The editors of the Washington Post see a prospect just on the horizon for a new, improved vaccine to prevent the spread of COVID-19:

After two years of research, scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research are making progress toward the development of a pan-coronavirus vaccine, one that might work against all variants, including the new omicron and those potentially emerging in the future. According to Tara Copp of Defense One, scientists at the Emerging Infectious Diseases Branch set this goal at the outset of the pandemic when they received the first whole genome sequence of the virus. Known as the Spike Ferritin Nanoparticle or SpFN vaccine, it is now completing Phase I clinical trials and will need to undergo Phases II and III. But its developers say it has demonstrated a potent immune response and holds out the promise that it can confer broader protection than the current vaccines. The vaccine uses a soccer-ball shaped nanoparticle with 24 faces that allows scientists to attach spikes of multiple coronavirus strains on different faces of the protein.

While the wealthier nations of the world have been able to afford the advanced mRNA vaccines and boosters, people in poorer countries have been forced to wait. A vaccine candidate now in clinical trials could change that. The vaccine being developed by the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, under co-directors Dr. Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Bottazzi, relies on an older and proven recombinant protein technology, already in use for hepatitis B vaccines. This vaccine could be scalable, cheap, safe and easy to make — a substantial gain at a time when much of the global south is still badly in need of doses.

I think there needs to be a footnote attached to their remarks about “poorer countries”. There are many impediments to extending vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 to people in many Third World countries. For one thing they don’t have the infrastructure, either physical or medical, especially for the mRNA vaccines which require environmental controls that are just beyond reach in many of these countries. And you think that “vaccine hesitancy” is a factor in the U. S.? According to at least one survey 60% of people in Benin, Liberia, Niger, Senegal, and Togo would refuse to accept vaccines. The issue is one of trust. They don’t trust us, they don’t trust the UN, they don’t trust their own governments, they don’t trust each other.

A vaccine that didn’t require special handling would be good but it probably wouldn’t get as much acceptance as the editors seem to assume.

There is also the issue of approval. Even emergency use authorization takes time. While not outright negative about what the editors are proposing, let say I’m skeptical that it’s the solution to our problems.

The infographic above was taken from Visual Capitalist.

Much commentary will be made about 42% of world GDP having been produced by the U. S. and China between the two countries. I want to draw attention to the small green parallelogram representing the GDP of African countries. In aggregate that’s about the GDP of the UK.

Of the ten countries with the fastest-growing populations nine are in sub-Saharan Africa. None of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa are among the fastest-growing economies. My interpretation of that is the per capita GDP in those countries may actually be declining and in terms of standard of living they are getting ever farther behind the rest of the world.

I suspect that Europe in particular will experience increasing pressures from African migrants. That will be quite a challenge for the ethnic states of Europe. In some of them there is already no such thing as a legal immigrant.

The graph illustrates what I suspect the future is going to look like. Mouseover each country in the list on the right to single its results out. I’m hoping that the case mortality might go down a bit more but I don’t think it’s going to zero no matter what we do.

Do you believe that the use of coal has peaked? Allow Rurika Imahashi to set you straight in her piece at Nikkei Asia:

TOKYO — Coal-fired electricity generation around the world is expected to reach an annual record in 2021, undermining efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report by the International Energy Agency released on Friday.

Global power generation from coal is expected to increase 9% this year to an all-time high of 10,350 terawatt-hours, according to the agency’s latest Coal 2021 report.

IEA estimates that global coal demand could hit new highs next year — depending on weather and economic growth — and will likely “remain at that level for the following two years,” underscoring the need for fast and strong policy action.

The largest consumers China and India hold the key in steering future coal demand. The two economies account for about two-thirds of overall demand.

In 2021, both China and India are expected to see a record high in coal-fired electricity generation, with 9% growth in China and 12% in India as their economies recover from COVID-19-induced slumps.

I don’t know if you have different ideas but to me to eliminate something I would think its use needs actually to, like, go down. Sounds like we’re heading in the wrong direction.

U. S. use of coal has been declining sharply over the last ten years. We are now using less than half the coal we used just ten years ago. If we were to eliminate all domestic coal usage it wouldn’t offset the worldwide increase in the use of coal.

There is an element of nationalism in China and India’s use of coal. To transition to natural gas as the U. S. has largely done they’d need to import it. And the U. S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal.

