Coronavirus week 73B: what's next?

The biggie here in Tex-ass? Last week, Kenny Boy Paxton admitted in legal pleadings that his office cannot and will not enforce Abbott's GA-38 banning masks, and Harris County's county attorney set this out for public consumption. I would assume, then, that Kenny Boy also cannot enforce bans on vaccine mandates. Flip side is that the Texas Supremes sided with Strangeabbott again, and that the hypocritical sack of shit amended GA-38 to include ALL COVID VACCINES, whether of an EUA only or full FDA approval.

That's even as school districts like Leakey ISD and Medina ISD are shut this entire week, because of COVID. The Lege has passed a bill with modest to moderate expansions of remote learning, but its fate at Strangeabbott's hands is murky.

And as Caleb Wallace is now dead.

And, outside of Texas, so is Mark Bernier.

Off the Kuff notes that for all of the litigation over Greg Abbott's mask mandate ban, Abbott himself admits he can't enforce it anyway.

The Atlantic reminds us that Delta is likely not the last variant, but that ... as any non-troll knows, vaccination "corrals" the virus and reduces its evolutionary variant development, along with all the other things vaccination does.

At Jacobin, Branko Marcetic supports a national vaccination mandate. The Atlantic has a related story that says we need to keep shifting the public health burden onto the antivaxxers.

Just because you can smell perfume, or farts, through or around a mask, even an N95, doesn't mean they're not effective. This was raised ... and dismissed ... 16 months ago. More here. And on Reddit even.

The man who claims to have invented mRNA vaccination technology is also a COVID antivaxxer, which he denies. TLDR, or preview? He's overstating his vaccine work claims (which is nonetheless not insubstantial), he IS a COVID antivaxxer, and despite his graduate work, he's idiot enough to have gotten a vaccine AFTER getting COVID and thinking it would reverse the already started effects of infection, which in his case seems to include long-haul COVID. Sadly, wingnut media is giving him the recognition he craves.

Robert Malone is also apparently the nut who started mongering the claim that Pfizer's vaccine, now with the name of Comirnaty, has not "really" gotten full approval and is still on an EUA, per Orac. (Somebody emailed my newspaper about this.)

Biden appears to be kowtowing to Beijing on not pushing for more information about a possible lab leak at WIV being the root of the pandemic. Orac will continue to not discuss this, of course.

Zeynep Tufekci is a co-author, one of several, of a new piece at Science studying the history of scientific study of aerosol transmission of viruses. She gives the nickel version of the piece at her Substack, which also has a link to a NYT column, which discusses the lack of large scale clinical trials related to COVID, AND an announcement she will now be a regular columnist there. Hey, Zeynep, wade into foreign policy and kick Teapot Tommy Friedman in the nads. The Science piece (and I already know part of the history, and this builds on that) shows how blind reliance by many immunologists and related scientists at the start of the pandemic had them convinced that droplets, not aerosals, was the primary means of transmission.

More on waning vaccine efficiency.