++QAnon’s prophecies failed to come true. Here’s why the conspiracy theory will persist anyway. +
++If you’re a hardcore QAnon believer, you had high hopes for January. +
++Among other things, you expected Donald Trump to remain president. You expected mass arrests and public executions. You expected an underground cabal of child-trafficking Democrats to finally be captured. +
++None of those things happened. +
++Instead, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. So if you’re one of those people — perhaps millions — who were deeply invested in the various QAnon conspiracy theories, the past few weeks likely produced an immense amount of dissonance. +
++But for the most die-hard QAnon followers, hope springs eternal! The next big prophecy is supposed to unfold on March 4, which had been Inauguration Day before the ratification of the 20th Amendment in 1933 — and the day Trump will gloriously return to power and retake the White House, according to the febrile imaginings of the QAnon movement. +
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Logan Cyrus/Bloomberg via Getty Images
++All of which is to say, QAnon is still with us, and may be with us for a while. Conspiracy theories are powerful precisely because they’re so flexible. They never have to cohere; they just have to explain what seems otherwise inexplicable and, above all, offer the believer a sense of direction in a complicated world. +
++With that in mind, it’s worth asking what might become of the QAnon movement. Assuming March 4 doesn’t go as expected, where do the followers of Q turn next? And what does it mean for our politics moving forward if QAnon shape-shifts into an even more nebulous cult? +
++To get some answers, I reached out to eight journalists and researchers who’ve covered the conspiracy beat over the past four years or so. Their responses, edited for clarity and length, are below. +
++There wasn’t a perfect consensus, but a couple of themes emerged. One, the way to think about QAnon is that it’s less a political movement than a religion. Two, that is precisely why QAnon will keep going even as its prophecies fail to materialize. Everyone agreed that QAnon will likely persist as a major factor in American politics. +
++If these experts are right, and I suspect they are, the problems driving the QAnon movement will probably get worse before they get better, if they get better at all. +
++It’s a religion — and religions have staying power +
++Andrew Marantz, staff writer, the New Yorker +
++In late April 2011, while walking through Times Square, I stumbled on a group of Christians who were holding a rally to warn about the coming apocalypse. They were followers of the radio evangelist Harold Camping, and they believed not that the end was nigh in some general sense but that it was extremely, specifically nigh: that Jesus would return on May 11, which was then about two weeks away. +
++I asked one of the rallygoers, a firefighter named Jeff who lived on Long Island, how he planned to spend that day. He had no specific plans. Somehow, he agreed to let me spend the afternoon and evening at his house, observing up close what it looks like when prophecy fails. By the time I left Long Island on the uneventful night of the 11th, Jeff had convinced himself that the world-ending earthquakes were late, but that they would arrive by morning. His wife, who took me aside for a desperate whispered chat, was less convinced. +
++I haven’t spoken to Jeff since the non-rapture. Maybe he woke up chastened on the morning of May 12 — even while I was with him, friends were already sending him mocking texts — and stayed away from DIY prophecy. Or maybe he kept exploring, swinging from apocalyptic theory to apocalyptic theory like vines leading farther into a forest, until he found his way to Pizzagate and Frazzledrip. +
++Research suggests that some people are unusually predisposed to accept implausible conspiratorial beliefs, and that those people may accept multiple such beliefs at once, even when the beliefs are brazenly contradictory. In any case, the glaring failure of a prophecy is almost never enough to make the prophecy go away. In late May 2011, Harold Camping made a new announcement: He had miscalculated. The rapture would actually arrive in October. +
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Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
++Jane Coaston, host of The Argument, New York Times +
++Many observers of the movement have compared QAnon’s failings — the myriad predictions that did not come to pass, including the very predictions of ultimate Trumpian victory that served as the foundation of the conspiracy theory — to the 1844 “Great Disappointment.” +
++During a time of significant religious upheaval in the United States, Baptist minister William Miller predicted that the world would come to an end on March 21, 1844. When Jesus Christ did not return to earth on that date, Miller revised his prediction, saying that the Second Coming would instead take place on April 18, 1844. +
++When Christ did not make his return on that date, Miller apologized for the error, but another Millerite preacher, Samuel Snow, declared that Christ would return on the “tenth day of the seventh month of the present year,” and, using the calendar of a Jewish sect he believed to be more accurate than our own, said that that date would be October 22, 1844. +
