ANONYMOUS - OUR VOICE

The M&Ms are different now

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So far, 2022 has not been very different from recent years, in that every day America seems to wake to what I can only call immensely bad news. Omicron cases are sweeping the nation, and there <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/2022/1/20/22889364/joe-biden-covid-19-omicron-plan-free-tests-masks">doesn’t seem to be a decent plan</a> for that. Britney Spears, the sweet but often suffering patron saint of 2000s pop, is finally free, but now <a href="https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/britney-spears-jamie-lynn-spears-instagram-rant-1235020176/">embroiled in a very public feud</a> with her sister. And oh yeah, did you hear, they’re getting rid of the go-go boots on the goddamn green M&M?
Outrage feels woven into the daily cloth of our country now. That’s just the way it is — we are perpetually angry, if not mildly irritated, almost all of the time. There are a number of reasons for that: political tensions, social media and its underpinnings of constantly being surveilled, the general feeling that things used to be better. In the midst of all this, there is something psychically bothersome about a new announcement from the Mars candy company, in which they say that going forward, their iconic M&M characters will have more “nuanced personalities.”
Except that we do not want more nuance. Nuance is what begets discourse, and discourse will always beget general unpleasantness.
The changes to the M&M characters are mainly as follows, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/m-m-characters-redesigned-progressive-world/">according to CBS</a>: The red M&M, who is generally known for being a pain, will be nicer. The orange one “will embrace his true self, worries and all,” whatever that means, and is being angled toward Gen Z. (You know, because he’s anxious.) The brown M&M will have shorter heels, and the green M&M will be reduced to a pair of sneakers (<a href="https://twitter.com/mmschocolate/status/615220459253141504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E615220459253141504%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Fnews%2Fm-m-characters-redesigned-progressive-world%2F">still unclear if they are actually dating or not</a>). Yellow and blue appear to be coming out of this move relatively unscathed, although it’s unclear what makes them so much better than the rest of the gang.
According to Mars, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/12/mars-nestle-and-hershey-to-face-landmark-child-slavery-lawsuit-in-us">which has faced accusations</a> of human rights violations, these changes are meant to reflect a “more dynamic, progressive world.” It might seem that they have failed to see the progressiveness of their green M&M, their crown jewel, who for as long as the public can remember has been <a href="https://www.gawker.com/culture/they-made-the-green-mm-a-dumpy-slut">unafraid of her own sexuality</a>. However, it is obvious, and maddening for reasons I can barely articulate, that Mars knows the extent of her power and yet chose to downgrade her just the same.
Everything is political and everything feels personal now. Chocolate candy, tied to some of the happiest and simplest memories Americans have, is no different. Publicity stunts are not new, but years ago, no one would be expected to go along with the idea that the green M&M loves being “<a href="https://www.mms.com/en-us/experience-mms/characters?color=green">a hypewoman for her friends</a>,” especially since, IMO, she has the qualities of a very glamorous hater who tolerates the other M&Ms because she loves attention. Marketing executives seemingly love nothing more than to watch us shriek into our screens about their silly little decisions, and we fall for it every time. It is almost embarrassing how easily <a href="https://twitter.com/mmschocolate/status/1484286099426095108">consumers can be manipulated</a>, and also a little frightening how badly I now want to eat M&Ms.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22893919/green-mms-change-mars-candy">https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22893919/green-mms-change-mars-candy</a>

vox The M&Ms are different now

So far, 2022 has not been very different from recent years, in that every day America seems to wake to what I can only call immensely bad n...

The frustrating Covid-19 test reimbursement process is a microcosm of US health care

