(CNN) Top US commanders in Afghanistan wrestle with mistakes and regrets as America’s longest war ends.

The discussion is a tribute to the self-critical powers of the U.S. military.  The criticisms have distinct categories:

• Combat. Failure to provision  adequate helicopters; provisioning the Afghans primarily with Humvees, highly vulnerable to IEDs, instead of the far more durable MRAPs.
• Counterinsurgency. Insufficient language skills and cultural knowledge prohibited the level of influence required to compete with the insurgency.
• Civil affairs, nation building. Absence of political partners sharing Western ideals of government. An unachievable political end state. As Wesley Clark says, the Afghans are “tribal.”

In another place in another time, each of these might have been decisive. In Afghanistan, Wesley Clark comes closest. “Tribal” might say it all about the Afghans. The rest is what we have to say about our own intellectual baggage.

It is said the intervention failed to address what we call corruption. Our Western standards  are only partly products of  hundreds of years of civil evolution in the modern period. In religious perspective, still strong in the West, corruption is a “sin”,  an object to “fight” or “conquer”.

What sounds good on Sundays isn’t so real the rest of the week. Corruption is an iceberg. Blowing the top off with a howitzer simply reveals hidden bulk. In the Afghan tribal system, it’s just business as usual.

Corruption is a characteristic of a social system of exchange. In the West, it was not suppressed by moral force; other causes apply. The Age of Discovery, and the Industrial Revolution required reliable monetary disposition over great distances, and later, in complex  finance of vast enterprise. Wealth was leveraged, creating more wealth.  Corruption was not conquered; it was out-competed by the benefits of lawful finance.

Theories of counterinsurgency don’t delve this deep. To do so postulates complexities beyond the scope of a military operation. The corruption problem is addressed by proselytizing for the “one true faith.” (Wikipedia, Counterinsurgency) Martin van Creveld writes,

The first, and absolutely indispensable, thing to do is throw overboard 99 percent of the literature on counterinsurgency, counterguerrilla, counterterrorism, and the like. Since most of it was written by the losing side, it is of little value.^[29]

Creveld explores many other reasons, not particular to Afghanistan, why counterinsurgency usually fails. This is one more: Afghanistan has no legitimate economy. From Trump Wants to Fire U.S. Commander in Afghanistan,

The bare-bones boiled-down essence of modern government is just a few things:

• • • Raise revenue by taxation.
    • Use at least some of the taxes to provide services.
    • Facilitate commerce.
    • The services provided justify the taxes enough for popular acquiescence.

You can add all the bells and whistles. But it’s the irreducible minimum. Anything less, and it becomes a protection racket.

In the framework of a protection racket, corruption out-competes the alternative. Hence, no political end-point.

Could the U.S. have prevailed? There are a few tricks that could have been tried. British India was a colonial enterprise, while our ethos is raising democracy.  The strategies by which the British dominated India may have had utility in pursuit of our lofty goal.

The British conquest of India, which took a couple hundred years, was not mainly by combat. The greater part was the buying-off of the hundreds of princely states. The British raised indigenous forces that, despite occasional rebellions, were instrumental in defense of the entire Empire.

The tiny detail is that the British were the paymasters. A professional Indian soldier had a choice, to serve a princely state, or the British. The princes were slow payers; the Brits paid on time. This inspired astonishing loyalty.

The alternate path:

• Run Afghanistan as if a colony, but absent the element of exploitation.
• Develop the place, with industry complementing natural resources.
• Establish economic conditions where lawful monetary exchange out-competes corruption, and a government is more than a protection racket.
• Hand the keys to government back to Afghans in stages.
• Exit.

This takes a long time. But we didn’t know we had 20 years.

I remember 9/11 as a flash, an instantaneous moment. So most of my remembering is of before, of which I had lived a long time, and after, which I continue to live. The flash was at blinding brilliance in a televised statement by NY officials. The body language of one presenter was so panicked, I surmised a nuclear threat, the “suitcase nuke”. Later, it was disclosed there had been a hoax.

The period before, in the 90’s, and up until the day, resembled the Belle Époque, replete with  the fruits of a serene, wealthy society in manifestations of cultural arts and pleasures, with scope much greater than the essential stories which in her book The White Album, Joan Didion  says we tell ourselves in order to live.