++Clearly, the world did not end on October 22, 1844. But neither, surprisingly, did the Millerites. Instead, they broke into factions — the most famous of which, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, came to believe that October 22 did not mark the second coming but rather an event that took place in heaven. +
++Failed predictions will not doom QAnon, as it did not doom the Millerites, because QAnon could perhaps be best understood as a religious movement of sorts that places faith above accuracy, and believes in, above everything else, a final judgment for sinners where, to loosely quote Philippians 2:10-11, every knee shall bend and every tongue shall confess. It’s just that to QAnon, “sinners” are “all Democrats, and most celebrities” and the tongues of all would be confessing that Donald Trump has defeated ultimate evil. +
++Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor, the Atlantic +
++One of the weirder things I discovered when I began reporting about QAnon is that the true believers don’t care who Q is. Naturally, I wanted to know who was behind the hoax. But to the QAnon devout, Q’s identity simply did not matter. This observation was key to my realization that the QAnon movement doesn’t behave merely like a pro-Trump conspiracy theory but instead like a baby religion, born on the social web and spread by Q’s acolytes to extremists who feel the movement’s anti-establishment message in their bones. +
++Jared Holt, Visiting Research Fellow at DFRLab +
++The QAnon movement is no stranger to failed prophecy. It is not a logical or rational movement, and it can’t be simply debunked or cast aside. There are some QAnon believers who are likely to maintain their faith in the distorted reality for the rest of their lives. +
++When forecasts that Trump would somehow retake office before or during inauguration failed to materialize, though it shook the faith of a significant portion of believers, it did not end the broader movement. Within the QAnon movement exists a well-practiced ecosystem that reflexively shifted the goalposts to keep followers engaged. Some claimed that their predictions had come true despite appearing not to, and others pushed the deadline for their prediction back a handful of weeks. +
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Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
++Travis View, co-host, QAnon Anonymous podcast +
++QAnon followers have been mostly purged from mainstream social media platforms following the January 6 insurrection. While this has hurt their proselytization and propaganda efforts, it has also enhanced their self-image as persecuted renegades. +
++A minority of less tech-savvy or less committed QAnon followers have given up on the movement, but the true believers are doubling down on alternate platforms such as Gab or Telegram. They continue to “trust the plan” and will likely do so for the rest of their lives. They’re now committed to the cause because of the community, the sense of mission, and the time and sacrifice they have already invested. +
++Where QAnon goes from here +
++Charlie Warzel, opinion writer at large, New York Times +
++The short answer is that I don’t know where QAnon goes from here, but I do not see it going away. My big fear, though, is that it becomes a political abstraction as it veers out of the fever swamps and is a subject of more mainstream reporting, fascination, and punditry. +
++That’s a real concern because I think if QAnon becomes some kind of vague shorthand for “right-wing loons,” it has two pretty negative effects. +
++First, it flattens and obscures what QAnon really is and that is, as Ben Collins [reporter for NBC News] has rather eloquently put it, “a political movement based on the imminent, public executions of political enemies.” +
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Alex Halada/AFP via Getty Images
++Second, it has the potential to mainstream the belief even more. It’s one reason why I think Democratic lawmakers need to be very careful about their framing of the GOP as the “QAnon party.” Because while I understand and even agree that the GOP has to be held to account on their embrace of this movement, I also think it could drive the party deeper into the arms of its furthest-right fringe. +
++Basically, our political leaders really underestimate just how much a huge portion of the country values the ability to piss off liberals. And how much those who love to see elites angry/uncomfortable/upset are willing to excuse the people who can deliver on “triggering the libs.” Marjorie Taylor Greene is a perfect example of this type of person. She is a particular brand of politician who feeds off outrage and uses it to acquire political power. For that reason, I think trying to make her the face of the GOP could absolutely backfire. +
++It’s important to note, though, that there is absolutely no good, satisfactory answer here. And that is because one of our two political parties has openly embraced and tolerated a movement whose hallmark is hostility toward democracy. Whatever happens in the short term, this is likely to be the longer-term legacy of QAnon: a process of radicalization against the democratic process, underwritten by increasingly dangerous and absurd conspiratorial fictions. +
++Jane Coaston +
++The point of QAnon is not just that Hillary Clinton is already in prison at Guantanamo Bay or that Nancy Pelosi eats children. The point of QAnon is that there will be a point of reckoning in which evil will be punished and good will be rewarded. QAnon offers purpose, direction, mooring in a world that seems threatening, and offers insider knowledge of a “Plan,” one that remains clear no matter what actually takes place in real life. Donald Trump will somehow be president again, or already is president, forever and always, amen. +
