Sunday School 12/13/20

I decided that, in the interest of good behavior during a pandemic, I'd only visit one classroom today, and I decided, after seeing who was making the rounds, that CNN's State of the Union classroom was the place to be.  

Visiting with Tapper today?  Bill Gates, for one, who suggested that the next few months - four to six, he said - "could be the worst of the epidemic," with a forecast of another 200K+ deaths. We don't have to have that many, and we wouldn't if people would wear masks and not mingle with others.  He also said that he never thought we'd be seeing what we're seeing here; he thought we'd "do a better job handling it."

Tapper asked Gates how much credit the president and his Operation Warp Speed deserve for getting us vaccines in less than a year.

Well, the mRNA vaccines, which the first two are, our foundation and others have been backing for quite some time. Now, Pfizer teamed up with BioNtech, a partner of ours, and did not take government money. So, they went out on their own. Moderna got money before there was an Operation Warp Speed, back when it was the -- just called BARDA. And that money did help them take risks, because they're not a large company, and they got help on some of their trials work.  So, the U.S. R&D funding, which is -- had been there for pandemics well before this administration, that was a contribution greater than any other country.

And, Tapper wondered, what does Gates think about Trump's Executive Order on prioritizing Americans getting the vaccine over folks in other countries?

Well, I think we need to help all of humanity here. You know, we want the world economy be going. We want to minimize the deaths. And, you know, the basic technology is a German company. And so blocking international sharing and cooperation has been disruptive and a mistake during this entire pandemic. So, we need to ramp up the capacity of all the vaccines. There will be some additional ones approved in the months ahead that are easier to scale up the manufacturing. But the U.S. has benefited from other countries' work care, and we shouldn't be entirely selfish in how we go forward.

And, when Tapper asked, "So, in your view, America first, as the president might call it, not the right approach?"

Well, the extreme idea that everybody should die until we have the very last American vaccinated, that's hardly the appropriate response.

Gates also said the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines "look very similar" (in terms of efficacy) and he expects the others "are likely to be about the same." And, he thinks "we have a real communications challenge," given poll results showing only 60% of Americans say they intend to get vaccinated. 

...you have got to find out, who do people trust, make sure they have got the data. I hope, as people see it being rolling -- this vaccine rolled out, in reducing the death rate, reducing transmission to people you care about, that that 60 percent number will go up. For some jobs, like working in a nursing home, the government could decide that it's important for those people to be vaccinated, because that will save a lot of lives. And so the track record will be developed, and I think we will get over the 70 percent that should reduce the transmission dramatically.

He also said when it was his turn to get the vaccine, he'd take it publicly. He has no intention of moving to the head of the line, because 

It should be based on medical need, not wealth at all. After all, this epidemic has been awful in the way that it's exacerbated inequities. It's been worse for Hispanics, worse for blacks, worse for low-income service workers, multigenerational households, a number of things that mean that, in terms of picking who gets the vaccine, we better be using equity to drive all those decisions.

He thinks "Certainly, by the summer" we'll be much closer to normal, but that it could take longer. And how about trying to do all of this stuff during a transition?

 Yes, transition is complicating. But the new administration is willing to rely on actual experts, and not attack those experts. They're laying out clear plans. So, I think we will get through this in a positive way.

He said he's pleased with how Biden and his team are looking at things, working to retain key people like Dr. Fauci, how they're prioritizing things, and so on. Because of all of that, he thinks "the U.S. will not be one of the worst performers as the team comes into office."

Tapper asked him what he thinks about current administration's handling of things, the inaccurate statements, mistakes that were made, the undermining of the experts, and so on. He said it actually could have been worse, say if Trump had fired Fauci, or if Scott Atlas had been around longer. The postmortem, when it's all over, will go back further than Trump, back to 2015 when Gates and others sounded the alarm about a pandemic, what they could have done differently, and what they can learn from this one before the next one hits.

 And whatever that administration is, being smart about getting the testing up fast, allowing the CDC, who are the experts, to give the message to the public, not being afraid of bad news, so that we get people ready, it's pretty clear we're going to be smarter next time.

Tapper did ask Gates for his response to talk about the "Fauci-Gates vaccine" and how he wants to inject microchips into people.

Well, I'm surprised, and I'm not even quite sure how to react. Dr. Fauci and I believe in vaccines. Vaccines have saved millions of lives. That's what our foundation is all about. And so our expertise was valuable here in getting the scale-up of those things. You have got to be willing to speak out publicly, even if it's not always well understood. So, I do worry, will this make people not want to take the vaccine, or not believe in polio eradication and our other causes that I think are valuable.