After the flash, I groped desperately for those stories and, finding the cupboard bare, retreated briefly into myself as I contemplated the interconnectedness of all things. Philly commuter trains stopped running because they were controlled from NY.  Still in shock, pronoun “I” became “we”; contrary to survivalist nuts, we are all in this together; the nation is our boat; if it sinks, we all go down together. As with COVID,  the preoccupying question became “How do we survive this, pick up, and carry on?

So we ditched the fulsome beauty and  expansive openness of our Belle Époque, hunkered down, ditched the frivolities, and carried on. The watchwords: avenge, detect, defend. In the dim afterlife of the Époque,  targeting of ethnicities was notably absent. As the flash distanced. I speculated on how and when the demands of fighting terror, and inattention to domestic problems, would corrode the American moral viewpoint.

We lost innocence, openness, and the invulnerability of surrounding oceans. Guarding against terror, we lost the quality the Church of the SubGenius calls “slack”, the co-existence of inside the system with outside, the habitat of pranksters,  creatives, and people who like to smell flowers. Now a joke can get you strip-searched.

It is popularly believed that 9/11 is somehow responsible for our current state of decay. In diversion of funds from infrastructure, this is undoubtedly true.  As to the human cost, I am skeptical that it is the primary cause. For that, we must look elsewhere, beginning with Walter Lippmann’s proposal of how democracy works.  Some of this appears in the previous article, Biden’s COVID Plan; Napkin Calculation #5, Total Mortality.

(CNN) Biden’s six-step Covid plan, explained.

Napkin calculation #5 follows. Unlike previous calculations, it requires political preface.

The plan is scientifically sound and politically risky. Roughly a third of the electorate march to the beat of a primitive drum, eschewing the obligations that come with the rights of citizenship. The triviality of secession from masks and vaccines, the small stakes, evidence deep division.

This was last diagnosed in 1858, when the stakes were much higher, by a senatorial candidate in Illinois, in this speech:

…“A house divided against itself, cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided…

The speaker,  Abraham Lincoln, was optimistic.  The house did divide; discordant reunion followed, touched upon a century later by JFK in his inaugural speech: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

Is wearing a mask too much sacrifice? A mask is noninvasive. It makes no change to the body of the wearer. Not so for a vaccine. Since I am fervently in favor of vaccination, and my viewpoint is not primarily legal, I can only watch with nervous awe as this plays out, and do a little diagnosis of the body politic.

The geography of the U.S. is a blessing and a burden. The Northeast Megalopolis and California are dense and cosmopolitan. The Rustbelt and the agrarian center have different ethos-es. Population densities and travel distances foster  illusions of autonomy, versus the interconnectedness of a megalopolis. This is the origin of red states versus blue.

The illusion of regional autonomy is old, implicit in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791, implicit also in the divisive doctrine of states’ rights. These are old wounds, periodically picked open in politics. In the latter half of the 20th century, network television may have promoted unity and civility, with projection of  moderated politics into the heartland, minus  extremism. A credible external threat, communism, also contributed.

The vertical dominance of TV networks has been replaced by myriad lateral connections of social media. As one extremist explained to me, “It’s so easy to find people who think like you do.” Every region of the interior has its own web, selective towards regional attitudes, exclusive of the cosmopolitan coasts. External threats exist, but lack obvious-to-the-electorate appearance.

This is a good part of why COVID is political.  There is more in the way of explanation, but it isn’t as complicated as Spengler would make it. In 1976, during the 1976 swine flu outbreak,  people lined up and got and their shots — or didn’t, but it was not political.  During the 1918 influenza pandemic, some refused masks, and there was some organization to it, but there wasn’t a national schism.

Rejection of masks and shots figure as tragic proxies for a national malaise, a loss of purpose and responsibility that threatens the very existence of American democracy. Vaccine  mandates put more stress on weak joints in the structure. Why, then, has Biden chosen this course? The answer comes as napkin calculation #5.

Napkin calculations are not to be trusted, though #1 through 4 have done pretty well. The fatality rate of all COVID variants remains informed guesswork. For the original strain, one estimate is 1.7%. For delta, double that. So a napkin calc shows what is possible. Assume:

• 80 million hardcore never-vaxers.
• 85%  eventually contract delta.
• 3.4%  die.

