Texas Progressives on coronavirus Week 22: Reinfection clinically proven, more layoffs ahead, Stephen Hahn sucks

COVID reinfection has officially been confirmed. Masks UP!

Even worse? Good old American exceptionalist capitalism, plus nationalism on which the US has no leg up on either Russia or China, is bollixing up scientific research for a vaccine.  This thing is going to get ugly before a new vaccine that is both safe and effective hits the market.

Meanwhile, new Trump pandemic advisor Scott Atlas, neither a virologist nor an epidemiologist, is openly advocating Trump push Swedish-type herd immunity. As the story notes, it hasn't worked, and Sweden has a higher death rate than the US, despite all of Trump's OTHER fuck-ups on handling COVID. The UK, which started down the herd immunity road, is also higher. This:

With a population of 328 million in the United States, it may require 2.13 million deaths to reach a 65 percent threshold of herd immunity, assuming the virus has a 1 percent fatality rate, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

Is the reality.

Deborah Birx goes further down the Trump toady road by saying she's "optimistic" about a vaccine this year. I don't need Fauci to tell me she's full of shit.

Stephen Hahn, whether a secret Trump toady or, as many feared when he was nominated to run the FDA, a guy without any political history and likely without any political backbone, is letting his agency cave to Trump's politicization, first with blood plasma treatments and now with medically unindicated expanded use of remdesivir.

Related? A Health and Human Services mouthpiece claims a COVID vaccine will be ready by the end of the year after announcing clinical trials will start by the end of the month. No it won't, not in the normal definition of "safe" and "effective." If Hahn caves on this, he is really part of the problem, not part of the solution. If Hahn even caves on not challenging this statement, he's part of the problem, not part of the solution.

A Trump plan to supplement Obamacare for COVID patients has been a big old fail so far, for a variety of reasons.

Trump's attempt to put new smiley faces on his handling of the pandemic continue to fail. A number of companies have announced that old furloughs will become permanent, or at best that any people recalled will have work modified (ie, paid less), while other companies have announced new layoff plans.

A survey of human-resources employees released by Randstad RiseSmart found nearly half of U.S. employers that furloughed or laid off staff because of Covid-19 are considering additional workplace cuts in the next 12 months.

The story goes on to note that many companies expect the pandemic's problems to be worse than they first planned months ago. Question: Assuming he's elected, is ConservaDem Joe Biden preparing for this? And, per the "Obamacare" link, is there even a snowball's chance he changes his mind on national health care? There is no Joe Lieberman (D-Zion) to block it if the Dems get to 51, not 50, in the Senate.

More employment-related news? Trumpy was told by the IRS he cannot unilaterally waive employees' portion of FICA taxes. Only Congress can, and the ConservaDems better not! All Trump can do is allow employers to delay collecting employees' half until the end of this year, and then collect the whole outstanding amount at once. Even conservative biz organizations are balking at that. So, Trump's executive declaration on this will likely be ignored.

DosCentavos points you to a post by researcher Angela Gutierrez regarding a Latino Decisions survey of Latino parents and the challenges they face as schools reopen.

ISIS was scamming America with fake N95 masks. (Dear ISIS: Want to do this right? Scam ONLY red-region America with real Ben Carson Brand and My Pillow Guy Brand oleandrin.)

Meet "Doctor" Roger Marshall, the MD COVIDIOT Kansas Congresscritter running for Senate.

Bush gives al Qaeda its boogeyman

I don’t think I could say it any better than Gary Kamiya:

Jihadists need their American boogeyman as much as Bush needs his Islamist boogeyman. By fighting them in the wrong way and on the wrong terrain, we have inadvertently allowed them to claim the heroic mantle of nationalism and anti-Americanism. When the U.S. occupiers leave, Osama bin Laden and his ilk will groan in despair. ...

By conflating jihadists with militant, religiously oriented national liberation movements like Hamas, Bush has not only undercut the support we might otherwise have received from Arab populations for police operations against genuine jihadists, he has helped to create toxic new forms of anti-Western extremism. … The irony is that without our help, the jihadists would be struggling to survive. As Gilles Kepel, a French expert on radical Islam, argues in "The War for Muslim Minds," very few Muslims, no matter how radical, support al-Qaida. "Beyond the circle of Bin Laden and Zawahiri and their supporters and admirers ... the majority of Islamists and salafists, let alone most of the world's Muslims, no longer see the commando action carried out by 'the umma's blessed vanguard' against the twin towers and the Pentagon as fulfilling the promise of jihad," Kepel writes. "On the contrary, after the first few seconds of enthusiasm for this blow to America's 'arrogance,' most Muslims saw the massacre of innocents on Sept. 11 as opening the door to disorder and devastation within the house of Islam."

The suggestion that we now leave a bunch of fanatical mass murderers alone may strike most Americans as cowardly and morally contemptible. But what we want are results, not self-righteous campaigns that make matters worse. Bush's righteous war has failed. To leave jihadists alone is not to appease them. It is to plan their isolation and eventual extinction more precisely.

Kamiya goes on to worry about what could happen if al-Qaeda gets established in Gaza or Lebanon.

I’m not that worried about that. I suspect that Egypt would give tacit assent to Israel cracking down in Gaza and that Syria, where a majority is Druze or Alawite or otherwise non-Sunni, that Assad would do the same in Lebanon. (Another reason why it’s absurd for Bush to think AQI is getting support from Damascus.)