In his Wall Street Journal column supporting the extension of the expanded child tax credit, William Galston points to an important question about the measure:

If the point of the CTC is to reduce child poverty and the economic burdens of child-rearing for low- and moderate-income families, one might wonder why couples making five times the median family income are eligible to receive any of it. But Mr. Biden has ruled out higher taxes on families making less than $400,000, so the point is moot.

I’m game. Clearly, that’s not the point. What is?

The editors of the Washington Post are highly critical of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s remarks supportive of elected officials trading in stocks during their tenure in office:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) stunned a lot of Americans this past week when she ardently defended the right of lawmakers — and their spouses — to buy and sell stocks while they serve in Congress.

“We’re a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters.

She should have advocated for tighter scrutiny on congressional trading. Even better would be a full ban on individual stock trades for members of Congress.

There’s a big catch to Ms. Pelosi’s “free-market economy” claim: U.S. representatives and senators have access to a lot of confidential, nonpublic information. That gives them an unfair advantage in trading.

Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, put it this way in a tweet: “It’s a ridiculous comment! She might as well have said ‘let them eat cake.’ Sure, it’s a free-market economy. But your average schmuck doesn’t get confidential briefings from government experts chock full of nonpublic information directly related to the price of stocks.”

Let me acquaint them with the realities of the psychology of holding elective office. They believe that trading in stocks based on insider knowledge, influence peddling, and becoming wealthier while in office than their wages as House representatives or senators would accomplish are perks of the job. Not only that but they believe that their election (and re-election ad infinitum) is necessary for the public good. It’s a cushy gig.

There’s a good status report on COVID-19 by J. Emory Parker at STAT:

For the last four days, New York has posted all-time record case numbers of Covid-19. On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new forecast that estimates that the Omicron variant is already the dominant variant in the U.S. Meanwhile, cases have been climbing in the Northeast and Midwest for the last several weeks. The nation’s Delta wave isn’t over and an Omicron wave has just begun. Here’s where things stand.

Lot of good graphs and other infographics. I found this one the most evocative:

At this point it appears to me that we don’t really know where we stand. If the omicron variant is very contagious but less virulent than, say, delta, it could be the best thing that ever happened to us. If, on the other hand, it’s just as likely to become a serious, life-threatening illness as prior variants, it could be a disaster. It’s too early to tell.

The word I’m getting from the United Kingdom is that the country is teetering on the brink of following the lead of the countries on the Continent and returning to widespread lockdowns. Boris Johnson’s present political weakness makes any action difficult—he needs opposition votes to accomplish anything. As of this writing Chicago and Illinois are not putting any additional restrictions in place. The editors of the Chicago Tribune write in opposition to suspending in-person public education:

The pandemic has upended virtually every facet of our lives. Work from home is still the norm for many. The diversions we need to augment our days — dining out, heading out to a performance, seeing a favorite team in person — continue to require an assessment of how much risk is involved in doing something we once took for granted.

For children, however, the pandemic has had a disturbingly far-reaching effect. Remote learning veered the educational experience off track for many students. Chicago Public Schools, and its parents, cannot afford to let the damage build up. The prescription for avoiding a return to remote learning is simple. Mask up, test, and vaccinate.

As I have been saying since the start of the pandemic the public school systems actually serve multiple constituencies: children, parents, and teachers, just to name three. Suspending in-person education primarily serves risk-averse teachers. We’ll see what happens this time around.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal make the point that events have driven Joe Biden to a more restrained position:

At long last, a sense of reality seems to be settling in at the White House that we will have to live with Covid-19, even if President Biden didn’t say so explicitly in his speech Tuesday. He can’t “shut down the virus” as he claimed in the campaign. But at least he isn’t shutting down the economy or schools.

Mr. Biden was at pains to say Tuesday that this is no time to panic, even as the Omicron variant spreads. He advised Americans not to abandon their holiday plans if they’re vaccinated, though he repeated his dire warning about the unvaccinated. He even offered a grace note to Donald Trump for producing the vaccines, which must be a first.

Then again, there isn’t much the Administration can do at this point. It plans to distribute 500 million free at-home tests, though not until January because ramping up manufacturing takes time. Mr. Biden hammered the Trump Administration over long test lines, but now the reality is his.

Last year the major challenge was a shortage of testing reagents. Now it’s a shortage of workers, which is also hamstringing the vaccine booster campaign. Mr. Biden’s vaccine mandate may be contributing to the testing snarls. Ditto hospital staffing shortages. Some governors have called in their National Guard to assist at overburdened hospitals, some of which have lost unvaccinated staff.

concluding:

The reality is that the virus will eventually become endemic, like many other pathogens that humanity lives with. Immunity from vaccines and infections over time should lessen its severity. Omicron may accelerate this process, and we will be fortunate if it turns out to be less virulent, as some evidence suggests.