This is 2,312,000 fatalities over an unspecified time frame. The progression could be diminished or interrupted by changing attitudes towards vaccination, or the development of really effective antiviral therapy for later stages of disease. It could be increased by mutations. Impossible? The Black Death dwarfed this number.

This is not the kind of thing you talk about on CNN. Joe Biden must have asked his advisors, what’s the worst it could do? And they told  him, in hushed tones, “unlikely but possible.” Then there was a little meditation, and a choice. He made the choice because  he is a moral person. The choice, not to save his presidency, but to save a lot of people, mostly members of the other party. That takes guts I haven’t seen in a long time.

In other quarters, soulless political operatives, in note of the resulting acceleration of the demographic shift, may reconsider the value of some voices.

The demands of elder care seem consuming, but I’ll write something soon.

Bob

(CNN) Fauci’s new 2022 timeline for Covid fight could be a political disaster for Biden and Democrats.

This is about Fauci’s prediction, for spring 2022. In my book, relative to the evolving state of knowledge along the timeline of this epidemic,  Fauci’s handling of the epidemic has been unimpeachable.  Quoting,

“As we get into the spring, we could start getting back to a degree of normality, namely reassuming the things that we were hoping we could do — restaurants, theaters, that kind of thing,” Fauci told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

For a steward of public health, this is the right thing to say. If  this blog had broad readership, I would not want to undermine Fauci’s hopeful message. Relative obscurity releases this blog from the obligations of a steward. There has to be hope – in a reasonable time frame.

The principal obstacles to the timeline are:

• Current vaccines, while tremendously beneficial to the individual, even with the Delta variant, are inadequate to suppress community presence. See Delta Strain; the Rough Ride Begins.
• Israel experience indicates that a non-Delta specific Pfizer booster is still not sufficiently protective to suppress community presence of Delta.
• The school age population will become a tremendous reservoir of Delta, in constant contact with the more susceptible adult community. (For the math inclined: This is the driving term of an equation for adult infection, so powerful that even for adult R < 1, it can drive infection in the adult community  all by itself.)
• The school-age reservoir will not drain until late June ’22.
• Although social distancing suppressed the winter 20-21 flu season, Delta may compromise resistance to secondary infection, to the point that co-infection with Delta is common, bringing lethality up to 2020 levels.
• All of the troublesome COVID variants have come from outside the vaccinated world. All of them have traveled well. While vaccination in the U.S. has a suppressive effect on domestic mutation, this is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
• Some 100 -140 million recalcitrant U.S. adults may never vaccinate. This group will be ravaged. Survivors will be slow to change their minds. The rest of us have need for protection from this reservoir.

From (CNN) Fauci: You get vaccinated… Smouldering Epidemic or Western Wildfire?,

A sociological argument renormalizes this epidemic:

• • • People tend to cluster with others of similar attitudes.
    • The U..S. is in a state of deep division which accentuates clustering.
    • Antivaxers comprise such a group, with social interactions biased to stay within this group.
    • This group of perhaps 140 million moves through a vacuum in which groups with other attitudes do not socially exist.
    • This is in effect an unvaccinated nation of 140M, as was the U.S. in February 2020, except the virus is much worse.
    • Fulmination is possible.

Crash production of a Delta-specific variant could avert some of this, possibly leading to a decent summer ’22. From (CNN) White House frustrated with Irresponsible Delta Variant Coverage…Napkin Calculation #4,

It is possible that a Delta specific booster would both

• • • Reduce the relative risk, which stands at 20-40%
    • Reduce the viral load of breakthroughs.

Time relevant delivery of  boosters and strain adjustments requires a policy tweak that is actually baked into seasonal flu vaccines, and was the crux of Operation Warp Speed, production in advance of proof.

A decade ago, there were DARPA programs for rapid vaccine production to defend against biological warfare. The  programs were successful in rapid production of vaccines of variable quality, for deployment against dire threat. But the loop was never closed; identification  of dire need was never pursued. The process infrastructure for identification of dire need remains vacant.

So we may be in dire need of a Delta-specific booster, with no established process or criteria to establish it. If epidemiology were a mature science, if it could predict with some confidence, that X00,000, or X000,000 people will die this winter, it would be an easy decision. Since epidemiology is not on track for this kind of predictive power, is there another course of action? Yes.

