Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• Putin, Ukraine, and the Preservation of Power - Once more, the Russian President is poised to invade the nation. His weapons include military hardware, malware, and propaganda. - link

• Is the Plunge in the Nasdaq and Bitcoin the End of a “Superbubble”? - “Perma-bear” Jeremy Grantham has long warned of a much bigger and far more damaging crash that could include stocks, bonds, and real estate. - link

• What Is Eric Adams’s Plan for the Rikers Island Crisis? - The horrors in the city’s jail system have been several administrations in the making. Adams has given a few early signs of how he’ll try to manage them. - link

• Does Biden’s Presidency Hang on the Crisis with Russia? - Potentially at stake is everything America has built since Biden was born and the United States became a superpower, after the Second World War. - link

• Stephen Breyer’s Decision to Retire Is in Keeping with His Careful Supreme Court Tenure - Breyer knows what a major crossroads the Court is at, with the conservative super-majority feeling its strength. - link

From Vox

• America’s NATO expansion obsession plays into the Ukraine crisis -

  

  The post-Cold War debates shaping the current standoff with Russia.

  When tens of thousands of Russian troops started moving toward the Ukrainian border late last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin effectively issued an ultimatum: They won’t go home until he had “concrete agreements prohibiting any further eastward expansion of NATO.”

  But few have been asking why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would want to move east in the first place. What was once a Cold War security pact has become a 21st-century organization with global military commitments and ever more member countries from Eastern Europe. Members of the alliance didn’t always foresee its expansion and, three decades ago, some of America’s most renowned foreign policy thinkers argued that NATO should be nowhere near Ukraine.

  Ukraine is a former Soviet republic. It isn’t joining NATO anytime soon, and President Joe Biden has said as much. Still, NATO’s open-door policy — the alliance’s foundational principle that any qualified European country could join — cuts both ways. To the West, it’s a statement of autonomy; to Russia, it’s a threat. The core of the NATO treaty is Article 5, a commitment that an attack on any country is treated as an attack on the entire alliance — meaning any Russian military engagement with a hypothetical NATO-member Ukraine would theoretically bring Moscow into conflict with the US, the UK, France, and the 27 other NATO members.

  The prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO has antagonized Putin at least since President George W. Bush expressed support for the idea in 2008. “That was a real mistake,” said Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton. “It drove the Russians nuts. It created expectations in Ukraine and Georgia, which then were never met. And so that just made that whole issue of enlargement a complicated one.”

  No country can join the alliance without the unanimous buy-in of all 30 member countries, and many have opposed Ukraine’s membership, in part because it doesn’t meet the conditions to join. All of this has put Ukraine in an untenable position: an applicant for an alliance that wasn’t going to accept it, while irritating a potential opponent next door, without having any degree of NATO protection.

  Revisiting NATO’s own history is not to justify Putin’s revanchism and threats to democracy. It is certainly true that he is a repressive leader who has annexed neighbors and funded separatists, cracked down on activists and allegedly poisoned enemies. Some experts say that his criticism of NATO expansion is a mere pretext. Still, the stakes of NATO’s presence on Russia’s borders and potential expansion are high, and at least in today’s Washington, few question that presence.

  “The open-door policy is the one that maximizes friction with Russia, which has culminated in the crisis we have now,” said Mary Sarotte, a historian of international relations at Johns Hopkins University. “I don’t think Vladimir Putin is primarily interested in historical accuracy, but I believe he is genuinely aggrieved at the way the post–Cold War order includes no stake for Russia.”

  So how did it become an article of faith in Washington that NATO would expand in its membership and its purpose?

  Debating NATO’s future in the ’90s

  As the Soviet Union cracked up, it wasn’t certain that NATO would stick around either.

  “During the Cold War, NATO had a mission that was clear and tight, and could be put on a bumper sticker,” said Rajan Menon of the research group Defense Priorities. The alliance existed, he explained, “to deter and defeat the Warsaw pact,” the countries aligned with collapsing Soviet Russia. Its mission was in doubt after the Cold War — so much so that the president of the dissolving Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, even asked about his country joining NATO.