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Do you have a printer? Do you have a fax machine? If not, you might have trouble getting <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22870328/how-to-use-rapid-tests-omicron">your “free” at-home Covid-19 test</a> paid for by your health insurer.
As of January 15, Americans with private insurance are able to submit their at-home testing bills to their insurer in order to get reimbursed. But for some people, that may be easier said than done. <a href="https://www.uhc.com/health-and-wellness/health-topics/covid-19/coverage-and-resources/covid-19-at-home-testing-coverage">Some insurers</a> are letting their customers submit their bills online, but others are requiring people to physically print <a href="https://www.cigna.com/static/www-cigna-com/docs/coronavirus/covid-otc-med-claim-form.pdf">a piece of paper that resembles an IRS form</a>, fill it out, and then either send it to their insurer through the mail or fax it.
A quick scan of social media finds Americans who sound baffled by what they are being asked to do in order to secure free Covid-19 tests in the middle of a public health emergency.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
I just had a look at my health insurer's COVID-19 home test reimbursement form. Obstacle #1: it's not electronic, and I don't have a printer. Nor a fax machine, for that matter. <a href="https://t.co/fQRbfLEBGR">pic.twitter.com/fQRbfLEBGR</a>
— Dataubergine™ Research (@midnucas) <a href="https://twitter.com/midnucas/status/1482456373983993857?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 15, 2022</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none">
Look at this tax form, <a href="https://twitter.com/fepblue?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@fepblue</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/BCBSAssociation?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@BCBSAssociation</a>. Not even a specialized, simplified form for at-home COVID test reimbursement? And no online option? I don't even know how you want me to fill out most of this form. What if I do it wrong? How is anyone supposed to get reimbursed? <a href="https://t.co/X7rE8GdPbF">pic.twitter.com/X7rE8GdPbF</a>
— Zach Binney (@binney_z) <a href="https://twitter.com/binney_z/status/1483168696654864392?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 17, 2022</a></blockquote>
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People can also order free tests through a new government website, <a href="http://covidtests.gov/">covidtests.gov</a>. But they are limited to four tests per household, which may not be enough for the people who have been exposed or need to test regularly.
Asking a patient in the year 2022 to send a fax in order to have their medical services paid for may sound laughable. But it’s a microcosm of the burdens the US health system puts on Americans in order to receive necessary health care.
“Our health care system is mind-numbingly complex,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, “and that complexity takes its toll on patients in terms of time, access, and affordability.”
The United States health system, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/1/13/21055327/everybody-covered">more than any other in the developed world</a>, forces patients to manage their health care on their own. They pay a lot of their own money for medical care. They have to make sure their specific doctor is covered by their specific insurer. And even if their doctor believes they need a certain treatment, patients must follow rules set by their health insurer, or risk delays in treatment or ultimately having their insurance claims denied.
Patients run into these obstacles all the time — with serious consequences for their well-being. A recurring finding in health care research is that when patients run into any friction, whether high cost-sharing, limited access to providers, or something else, they tend to receive less timely and appropriate care. Over time, that will make people more likely to develop serious health conditions and, ultimately, die younger than they would with proper care.
It starts with the sheer cost of health care to US patients. Out-of-pocket spending per person is <a href="https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/indicator/access-affordability/out-of-pocket-spending/">higher in the US than in any other wealthy country save Switzerland</a>, and roughly twice as much as in countries like the UK, the Netherlands, and Japan. Recent research has <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22276166/us-health-insurance-out-of-pocket-costs-research">found</a> that even small cost obligations, as little as $10 for a prescription, can discourage patients from taking their medicine as prescribed. A third of Americans have <a href="https://www.gallup.com/analytics/357932/healthcare-in-america-2021.aspx">reported in public opinion surveys</a> that they skip medications or other necessary medical care because of the cost.
But the US health system puts up other, subtler hurdles. Insurers don’t cover care at every doctor’s practice or hospital; they instead contract with certain providers to create provider networks, within which their patients must seek care for their treatment to be covered. These networks put the onus on patients to figure out where they can go for care, at the risk of incurring huge medical bills if they get it wrong. That problem came to the forefront in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/22193319/surprise-medical-bills-legislation-second-stimulus-package">recent debate</a> over <a href="https://www.vox.com/health-care/2018/12/18/18134825/emergency-room-bills-health-care-costs-america">surprise billing</a>: Many people were going to the hospital for an emergency, only to find out after the fact that either the hospital or a doctor who treated them was not covered by their insurer.
That has been a common experience for American patients: <a href="https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/surprise-bills-vary-by-diagnosis-and-type-of-admission/">About one in four heart attacks</a> lead to the patient being charged for out-of-network care in the emergency department or if they are admitted.
Networks also make shopping for health insurance more difficult. Patients have to try to figure out in advance whether their existing primary care doctor or specialists, or the local hospital, will be covered by their new plan. Levitt told me he had recently been helping a friend shop for an insurance plan through the Affordable Care Act and ran into that problem.
“There have been multiple calls with the marketplace, the insurers, and doctors’ offices,” Levitt said. “It’s hard to get straight answers. I’m a health insurance expert and he’s got an MBA from Harvard.”
Patients can run into the same kind of problem with drug formularies, a list of approved drugs that health plans use to prioritize coverage for certain medications. If a drug is not on a plan’s formulary, customers must pay more of their money than they would for approved drugs. Sorting out which drugs are covered or preferred under a health plan’s formulary can be a headache, and research <a href="https://www.ahdbonline.com/issues/2011/november-december-2011-vol-4-no-7/890-feature-890">has shown</a> that such restrictions lead to patients using fewer medications.
And even when care is ostensibly covered, it can be hard to actually get it paid for. The complicated reimbursement for Covid-19 tests is one striking example. Another common barrier is prior authorizations — when an insurer won’t cover a test or a procedure unless the health care provider has requested and received permission ahead of time.
In both <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31507077/">academic research</a> and <a href="https://www.modernhealthcare.com/patient-care/doctors-say-prior-authorization-led-life-threatening-delays-care">provider surveys</a>, prior authorization requirements tend to lead to treatment delays, even though most requests do eventually get approved. Forcing patients and doctors to take this extra step doesn’t seem to weed out unnecessary care, but does lead to delays for care that is ultimately deemed necessary.
It’s a needlessly complicated process that provides little benefit but creates plenty of problems — in other words, like the test reimbursement process, it’s the US health system in a nutshell.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22893116/covid-19-free-tests-health-insurance-reimbursement">https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22893116/covid-19-free-tests-health-insurance-reimbursement</a>

vox The frustrating Covid-19 test reimbursement process is a microcosm of US health care

Do you have a printer? Do you have a fax machine? If not, you might have trouble getting your “free” at-home Covid-19 test paid for by you...