++QAnon will change, and likely decrease in popularity but remain critical to the lived experiences of those who remain steadfast. Like the Millerites, Qanon will not be defeated by being wrong. Faith doesn’t work that way. +
++Hilary Sargent, freelance journalist and researcher +
++Despite the fact that the so-called inside knowledge shared by Q has proven false, time and time and time again, the number of QAnon believers has grown exponentially since its inception. I don’t think there’s any reason to think that won’t continue. QAnon believers are a captive audience, and a vulnerable one. +
++I don’t think anyone can say with confidence what will happen in the next year — or the next week — but it’s safe to assume that bad actors (including those openly encouraging acts of violence) will continue to take advantage of the faith QAnon believers have and are clinging to. +
++I wish I could say that we will see the movement’s members begin to realize they are being toyed with, but I think that’s unlikely on a widespread scale anytime soon. As the major social media platforms crack down on QAnon content, violent extremists are actively working to radicalize QAnon believers for their own purposes. The extent to which this will be successful on a wide scale remains to be seen, but the risks posed by QAnon believers being radicalized and weaponized on even a tiny scale are significant. +
++Adrienne LaFrance +
++Just as elements of ancient anti-Semitic doomsaying belief systems were recycled into Pizzagate and eventually into QAnon, the QAnon narrative is already evolving and adapting to the current moment. +
++The Q worldview isn’t just highly tolerant of contradictions; it’s reality-proof. Which is another way of saying QAnon is not going anywhere. It will morph, and may even eventually go by a different name, but for as long as the major political fault lines in this nation are drawn between elites and populists, QAnon — or whatever it warps into — will be with us. +
++Travis View +
++Some QAnon followers may be recruited by or blend with more militant extremist movements. We can already see this in how they borrowed arguments from the sovereign citizen movement in order to absurdly claim that Trump’s true inauguration date will be March 4. Some extremism researchers have also observed neo-Nazis organizing social media “raids” that are part of an effort to recruit disaffected QAnon followers. If these efforts are successful, then the domestic extremism problem in the United States will only become more dangerous. +
++That, combined with the fact that QAnon followers have grabbed a foothold of real power in the form of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), a handful of state legislators, and at least one mayor, make me convinced that QAnon, or some form of it, is now a permanent part of the American political landscape. +
++Jared Holt +
++In its current form, QAnon exists as a decentralized catchall for conspiracy theories alleging nefarious actions are being conducted in the upper echelons of world power. Even if Q posts and Trump gradually take a backseat role in the movement, many of the tagalong theories — on topics including 5G, vaccines, and alternative medicine — will produce significant risks to the public. +
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Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
++Kevin Roose, tech reporter, New York Times +
++I may be tempting fate here, but I think that QAnon, as it was originally constituted, may be almost over. Without Trump in office or on Twitter, and with no new posts from Q in months, the community is basically running on fumes. It’s always conceivable that Q could come back, or that some new development could jolt believers back to their keyboards. But I don’t think random tweets from Lin Wood and the MyPillow guy are going to be enough to keep them hopeful and engaged. They’re pretty dispirited. +
++But even if QAnon dies, I fully expect that many of its core beliefs will get watered down a bit, stripped of the Q-related language, and dissolved into Republican Party orthodoxy. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some kind of a “Patriot Party” made up of ex-QAnon believers and MAGA dead-enders that forms ahead of the 2022 midterms, and I wouldn’t be shocked if that cohort pushed the entire Republican Party in a more conspiracy-minded, reality-denying direction. By 2024, Marjorie Taylor Greene may look like a moderate. +
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Drew Angerer/Getty Images
++I also think the QAnon epistemology — the idea that every official narrative and mainstream institution is inherently suspect, and that real knowledge is produced by like-minded strangers working together on the internet to “do their own research” — is likely to become a more or less permanent feature of American life, regardless of what happens to QAnon itself. Once you’ve started seeing the world as a massive, interconnected conspiracy orchestrated by bloodthirsty elites, it’s very hard to stop. +
++From now on, every time there is a natural disaster or a political protest or a Hollywood awards show, there may be millions of people squinting at their screens, looking for clues about who’s pulling the strings. +
++Hilda Bastian on the most important pandemic vaccine in the pipeline and why we’re on track for annual booster shots. +
