Not entirely though actually getting anything past the courts is going to mean something like expanding the court to disempower the Republicans there.

That’s probably become increasingly untenable. So he just responds with nonsense instead of a meaningful answer.

Yes, once the anti-vax anti-mask folks got their footing, it was pretty much guaranteed that we’d see a lot of deaths.

But what does “has to” mean anyways? The reality is motivated judge can rule pretty much anything as “ambiguous”

The debate has had a remarkably slight impact on public opinion to date. It’s not clear that it’ll shift things in any kind of meaningful way.

Getting something done means having enough Democrats in the Senate who want to change the rules. That’s a tough lift

Sorry, but the judge is hoping for a gratuity

There are things we could have done better; the US isn’t some island of perfection, but it was on the whole, a decent response after Biden took office.

Smallpox is a disease where vaccination once protects you for life.

The current round of vaccines for COVID protect you for several months.

There’s a difference in outcomes because of that. I’ll also note that a big chunk of China didn’t get vaccinated either, and that we have a really active anti-vax contingent in the US with the support of Trump and the other Republicans.

It’s not the end; it’s not something that ever ends, in the same way that influenza still kills people.

But vaccines got us from a disease that was killing an awful lot more people to one where it’s one that kills a few.

Yes actually — he started sabotaging pandemic response as soon as it became known that in the absence of vaccines, the disease would disproportionately harm minority communities which have less access to care.

That’s the idea: extract the oil, pay out everything as dividends or share buybacks, and then sell the well to a doomed-to-fail company which can declare bankruptcy and leave the public responsible for cleaning up the mess. The oil industry has a long history of taking advantage of inadequate bond requirements for oil wells to do exactly that.

If you’re in the US, the basic answer looks like this:

• Talk to people about what they’re actually doing and what’s going on.
• Check your voter registration so you can actually vote against them
• volunteer when you can
• provide what financial support you can to both the Presidential candidate and to those downballot.

Which is why I’m going to do what I can to prevent that: I care about policy, not about how the candidates look or anything.

It means his team arranged for actual delivery, federal payments, and not just dumping it on the system, which weren’t prepared

What he did do was get vaccine distribution working. That made a world of difference in fatality rates

It’s about the voters’ views, not the elected officials.

Yes, they’ve been updating the vaccine every year to match currently-circulating virus strains. This is about an additional update coming out this fall.

Pretty much the same thing is done with flu vaccines, where you need a periodic update for it to be effective.

No, not yet. There will probably be one in September or October.

Not sure anything like that is put together, but a good start is to call your rep and senators and ask them to close the various loopholes that the courts have put in US bribery law, both the after-the-fact-gratuity one and the explicit (instead of implicit) quid-pro-quo one.