. The fact that it was used for this, and without prior rigorous testing on longterm and shorterm side effects was malpractice in the first degree, only to be compounded by mandating it for everyone, and all this in addition to knowing so little about the origins and actual makeup of the Covid strain itself. The entire enterprise was an insult to science itself, not to mention a moral and legal outrage.
And since when did a vaccine for any virus become such a widely accepted procedure when the decades long evidence of scant protection from the seasonal flu shot is right there to prove the folly and deception of it all.
It was a nightmare that shockingly continues to this day because the instigators themselves are far from interested in anything resembling the truth. And moreso, are still willing to quash even the slightest debate over their wicked and thoroughly unscientific efforts.