Well, this has been a week. We got an acquittal in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Also, we received new C.D.C. guidelines for in-person schooling. President Biden announced how he would have enough vaccine for everybody by the end of July. He also claimed his actions would save us from Trump’s failures. All of this gave us some insight into the competence of the Biden administration. The signs aren’t good.
Knowing you’re going to lose a battle and attacking anyway may make for a stirring poem. Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” highlighted reckless bravery. It wasn’t a good idea then, and it’s foolhardy politics. There never was a chance of getting 17 Republican Senators to convict Trump. Why would you give the Ex-President a victory to lord over you? All it did was further divide the country along partisan lines. Wasn’t Joe all about bringing us together?
There was a win-win way out of the Capitol Riot mess if only Biden had the sense to see it. Republicans offered a censure rather than impeachment—a bipartisan measure condemning the departed President for his part in the rampage showing unity rather than division. A Gerald Ford moment is opting to focus on the National healing and needs instead of revenge. The Democratic left-wing might scream, but most of the nation would think of Biden as a bigger person.
Instead of asserting control of his party as all successful presidents have done, he allowed his party’s legislators to charge into “the Valley of Death.” Now Biden is faced with following the divisive impeachment with the highly partisan Covid Relief Bill. This massive legislation will lack any Republican input. It would’ve been far better to have a unifying action under his belt before pushing this highly partisan package. This sequence negates Joe Biden’s campaign promise to be a unifier. Worse, it upends his claims to competence.
Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, had a great tweet the other day, “In truth, the vaccination program, combined with the naturally acquired immunity of people previously infected with the virus, would probably get the U.S. close to herd immunity by the summer, even if Joe Biden spent the next six months just riding his Peloton.” His contention that the vaccine regime Biden inherited will tame the virus by summer received even more clarity. Johnson and Johnson asked for FDA approval for its vaccine this week. Already in use in the U.K. since December, the AstraZeneca vaccine could be approved shortly. Novavax expects to have its results by the end of the first quarter.
The U.S. has contracted for 100 million doses from each company. Johnson & Johnson requires only one shot, while the other two need a double dose. These vaccines maybe a little less effective than the two already in use but are much easier to distribute. They require the same handling as our seasonal flu shots so they can use the same widespread system.
As I said in my 1/24 post “Birth of A Lie’,” the Biden administration could only mess things up. Specifically, I warned against placing orders for much more of the two already approved hard to distribute vaccines. Sure enough, Biden ordered 100 million more doses from each for delivery starting in the summer. If any of the three new vaccines in the pipeline are approved, you will have more than enough doses to vaccinate every adult in the country by then. (at present, there is no plan to include children).
Given the success of the already-in-place vaccine distribution plan, leaving it alone is the best policy. Just incorporate the already contracted new vaccines as they come online. How do we know the current program is a rousing success? Biden’s goal was 100 million doses to be administered in his first hundred days. We were already on that pace by his inauguration. He now aspires to get to a 1.5 million a day rate by the end of the hundred days. We have already surpassed that rate. Having met all the Biden goals, the Administration must agree this is a success.
The press plays up the uneven and, in some spots, problematic vaccine rollout. Remember, this was from a standing start. The special considerations with the two approved products ruled out the distribution network we used for other vaccines. I always say, we have to ask, compared to..? Faced with the same problems, the European Union is far behind our shot rate.
There will be glitches and weather disruptions, but with more vaccines and supplies coming online, we can feel confident we will continue to outperform the Biden goals.
Those goals point to a different problem, the ignorance of the Biden team. By issuing desired vaccination goals already attained and claiming the pandemic here will worsen when improving, the Biden administration is at odds with the facts. “A 100 million doses in 100 days” is a good slogan but had no basis in reality. The nation recorded well over 2 million shots the last two days. The Biden low-ball shows a remarkable lack of knowledge of Operation Warp speed. Is it ignorance or politics?
The administration has claimed inadequate transition information from the previous administration, but the info is public knowledge. I can assure you I have never had a government briefing. Yet, I have the needed information to know what’s happening. Given what the Trump administration put in the works, we will be swimming in Covid vaccines by the end of June. Like the GameStop bulls, I found it on the internet. Here’s your pandemic update from Johns Hopkins:
To give the appearance of doing something, the administration announced a couple of actions. It claimed to be increasing vaccine deliveries, but the New York Times reported this was already in the works. Also, it will send a million doses to 6,500 pharmacies. This action might be getting ready for the Operation Warp Speed’s supported Johnson and Johnson vaccine. Without special handling, this one dose vaccine is excellent for pharmacies and other local distribution points. The J & J vaccine is on the verge of approval. If not, it’s just diverting doses from a system already able to inoculate 1.5+ million people a day.