++When Hilda Bastian and I first caught up over Skype to talk about Covid-19 vaccines last autumn, she showed me the boxes and unfinished rooms in her new home in Victoria, Australia. She’d been so busy tracking the global vaccine effort, she hadn’t had time to settle in. +
++Bastian — an expert in analyzing clinical trial data, founding member of the Cochrane Collaboration, and a former National Institutes of Health official — has gone down rabbit holes before. There was the time she traveled the US on her own dime to research and take historical photos for a Wikipedia list of African American mathematicians. +
++But her obsession with vaccines in this pandemic has been especially fruitful: She’s called the race right at just about every turn. +
++Last July, she warned that side effects for some Covid-19 vaccines may be more severe than we’re used to with other shots. At the time, she says, “I copped flak for it.” Also last July, when the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine was the focal point of media coverage, she praised the rigor of clinical trials for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine — the first to receive emergency authorization use in the US — and said it was the one to watch. +
++On the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, she was among the first to spot the inconsistencies and issues with the clinical trials back in June. She also supported emergency use authorization for Covid-19 vaccines last August, when it was still controversial to do so. +
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Courtesy of Hilda Bastian
++With all her foresight, Bastian has become something of a Zeynep Tufekci on pandemic vaccines. Like the prescient computer programmer turned sociologist, Bastian — who does this work independently and without pay — has seen the state of play more clearly than many others. Her blogs, articles, and Twitter account might also be the most comprehensive look at just about everything published on Covid-19 vaccines anywhere. +
++The Covid-19 vaccine project was born out of concern for her sons, one of whom is immunocompromised and at higher risk of coronavirus complications. “I wanted to do something useful, and I decided early on I thought that it was likely there would be vaccines,” Bastian told me recently. +
++But another motivation was frustration: The myopic focus in Western media on Europe’s and America’s vaccine development and rollout missed what was happening in most of the world — in countries like China, Russia, and Cuba, Bastian said. And so much of the coverage was “uncritical of vaccine developers’ marketing hype. … You couldn’t get an accurate perspective of what was going on, without putting a ton of time into it.” +
++Nearly a year into her project, I caught up with Bastian to ask where our blind spots are now and how she predicts the vaccine story — and the pandemic — will unfold. She talked about the need for health officials to acknowledge that coronavirus vaccines have potentially “big differences in efficacy and adverse events,” a time in the future when we may need Covid-19 vaccine boosters every year, and the problem of people in rich countries like the US shamelessly hogging vaccines. The transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. +
++Covid-19 arrogance +
++Julia Belluz +
++Early in the pandemic, you pointed out how multiple rich countries, especially in the West, were getting their pandemic responses wrong. They were not learning from our Asian-Pacific neighbors, especially when anti-virus measures didn’t fit our preconceived notions. One example is the great mask debate of 2020. What do you think was driving that inability to learn from the experience of Asian-Pacific countries? +
++Hilda Bastian +
++Somebody said that people in many rich countries have got used to thinking that they’ve conquered all infectious disease, and so there’s this hubris about that, and I think that we found that hubris was more profound than we realized. We felt far too safe, and there was really quite a great degree of arrogance in there. +
++I [also] started to think, “This is just racism,” an old colonialist-thinking legacy, discounting Asian science and experience, and that’s a large part of what this whole theme is. Just that assumption that you are Americans or Europeans and know best over and over again. If this pandemic has taught us anything, it should be not to think that anymore, and, yet, people keep doing it. +
++Julia Belluz +
++Where do you see that playing out now — the discounting of non-Western or lower-income countries and overestimating the wealthier, Western ones? +
++Hilda Bastian +
++It’s happening with vaccines, especially thinking it’s all about the vaccines of a few big EuroAmerican multinationals galloping to the world’s rescue. One of the most fascinating stories is Cuba. I mean, there’s this really interesting juxtaposition between Cuba and Canada, ironically. In Canada [where the vaccine rollout has been slow] there’s a debate about why did they let their capacity to produce vaccines dwindle away to next to nothing. +
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Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images
++Cuba had the exact opposite. Cuba had to become self-sufficient at pretty well everything, and that included producing drugs and producing medical teams. Cuba now exports a lot of medical care to poorer countries. The first two of their vaccines are looking really quite good. The first one’s just about to start its big phase 3 trial, and they’ve got three others coming up behind. +
