What Happened Today: October 21, 2022
Underage vaccines recommended by CDC committee; Bannon hit with 4-month sentence; Thanksgiving turkey supply in jeopardy
The Big Story
The CDC announced on Thursday that its advisory committee on immunization practices voted unanimously to recommend COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for children aged 6 months or older beginning in 2023, a vote that the CDC is expected to endorse. Insurance companies are supposed to cover the cost of the vaccines following the CDC guidance, which is important since Pfizer has already said it will quadruple the price for its vaccine to at least $110 per dose following the end of the federal vaccine-purchasing program in 2023.
The CDC’s recommended immunization schedule is not a federal mandate, and while local and state municipalities generally adopt the CDC’s suggestions on vaccine requirements for their public school students, already the governors of Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Tennessee, and Oklahoma have vowed to not mandate the vaccine. But the CDC’s recommendation will ripple outside of schools as pediatricians generally consider the agency’s suggestion as the gold standard for their own patients. “The CDC made the right decision. Every year 3.5 to 4 million children are born in this country who are fully susceptible to COVID,” Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told The Scroll.
But it’s unclear how much the vaccines will reduce the number of childhood cases, as studies continue to show that vaccines fail to prevent infection. Earlier this month, the CDC said 86% of all children aged between 6 months and 17 years have already been infected at least once by the novel coronavirus. Given the widespread natural immunity among children and their low risk of serious illness from an infection generally, some critics of the CDC’s decision have pointed to other nations with significantly different public health recommendations.
In September, the Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs announced it would no longer recommend vaccines for healthy children between the ages of 12 and 17, expanding earlier recommendations that children under 12 needn’t get the vaccine. “Few children and young people have become seriously ill from Covid-19 … and immunity in the group is very high,” the Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs said, echoing the guidance from British health officials last month when they lifted their vaccine recommendation for healthy children under the age of 11.
In the Back Pages: The Second-best Photographer
The Rest
→ A federal judge handed down a four-month sentence to Steve Bannon on Friday after he was found guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress following his refusal to cooperate with the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A one-time White House adviser who was no longer employed by the Trump administration but was still informally providing consultation to President Trump at the time of the Jan. 6 attack, Bannon told his podcast audience the night before the attack that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” Citing executive privilege that protected any communication between himself and the White House, Bannon declined to participate in the House committee’s probe when in September 2021 it issued a subpoena for documents and testimony. “The sentence I am imposing reflects the fact that there can be more culpable ways to be in contempt of Congress than Mr. Bannon’s conduct,” U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols said as he brushed aside the defense team’s legal claims of executive privilege. “But I do believe Mr. Bannon does have some culpability here.” Bannon will remain out on bail as he appeals the decision.
→ With Israel poised to vote for a new government for the fifth time in four years, polls show Benjamin Netanyahu with a slight lead, giving rise to the possibility that the former prime minister will form an ultranationalist and ultra-religious coalition with the far-right firebrand Itamar Ben-Gvir, a Kahanist who until recently had a photo of Baruch Goldstein framed and hanging in his home. Beyond questions about whether Netanyahu will secure legal immunity from allegations of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust by winning the premiership in the Nov. 1 elections, the prospect and meaning of a Netanyahu/Ben-Gvir coalition, which would also include the right-wing Religious Zionist Party, has dominated headlines—not a bad thing for a candidate in the midst of an election season—while the other leading candidates have failed to inspire much enthusiasm. As Armin Rosen wrote this week in Tablet, the appeal of Ben-Gvir is this:
[He offers] an especially dark and absurdist answer to the core dilemma of what a Jewish state in putative control of the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea should look like [...] His innovation is offering any answer at all, in a language that doesn’t seem overly religious or extreme to Israeli voters. It is a great failure of Israel’s political system, maybe Israeli society in general, that Ben-Gvir is the most prominent such figure on the ballot, and maybe the only one.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/rise-itamar-ben-gvir-armin-rosen
→ ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, sought to use location data from some of the app’s users to surveil those users without their knowledge or consent, according to documents reviewed by Forbes. TikTok responded by vociferously denying these allegations, saying that the magazine “chose not to include the portion of our statement that disproved the feasibility of its core allegation: TikTok does not collect precise GPS location information from U.S. users, meaning TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the way the article suggested.” Could the company monitor U.S. users in a way other than how the article suggested? Who’s to say. Forbes, meanwhile, is standing by its reporting.
→ The long-term effects of the pandemic continue to undermine the agricultural industry, as farmers and grocery distributors warn that supply chain issues and pandemic-induced inflation, along with a devastating season of the avian flu, have gobbled up the turkey supply, raising the alarm that meals this Thanksgiving could be historically expensive. “I’ve never seen anything as crazy as the turkey market right now,” said Greg Gunthorp, an Indiana farmer. If you see one in the store, he warns, you “better pick it up and put it in the freezer.” While turkeys are likely to still be in stores come November, the quality will be highly variable as prices continue to rise between now and then, analysts say, with the average per pound price for frozen birds, $1.99, already 73% higher than it was in 2021.
→ In an effort to “contribute to moving the structural composition of our faculty towards parity with that of the State of Texas,” the Faculty Senate of Texas A&M University has voted to approve a program that will make “new mid-career and senior tenure-track hires from underrepresented minority groups,” even though this program is already the object of a class-action lawsuit alleging that it will lead to prejudiced hiring decisions in violation of federal law. Noting that Asians do not count as an underrepresented group within this program, one faculty member said getting behind this policy is the equivalent of “supporting the replacement of two-thirds to three-quarters of our Asian faculty solely because of their race.” The Supreme Court is set to begin hearing arguments later this month in a similar lawsuit brought against Harvard that alleges comparable discriminatory practices against Asian students.