  Even the shape of the US role in Europe was uncertain. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the American public was more concerned about domestic policy. Bill Clinton had been elected with a campaign slogan of “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” and without experience as a statesman, he seemed likely to restrain America’s global ambitions.

  Diana Walker/Getty Images

As Clinton became a frequent traveler to Russia and quickly plunged into statecraft, the promotion of democracy in Europe emerged as a primary US foreign policy goal. But it wasn’t clear that a military alliance like NATO would be the best way to advance that.

A debate over NATO’s merits erupted in Washington in the ’90s. George Kennan, the eminent architect of the Soviet “containment” strategy and a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, wrote in 1997 that expanding NATO would be a “fateful error” because it would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.” Kennan was far from alone in his criticism, as journalist Peter Beinart noted this week:

Thomas Friedman, America’s most prominent foreign policy columnist, declared it the “most ill-conceived project of the post-Cold War era.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, widely considered the most erudite member of the US Senate, warned, “We have no idea what we’re getting into.”

Meanwhile, military leaders saw enlargement as detrimental to US interests, the Congressional Budget Office saw it as too expensive, and, later, intelligence agencies outright opposed adding Ukraine and Georgia. Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote in his memoir that he nearly resigned over enlargement.

The nascent European Union might have been the channel to consolidate democratic development in post-Soviet countries. Or Europe could have been engaged through the multinational Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or even through a focus on closer relationships with individual countries.

But Washington chose NATO.

In the early ’90s, that generation of national security operatives weren’t prepared to forfeit leverage in Europe. “NATO had to find something to do or go out of business, and these people who grew up all their lives alongside it would not let it go out of business,” said Barry Posen, a political scientist at MIT.

Jenonne Walker, who served in the Clinton White House, said she was among the minority who would have preferred the European Union as the mechanism for US engagement. “Almost everyone in the establishment wanted it to be through NATO, because that was where our influence was deemed to be greatest,” she said.

Clinton first floated a program that would be a gateway to NATO membership, called the Partnership for Peace, but that was ultimately dropped. By 1994, NATO said it “would welcome NATO enlargement that would reach to democratic states to our East,” and Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungry would be the first to join.

Electoral politics of the moment also reinforced Clinton’s decision to back NATO expansion. Republicans had won on that platform in the ’94 midterms. Ahead of the 1996 presidential election, “the domestic side of the White House” believed that growing the alliance would “play good with Polish American, Baltic American, Hungarian American communities,” explained Pifer.

President Clinton, his national security adviser Tony Lake, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher were optimistic that NATO could branch out, with the possibility of a constructive relationship between NATO and Russia. As that trifecta supported adding member states, the NATO alliance became an organizing principle of US foreign policy going forward.

NATO enlargement reoriented America in the world

Initially, it took much political maneuvering for the newly united Germany to join NATO. The alliance added more eastern bloc counties in the late ’90s and early 2000s. The Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania on the northern end of Russia’s western border joined NATO in 2005 without much fuss from Russia.

As it grew, NATO became a vehicle to address new global issues that worried US leaders. “Enlarging NATO becomes the gift that keeps on giving,” said Joshua Shifrinson, an international relations scholar at Boston University. “It was a way of incentivizing liberalization in countries that had been in the Communist bloc, showing that the US still has a mission in Europe, and a way of the US projecting power and checking alternative systems like the European Union.”

During the Cold War, NATO never engaged in military operations. But amid the Yugoslav conflict and Kosovo war of the ’90s, the alliance enforced a no- fly zone, then deployed a peacekeeping force, and in 1999 dropped hundreds of bombs on Yugoslavia. The whole process was delayed and disorganized, according to diplomats, and exposed NATO’s inadequacies in dealing with a hot war.

That pushed Clinton to embrace NATO further. “Our inaction was making NATO look weak and irrelevant,” said Walker, who went on to serve as ambassador to the Czech Republic from 1995 to 1998. “And the line in the halls of power in Washington was, ‘We have to enlarge NATO to save it, to make it look as though it were dynamic and on the move and not stagnant.’”

