Let’s try this. At the Missouri Independent Dillon Bergin and Rudi Keller report that there’s been enormous undercounting of deaths due to COVID-19:

In Cape Girardeau County, the coroner hasn’t pronounced a single person dead of COVID-19 in 2021.

Wavis Jordan, a Republican who was elected last year to serve as coroner of the 80,000-person county, says his office “doesn’t do COVID deaths.” He does not investigate deaths himself, and requires families to provide proof of a positive COVID-19 test before including it on a death certificate.

Meanwhile, deaths at home attributed to conditions with symptoms that look a lot like COVID-19 — heart attacks, Alzheimer’s and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — increased.

“When it comes to COVID, we don’t do a test,” Jordan said, “so we don’t know if someone has COVID or not.”

In Cape Girardeau County, the coroner hasn’t pronounced a single person dead of COVID-19 in 2021.

Wavis Jordan, a Republican who was elected last year to serve as coroner of the 80,000-person county, says his office “doesn’t do COVID deaths.” He does not investigate deaths himself, and requires families to provide proof of a positive COVID-19 test before including it on a death certificate.

Meanwhile, deaths at home attributed to conditions with symptoms that look a lot like COVID-19 — heart attacks, Alzheimer’s and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — increased.

“When it comes to COVID, we don’t do a test,” Jordan said, “so we don’t know if someone has COVID or not.”

The discrepancy is not limited to Cape Girardeau County, either:

Cape Girardeau County in Missouri; Hinds and Rankin counties in Mississippi; and Lafayette Parish in Louisiana are four of the 10 counties with the greatest spike in deaths not attributed to COVID-19. In those communities, official COVID-19 deaths account for just half of the increase in deaths in 2020.

If official figures are to be believed, in Lafayette Parish deaths at home from heart disease increased by 20% from 2019 to 2020. Deaths from hypertensive heart disease, or heart ailments due to high blood pressure, doubled and are on track to remain that high in 2021.

IMO the reality is actually complicated. For example, do you attribute deaths that can be attributed to lack of care to COVID-19? Or to the political response to COVID-19 which is arguably not the same thing.

It’s not hard to find complaints that the number of deaths due to COVID-19 has been tremendously over-stated. Google it for yourself if you don’t believe me. So, which is it? Are we under-counting deaths due to COVID-19 or over-counting them? My guess is both. I think it’s unconscionable that at this late date we have no solid notion of either the virulence of SARS-CoV-2 or its prevalence. We’ve got lots of estimates and models, based on assumptions you may or may not believe but real measurements are lacking.

What we also have lots of is politicization of something we should unite us. Instead we have lots of finger-pointing and placing blame which puts people who contract the disease “despite doing everything right” in an uncomfortable position which they hardly need at this point.

Does it make any difference? I think so, particularly with respect to prevalence. It should make a difference in the policies advocated whether the number who’ve contracted the disease is 1 in 6 Americans or 4 of 6 Americans. Which in turn would affect the reckoning of the virulence of the disease.

In his Wall Street Journal column Daniel Henninger has these remarks about West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition to the “Build Back Better” bill:

In a next-day interview with a West Virginia radio station, Mr. Manchin pointed American politics and indeed its culture toward the long-term lesson of his stand:

“They just never realized it, because they figured, ‘Surely, dear God, we can move one person—surely we can badger and beat one person up, surely we can get enough protesters to make that person uncomfortable enough [that] they’ll just say: “I’ll go for anything. Just quit.” ’ ”

Why did it occur to a senator from West Virginia to describe his experience in that way—the belief by his opposition that if they threw enough flak at him, he’d break and give them what they wanted?

The answer, of course, is experience. It’s the shared experience of him and quite a number of people who got in the way of what progressives wanted to do. I think it’s a consequence of a Marcusist outlook. Their mothers certainly did not tell them that they could catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

I also attribute the decline in collegiality in the Congress to trends in the practice of law in which zealous advocacy outweighs all other values. Or possibly the increasing trend in the society at large to see things in strictly Aristotelian terms. Things (and people) are either right or wrong; good or evil.

As I’ve said before foreign policy happens to presidents. However urgent domestic and political needs are, they can’t escape it. It’s in the job description. In his latest Washington Post column Josh Rogin asks what the Biden Administration’s policy with respect to Syria is?

When he was elected, many Syrians had high hopes that Biden would come up with a comprehensive plan to marshal the international community to act on Syria and to hold Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad accountable for his war crimes, as Biden had promised. These hopes have been largely dashed. The U.S. government under Biden has neither reinvigorated U.N. diplomacy nor used American leverage and influence to significantly turn up the heat on Assad.

On the contrary, lawmakers and activists no longer believe the Biden administration’s claims that it is working to oppose the normalization of the Assad regime. They see it doing the opposite.

“I don’t know what the administration’s Syria policy is. And I say that as a criticism,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said last week at a conference on Capitol Hill hosted by a Syrian American advocacy organization called Citizens for Secure and Safe America.

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is publicly saying that his own administration’s Syria policy is impossible to understand. Specifically, Menendez said he doesn’t know why the U.S. government hasn’t done more to push back against the normalization of the Syrian regime, including by U.S. partners in the region such as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. The confusion is bipartisan.

“Unfortunately, this administration seems to be turning a blind eye as our Arab partners push to normalize relations with the regime and pursue energy arrangements in contravention of U.S. law,” said James E. Risch (Idaho), the committee’s ranking Republican, at the same conference.

I don’t honestly know what our policy with respect to Syria should be and I don’t know how popular Assad actually is within Syria. I’m skeptical when I read the complaints of Syrians who aren’t living in Syria. I don’t place a lot of stock in the recent elections there. I’ve read reports of polls taken by the Russians that found very low approval ratings of Assad, completely out of line with his election results. On the other hand what is the alternative other than someone just as bad or even worse than Assad?

As usual I view the matter solely through the prism of U. S. interest and, sad to say, IMO a stable Syria with Assad at the helm is probably more in the U. S. interest than a Syria in chaos without him. And for goodness sake don’t take the Israeli view as gospel. Their take is tainted by the “Greater Israel” crowd who would probably prefer chaos over a Syria able to thwart their goals.

So, what should our policy with respect to Syria be?

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.