The parents of the youngest children are not okay

More kids younger than 5 are sick with Covid-19 in the US this month <a href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographicsovertime">than at any other time in the pandemic</a>. None of these millions of children can be vaccinated yet, and almost half of them are too young to wear a mask. This is bringing a new wave of disruptions and stress for many families — especially those that rely on day care, preschool, and other shared child care — who have already endured almost two years of strain.
<a href="https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/coronavirus-outbreak-and-kids">Various</a> <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/25/997467734/childrens-risk-of-serious-illness-from-covid-19-is-as-low-as-it-is-for-the-flu">experts</a> have <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57766717">reassured</a> parents that children are not at high risk for severe disease, hospitalization, or death from Covid-19 (though certain underlying health conditions could raise the risk). <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2304688-why-omicron-isnt-more-severe-in-kids-despite-rise-in-hospitalisations/#ixzz7INKmp1mb">Recent data</a> from South Africa and the UK suggests that even among hospitalized babies and young children, the omicron variant seems to cause less severe illness much of the time, infecting the upper airways more than the lungs, the same as adults.
While this should give parents comfort, the <a href="https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affairs-pediatrics-and-omicron?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=email">sheer volume</a> of cases this month from the super-transmissible variant means pediatric hospitalizations are reaching new highs, including among young kids.
Children younger than 5 have already consistently had <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7036e2.htm#F1_down">the highest hospitalization rate of all children’s age groups for Covid-19</a>. And <a href="https://www.nicd.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/COVID-19-Special-Public-Health-Surveillance-Bulletin-January-2022.pdf">new data</a> out of South Africa reports higher proportions of kids under 5 being admitted to the hospital after testing positive for Covid-19 during the omicron wave than other ages, including older adults. <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-in-babies-and-children/art-20484405">Newborn babies</a> remain the most vulnerable, and without guaranteed paid parental leave in the US, many parents must send them to day care when they are just 6 weeks old.
Even when Covid-19 infections in young kids are only very rarely severe, they can create havoc at home. With frequent breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated and boosted, families must figure out how to protect themselves and others in the household — even more so if there are higher-risk members.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Our 3-year-old tested positive today and we assume the entire family is also positive. He attended daycare for two days. Good mask. Great hvac. Mostly outside. Dedicated, careful, fully vaccinated, heroic teachers. But omicron is just that contagious. He was exposed Tuesday.
— melody joy kramer (@mkramer) <a href="https://twitter.com/mkramer/status/1482512916326850562?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 16, 2022</a></blockquote>
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In a two-parent household, should one be the designated caregiver to a sick toddler, while the other isolates themselves? Will other children now be home because of their exposure? Who will be able to take time off of work to watch the kids? And what happens if all of the adults in the household get too sick to care for a baby or child who cannot care for themselves? These questions carry more crushing weight in a single-parent household and in those where both parents must work outside the home and cannot afford to take time off.
Even if children who have been exposed to Covid-19 at day care or preschool test negative, in many places, they will still have to stay home for 10 to 14 days. This sudden loss of child care sends millions of families — and, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/17/upshot/women-workforce-employment-covid.html">overwhelmingly, mothers</a> — scrambling to figure out how to continue earning money (and pay for the child care they aren’t able to use); care for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers; and keep their families as safe as possible.
Johns Hopkins epidemiologist <a href="https://publichealth.jhu.edu/faculty/3926/genevieve-wojcik">Genevieve Wojcik</a>, who has a 20-month-old son and a 4-year-old daughter in day care, is a veteran of these struggles. Like so many other pandemic-weary parents, Wojcik has had to take on child care alongside her paid work — typically at a moment’s notice, for days and sometimes weeks at a time. And she is exhausted.
I talked with Wojcik about how she thinks about risk right now for this unvaccinated age group, how studying children, viruses, and vaccines has shaped her risk tolerance, and the toll all of this is taking on her work and life. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
<h4>Katherine Harmon Courage</h4>
As an epidemiologist, how concerned are you about surging pediatric hospitalizations, while also knowing that the omicron variant tends to cause less severe infections?
<h4>Genevieve Wojcik</h4>
I understand that the absolute risk of my kid getting sick enough for hospitalization or death is very, very small. But I also know that the relative risk of my kid getting sick or seriously sick isn’t worth going out and eating inside a restaurant. So I get that the absolute risk is small, but I don’t want to risk the relative risk. I will say, full disclosure, I am definitely more on the risk-averse side.
<h4>Katherine Harmon Courage</h4>
How does your own research impact how you think about these risks to kids?
<h4>Genevieve Wojcik</h4>
I’ve always done research in kids and what can go wrong with kids — and there are a lot of things that can go wrong. I also have experience working with post-viral-infection syndromes, and I know what can happen to kids, even before Covid and long Covid.
When you give somebody a risk of 5 percent of developing cancer in the next five years, they’re not going to develop 5 percent of the cancer. They’re either going to develop it or not. There’s often that lack of translation between risk and the sort of binary outcome, where it’s like, yes, kids have only a very small percentage chance of being hospitalized or very, very sick. But they don’t just get a tiny bit bad; they get very bad.
I’d rather do everything I can to make sure it doesn’t happen than just give up. There is harm in this whole debate about: “everyone’s going to get it” or “it’s a small risk.” What you’re asking people to do, it’s not that hard. It’s not that difficult to put a mask on.
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<figcaption>Shanikia Johnson, a pre-K teacher, helps Magjor Jones clean up a puzzle at Little Flowers Early Childhood and Development Center in Baltimore, Maryland, in January 2021.</figcaption>
<cite>Matt Roth/The Washington Post via Getty Images</cite></figure>
<h4>Katherine Harmon Courage</h4>
How do you think about the risk of illness right now for kids in day care, like yours?
<h4>Genevieve Wojcik</h4>
My kids started back at day care in August of 2020, and my oldest was 2 and a half and wore a mask. And then things started opening back up again, and now my younger one is sick constantly. There was <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/rsv/index.html">RSV</a>; hand, foot, and mouth; a bunch of different colds; and we got a stomach bug as well.
So it’s not even just Covid; it’s everything else that’s circulating that they’re more susceptible to and could be more dangerous for them [if they get them] at the same time. You have these overlapping risks that you’re constantly trying to manage. It makes it a little bit more stressful because they get sicker when things overlap. Especially for our youngest, because he doesn’t wear a mask, he puts his hands in his mouth. It’s his first rodeo, and he’s going to get everything that comes through. It’s just relentless.
<h4>Katherine Harmon Courage</h4>
How do you think about different levels of risk for babies versus kids in this unvaccinated group?
<h4>Genevieve Wojcik</h4>
At the beginning of this, I had a 2-year-old, and then I gave birth in April 2020. It is very different in the way we navigate with the two kids because they have different levels of being able to wear a mask. Wearing a mask has cut down the number of illnesses my 4-year-old gets an insane amount.
It’s also clear to anybody who’s got young kids that the way they handle illnesses is very different at different ages. And the effects of those illnesses on the parents are very different in terms of stress and sleep deprivation. There’s a reason there’s a lot of <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33342635/">hospitalizations for infants</a> — because <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-in-babies-and-children/art-20484405">it’s more dangerous for them</a>.
We’ve been locked down for the past two weeks now. My son had mild congestion around Christmas and then seemed a little better after a few days. Then all of a sudden he spiked a fever and developed pneumonia. It’s not Covid-related, but I can’t have him get Covid while he has pneumonia. He’s 20 months, so he can’t handle more.