By taking on new military roles, the institution created new imperatives for itself. In the 2000s, NATO went to the front lines: fighting in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks and training Afghan forces starting in 2003, countering piracy in waters near Somalia, and then in a military intervention that was meant to protect civilians in Libya and went much further than its United Nations–approved mandate in toppling the tyrant Muammar Qaddafi.

Now, America’s foreign policy establishment is dominated by people who are even more committed to the alliance’s power than those who saved it in the 1990s. NATO’s existence and enlargement is a baseline assumption. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, and Ukraine aspire to join.

That has consequences. James Dobbins, who served as a senior diplomat in Europe during the ’90s and 2000s, says that a commitment to NATO expansion has limited Biden’s options. “It’s particularly out of tune — the idea that the United States should expand its defense perimeter to a half-dozen countries in Europe, when we should be shifting our focus on China,” Dobbins said.

At its core, this is about US power and how it has changed since the Soviet Union’s end. “It’s become a conversation about whether the US should be out in the world defending human rights and spreading democracy,” said Emma Ashford of the Atlantic Council. “Is the US out in the world to protect its own security or to be a crusading force for good?”

The Biden administration will now have to find its own answer.

• Microsoft avoided a round of Big Tech scrutiny. Then it bought a company for $69 billion. -

  

  How Microsoft’s 20-year-old antitrust battle prepared it for today’s techlash.

  This story is part of a Recode series about Big Tech and antitrust. Over the next few weeks, we’ll cover what’s happening with Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google.

  If Microsoft is worried that the anti-Big Tech, pro-antitrust movement will finally come for it, you wouldn’t know it. The company announced on January 18 that it would make the largest acquisition in its history, buying up Activision Blizzard, one of the biggest video game publishers in the world. If the $69 billion deal goes through, Microsoft will become the third-largest gaming company in the world by revenue. Its library of games will expand significantly, potentially giving its Xbox console and Game Pass subscription program an edge over Sony’s PlayStation and rumored Game Pass rival.

  Opinions are mixed about how good for the gaming industry the merger will be. You may not be a gamer, but a lot of other people are. It’s a huge business, raking in about $180 billion globally last year. Microsoft says about 3 billion people play video games now, and it expects 4.5 billion will play by 2030.

  Some are concerned that Microsoft will use the purchase to monopolize an increasingly consolidated gaming market and exclude rivals; others see it as a way to level an expanding playing field and even promote more competition, not squelch it. Microsoft says it wants to offer as many games as possible to as many people as possible on as many devices as possible — including in new spaces like the metaverse, the virtual world that some companies (most notably, Facebook) see as the next tech frontier. There’s nothing more metaverse-y than games, where people already create virtual versions of themselves and navigate virtual worlds, often interacting with virtual versions of other, real, people along the way.

  The timing of Microsoft’s announcement wasn’t ideal. In an unfortunate coincidence, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), which enforce antitrust laws in the United States, announced a few hours later that they are working together on new guidelines for mergers that take the digital economy into account. The FTC and DOJ’s antitrust divisions are headed by prominent Big Tech critics — Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, respectively — who have advocated for using antitrust laws to curb those companies’ size and influence. Microsoft’s massive merger almost seems to be daring them to do something about it.

  Microsoft has had a relatively smooth ride through the scrutiny and criticism that has plagued its four Big Tech rivals — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — over the last few years, even though it’s worth more than most of them. This conspicuous merger threatens to upend that. Microsoft knows better than anyone what the consequences of going up against the government are: Twenty years ago, a protracted antitrust lawsuit from the DOJ almost broke up the company. Back then, Microsoft stood alone as the big, bad tech monopoly. Now it stands alone as the Big Tech company that lawmakers and antitrust enforcers don’t have much of a problem with.

  “It’s odd how you can fall out of the field of vision, even though you’re an extraordinarily important company,” William Kovacic, who served as chair of the FTC under President George W. Bush, told Recode.