And, thinking about how history will just our performance - 20% of the world's cases, 20% of the world's deaths, but we're only 4% of the world's population.

Well, the U.S. would have been expected to be the best. You know, we have the CDC. We have the most PCR machines. We have got the NIH, all this capacity. And, sadly, before the epidemic, in the first two or three months of the epidemic, we didn't get on top of it like many countries did. So, figuring out where we need to change things, these postmortems over the next year will guide us. But it's a tragedy that we weren't able to respond like we could have.

Ain't that the truth. 

Masks on; as Gates said, there's little downside to wearing one  - and we have to get through the next four to six months. 

See you around the virtual campus.

Sunday School 4/5/20

Today I'm going to devote the whole lesson to the classroom with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. 

First up? The Surgeon General, Vice Admiral Jerome Adams, who also visited another classroom today. Let's start there, with Wallace asked how bad things are going to get for us, how long the darn epidemic is going to last here. Adams didn't pull any punches.

Well, it's tragically fitting that we're talking at the beginning of Holy Week because this is going to be the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans' lives, frankly. This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it's not going to be localized. It's going to be happening all over the country. And I want American to understand that.  

He also emphasized that we all have the power to change the trajectory, and

...I want Americans to understand that as hard as this week is going to be, there is a light at the end of the tunnel if everyone does their part for the next 30 days...there is hope. But we've got to all do out part. 

They talked about mitigation efforts, with Wallace noting there are still nine states without stay-at-home orders. He shared some of the president's comments, including that "the states we're talking about are not in jeopardy." Is he wrong, Wallace asked? 

Adams said over 90% of the country is under stay-at-home orders, and that they've been balancing states rights and the federal government's role, pointing to the uproar at the suggestion of a quarantine in the NYC area. He reiterated that he'd ask the nine governors to give us whatever they can over the next several days, a week or two, to help us get us to the other side of the peak.

Wallace asked whether Adams is "comfortable with people taking an unproven untested drug, (referring to hydroxychloroquine) even people who don't have the virus?" Adams noted it's all about the desire to help however they can.

And the last question was on masks (you can watch Adams demonstrates how to make one here), including this bizarre comment by the president (there's always one of those isn't there?), about greeting "presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens.... I don't know. Somehow I don't see it for myself." 

Does that statement from Trump send a mixed message, Wallace wondered? It's voluntary, Adams noted, and there are people who are making sure the president is practicing social distancing (even though we watch him ignore the rules daily) but, he said, the mask is not to protect you, it's to protect your neighbor.

And so we shall wear masks when we go out. 

Next up was philanthropist Bill Gates, in a taped interview.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation  has pledged $100M to fight the coronavirus. Five years ago, Gates predicted that missiles wouldn't be our biggest threat - microbes would be. Wallace wondered how dangerous, "how fearsome" this virus is and how it'll play out here. 

Calling it a "nightmare scenario" because this kind of respiratory virus can "grow exponentially," Gates noted if we'd kept on doing what we normally do, we'd be in pretty dire straits. But, quarantining like we're doing, the social distancing stuff, 

if we use that well enough, we should towards the end of this month start to see those numbers level off and then if we continue country-wide and we're testing the right people to understand what's going on, which is not the case yet, those numbers will start to go down and then we can look at some degree of opening back up.

Wallace asked if Gates thought the administration's numbers, somewhere between 100,00 - 240,000 deaths over the next two months, sounded right. He said if we do the social distancing right, "we should be able to get out of this with the death number well short of that." And, he said he's glad that the estimate is out in circulation,

because a lot of people are still thinking hey, "this is like normal," not waking up every day to a completely new reality... You know, Dr. Fauci is doing a very good job here of saying the numbers are what count here.  

He said that the various models people are doing all show things could be even worse without the behavior changes from our mitigation efforts.

But I do think if we get the testing fixed, we get all 50 states involved, we'll be below that. Of course, we'll pay a huge economic price in order to achieve that.

Gates said we don't yet know how seasonal this strain is but it would be beneficial if we got a seasonal break with it. That would give us time to get the drugs we need and to advance the vaccine, a high-volume vaccine, that's  could be available world-wide.

Wallace wondered how much the government's slow start cost, in terms of  the spread of the disease. Rather than focusing on what we lost, Gates looked to other countries and what they did and how that helped.