The thing we think about now that’s different than the other waves is that people who are fully vaccinated and boosted are also getting pretty sick. Not seriously ill, but enough to get you down for the count for a few days. So if we’re both down for the count with Covid, who’s going to take care of the kids? I’m not worried about my own health, but I am worried about who’s going to feed these kids if I am bedridden. Because in the times of Covid, you’re really on your own.
<h4>Katherine Harmon Courage</h4>
How do you think about these risks in what you do — or don’t do — with your own family these days?
<h4>Genevieve Wojcik</h4>
I’m of two minds in the way I manage my family. One is obviously a risk to our own health. It’s not a risk to my husband’s health or my own health, but to my kids’ health. When they can get vaccinated I will feel a lot better, given the <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/01/vaccination-reduces-risk-long-covid-even-when-people-are-infected-study/">data we have on vaccines and long Covid</a> and severe outcomes.
You have a certain bucket of risk you can draw from, and so we use all of our bucket of risk for day care when we can. So we don’t do anything else. We don’t go to indoor areas with our kids, we don’t see people socially.
The other part of how I think about risk is for families who don’t have the flexibility to stay home, who might also live in multigenerational households or might have someone who is immunocompromised or medically vulnerable. So if I can swallow some of that burden in protecting our kids from getting sick, then I should do that because it’s for the community. Especially because we wouldn’t know if our kids are infected and transmitting things until it’s too late.
<h4>Katherine Harmon Courage</h4>
Have you all been through the rounds of day care quarantine?
<h4>Genevieve Wojcik</h4>
Yes. I’ve been trying to get a Covid extension for a grant, and you need to quantify how much time you’ve lost because of child care. And I have not had a full month of child care in two years. It’s a few days [lost] on a good month.
Either the kids get sick and have to get tested, [or] we have to quarantine. And we’ve been through four rounds of quarantine for exposures and two rounds voluntarily because we decided to have family visit.
In the fall of 2020, we spent 24 days in the house because my son had an exposure in his classroom, and then, with our luck, he developed symptoms a few days later. It was horrible. As a probable case, he had 10 days of isolation, then the rest of us — because none of us were vaccinated at that point — we had 14 days after his 10 days.
Our day care policies for quarantine and testing are following the science, and that’s important. I think that’s why we’ve had such low cases [at our center]. But still, you have your schedule, and you have your Zoom meetings scheduled, and all of a sudden, it’s like, oh no, for the next two weeks you’ve got to entertain your kids who don’t know how to entertain themselves yet.
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<figcaption>Jenny Cross Senff, right, and her husband Toby, background, try to work on their computers while contending with kids Avery, 6, and Colby, 3, in quarantine at their Washington, DC, home in the early days of the pandemic.</figcaption>
<cite>Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images</cite></figure>
<h4>Katherine Harmon Courage</h4>
How do you and your husband manage child care if day care isn’t available?
<h4>Genevieve Wojcik</h4>
Oh, it’s me. Academia gives me flexibility. My husband works as a school psychologist and doesn’t have time or bandwidth or enough sick days.
The kids have been home since Christmas. I don’t know what we’re going to do. Because on the one hand, I’m losing my mind. But on the other hand, there are still pretty high case numbers.
The other bad news is that I’ll bring them back, and maybe they’ll be there for a day or two, and then there will be another case at day care. And then we’re home for two weeks. Because even if it’s just one of the kids, it extends. Because if one kid gets sick, then the other one has to start their quarantine or isolation after that, so they’re staggered.
So do I just keep them home for another week and then send them back? That’s a little bit less of a risk. But I’m human, and I don’t know how much I can take. It’s like, do you want to suffer now, or just punt it down the road? Because it’s going to come.
<h4>Katherine Harmon Courage</h4>
How has all of this been impacting your work as a public health researcher?
<h4>Genevieve Wojcik</h4>
A lot of the more administrative work you can sort of struggle through. But the majority of the other work, in terms of scholarship, it’s really difficult because I need uninterrupted time to think, and I cannot have that. I’ll get to my work I want to do, and inevitably, because the universe is a funny, funny, funny person, they’ll be like, “Oh, now there’s another exposure,” or, “Your kid’s sick now and has to be home for a few days because they have a fever.” It’s just been really difficult.
You’re constantly in survival mode, and survival mode is not conducive to creative thinking and scientific progress. I do wonder if people who have kids under 5 have a very different kind of burnout than other folks. Because I’m exhausted, I’m absolutely exhausted. But I want to do the work. I deeply care about the work that I do. I just cannot do it. There’s a little bit of sadness around that. It’s something you uniquely value and care about, that you’re good at, you can’t do because your brain is just tired. Because kids, they just don’t stop making noises.
<h4>Katherine Harmon Courage</h4>
How do you see the challenges for this age group and their families exacerbating existing equity issues that the pandemic has laid bare?
<h4>Genevieve Wojcik</h4>
There are massive gaps in terms of who’s being affected by this. One example is in Maryland, there is Prince George County and Montgomery County, and Montgomery County is much wealthier and has half the positivity rates as Prince George County. And in terms of who is vaccinated, who has access to resources, and who can’t stay home is huge. And that exacerbates who’s having higher case rates, who’s being hospitalized.
Also there’s a massive difference in terms of, for zero- to 4-year-olds, their child care. It’s a question of who has their kids in day care versus who has a nanny, versus who has a stay-at-home mom — and the reasons why they have a stay-at-home mom. If you have a nanny for your kids, you’re really hoping that nanny doesn’t get Covid. But if your kids are in day care, you’re reliant on the community way more [to keep case numbers low].
<h4>Katherine Harmon Courage</h4>
How are you feeling about the vaccine progress and prospects for these final age groups?
<h4>Genevieve Wojcik</h4>
I have to be honest, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/17/health/pfizer-vaccine-children/index.html">the results</a> [of the clinical trial of a Pfizer vaccine for kids 6 months to 5 years] were absolutely gutting. And now the Moderna trials expanded and so they got pushed out another month or two.
You get through by saying, “Just a little bit longer.” And then after two years, that little bit longer just draws out. It’s also that everybody else 5 and above has access to vaccines at this point, and they’ve moved on. They’re not as worried about things. That’s the whole point. And I’m happy for them.
But I’m still stuck. And at the exact moment that you have this massive wave, somebody is pulling that life raft farther away from you.
But there’s no option to give up, right? There’s no option to say, “Well, screw it, I’m going to do whatever I want to do.” Because you’ve got these tiny children to take care of.
When I tell people we’ve had the kids home for weeks, and my son has pneumonia and I want to make sure his lungs are healthier before he is possibly exposed to Covid, they say, “You need to take a break.” And I’m like, “It doesn’t matter what I want. That’s not a possibility.”
I think most people who have kids under the age of 5 are not asking for everything to shut down. I just want you to be okay with the fact that I’m going to take longer to get things to you or that I’m not going to be able to work at that level, or to be patient with me — or be a little bit more empathetic.
<h4>Katherine Harmon Courage</h4>
Do you have any advice for families with kids under 5 for the omicron winter?
<h4>Genevieve Wojcik</h4>
No, I don’t. People ask me all the time, “How is this going to play out?” The models have ceased to be informative for my day-to-day life. I just don’t know, and as an academic, not knowing is horrible!
I don’t have any advice because I’m flailing as well. Some people give me the advice of “you need to hunker down and take care of yourself.” And I’m like, “I have nothing left of myself to take care of.” It’s been two years of this. Having two kids these ages during a pandemic is a lot.
So I don’t think there’s any hack or spin that will make the next few weeks bearable. It’s just going to have to pass at some point. It’s just a matter of doing everything within your power to keep your family safe — and trying to let go of the things that you have no power over.
You will do whatever’s right for your family and whatever you can do for your family. There should be no judgment one way or the other because we’re all just trying to get by in a world that’s not built to support us.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22892065/omicron-covid-kids-risk-daycare-hospitalizations">https://www.vox.com/22892065/omicron-covid-kids-risk-daycare-hospitalizations</a>