  The Activision acquisition will make it that much harder for lawmakers and regulators to ignore Microsoft. There’s no guarantee that the merger will be approved, and it’s all but certain that antitrust enforcers will look at it very closely. But Microsoft also knows better than its Big Tech rivals what to do to appease them, and has been working for years to improve its reputation and image after the beating both took more than 20 years ago. It must think its chances are good enough to take the risk.

  Microsoft may well get Activision. Or it may find itself back in the antitrust hot seat it left years ago.

  The poster child for Big Tech antitrust grows up

  Microsoft was once synonymous with antitrust and Big Tech. Even now, it’s the example in the definition of a monopolization on the FTC’s website, which details how Microsoft used its monopoly on computer operating systems to exclude and harm competitors — especially the nascent web browser market.

  Dan Levine/AFP via Getty Images

  Microsoft’s problems with antitrust enforcers began in the early ’90s, when it was investigated by both the FTC and the DOJ over how it used licensing agreements with computer manufacturers to cement the dominance of its Windows operating system. In 1994, Microsoft entered into a consent decree with the DOJ. Among other things, the company said it wouldn’t require computer manufacturers to buy other Microsoft products when they bought Windows licenses.

  But the very next year, Microsoft began bundling its new Internet Explorer browser with Windows 95. Not only was Internet Explorer the default web browser on Windows 95 computers (and Macs), but Microsoft also made it nearly impossible to uninstall Internet Explorer and very difficult to install a competitor’s browser. Internet Explorer was far and away the most used browser for years — about 95 percent of the market at its peak — even though it was arguably worse than some others.

  The DOJ sued in 1998, accusing Microsoft of violating its consent decree not to force other Microsoft programs on Windows machines. Microsoft said Internet Explorer wasn’t a separate product but an integral part of Windows. The DOJ won, and the penalty to Microsoft was severe.

  A judge ordered Microsoft to break up into two different companies: one for the operating system, and one for everything else. That ruling was overturned on appeal. In 2002, the DOJ and Microsoft settled. The terms were better than being broken up, but Microsoft didn’t get off scot-free. The company had to make it easier for third-party software to work with Windows, couldn’t punish manufacturers for including third-party software on its machines, and had to submit to years of government oversight. There were also billions in fines and settlements to end other antitrust cases brought by other companies, states, and countries.

  “They learned in a big way, at a time that antitrust really had not put anyone under the microscope like Microsoft was,” Michael Carrier, professor at Rutgers Law School, told Recode. “This was front-page news, every day was what happened in the trial that day. [Then-CEO Bill] Gates did not come across well. It really was a wake-up call.”

  The impact on the tech industry was sizable and is still felt today. During the years that the case wound its way through the legal system — and for the ensuing years when Microsoft had to follow a consent decree, which only ended in 2011 — the company didn’t want to do anything that would incur the further wrath of antitrust enforcers. If Microsoft still controlled 95 percent of our access to the internet, it could very well be forcing us all to use Bing and Outlook instead of Google and Gmail, or blocking users from going to Facebook in favor of its own, very similar, social networking site. Other tech companies were able to gain a foothold when Microsoft was scared to move.

  “Microsoft has now had more than 20 years to hone its message to try to distinguish itself from the other big tech companies and say we’re different, we’re here to help you, we’re focused on the industry and the economy at large,” Carrier said. “They have been owning that message for years.”

  Microsoft president Brad Smith and CEO Satya Nadella have worked for the company for decades, including during its antitrust woes. Now they write books about how technology companies have a responsibility to make sure their innovations aren’t harming society and to make that society better. (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, by comparison, has been blamed for contributing to everything from eating disorders to genocide.) Microsoft is careful about what it does and how its actions could be perceived. It works hard to build and maintain good relationships with the people and agencies it doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of because it knows better than anyone else how important that is.

  “I think the company as a whole learned a lot from our experience in the 1990s,” Rima Alaily, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel for the competition law group, told Recode. “It had a lasting impact on our culture and how we view our role in society and what responsibility we have to take with respect to our technology, and how we have to engage with government, partners, and customers.”