++They’re going to have a massive amount more vaccine than they need. They’re not going to have any trouble vaccinating their population with home-grown vaccines in 2021. That just does not look remotely like it’s going to be a problem, and, then, they’re just going to be exporting masses and masses of vaccine. +
++Vaccine hype +
++Julia Belluz +
++One vaccine group that there was a ton of hype around — and that has under-delivered — is Oxford/AstraZeneca. It was supposed to be the vaccine that saved poor countries, but now there are manufacturing problems, and questions about the quality of their clinical trial data, including whether the vaccine even works in the highest-risk groups, like people over 65. You were, I think, first to point out the troubling signs in their clinical trials, back in June, and then followed the story in detail. Where do you think that vaccine is going? +
++Hilda Bastian +
++I wouldn’t be surprised if the situation got worse, though I hope it will get better. [They went] about their clinical trial program in such a problematic way. [They] overlapped the early phases of their trials too much. They didn’t do early phase tests in older people as a result, leaving us struggling now with the results in a way we don’t have to with other EuroAmerican vaccines. +
++The publicly available details about the trial kept changing while it was in progress — and didn’t even say clearly what the dose was, for example. +
++The really big question about that is why on earth did the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency [the UK’s health regulator] greenlight these plans? Maybe people ceased to be critical enough, and they went over a bit of a cliff. +
++Whether it turns out to be a good vaccine or not, let’s leave that to one side. The clinical trials were, the European Medicines Agency [Europe’s drug regulator] concluded, sub-optimal. That shouldn’t happen. We’re lucky the [Food and Drug Administration] insisted on a large trial. We’ll hear the results soon. +
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Mlungis Mbele/AFP/Getty Images
++Julia Belluz +
++We already saw South Africa halt distribution of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine because of preliminary data suggesting it didn’t work as well against the variant that emerged there. If the vaccine doesn’t end up being widely distributed in low and middle-income countries, do you think that gap will be filled maybe by the Russian and Chinese vaccines? +
++Hilda Bastian +
++[The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine] is already being widely distributed. But China may already have supplied as much as 1 in 5 of the vaccines administered globally. And China and Russia are the ones who are there first with batches of vaccine in a lot of countries. +
++The role that people were ascribing to AstraZeneca, I thought always was going to be Johnson & Johnson because [they’re] a huge vaccine company. AstraZeneca is not really a vaccine company. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is a single dose. They were also doing trials that were seriously geared at international needs. They ran the biggest trial in the most countries, and that matters a lot to people from different ethnic groups. +
++Even though the actual doses are a bit more expensive [for Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine], the cost of actually vaccinating people is enormously lower if you’ve only got to vaccinate everybody once. And Johnson & Johnson also committed to affordable, nonprofit vaccine for the emergency. It’s going to depend a lot on how many doses actually get delivered in the end, and what happens with variants. Now it seems likely Novavax may be as big a supplier as well — possibly more than half of the WHO-provided supply. +
++Julia Belluz +
++Another vaccine you put a lot of stock in from the start was the one developed by Pfizer/BioNTech — one that got relatively little attention in the US until the big finding of 95 percent efficacy last autumn. Why were you so impressed so early on? +
++Hilda Bastian +
++That was because BioNTech was doing such thorough work early on — they were developing several versions, and testing them against each other in early trials. They didn’t have all their eggs in one basket. Then there was the partnership with Pfizer, which was going to give them an important edge in running a massive clinical trial in a pandemic. You had to have both those things — a good vaccine, and a good major trial. +
++Julia Belluz +
++Which vaccine group is the next Pfizer/BioNTech? +
++Hilda Bastian +
++Novavax is an important one to watch, if the results continue to be as good as their first ones, which were similar to the mRNA vaccines. It’s a more traditional form of vaccine, so there’s more capacity to manufacture it. +
++There are others that could be important globally, like one from Thailand that will be cheap and both profit- and royalty-free for lower-income countries, and another that UNICEF is supporting that’s also aiming at preventing infection. +
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Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Getty Images
++Julia Belluz +
++Can we talk a little more about the Russian vaccine, Sputnik V: The data published in The Lancet looked quite impressive taken at face value — but you weren’t convinced. Can you tell me why? +
++Hilda Bastian +