vox The parents of the youngest children are not okay

More kids younger than 5 are sick with Covid-19 in the US this month than at any other time in the pandemic . None of these millions of chil...

German Government Demands Big Tech Crack Down On Telegram, Other Free Speech Apps

Following threats to shut down the pro free speech encrypted messaging platform Telegram, the German government has stepped up its efforts by putting pressure on Apple and Google to take a more hands on approach to limiting the content people are sharing on the app.
Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser claimed that the app is contributing to an acceleration of “right-wing extremism” and “conspiracy theories,” in the country.
The minister tweeted “We remind #Apple and #Google of their social responsibility. As long as they offer apps like #Telegram in their stores, they are also a form of accelerator for #right-wing extremism and #conspiracy theories. No place for #hate and #calls for murder!”
<figure class="wp-block-embed-twitter wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter"></figure>
In another tweet, Faeser asserted “Everyone has the #right to peaceful assembly. We draw the line when it comes to #hate and #baiting. #Right-wing extremists are increasingly abusing the #Corona demos for their ideology against the #state. We will crack down there with consistent #law enforcement.”
<figure class="wp-block-embed-twitter wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter"></figure>
A further statement statement from Germany’s regional interior ministers specifically noted that those organising against the government’s COVID restrictions are using Telegram.
“The social network Telegram and comparable providers serve people in Germany as a networking [platform for Covid protest movements], corona deniers and right-wing radicals,” the statement read.
Last week, Faeser told the German media “We cannot rule this out,” when asked if the platform will be targeted for censorship.
“A shutdown would be grave and clearly a last resort. All other options must be exhausted first,” Faeser clarified.
The minister also told the newspaper that while it is currently unclear what legal action would be needed to shut down the platform, the German government is in consultation with the European Union regarding potential regulation of it.
<a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/germany-considers-shutting-down-telegram_4209098.html?slsuccess=1">The Epoch Times notes</a> that in Germany, which has implemented some of the <a href="https://summit.news/2021/12/20/video-german-health-minister-calls-for-immediate-forced-vaccination-of-entire-population/">most severe pandemic restrictions</a>, “Telegram has been used as a hub of communication for the protest movement against the measures established to fight the CCP virus, including lockdowns, intermittent mask mandates, and restrictions for the unvaccinated.”
Telegram has been shut down or blocked in other countries including Iran, China, Pakistan, India, Thailand, and Russia.
The platform saw a <a href="https://summit.news/2021/01/12/telegram-enjoys-user-surge-as-founder-decries-people-being-held-hostage-by-tech-monopolies/">huge surge in users last year</a> after Facebook owned Watts App introduced a controversial privacy update which led to concerns that the app would hand over user data to its parent company. It also came at the same time as President Trump’s purge from big tech social media platforms.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov warned that people are “being held hostage by tech monopolies.”
In addition to being independent from big tech, Telegram promises robust end-to-end encryption, ensuring messages remain private.
This has made Telegram a target for authoritarians and big tech monopolists.
In the U.S. lobbyist group The Coalition for a Safer Web even <a href="https://summit.news/2021/01/18/lobby-group-sues-apple-to-remove-telegram-from-app-store-for-allowing-hate-speech/">filed a lawsuit against Apple</a> in an effort to get Telegram removed from the app store, claiming that it allows ‘extremists’ to spread ‘hate speech’.
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source <a href="https://summit.news/2022/01/20/german-government-demands-big-tech-crack-down-on-telegram-other-free-speech-apps/">https://summit.news/2022/01/20/german-government-demands-big-tech-crack-down-on-telegram-other-free-speech-apps/</a>

revolution summit German Government Demands Big Tech Crack Down On Telegram, Other Free Speech Apps

Following threats to shut down the pro free speech encrypted messaging platform Telegram, the German government has stepped up its efforts b...