Produce a Delta-specific booster in advance of proofs of need/efficacy. Defer the decision to deploy until more decidable. In the meantime, work at occupying the vacancy of decision infrastructure.

At worst, it’s a waste of money.

From (August 2017) Trump Wants to Fire U.S. Commander in Afghanistan,

The bare-bones boiled-down essence of modern government is just a few things:

• • • Raise revenue by taxation.
    • Use at least some of the taxes to provide services.
    • Facilitate commerce.
    • The services provided justify the taxes enough for popular acquiescence.

You can add all the bells and whistles. But it’s the irreducible minimum. Anything less, and it becomes a protection racket.

Afghanistan has no legitimate economy. Mullah Omar’s gang used to joke that the country couldn’t even make glass. The only trade is underground, opium, immune to civil taxes. But opium makes money for the Taliban. Indirectly, they can tax it, by shaking down the farmers.

This is the essence of the debacle. An even more compact criteria:

• A state with a history of strong government embodies possibility of restoration by foreign intervention.
• A state without a history of strong government lacks even the possibility.

Afghanistan did not have an indigenous central government until the 1747 appointment of Ahmad Shāh Durrānī. It did not resemble a modern state. It was a brief imitation of ancient empire builders, sustained by plunder.

From Biden: Leaving Afghanistan,

I have grave certainty that they [Taliban] won’t uphold. This will be a slaughter of the good. The   future reeks of the fall of Saigon, when our friends were falling off helicopter skids as they begged for rescue. I suspect that the slaughter of innocents bothers H.R. McMaster even more than the strategic retreat.

To remain would only delay the inevitable. Afghanistan is caught in the gyre of a primitive cultural ocean.  Eventually, China, and perhaps India will, in exploitation, bring some measure of humanity.

Do I feel bad? Yes. We spent our blood and treasure unwisely. Venezuela has much better prospects for catalyzed change.

More Afghanistan articles here.

Have a look at (CNN) White House frustrated with Irresponsible Delta Variant Coverage…Napkin Calculation #4. I’ll drop in some text.

So let’s try another intervention, vaccine+masks. (PNAS) Face masks considerably reduce COVID-19 cases in Germany. Quoting,

…Weighing various estimates, we conclude that 20 d after becoming mandatory face masks have reduced the number of new infections by around 45%.

This approximates a relative risk reduction of 1/2 = 0.5.  In combination with 100% vaccination,

• • • For Pfizer and Delta, R_mask = 9*( 0.2 to 0.4)*0.5 = 0.9 to 1.8.

This is a bad number. If napkin calculations have credibility, it implies disaster. Though not fact,  it should not be dismissed. It is the result of high viral load of Delta breakthroughs.

The implication  is that R remains above 1, implying runaway, forest fire growth. This glum observation is based on the typical public-use mask, which is derived from the fluid barrier procedure mask, which is not designed for infectious disease control. This class of masks is relatively comfortable to wear; it reduces transmission by about half. In the above calc, it’s the factor 0.5.

Healthcare workers in infectious disease wards use far more effective and uncomfortable N95 masks, which are designed to protect against most aerosols. Experimental factors for transmission reduction may not exist; let’s guess 0.1, a tenth.

So substitute 0.1 for 0.5:

• For Pfizer and Delta, R_mask = 9*( 0.2 to 0.4)*0.1 = 0.18  to 0.36

Less than 1, these are good numbers! If everyone in the U.S. wore N95 masks and practiced perfect aseptic  technique, COVID would vanish. Given the political climate,  unreasoning resistance to masks, and general impracticality, why have I written this?

Many people might be eager to make limited use of N95 masks, in situations they perceive as hazardous. Mask receptivity may jump in those who meet Delta up close and personal. So this is a proposal for the White House task force:

• Subsidize N95 production.
• Make the masks widely available.
• Possibly be surprised at the uptake.

As for refusniks, you do what you can; they do what they will. They may soon become more receptive.

(CNN) How safe is it for vaccinated people to return to in-person work? An expert weighs in. Quoting,

However, the chance of actually contracting Covid-19 is greatly reduced if you’re vaccinated. According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, you have an estimated eight-fold reduction in risk of having coronavirus if you’re vaccinated compared to if you’re not – and an estimated 25-fold reduction in risk of having severe enough disease to cause hospitalization and death, which is truly remarkable.

