Replacing Biden with a white man and making it unlikely that Harris would end up as President is a recipe for breaking the Democratic coalition. Probably not a good move.

The problem is that I don’t think the odds are appreciably better with any other Democrat.

And here I was thinking “crime” in public surveys meant “I see people with darker skin than me sometimes” rather than any kind of actual criminal behavior.

Yes, once the anti-vax anti-mask folks got their footing, it was pretty much guaranteed that we’d see a lot of deaths.

The debate has had a remarkably slight impact on public opinion to date. It’s not clear that it’ll shift things in any kind of meaningful way.

There are things we could have done better; the US isn’t some island of perfection, but it was on the whole, a decent response after Biden took office.

Smallpox is a disease where vaccination once protects you for life.

The current round of vaccines for COVID protect you for several months.

There’s a difference in outcomes because of that. I’ll also note that a big chunk of China didn’t get vaccinated either, and that we have a really active anti-vax contingent in the US with the support of Trump and the other Republicans.

It’s not the end; it’s not something that ever ends, in the same way that influenza still kills people.

But vaccines got us from a disease that was killing an awful lot more people to one where it’s one that kills a few.

Yes actually — he started sabotaging pandemic response as soon as it became known that in the absence of vaccines, the disease would disproportionately harm minority communities which have less access to care.

If you’re in the US, the basic answer looks like this:

• Talk to people about what they’re actually doing and what’s going on.
• Check your voter registration so you can actually vote against them
• volunteer when you can
• provide what financial support you can to both the Presidential candidate and to those downballot.

It means his team arranged for actual delivery, federal payments, and not just dumping it on the system, which weren’t prepared

What he did do was get vaccine distribution working. That made a world of difference in fatality rates

Yes, they’ve been updating the vaccine every year to match currently-circulating virus strains. This is about an additional update coming out this fall.

Pretty much the same thing is done with flu vaccines, where you need a periodic update for it to be effective.

No, not yet. There will probably be one in September or October.

Not sure anything like that is put together, but a good start is to call your rep and senators and ask them to close the various loopholes that the courts have put in US bribery law, both the after-the-fact-gratuity one and the explicit (instead of implicit) quid-pro-quo one.

Yes, the federal minimum wage hasn’t risen; that’s static and requires an act of congress to change. What happened is that the pandemic also gave a lot of people negotiating power, so the wages most people earn went up more than prices.

Wages weren’t stagnant though.

The key thing is that right now, wages are rising at about 4% per year, while prices are rising at about 3% per year. That’s a good place to be.

I wonder how much of a gratuity the Republican justices are going to get for this ruling.

Inflation of 3% per year is lower than median wage growth; it’s generally considered somewhat desirable because it transfers wealth from lenders (who tend to be well-off) to borrowers (who are less so)

The key thing is that it dropped down to around the long-term average of 3% per year. And did it quickly and without a recession. That combination is downright amazing.