Why Covid-19 is always one step ahead of the US response

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/UnM3_jvDwt_kyUvz-LENWFmqOXk=/0x0:3000x1571/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23181965/GettyImages_1361961770.jpg" /></div>
The Biden administration’s response to <a href="https://www.vox.com/22846696/omicron-covid-19-variant-virology-mutation-vaccine">the omicron variant</a> is belatedly kicking into gear. The White House <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/us/covid-biden-free-masks.html">announced</a> Wednesday that it would soon ship 400 million N95 masks to US pharmacies and community health centers to be given away. Americans can <a href="https://www.cms.gov/how-to-get-your-at-home-OTC-COVID-19-test-for-free">submit their bills</a> for at-home tests to their health insurer for reimbursement, and on Tuesday, <a href="https://www.covidtests.gov/">a new federal website</a> launched that lets people order a few free at-home coronavirus tests.
Free tests and free masks are finally here — after some public health experts have been calling for them since omicron was first detected around Thanksgiving <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/12/the-biden-administration-rejected-an-october-proposal-for-free-rapid-tests-for-the-holidays">or even earlier</a>. But the tests and masks might not arrive in Americans’ hands until the end of the month.
“By the time the masks and tests get there, the surge will probably be over,” Monica Gandhi, an infectious diseases doctor at the University of California San Francisco, told me. It’s possible — but far from certain — that the omicron wave has already peaked. The average number of daily cases has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html">dropped</a> by 50,000 in the last week, a 6 percent decline.
From the very beginning of the pandemic, the US response was defined by slow action on <a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/3/6/21168087/cdc-coronavirus-test-kits-covid-19">tests</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/22870268/cdc-covid-19-guidelines-isolation-boosters-masks">masks</a>. Two years after the first coronavirus case on American soil was diagnosed, the national strategy to combat the virus is still too little, too late. The Biden administration’s response to omicron, experts say, will likely not arrive in time to meaningfully change the course of the latest pandemic wave.
“At this point, not sure widespread testing is going to be helpful until this wave calms down,” said David Celentano, who leads the epidemiology department at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
On December 1, the US was averaging 87,000 new Covid-19 cases per day. It’s now averaging more than 750,000 new cases daily, according to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html">New York Times data</a>. There are a record 158,638 Americans hospitalized with Covid-19. Roughly 1,900 people are dying of Covid-19 each day, a figure that has more than doubled since late November.
Other countries were caught off guard by omicron, too, but they were able to act quickly once it arrived. In the UK, for example, free at-home tests were already the norm. In the fall, before the omicron wave, Brits could walk into any pharmacy in the country <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/at-home-covid-tests-are-a-free-easy-part-of-everyday-life-in-the-uk-and-the-us-has-taken-note/">and get five or seven testing kits free of charge</a>.
Experts point to three main factors in the US government’s slow response to omicron: an over-reliance on vaccines, a failure to develop contingency plans, and the fracturing of the expert consensus on what the appropriate public health interventions would be.
Some experts say the Biden administration and federal officials put too much faith in the power of vaccines alone to end the pandemic. Advisers to the White House <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-covid-test-shortfall/2021/12/23/aca925a0-629d-11ec-a7e8-3a8455b71fad_story.html">told the Washington Post last month</a> that the eye-popping data reported in the initial Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials, showing those vaccines more than 90 percent effective at preventing all infections, contributed to a belief within the administration that sufficient vaccination would be enough to bring the pandemic to an end.
“I think the Biden transition team saw the first, highly promising vaccine efficacy results from Pfizer in fall 2020 and decided against making serious investments in so-called ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’ from the beginning,” Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at Harvard, said. “This vaccine-only strategy was never a good idea, but there were wake-up calls that were missed.”
For example, by late July of 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already knew that vaccine efficacy was waning and the delta variant was more contagious than its predecessors, which threatened a new wave of infections, according to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07/29/cdc-mask-guidance/">internal documents leaked at the time to the Post</a>. Around the same time, Israel started <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114255#:~:text=On%20July%2030%2C%202021%2C%20Israel,program%20to%20the%20entire%20population.">offering booster shots</a> to its most vulnerable residents, a step the US would not take for <a href="https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-authorizes-booster-dose-pfizer-biontech-covid-19-vaccine-certain-populations">two more months</a>.
The vaccines did fundamentally change the pandemic. Suddenly, tens of millions of people could safely acquire some immunity from Covid-19, and the vaccines offered particularly strong protection against severe illness. But they were never a panacea. Even in clinical trials, the vaccines were not 100 percent protective against infection. Over time, their effectiveness in stopping infections <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/22630979/covid-19-vaccine-booster-shots-delta-variant">declined</a>, even as they remained powerful in preventing the worst outcomes from Covid-19.
That made a vaccine-only strategy insufficient. The virus was still spreading widely. There were still millions of people who either <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/22686147/covid-19-vaccine-betadine-hydroxychloroquine-ivermectin-trump-conspiracy">refused to get vaccinated</a> or for whom the vaccines did not provide as strong of protection as they do for younger and healthier people. And there was <a href="https://www.vox.com/22712737/covid-19-cases-deaths-2021-winter-wave">always the threat of a new variant</a> that would be more resistant to the vaccines.
There are limits on what the federal government can do under our federalist system of government. Mask mandates and social distancing restrictions are largely the purviews of state and local authorities. The Biden administration did attempt to take sweeping actions, such as a vaccine mandate for large employers, that <a href="https://www.vox.com/22883639/supreme-court-vaccines-osha-cms-biden-mandate-nfib-labor-missouri">got tied up in the courts.</a>
But there were also clearly missed opportunities ahead of the omicron surge.
In October, with the delta wave underway, the White House rejected a plan to manufacture and distribute at-home rapid tests for the winter holidays, according to <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/12/the-biden-administration-rejected-an-october-proposal-for-free-rapid-tests-for-the-holidays">a Vanity Fair report from late December</a>. Over the summer, Abbott Laboratories — the largest manufacturer of at-home rapid tests in the US — actually <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/us/abbott-covid-tests.html">started destroying some of its test inventory</a> because it did not anticipate a market for those tests and the government had not bought the excess supply. This meant that when omicron start to spread, there was not a stockpile of masks or tests to distribute to people quickly.
And once the new omicron variant was spreading, it was already too late anyway. As several experts emphasized to me, the government does not move swiftly, even in the face of an emergency. It can take days for public health guidance to be revised. Setting up a website where people could order free tests took weeks. And the facts on the ground are always changing. With omicron, for example, the evidence is growing that throat swabs may be more sensitive in the early days of an infection than the nasal swabs included in most testing kits.
US health agencies are not accustomed to making and revising policy quickly, as demonstrated by <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/22870268/cdc-covid-19-guidelines-isolation-boosters-masks">the delay in revising the CDC’s isolation guidelines</a> or <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/types-of-masks.html">a long-overdue update on which face masks are recommended</a>.
“A rapid response is not possible within the way policies are normally formulated and implemented,” Bill Hanage, a Harvard University epidemiologist, told me. “We’re not caught fighting the last battle, but the one before that.”
The government’s ability to act quickly has been complicated by another factor: Public health experts are increasingly divided on what the country should be doing in its pandemic response. It’s hard to plan ahead or change plans quickly when experts can’t even agree on what you should do.
Public health experts were never a monolith. But early in the pandemic, there was a fairly clear consensus about what to do about Covid-19: Close some businesses, ban most large gatherings, mandate masks, and develop a vaccine. A New York Times survey of hundreds of epidemiologists <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/08/upshot/when-epidemiologists-will-do-everyday-things-coronavirus.html">found in the summer of 2020</a> that more than half were in agreement about the timeline for resuming many activities that had been stopped because of Covid-19, such as vacationing within driving distance or eating out at a restaurant.
But as the pandemic has dragged on, expert opinions diverged. In spring 2021, the Times ran <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/upshot/epidemiologists-coronavirus-masks.html">another survey of epidemiologists</a>, asking them how long people would need to wear masks indoors, the answers varied wildly; 20 percent said half a year or less, while another 26 percent said people would wear masks indefinitely, at least in certain situations. As the Biden administration <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/22738202/covid-19-vaccine-booster-shot-moderna-pfizer-j-j">debated booster shots this summer and fall</a>, some experts were full-throated supporters of giving everybody an additional dose, while other prominent experts argued boosters made sense only for certain people.
Even as I asked experts whether the White House’s proposals to distribute tests and masks were coming too late, there was disagreement about whether these plans were even necessary. Some said testing should be concentrated on nursing homes and on other high-risk populations. Some argued we should <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/news/chop-covid-guidelines-philadelphia-school-masks-20220106.html">stop testing asymptomatic kids in schools</a>.
And many of them continued to say that vaccines, more than any other intervention, are still the best way to bring Covid-19 under control. If the Biden administration neglected other parts of the pandemic response, it was partly following the belief among public health experts that vaccination trumps everything else in stopping Covid-19.
But some experts <a href="https://www.vox.com/22712737/covid-19-cases-deaths-2021-winter-wave">warned</a> that future waves — or variants — could threaten the tentative victory the country appeared to have won in the spring and early summer of 2021.
Rather than take proactive steps to prepare for that eventuality, the Biden administration sidestepped those decisions, and now the country is struggling to catch up to omicron.
“When it comes to public health overall, I think there is a relentless tendency to allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good,” Hanage told me. “When you are facing an exponentially growing wave of infections, we do not have the time to identify and demonstrate which policies are optimal, and that means we are caught out over and over again.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/2022/1/20/22889364/joe-biden-covid-19-omicron-plan-free-tests-masks">https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/2022/1/20/22889364/joe-biden-covid-19-omicron-plan-free-tests-masks</a>

vox Why Covid-19 is always one step ahead of the US response

The Biden administration’s response to the omicron variant is belatedly kicking into gear. The White House announced Wednesday that it wo...