  How Microsoft “tried to get ahead” of regulators

  While antitrust advocates lambast Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google for being too big, Microsoft has a market cap of about $2.3 trillion, making it the second-most-valuable company in the world (only Apple is bigger). It’s a tech conglomerate with many lines of business, from software to social media. Generally, Microsoft is more enterprise-focused than the others, which makes it easier for the general public to overlook. The company either doesn’t do the things that the other Big Tech companies have been criticized for, or it isn’t seen as a dominant, potentially abusive, presence in those spaces with too much power over large swaths of the economy.

Microsoft has also been careful to keep tabs on public sentiment and avoid (or stop) doing things that get the kind of negative attention that lead to, say, sweeping congressional investigations, bills targeted at curbing specific business practices, and crackdowns from government agencies.

“In many areas, like in how we run our app stores, we’ve tried to get ahead of where regulators and legislators are signaling they’re going, rather than fight needed change,” Alaily said.

With a few exceptions, lawmakers have skipped over Microsoft in their crusade to curb Big Tech’s power, even using Microsoft as a resource when investigating those companies. Microsoft was not only left out of the House Judiciary Committee Democrats’ report on competition in digital markets, but Smith was also invited to brief the House for it. Smith also testified against Google’s dominance before the House antitrust subcommittee last year. While Microsoft says some of the bills in Congress’s big antitrust package could apply to it as well, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are very clearly the main targets of it.

Microsoft also has a long-established presence in DC, which it realized the need for when it got hammered decades ago. Its lobbyists have been working for years to build solid relationships with politicians. Smith is seen as an eager ambassador for Microsoft, while other companies had to go on apology tours that arguably came too late. When President Trump needed a company to buy off part of TikTok, he talked to Microsoft — in between tweets lashing out at other Big Tech companies.

“If you were to go back 10, 15 years ago, a lot of other tech companies just had this disdain for Washington and for lobbying in general,” said Nu Wexler, a DC-based communications consultant who worked in policy communications at Twitter, Google, and Facebook. “The other companies didn’t want to invest in their Washington offices. Microsoft … saw the need.”

Microsoft also knows how to play the antitrust compliance game. That yearslong consent decree forced its hand, sure. But even after that expired in 2011, Microsoft has been careful to look as though it’s toeing the line, rather than see if it can get away with crossing it.

Many now see Microsoft as having done its time, learned its lesson, and been punished enough. Even lawmakers who are usually eager to criticize Big Tech seemed almost positive about Microsoft’s Activision acquisition. Rep. Ken Buck, who has led the antitrust movement for Republicans in the House, tweeted that he was “encouraged” by Microsoft’s “assurances” to him that the merger would increase competition.

Microsoft’s antitrust outlook

Of all the acquisitions Microsoft could have chosen to make, the gaming industry — one of Microsoft’s more visible, consumer-facing segments — is the one that could elicit the most passionate responses from a sizable crowd. Including, very possibly, an FTC and DOJ looking for a merger to make an example of.

Microsoft points out that the acquisition would only make it third in the gaming market, which weakens the argument that it would suddenly own the space. But it also has its own gaming platform, the Xbox, and Windows PCs are the hardware of choice for big segments of gamers, too. Because the Activision acquisition would add some of the biggest games in the world (Candy Crush, Call of Duty, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft) to Microsoft’s game library (which already includes Minecraft, Halo, Gears of War, Age of Empires, and Fallout), there are concerns the company will make them all Xbox and/or PC exclusives. Or Microsoft could throw them all on its monthly Game Pass subscription service, which is available for most platforms but not PlayStation.

    <img alt="A young man wearing large headphones sits at a laptop at a table with other people, each playing a 

Daniel Hanley, senior legal analyst at Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly advocacy group, told Recode that the merger shouldn’t just be looked at in terms of where it will put Microsoft in the gaming market now, but the potential it has to disadvantage its competitors.

“It’s about what can Microsoft do with its portfolio of products and services, with this company, against its rivals and for the market?” Hanley said. “And what will happen to the market after Microsoft does this?”