This is a boo-boo. Fauci knows what he’s talking about; a statistician knows the true meaning of 8X risk reduction, but the statement is missing context for the typical reader.

Relative risk is not a simple number; it does not mean what it appears to. It is the expectation value of a random variable, which means it has value only in the context of a trial with some group, and the exposures of that group, as in,

“We did vaccine trials on a group, shot versus placebo, and this is the risk ratio for this group.”

You probably aren’t into math, so I’m going to make it real for you. Consider these types of groups of fully vaccinated people, in which there is initially one contagious Delta individual. Our sample has 10 Type A groups, 10 Type B groups, and 10 Type C groups.

• Type A: 8 college students jammed into a payphone booth.
• Type B: 8 employees doing phone sales out of a 10×10 room in a converted residence.
• Type C:  Skeleton crew of 8 in a large ventilated newsroom with forced air HEPA filtration.

The 8X risk reduction of Fauci, or the 2.5X – 5X  I previously computed in Delta Strain of COVID — We’re in for a Rough Ride; Napkin Calculation #3 are based on different groups. Provincetown tourists are a healthy bunch. Both numbers permit these results:

• Everybody in every one of the 10  Type A groups (payphone booth) get  Delta.
• 9 out of 10 Type B groups (small room)  get 6 or more Delta cases.
• 3 out of 10 Type C groups (newsroom) get 3 or more Delta cases.

This is completely compatible with an 8X risk reduction, because random variables do not follow ordinary arithmetic.

Are there  fatalities in A, B, or C? With extreme exposure, as in the payphone booth,  and Type B with the windows shut, it’s possible.

Is this anti-vaccine? No! You might even pick up a few new advocates. 14% of people have intelligence in the range of “bright.” The paradox exposed above makes bright people uncomfortable about something that doesn’t make sense. They are important  to the rest of us as trusted peers and guides.

In (CNN) Covid news coverage needs to start from this fact: ‘The vaccines work’, Brian Stelter is down on media fear-mongering and CDC messaging.  He states, almost true for the moment, that Delta is a disease of the unvaccinated.

That implies unjustified optimism. COVID-19 is not static. It has a huge tendency to mutate. There is already Delta+; virologists cannot set a limit.  We don’t yet know the consequence, in vaccinated individuals, of simultaneous infection with influenza and Delta.

Will vaccine uptake be maximized by hand-holding, with inaccurate, anodyne medical journalism? Something to think about.

Lay it all out.

.

(CNN) White House frustrated with ‘hyperbolic’ and ‘irresponsible’ Delta variant coverage, sources say. Quoting,

“The media’s coverage doesn’t match the moment,” one of the Biden officials told me. “It has been hyperbolic and frankly irresponsible in a way that hardens vaccine hesitancy. The biggest problem we have is unvaccinated people getting and spreading the virus.”

A legitimate concern. Mainstream media made headline mistakes. Where I quoted WaPo in the text of (CNN)Washington Post: CDC Document Warns Fully Vaccinated Might Spread Delta at Same Rate as Unvaccinated, I edited (7/31) to add a correction in square brackets.

This blog is not mass media; it’s read by  intelligent people, so let’s get down to business. Breakthrough infections are said to be rare, yet

• Pfizer, large scale pre-Delta breakthrough = 5%
• Pfizer, Delta breakthrough,(Napkin Calculation #3) = 20-40%

This apparent contradiction of small-large stems from subtle definition. These numbers are not chances of getting COVID. They are relative risks:

(chance of  getting COVID with vaccination)

DIVIDED BY

(chance of getting COVID if unvaccinated)

Whether this definition of breakthrough satisfies “rare” depends on the chance of getting COVID in the first place. People in areas with low vaccination rates, where COVID is just beginning to have a heavy presence, have the illusion that  COVID will miss them. They erroneously believe the risk reduction is not worth the shot. They are tragically wrong.

Takeaway #1: If your chance of catching COVID in some interval is small, vaccination will make it smaller, conceivably satisfying the definition of “rare.” if your chance of infection is moderate or high, vaccination reduces risk, which remains significant.

The White House used the word “hyperbolic” in criticism of the media. Here we have a little disagreement. The immediate future, if not hyperbolic, looks exponential. So let’s do  Napkin Calculation #4.