Major retailers run loss leader sales simultaneously on toilet paper. Consumers buy to stock up at a bargain price. A week later, these companies find their reorders are cut or refused. It turns out, manufacturers oversold toilet paper by 140%. Word gets out of a severe shortage, and People bid up the existing supply and hoard it. The price of toilet paper soars. The manufacturers face very costly lawsuits for failure to deliver. This scenario sounds familiar. That’s because we just had a toilet paper shortage with sharply rising prices during our present pandemic.
Keeping this in mind will help us understand what happened with GameStop and other traded stocks. Some individual investors felt these beaten-down stocks were selling below their actual worth. They bought and shared their reasons for buying with others on the internet. They may or may not have been aware of large short positions, but it would become apparent in any case as the share prices jumped.
Short selling is a widely used method of selling something today for delivery or liquidation later. Futures markets exist for most of the things we need. A farmer looking at the corn vs. soybeans price for delivery next November chooses the more profitable to plant. The farmer then sells corn contracts for delivery at that time. The farmer presently has no corn but will have by fall. By what we call hedging, the farmer locks in his profit. People needing corn in the future are on the buy-side. We do this with everything from copper to U.S. Treasury Bonds. We’ve done this for a long time. The Chicago Board of Trade dates back to 1848.
Other people see the November price of corn as too high or too low, and they buy and sell contracts simply hoping to profit from the price movements. These traders have no corn now or use for it in the future. These speculators are welcome to give liquidity to these markets.
Selling something you don’t own is nothing new and is needed to facilitate commerce. However, stock trading has an added wrinkle. Because of settlement rules, short-sellers have to borrow the stock to settle the trade. Generally, brokers facilitate this between their clients, but not having enough supply to borrow is always dangerous for the short seller.
Recently, I wrote of Biden’s proposed Covid-19 solutions to problems already well on their way to being solved or were inflicted on us by Biden’s allies, the teacher’s unions, and the educational establishment. President Biden means with the help of his media allies to claim he defeated the virus. A Big lie is in the making.
It helps to see exactly where we were on Inauguration Day. The facts are, the virus has passed its apogee and is receding. Vaccine distribution is already on the pace to exceed 100 million doses in his first hundred days. The charts from 1/20 from Johns Hopkins and numbers from the CDC serve as base points.
As you can see, cases, hospitalizations, deaths, and test positivity on Inauguration Day are all heading down. The results were with record-high testing. I think the highs in these areas have passed, and we have seen the worst of the epidemic. It may be the result of mask-wearing and distancing being widespread. Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Marty Makary points to the beginning of herd immunity. Remember, we get this state when a significant percentage of the populace has had the virus, is vaccinated, or some combination of the two. While only 15 million are vaccinated, some have estimated up to a third of us have had the virus. Some people may have T-Cell immunity. The combination makes even this easy spreader’s job harder. The downtrends will only get more pronounced as people are vaccinated.
I predicted by 1/20, 15 million people inoculated. The total doses administered on that day were over one million. As forecasted, this rate meets Biden’s 100 million doses by the end of his first hundred days. With the infrastructure already in place to deliver a million shots a day, our delivery ability will only expand. Every day more inoculation locations are coming online. The only thing that might hold us back from far surpassing this goal is the vaccines’ timely delivery.
People might forget that Operation Warp Speed wasn’t about just the two vaccines we presently have. The Trump administration also invested in others. The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine is already vaccinating millions in the U.K. and Europe. Mid-April approval in the U.S.is expected. However, overseas success could speed up the timetable. Because it needs less special handling, it’s easier to distribute.
Lucky me, I downloaded Parler to see what it was all about, and it disappeared. It seems they violated the terms of service of the “Big Tech” companies it relied on for its business. Apple, Google, and Amazon claimed Parler allowed violent content on its platform. Without the ability to acquire new users and web services, it was simply out of business.
On the surface, this seems to be well within private businesses’ right to run their firms as they feel fit. As one with libertarian tendencies, I would generally agree they don’t have to give the free-speech protections of the first amendment to employees or those who do business. Still, it seemed the prohibitions almost always adversely affected those on the right. Similar content on the left never gets the same reaction. The measures inflicted by the Big Tech companies align with the goals of the Democrats. It just doesn’t seem right.
It turns out all this might not be legal. Vivek Ramaswamy & Jed Rubinfeld, in a recent Wall Street Journal OP-ED, pointed out, the government can’t induce or conspire with a private entity to do something Constitutionally prohibited from doing itself. I’m not a constitutional lawyer, but reading through the cases they cited, I wouldn’t want to defend big tech in front of a supreme court with six conservatives. Some of those Justices went through various degrees of “cancelling” by the Democrats. They might match Democratic control of the Presidency and both Congress houses with Big Tech’s lopsided actions in their favor. These actions are occurring while leading Democrats are proposing anti-trust measures. This picture looks terrible.
Detour on the Road 