Video game industry analyst Michael Pachter doesn’t think Activision will make Microsoft’s gaming arm too big to get enforcers’ approval, pointing out that even with Activision, Microsoft’s cut of the global video game market will only be 10 to 15 percent.

“Zero point zero percent chance that regulators in the US or the EU Competition Commission conclude that this makes them too big with pricing power,” Pachter said.

Pachter added that, to assuage concerns that Microsoft could act anti-competitively, the company can (and likely will) work something out with enforcement agencies. He sees Microsoft agreeing to conditions like not raising Game Pass prices for a set number of years and not pulling existing titles from PlayStation.

Microsoft says it intends to keep existing titles on other platforms, citing Call of Duty and PlayStation as an example. And it wants to move to a “player-centric” model, rather than a “device-centric” one.

“Gamers should be able to play whichever games they want, wherever they want, on whatever device they want,” Alaily said.

That might be a good business plan for Microsoft, as Xbox consoles are infrequent purchases from which the company doesn’t make a profit, while Game Pass is a consistent, monthly payment from 25 million people — a number that the acquisition will likely only add to. Detaching this from the Xbox gaming platform also lets Microsoft claim a much larger gaming market; it’s not just competing with Sony’s and Nintendo’s consoles, but also Apple’s mobile devices, Google’s cloud gaming service, Amazon’s gaming studio, and whatever Facebook is doing with the metaverse. It’s challenging the same Big Tech companies that regulators and lawmakers have been criticizing for years.

Microsoft will likely have to contend with scrutiny from the European Union, which is already looking into an antitrust complaint against Microsoft from cloud software company Nextcloud. The EU’s competition laws are stricter than those in the US, so maybe the people Microsoft really has to appease are across the Atlantic Ocean.

Microsoft expects to close the Activision deal sometime in fiscal year 2023, which starts this July. In US antitrust law, it’s illegal to monopolize; that is, to abuse a monopoly in ways that hurt competition and consumers. But it’s legal to be a big company, and it’s also legal to be a monopoly. Perhaps Microsoft is the best example of that now, after being an example of an illegal monopoly for so long.

“We’re hoping to accelerate this transition to subscription and cloud streaming that puts the player at the center of the experience,” Alaily said. “We feel really good about the deal.”

We’ll see if enforcers feel the same way.

• Deaths tell one story of the pandemic. The lives saved tell another. -

  

  Two charts show the extraordinary success of Covid-19 vaccines.

  
  

  There are several ways to look at the Covid-19 pandemic. One is that a cataclysm we weren’t prepared for — worsened by policy mistakes, misinformation, and global inequity — claimed more than 5 million souls and stalled the lives and livelihoods of billions of people around the world. As the pandemic drags into its third year, it’s hard to see it any other way.

  But another story of the pandemic focuses on its unprecedented scientific achievements: In record time, scientists went from discovering a new virus to unpacking its genome to developing multiple effective ways to prevent and treat it, fueling what may be the largest public health effort in history.

  The most visible part of the pandemic is what has been lost. Trackers have counted the mounting death toll since 2020, each spike revealing setbacks and missteps. But these numbers can obscure the progress against the disease.

  To understand the current moment, we need both — the harm done as well as the harm avoided. By studying the number of lives saved and how those deaths were averted, we can decide what to do next. Perhaps, we can even find some hope and optimism amid a stream of misery.

  The question is, how do we figure out how many deaths were avoided? Scientists have modeled a world without vaccines and found some surprising answers.

  From the start of the US vaccination campaign through the end of November 2021, Covid-19 vaccines prevented about 1.1 million deaths and 10.3 million hospitalizations in the United States, according to estimates by the health care foundation The Commonwealth Fund. Even without counting the continued impact of the omicron variant in 2022, it’s a stunning effect that presents a different side to the story of the pandemic.

  Covid-19 has taken a terrible toll, as the graph of Covid-19 deaths shows in blue. But estimates of the potential death toll, in red, suggest that vaccines averted a catastrophe.