There are countries like Taiwan, who are exemplary: saw the problem and really got the testing, community-wide testing done very well. They prioritized who got tested and so they won't either have the disease burden or the economic effect that other countries will have. China, by late January had taken it seriously - and so, their ability to get the cases down has been dramatic. South Korea has done that.

We're learning from what's happened, Gates said, and he also made it clear that this is a global issue, that "we're all in this together."

We've got to get rid of coronavirus from the entire world. You know, the US, we can see how tough it is here; likely it will be even worse in the developing countries who as yet don't have nearly as many cases. 

He also talked about testing in some detail, and how some folks might be missing the point, although he didn't name names.

...people have gotten confused and think it's just about numbers. the key is that you have to have a response to the test in less than 24 hours. And that you're prioritizing the right people...that allocation, prioritization of testing will be a key tactic for us to get into good shape. 

And, he agreed when Wallace asked if that should be done at the national level not a state level.  He also said that we're having to take more of an ad hoc approach, "because we never did a full-blown simulation."

There were a few things done, but it's not like war where we do war games all the time, we have people standing by, resources standing by in a dramatic level. You know, we're kind of figuring this out as we go...people are rising to the occasion and, you know, it's fantastic to see that, but, you know, every day we can see that case number is still going up.

Gates said that it's hard for people to put money into something that may never happen; we do it for fires, he said, because we've seen over time that we need to. And of course, we do it for war, too, he said - $600B a year's worth. But in the five years since he talked about this

less than 5% of what should have been done was done... people didn't get that this is the biggest single threat that could disrupt our way of life...even having predicted that as a risk. I'm really stunned at how...tough it is to go through this....the medical cost, the economic cost, the psychological cost. Everybody's lives have been completely upended and that's not just the United States, it's almost the entire world.

Before the interview ended, Gates gave us one more pep talk, reminding us that this was not the worst case. The fatality rate here, around 1%, is actually nothing like the 30% it would be if it were, say, smallpox.

This is super, super bad, but, you know, we will eventually get a vaccine. Even before that, if we do the right things, we'll be able to open up significant parts of the economy... I'm sure...once we get past this, we'll look back, understand what we could have done differently, and make sure that we're not letting it happen again... 

That's something we should take to heart.

Stay home as much as possible. If you do go out, practice social distancing, and wear a home-made mask. Wash your hands. Don't touch your face. Safely check on your neighbors. Do what you can to help your favorite small businesses. Be patient. Smile.

See you around campus. 

TGIF 8/24/18

Raise your hand if you're happy you're not an employee of the Trump Organization, or a friend of the president, or a Trump lawyer, or a former lawyer or campaign official - unless of course, you are one of those, and you got your own immunity deal from the Mueller investigation team or any other prosecutors. You're having a pretty good week, either way.

Raise your hand if you live in Randolph County Georgia and you're happy that the elections board made the right decision today, to keep all of the county's polling places open for the general election this fall. Raise two hands if you're happy it took them less than 60 seconds to do the right thing. You had a pretty good week, too.

Raise your hand if you're a parent and have sent one or more kids off to college in the past few days, or even if you're sending one off in the next few days - kudos to you! I can only imagine the emotions you must be feeling, and I wish you and your kids all the best.  You've had a good week, too!

If you're the person at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who decided that this past Wednesday the Foundation should bump up all non-matched donations made to classrooms around the country through the Donors Choose program, raise your hand. As a result of the Foundation's generosity and the encouragement it provided, over $4M was given in one day; over 20,000 teachers in 13,000 schools had projects receive funding from over 40,000 donors. Teachers, students and yes, the folks at the Foundation, had a great week!

We'll end sort of where we started, with one of Trump's former lawyers, Michael Cohen. He's in the news, of course, because of his guilty plea to eight counts, on the same day that Paul Manafort was convicted of eight counts himself. A GoFundMe page has been established to help support Cohen:

On July 2, 2018, Michael Cohen declared his independence from Donald Trump and (his) commitment to tell the truth.

On August 21, Michael Cohen made the decision to take legal responsibility and to continue his commitment to tell the truth.

Michael decided to put his family and his country first. Now Michael needs your financial help - to pay his legal fees.

The Michael Cohen Truth Fund is a transparent trust account, with all donations going to help Michael Cohen and his family as he goes forward on his journey to tell the truth about Donald Trump. 

In two days, the fund has raised nearly $156K of the $500K goal.

TGIF, everyone.