++There wasn’t the kind of data about possible adverse reactions that have become the scientific standard, for example. Trial participants get asked to record a list of specific possible reactions in the first week — things like fever, fatigue, headaches. We know if you don’t do that systematically, you’ll end up with an underestimate and a too-rosy picture of a vaccine. Because they didn’t seem to do that, we’ll stay pretty much in the dark on how tolerable this vaccine is for a while. And there’s a lot that’s not transparent about this trial, because they played it close to the vest with critical details, like the protocol [or pre-established plan] of the trial. +
++When we saw the report, we could see the age spread, and it was a pretty young group — about 90 percent were under 60, so that’s not where the greatest burden of suffering from this disease is. It was done in Moscow, so there’s little diversity — 99 percent of the participants were white, so that was stark, too. There are going to be more trials outside Russia, and that’s going to help get data we can more easily compare to other vaccines. +
++Julia Belluz +
++So I guess it’s pretty fair to say at this point: The vaccine rollout is shaping up to be quite different from what many of us expected. +
++Hilda Bastian +
++Yeah, we never really grappled with what we’ve got, which is, although some people don’t seem to want to face it head-on, vaccines with potentially big differences in efficacy and adverse events. So, what are the priorities, then, for the better vaccines versus the vaccines that have less protection and so on? The situation turned out to be far more complex than the experts prepared us for, I think. Communities have a lot of very tough calls to make, under very different levels of urgency. +
++Most of the trials haven’t had enough severely ill people to give us a clear picture on how much the vaccines will prevent severe disease, and the differences there might not be as big as other differences. If you’re in a community that’s very vulnerable to major outbreaks, with a limited supply of vaccines, the differences between them are small compared to the risks to ourselves and our communities of being unvaccinated. +
++Julia Belluz +
++Doesn’t this raise questions about health officials who are telling the public all vaccines are equal? +
++Hilda Bastian +
++Trying to convince people that the vaccines are all equal isn’t going to work. People are making claims that go beyond the solid data we have, and that’s a risky proposition. We’re going to see the differences in rates of adverse events, for example, pretty quickly for ourselves once we know lots of people getting vaccinated. +
++Especially when the fear of major outbreaks subsides — prematurely — and we’re trying to get younger people to accept vaccination, adverse reactions are going to matter to people. +
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Paul Yeung/Getty Images
++“The story of the pandemic” +
++Julia Belluz +
++Moving forward, what’s the big vaccine issue you’re going to be tracking? +
++Hilda Bastian +
++It’s still early days for clinical trials, so I’ll be tracking those and new boosters against variants, as well as what happens in vaccinated communities. [I’m] also watching how the rich countries are cornering vaccines, and those advancing their geopolitics to fill in the gaps — it’s actually quite a horrifying thing. +
++Very rarely do you see people from one of the rich countries expressing concern that their country may be fully vaccinated within a few months. I’m not utopian and that idealistic about it. It was never 100 percent going to happen that way [that the high priority groups in rich and poor countries got vaccinated at the same levels at the same time, per WHO advice], but I hoped at least for something roughly close, and I’m really quite shocked how comfortable people are with what’s happening. +
++Some are promoting personal donations to WHO now for vaccines, which just underscores the lack of awareness that the problem is rich countries taking all the doses for ourselves. You can’t buy what’s already gone from the shelves. There are severe limits to what can be produced this year. Even with recent promises of more money for WHO from rich countries, 2021 looks pretty grim. +
++In a way, for me, that’s the story of the pandemic. We had too many people more concerned about their individual rights or about wearing masks or flying for a vacation, or complaining about the restrictions that they faced, than the consequences of those actions for people more vulnerable than themselves. Now, it’s playing out [with] vaccines, too. +
++Julia Belluz +
++From a health perspective, why is hoarding so concerning? +
++Hilda Bastian +
++We need to reduce the chances of the virus morphing into more dangerous variants — vaccines might not protect communities enough from new variants sweeping through. And many of the rich countries will have trouble getting enough people vaccinated anyway. The notion that there can be countries where there’s going to be 40-year-olds and 30-year-olds vaccinated while there are terrible outbreaks in other parts of the world, and even the health care practitioners are unprotected, isn’t okay on any level. +
++Julia Belluz +
++Even rich countries, though, are having manufacturing and supply issues — like Canada, as you mentioned. Will the world be able to maintain a sustained production capacity for vaccines, or will it see spikes and drops for the next while? +
++Hilda Bastian +
++It could settle down, particularly if some of the more traditional forms of vaccine, like the one from Novavax, make it into use and are popular and effective. Vaccines that can tap into more of the existing widespread technical capacity should help. And I guess there’ll be more movement from the big companies that don’t yet have a vaccine of their own. +