The voting rights push in Congress is over. The fight for democracy isn’t.

If you listen to some leading liberal voices, the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/1/19/22881837/senate-filibuster-vote-voting-rights-joe-manchin-kyrsten-sinema">Senate defeat</a> of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/22876643/democrats-voting-rights-senate-filibuster-manchin">Freedom To Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Acts</a> could sound the death knell of American democracy.
In a Wednesday speech held before the Senate votes, President Joe Biden <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60063594">warned of future stolen elections</a>: “the prospect of [an election] being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed.” Mother Jones’s Ari Berman, a leading journalist on the democracy beat, argued that <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/01/kyrsten-sinema-just-killed-the-democrats-last-best-chance-to-protect-voting-rights/">the Senate is</a> “killing the Democrats’ last, best chance to protect American democracy.”
Biden and Berman are right that American democracy is <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22814025/democracy-trump-january-6-capitol-riot-election-violence">heading toward some sort of crisis</a>, and there’s good reason to think these bills would have improved the long-term outlook. But the reality is that the bills Democrats sought to pass were hardly the “last, best chance” to act in democracy’s defense.
For all the good they would have done, the bills would <a href="https://www.vox.com/22879991/election-subversion-voting-rights-us-elections-democracy">only have had a limited effect</a> on the biggest short-term threat to American democracy: election subversion, in which partisan political actors distort or outright disregard legitimate election results. The battle against these tactics was always going to take place in multiple arenas, most of which are outside of Washington.
Across the country, at the state and local level, Trump supporters are volunteering or running for local positions that would put them in charge of the mechanics of elections. According to an <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/01/04/1069232219/heres-where-election-deniers-and-doubters-are-running-to-control-voting">NPR analysis</a>, at least 15 Republicans who doubt or deny the legitimacy of Biden’s election victory are campaigning for state secretaries of state. For anyone concerned with American democracy, defeating these candidates should be a priority.
At the federal level, Republicans have signaled openness to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/11/new-proposal-electoral-count-act-trump-2024/">reforming the Electoral Count Act</a> (ECA) — the obscure federal law that opened the door to then-Vice President Mike Pence potentially overturning the 2020 election at Trump’s behest. The reform isn’t perfect but it’s worth pursuing, especially since a bipartisan coalition in the Senate might be willing to consider it.
These fights — contesting thousands of local elections and passing less ambitious but bipartisan reform legislation — may not be as emotionally satisfying as landmark elections overhaul. They won’t address voter suppression and gerrymandering, which still pose challenges for American democracy. But they do move the needle in ways that the doomsaying this week can obscure.
The Democrats’ two bills would have addressed some large and significant problems, most notably state laws to suppress the vote and extreme partisan gerrymandering. These state efforts tilt the playing field in the GOP’s direction and create significant burdens on groups attempting to get voters from minority communities to the polls; there is a reason why leading experts on democracy <a href="https://www.polisciforthepeople.com/">widely supported the Democrats’ voting rights proposals</a>.
And yet the impact of these bills’ failures might not be as significant as some fear, at least when it comes to the next election cycle.
Studies suggest that voter ID laws, for example, <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/21/18230009/voter-id-laws-fraud-turnout-study-research">don’t significantly depress minority turnout</a>. It doesn’t make such laws okay, of course — they <a href="https://www.democracydocket.com/news/democrats-must-reform-the-electoral-count-act-and-pass-comprehensive-voting-rights-legislation/">sap valuable activist resources</a> and there’s little doubt about their racist intent — but it’s worth noting that the evidence suggests their effects on election outcomes is fairly limited. Partisan gerrymandering remains a problem, particularly at the state legislative level, but the current round of House redistricting is turning out <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/democrats-are-doing-weirdly-well-in-redistricting.html">far less tilted in the GOP’s direction than Democrats had feared</a>.
Republicans are certainly still working to erode Democrats’ access to the ballot box, in ways that really do threaten American democracy. But their work has not been quite as effective as some dire analyses assumed (<a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/11/9/22765982/north-carolina-redistricting-gerrymandering-2021-2022">including my own</a>), giving reformers more time to come up with solutions before the system is past the point of no democratic return.
The story is different when it comes to election subversion. Anti-democratic forces are moving to seize control over the system more swiftly than even some of the most pessimistic analyses had feared.
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<figcaption>Former President Donald Trump prepares to speak at an Arizona rally on January 15.</figcaption>
<cite>Mario Tama/Getty Images</cite></figure>
Election subversion can happen in different ways at different points in the byzantine American electoral process. During the actual vote count, partisan local election officials could <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/537260251/The-Election-Sabotage-Scheme-and-How-Congress-Can-Stop-It#download&from_embed">deem Democratic ballots illegitimate on specious grounds</a> or <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-55524676">invent Republican ones</a>. If this fails, Republican state election officials could <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/19/21575177/trump-wayne-county-michigan-certification">refuse to certify a Democratic victory</a>. Even if a presidential election is certified, a GOP-controlled state legislature could <a href="https://www.vox.com/22173990/electoral-college-trump-biden-stephen-miller">send an alternative slate of electors</a> to the Electoral College. And if Democrats are still winning, a GOP <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trumps-january-6-strategy-all-about-mike-pence.html">vice president</a> or <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/26/politics/josh-hawley-overturn-election-fact-check/index.html">Congress</a> could assert power to overturn the election on their own.
None of this is hypothetical: The Trump campaign and its allies tried every one of these tactics in 2020, and failed over and over again because public servants at key points in the system <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-solutions/election-officials-under-attack">did their jobs</a>. But the former president’s camp is working assiduously to improve their chances in 2024.
Across the country, Republican partisans motivated by Trump’s lies are <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/12/9/22824509/summit-for-democracy-biden-america">flooding precincts and contesting election administration positions</a>. Georgia’s new election law, SB202, gives the Republican legislature power to <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22368044/georgia-sb202-voter-suppression-democracy-big-lie">seize partisan control over local election administration</a>. The Republicans that held the line against Trump’s attempt to decertify elections in 2020 — like Michigan Board of State Canvassers member Aaron Van Langevelde — are being <a href="https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2021/01/18/michigan-republicans-seek-replace-canvasser-who-certified-election/4202195001/">sacked by their own party</a>. Many Republican candidates for state secretary of state <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/01/04/1069232219/heres-where-election-deniers-and-doubters-are-running-to-control-voting">in 2022 have publicly advanced Trump’s Big Lie</a>; several have reportedly formed an informal coalition aimed at <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/13/trump-loyalists-secretary-of-state-candidates">rewriting US election rules in their party’s favor</a>.