• A public health intervention is a vaccine, a mask, or lockdown.
• R_o, the basic reproduction number, is the average number of infections caused by an infected individual without interventions.
• R is the average number of infections caused by an infected individual with interventions.
• The original COVID R_o, is roughly 2. (PLOS) Estimating the basic reproduction number for COVID-19 in Western Europe.
• For Delta,  R_o is said to be 9, an absolutely monstrous value, implying the need for refrigerated morgue trucks.
• Effect of a vaccine: R = R_o * (breakthrough%)/100.

Let’s do the calc. We assume a fully vaccinated population, so R is based entirely on breakthrough cases. It uses the new finding that Delta breakthroughs are as infectious as unvaccinated breakthroughs. We need less than 1 to stop COVID:

• For Pfizer and original COVID, R = 2 * 0.05 = 0.1. Success!
• For Pfizer and Delta, R = 9*( 0.2 to 0.4) = 1.8 to 3.6. Disaster!

Takeaway #2: Even 100%  vaccination with the original Pfizer vaccine, although immensely effective against hospitalization/death, cannot reduce community presence of Delta COVID to an acceptable level.

So let’s try another intervention, vaccine+masks. (PNAS) Face masks considerably reduce COVID-19 cases in Germany. Quoting,

…Weighing various estimates, we conclude that 20 d after becoming mandatory face masks have reduced the number of new infections by around 45%.

This approximates a relative risk reduction of 1/2 = 0.5.  In combination with 100% vaccination,

• For Pfizer and Delta, R_mask = 9*( 0.2 to 0.4)*0.5 = 0.9 to 1.8.

This is a bad number. If napkin calculations have credibility, it implies disaster. Though not fact,  it should not be dismissed. It is the result of high viral load of Delta breakthroughs.

It is possible that a Delta specific booster would both

• Reduce the relative risk, which stands at 20-40%
• Reduce the viral load of breakthroughs.

Time relevant delivery of  boosters and strain adjustments requires a policy tweak that is actually baked into seasonal flu vaccines, and was the crux of Operation Warp Speed, production in advance of proof.

Warp Speed did not violate the statutory roles of CDC/FDA. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under Dr. Fauci co-developed the Moderna vaccine. But Warp Speed, with large speculative grants, could not be executed by CDC/FDA.

Takeaway #3. Warp Speed was a novel response. We thought we were done with novelty. COVID  isn’t. So let’s get novel!

(CNN) Washington Post: CDC document warns Delta variant appears to spread as easily as chicken pox and cause more severe infection. Quoting,

The document — a slide presentation — outlines unpublished data that shows fully vaccinated people [edit 7/31: with breakthrough infections] might spread the Delta variant at the same rate as unvaccinated people, according to the Post.

The CDC findings are much worse than the possibilities of Pfizer Booster is Needed? Breakthrough Case Infectivity; Managing Public Health Communications, when I wrote,

Yet it allows the possibility that in Arkansas, and even in locales with borderline vaccine uptake, such as LA, community infectivity may overwhelm the protection of the vaccine.

It may be worse. A few more mutations could threaten regions with high vaccination rates. We must rid ourselves of the idea that the COVID threat is stationary. It appears to evolve faster than our thinking:  Pfizer versus FDA & CDC; Booster Shot Needed Sooner than Later.

In this light, the FDA/CDC rebuke of Pfizer’s booster shot intent is tragic nonsense. Yet FDA/CDC staff are individuals of high intelligence. How can this be explained? The FDA/CDC are policy driven bureaucracies.

• Policies are instruction manuals for bureaucracies on how to execute statutory responsibilities. In the best of times, a policy is optimal for  the scenario.
• Bureaucracies are constrained by, or in the extreme, prisoners of policies.
• A policy drives a typically suboptimal response, the cost of insurance against expensive or dangerous error.
• In the extreme, a policy obstructs a necessary response, while providing no substitute value, such as consumer safety.

In the future, new policies can address threats like this. There is no time now. We need to roll our own.

In (CNN) Fauci: You get vaccinated… Smouldering Epidemic or Western Wildfire?, I wrote,

I hope with Dr. Fauci for no worse than a smouldering epidemic. The above logic allows for much worse, a  Western wildfire.

Had I said more, the accusation of yellow journalism might have resulted.  So in a very soft voice,

***Welcome to 2020.***