++How does this end? +
++Julia Belluz +
++Okay, so now we have multiple effective vaccines on the market, and more coming online soon. But we also have this emerging variant problem and questions about how to use the vaccines we’ve got. Do we know how this pandemic ends? +
++Hilda Bastian +
++No, I don’t think we [do]. I don’t think there’s been a pandemic quite like this because they were either that the thing went through and did its worst and left horrific death in its wake, or the smaller ones in more contained areas that are recent. +
++But this thing on this scale, while there’s this level of antibody-based treatments out there, and vaccines of different efficacy, and all of this stuff that could play in the favor of variants, this situation has never existed before. +
++I don’t think that the past tells us where this is going. [But] I believe the people who are saying that we appear to be on a course to eventually get to the point where we get vaccinated against this each year. The path to global eradication — through very high levels of vaccination with a high level of other suppression efforts — seems narrow. That could change, though, and I hope it does. +
++Julia Belluz +
++Do you have any predictions for long-lasting effects of the pandemic, how it changes society? +
++Hilda Bastian +
++For me, one of the things that is a really huge unknown is what happens with long Covid. When I lived in Germany, I was trying to understand why issues for people with disabilities were so much better in Germany than any place I’d ever spent time in, and on a scale that was really quite extraordinary. +
++Then, I started to read about the history of the disability movement after World War I, that you had such a huge proportion of young men with major disabilities, whether it was sight, limbs missing — and to have such a massive proportion of your population suddenly with disabilities, changed societies. It happened again after World War II. So, I’m thinking about that again, now. +
++To some extent, it’s going to depend on how disabling long Covid turns out to be, and for how many people? Are we looking at a really serious big wave of decades-long disability? Because if we are, that is a really profound, sudden change in societies. +
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++Manchin supported more Trump nominees than any other Democrat. Now, he could sink one of Biden’s. +
++Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) — the lawmaker who voted for more Trump nominees than any other Democrat — could sink at least one of Biden’s. +
++Thus far, Manchin has already expressed his opposition to Neera Tanden, a nominee for the director role at the Office of Management and Budget, on the grounds that her previous social media posts targeting both Republicans and progressive Democrats were too polarizing. +
++“I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget,” Manchin said in a statement, adding later that the decision wasn’t “personal.” +
++Manchin’s opposition matters because Biden nominees might end up needing every Democratic vote in the Senate, where the party has the barest 50-person majority, to be confirmed. His decision likely means that Tanden won’t make it through, especially since a growing list of moderate Republicans who might have saved her nomination have also said that they won’t support her. +
++Manchin is also undecided about the nomination of Rep. Deb Haaland (D-NM) for Interior Secretary, and the nomination of former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra for Health and Human Services Secretary. Both have been prime Republican targets, given their more progressive views on policies including the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-All, respectively. +
++Signaling that he may ultimately back Haaland, Manchin released a statement on Tuesday afternoon highlighting how she has committed to working on West Virginia priorities with him, and preserving the country’s broader energy independence. +
++At this point, it’s still unclear how Manchin will ultimately vote on either candidate. His initial hedging, however, has already prompted Democratic blowback and raised questions about why he’s been less than supportive of a number of nominees who are also people of color. Tanden would be the first Indian American person to become OMB Director if she were to be confirmed, Haaland would be the first Native American Interior Secretary, and Becerra would be the first Latino HHS Secretary. Manchin’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. +
++Regardless of the reasons behind his concerns, the optics of the situation have earned him rebukes from some prominent progressives. +
++Former President Donald Trump’s first Attorney General “Jeff Sessions was so openly racist that even Reagan couldn’t appoint him. Manchin voted to confirm him,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet regarding the senator’s concerns about Haaland. “Yet the 1st Native woman to be Cabinet Sec is where Manchin finds unease?” +
+++Jeff Sessions was so openly racist that even Reagan couldn’t appoint him.
+— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 22, 2021 +
Manchin voted to confirm him. Sessions then targeted immigrant children for wide-scale human rights abuses w/ family separation.
Yet the 1st Native woman to be Cabinet Sec is where Manchin finds unease? https://t.co/wyki5iE36Y +