And all of this is backed by a Republican base that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/07/republicans-big-lie-trump/">overwhelmingly believes Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 election</a> and a propaganda network, ranging from Fox News to Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, aimed at ensuring their minds are never changed.
The voting rights legislation would have helped address <a href="https://protectdemocracy.org/resource-library/document/election-subversion-freedom-to-vote-2-pager/">some of the concerns</a> about voter suppression. The Freedom to Vote Act, in particular, included chain of custody provisions that make it harder to outright manipulate vote counts and safeguards against state governments from removing election officials from their positions absent “good cause.”
But even if these provisions worked as intended — a big if given GOP control over federal courts — they don’t go far enough. They <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/12/us/politics/biden-voting-rights-speech-election-subversion.html">do not prevent Republicans from refusing to certify election results</a>, sending an alternate slate of electors to Washington, or otherwise seeking to overturn the results in January.
“If you look at 2020, we came much closer to a successful subversion of the election results than a lot of people understand,” <a href="https://www.vox.com/22879991/election-subversion-voting-rights-us-elections-democracy">Rick Hasen</a>, an election law expert at University of California Irvine, told my colleague Fabiola Cineas. The bills that failed in the Senate “would not have done much on the issue of election subversion.”
If the 2024 election is close, American democracy is heading toward a potential crisis.
But let’s not mistake that dismal assessment as the epitaph for democracy.
In their book <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172149/dictators-and-democrats">Dictators and Democrats</a>, political scientists Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman analyze what causes countries to transition from democracy to autocracy — and vice versa. One of their core findings is that, when a democracy is tottering, laws provide less of a bulwark on their own than most people think. Rules need people to help enforce them; when it comes to democracy, one of the law’s best guarantors are the citizens themselves.
The key to nearly every effective subversion strategy is control over institutions: when Trumpists are in positions of power, they get to set the rules of the game. If Democrats, non-partisan actors, or principled Republicans hold key jobs, as they did in 2020, the Trumpists can’t break the system.
So in 2022, many of the biggest fights for democracy are hyper-local: races for county executive, judgeships, election administration positions, and statehouses. If pro-democracy candidates can win these races in large numbers, they will collectively pose a significant barrier to an election subversion campaign in 2024.
There is a nascent infrastructure for competing in such races. Run For Something, a liberal group that encourages young candidates to run for state and local office, has launched a multi-million dollar effort to contest positions that “relate to local election work” — a direct effort to fight back against election subversion. Amanda Litman, the group’s founder and executive director, told me that she is hoping to field candidates in roughly 2,000 such races in 2022 alone.
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<figcaption>A rally for Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnick in Hampton, Georgia, on January 2, 2021. Both won their run-off elections, giving Democrats a slim majority in the Senate — but not enough votes to change filibuster rules to pass voting rights reform.</figcaption>
<cite>Sandy Huffaker/AFP/Getty Images</cite></figure>
But they need more people to run in these races. And Run For Something candidates, in turn, need volunteers and donors who can power their races against anti-democracy, pro-Trump candidates.
This is the kind of effort liberals need to look toward today. Paradoxically, the failure of voting rights bills in Congress could give this cause a boost by directing activist energy away from Washington.
“Democrats and liberals in general look to and make demands of the White House and DC when they have officials in power there,” says Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist who studies political movements. “That is actually a weakness, because the focus needs to remain bottom up.”
But Washington can’t be ignored entirely. Some election subversion problems — most notably, a repeat of Trump and congressional allies’ effort to overturn the election on January 6, 2021 — can only be solved at the federal level.
Some of the most important vulnerabilities can be addressed by reforming the Electoral Count Act, a confusingly worded law from 1887 that currently governs the final stages of presidential elections. The law sets the procedures by which Congress certifies the results of the Electoral College tally, allowing simple majorities in both houses to reject the electors if they so choose. It also <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-electoral-count-act-of-1887-is-showing-its-age-heres-how-to-help-congress-certify-a-presidential-election-with-more-certainty-175222">does not clarify</a> the vice president’s constitutionally mandated role in supervising the certification process, opening the door to Trump’s effort to pressure Mike Pence to reject the election results.
The congressional count creates an obvious point of vulnerability in a presidential election: a malign party that controls both houses could, in theory, overturn the results of a legitimate election. But at the same time, it is also a bulwark against some state-level election subversion — a statehouse deciding to appoint its own competing slate of electors to the Electoral College. The Electoral Count Act would allow Congress to reject the statehouse-appointed electors and replace them with ones who actually reflect the will of the voters.
Reforming the Electoral Count Act thus means striking a balance between blocking undemocratic action at the federal level while preserving a bulwark against it at the state level. But legislators can craft a reform that addresses these nuances. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/11/new-proposal-electoral-count-act-trump-2024/">The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent</a> reports that Sen. Angus King (I-ME) has a draft of an Electoral Count Act reform bill that would address these concerns by clearly prohibiting vice presidents from going rogue, requiring a supermajority to reject electors in Congress, and creating a judicial review mechanism that could block state legislatures from sending their own electors to Washington.
Something like King’s bill has a chance. <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/05/mcconnell-electoral-count-act-reform-526542">Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell</a> have signaled openness to fixing the Electoral Count Act; <a href="https://www.axios.com/electoral-reform-bipartisan-support-0b1ffd06-2c17-4460-b96e-f69f43a9786f.html">a bipartisan group of about 12 senators</a> is currently meeting to discuss a potential bill. It’s at least worth seeing if this yields something real.
Neither of these courses of action, contesting local and state elections and reforming the Electoral Count Act, are as satisfying as passing a landmark bill. Nor do they address the threats to democracy posed by voter suppression and gerrymandering. For Democrats, it’s less hitting a home run than a series of singles.
Ballgames can still be won with bloops and base hits. And Americans who care about their democracy still have agency; there are things they can do that really matter.
The future looks grim for American democracy. But liberals shouldn’t allow realistic pessimism to shade into resignation or despair. Democrats in Washington may have squandered an opportunity to safeguard future elections, but many of the key battles to protect our democracy have yet to be fought.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22876361/freedom-to-vote-act-senate-filibuster-what-next">https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22876361/freedom-to-vote-act-senate-filibuster-what-next</a>

vox The voting rights push in Congress is over. The fight for democracy isn’t.

If you listen to some leading liberal voices, the Senate defeat of the Freedom To Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Acts could...