South Africa has reported that only 1.7% of cases were being hospitalized during the second week of the Omicron wave compared to 19% during the Delta surge earlier in the year. Hong Kong researchers have found that Omicron replicated 10 times more slowly than the original strain in samples of human lung tissue, which may reduce the risk of pneumonia.

Some schools and colleges are going virtual again, but even most Democratic governors are ruling out more lockdowns, unlike European politicians. For that we can thank public insistence more than the most quoted public-health experts, who appear all too willing to force the public back into isolation even two years into the pandemic. The people are wiser than the experts.

Things are working out pretty much as I predicted 18 months ago. “Zero COVID” was, is, and will be an unrealizable fantasy. People need to assess their own circumstances and risks and take appropriate actions, whether those actions are getting inoculated against COVID-19 or avoiding public contact. I have had two inoculations against COVID-19 plus a booster as has my wife. That was our assessment of our circumstances and risks.

Urging daily testing of the entire population IMO is a continuation of the fantasy. Not only will it be costly and produce mountains of waste it won’t be effective.

The time for lockdowns has passed. They were supportable in March 2020. It’s darned hard to make the same arguments now.

Elected leaders must keep their actions within the confines of the law. COVID-19 is no longer emergent. It has emerged. Maintaining emergency powers at this point is a stretch.

Rather than thinking that this is the end of the world we should be deeply appreciative that we were fortunate enough to live during a period unlike any other in the history of the world when contracting a deadly disease was as unlikely as it was. It’s still not the end of the world but contracting such a disease is a little more likely now.

There’s a very interesting post at Russia Matters on whether the member republics of the USSR are better off now than they were before the USSR collapsed. TL;DR version: they’re considerably better off now by practically every measure but by and large the people in those countries believe they were better off then, including in places like Ukraine and Belarus. That suggests that getting the band back together may actually be easier than I thought.

Interestingly, the population in all of those countries is basically flat—not growing but not collapsing, either.

Today George Friedman of Geopolitical Futures commented on what is variously being called a “treaty proposal”, “ultimatum”, and “manifesto”. After articulating a number of the points about Russian interests I have been making here, he delves into the proposal in earnest:

The document is targeted at NATO. The key clause is Article 5: “The Parties shall refrain from deploying their armed forces and armaments, including in the framework of international organizations, military alliances or coalitions, in the areas where such deployment could be perceived by the other Party as a threat to its national security, with the exception of such deployment within the national territories of the Parties.”

In other words, Russia is demanding the right to limit the deployment of U.S. troops in NATO countries if the Russians feel threatened by that deployment. The immediate effect would be that, while Poland could build its strength, the U.S. would have to withdraw from Poland if Russia felt threatened, which it says it does. Of course, if the Russian Federation reintegrated former Soviet territories within its political system, which I think is a possibility, then Russia would be freed from Article 5.

There are other clauses that guarantee the United States will reject the document. It is therefore an interesting question why the Russians crafted it. It may be designed as a negotiating platform, but it is too skewed to the Russian interest to be a workable platform for Washington. Another possibility is that it is for domestic Russian consumption, showing that Russia speaks to the U.S. as a powerful equal to be respected. Or it might be that after the Americans’ initial response to Russian threats – that their banking system would be hurt – the Russians read the U.S. as unwilling to respond in Ukraine.

The key from my point of view is that no one wants a war in Ukraine because it would be long and bloody, and the geographic advantage would go to Russia. A proposal on the table, regardless of how preposterous, can give cautious nations an opportunity to capitulate while appearing to prefer a diplomatic course to irrational military responses. Much of Europe is unwilling to fight for Ukrainian independence. The United States, concerned with the free spread of Russian power through military force, might choose an intervention. This proposal might well be seen in Europe as a “basis of discussion,” limiting American options.

Maybe it’s an opening gambit in negotiations; maybe it’s an ultimatum intended to panic the United States. Mr. Friedman’s view is that President Putin had nothing to lose from the proposal and, possibly, something to gain.

I’m not as convinced of Russia’s military superiority to the U. S. as some but I do remain puzzled. I don’t understand what the U. S. interest in Ukraine is. I also hope that American diplomats start accepting that Russia has national interests it is unwilling to cede. You may not think they’re legitimate but the Russians definitely believe they are.