→ The start of soccer’s World Cup next month will mark the completion of a massive state-backed construction effort that’s spanned 12 years and cost Qatar $220 billion, including upgrades to its transit system and its airport in order to shuttle fans back and forth to no fewer than eight brand-new stadiums. Pointing to exploitative labor practices and scorching 120-degree-Fahrenheit summer temperatures that endanger construction workers, The Guardian and Human Rights Watch estimate that as many as 6,500 workers have died for the effort, though Qatari officials say the number of dead workers is no more than 37. A new Indian Express report shares interviews with several family members of Indian workers who died while in Qatar, none of whom have been compensated for the deaths or informed of what really happened. “I only know that my son went there fully fit,” one victim’s father said. “And he returned in a box.”
→ The Canadian commission launched to review Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unprecedented invocation of his country’s Emergencies Act to crush a Freedom Convoy protesting COVID-19 restrictions and punish its participants this past summer has found evidence that the prime minister’s dramatic move was unjustified. The head of Ontario’s Provincial Operations Intelligence Bureau testified that he saw no evidence and possessed no intelligence—either before or after the invocation of the Emergencies Act—of a national security threat. To the contrary, he testified that “the lack of violent crime was shocking.” According to National Post, most of the charges related to violent crime were made against police officers.
→ China might invade Taiwan as early as 2024, Admiral Mike Gilday, chief of naval operations for the U.S. Navy, said on Wednesday, in remarks aimed at making sure the United States is ready for what he believes to be a likely scenario. “I don’t mean at all to be alarmist,” he said. “It’s just that we can’t wish that away.” These comments came just days after Secretary of State Antony Blinken made similar claims that China was “determined to pursue reunification on a much faster timeline.” It remains to be seen if these comments are the result of China ratcheting up military maneuvering in the Strait of Taiwan or if they are in anticipation of the congressional vote on a $10 billion weapons deal with Taiwan that was recently added to the Pentagon’s 2023 budget with bipartisan support.
→ In a return to perfect synth-pop form, Taylor Swift has released Midnights, her 10th studio album and her fifth in just over two years—a triumphant run that has included Evermore (2020) and Folklore (2021), the 2021 Grammy winner for Album of the Year. “The story of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life,” Swift said of the album, Midnights reunites Swift with Jack Antonoff, the producer who has helped shape Swift’s sound since 1989 (2014), the thesis statement of her style: loopable love songs, a penchant for self-mythologizing, a genius for phrasing, a genuine ability to surprise. All of those traits are on full display in the first single of Midnights, “Anti-Hero,” which sees Swift ruminating on age, isolation, and regret as she varies up her rhythmic phrasing like she’s offering a master class before singing, beautifully if also bafflingly, “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby.”
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman, and Clayton Fox
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Biden Miracle by Bernard-Henri Levy
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Multiple versions of the spooky story—the good, the bad, and the drek.
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 Second-best Photographer
A family portrait becomes an act of betrayal
By Max Apple
In 1952, my older sister, Bailey, won a scholarship to the University of Michigan. Though only a three-hour drive, Ann Arbor could hardly have felt farther from our working-class neighborhood in Grand Rapids. We lived near furniture factories, where many of our Polish neighbors worked. We liked our neighbors but didn’t necessarily trust them. European memories persisted. We were their Jews; they were our goyim. When I walked to school, I would wave to Pani, the old woman who swept her porch every morning. She waved back and called me, “zhidu,” little Jew.
Bailey moved into the Martha Cook dormitory, which she told us was for “serious girls.” Long distance phone calls were expensive, but we called her every Sunday night. Bailey’s roommate was from Denver, and she met lots of people from Chicago and Detroit. She had learned to type legal documents and talked of becoming a lawyer. “It’s not that hard,” she said. I was in sixth grade, and when Bailey returned home from Ann Arbor for the summer, I tried to read the books she had brought home, books on policy issues and the French Revolution. In only one year, Bailey had become sophisticated. The rest of us would need to catch up.
One morning that summer, Bailey took me and our sister, Matkey, aside and revealed her plan: We were going to hire a photographer to take portraits of the three of us. The photos would be a 25th anniversary gift for our parents.
I thought it was a good idea and assumed Mr. Sandler would take the photos. Whenever our family celebrated a special occasion, Mr. Sandler would arrive with his camera. I’d guess it was a 35 millimeter, but, at the time, I thought of it as a serious professional instrument, like a microscope. He even had a special lens for closeups. When it was time to take the photos, Mr. Sandler told us where to stand and raised his camera before his long pale face.
I loved Mr. Sandler’s visits. He smoked a pipe and had an accent—not the Polish and Yiddish accents I was accustomed to but an Irish accent—a pipe-smoking Irish Jew! He was a friend to us all, a friend who told us stories about Dublin and its Jewish mayor, a friend who wouldn’t accept any payment other than some of my mother’s baked goods. Out of his own initiative, he’d shown up to my elementary school graduation to photograph me. Bailey was close with his daughter Maureen. Of course, we’d ask Mr. Sandler to take the photographs for my parents’ anniversary. How could we ask anyone else?
Bailey looked at Matkey and me: “Van Dyke will take the photos,” she said.
Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/second-best-photographer-max-apple