  Christina Animashaun/Vox

The Commonwealth study wasn’t peer-reviewed, but it builds on a methodology that was. In a paper published this month in the journal JAMA Network Open, several of the same researchers estimated that Covid-19 vaccines averted more than 240,000 deaths between December 12, 2020, and June 30, 2021, before the worst of the delta variant ignited in the US.

In that same six-month window, vaccines were estimated to have prevented 1.1 million hospitalizations and halted 14 million infections, showing that more than 338 million doses had a powerful effect. “It was larger than we would’ve expected,” said coauthor Meagan Fitzpatrick, an infectious disease modeler at the University of Maryland.

Even now, Covid-19 vaccines are saving lives, and an estimate of the lives saved into 2022 would be even larger. The recent wave of infection in the United States spurred by the omicron variant may have already crested, and the proportion of deaths appears to be smaller than in previous surges. Vaccines have absorbed much of the shock.

The number of lives saved might not comfort those who have lost loved ones or are struggling with unemployment, social isolation, and the lasting effects of a Covid-19 infection. It may be a source of frustration, given that effective vaccines are going unused among millions of people, even as the unvaccinated form the dominant share of hospitalizations and deaths. Once vaccines were widely available, much of the suffering of the pandemic was avoidable. It still is.

The scale of the lives saved can still show how our actions now can prevent further misery and could shape the future of the pandemic for the better.

Covid-19 vaccines arrived in time to radically alter the pandemic

To figure out how many people would have died without vaccines, researchers drew on real-world observations of Covid-19 impacts on the population and actual vaccination rates across the US. They created a model of Covid-19 transmission and fit their model to what actually happened. From there, the scientists calculated what would have happened if there were no vaccines (as well as if the vaccination rate were halved).

The results showed that the timing of the vaccines — which were developed faster than any new vaccine in history — had a huge impact. In the US, vaccines began distribution in December 2020, and they were offered to all US adults by April 2021. The mass-vaccination campaign kicked in just as the country was facing a major wave of new cases.

“Not only did our vaccination program really suppress the ongoing surge … but it also helped avoid a later spring wave that would have happened with variant emergence,” said Fitzpatrick. “I think the main takeaway is really focusing on speed and not just coverage. The emphasis that we had on getting the vaccines out fast … was the right impulse.”

These conclusions line up with other estimates of lives saved. Sumedha Gupta, a health policy economist at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis, created a model that used the varying vaccination rates between states as a natural experiment. Gupta and her team found that by May 9, 2021 — less than six months into the vaccination effort — vaccines had already prevented 140,000 people from dying.

Gupta found that the most vulnerable groups benefited the most: the elderly, the immunocompromised, those with preexisting health conditions. But the Covid-19 vaccines also had knock-on impacts because they slowed the transmission of the virus, which helped protect unvaccinated people too.

They were also an immense bargain. The US government spent upward of $40 billion to develop Covid-19 vaccines, but Gupta estimated their value in terms of lives saved — just a few months into the campaign — at as much as $1.4 trillion.

These studies focused on the US, which has managed to vaccinate a majority of its population. But the sheer impact of vaccines highlights how much unnecessary suffering is continuing in places that are still struggling to get enough shots. Continuing to invest in the ongoing vaccination effort, not only in the US but also globally, would likely tip the scale even further. “That seems like a no-brainer,” Gupta said.

How can vaccines reach their full potential?

Covid-19 is still here, and about a quarter of the US population — more than 80 million people — haven’t received the shots at all.

That means that the benefits of vaccines have not been exhausted, and some of the misery right now is avoidable. “We’re really leaving benefits on the table,” Gupta said.

It may seem puzzling that half of all US Covid-19 deaths — that’s more than 430,000 people — occurred after vaccines began rolling out. That share will grow for as long as people keep dying of Covid-19.

But the large majority of the people hospitalized and dying of Covid-19 right now are unvaccinated. Compared to vaccinated people, the unvaccinated are 15 times as likely to die from Covid-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At the same time, the virus is changing in ways that allow it to better evade vaccines, as the omicron variant has shown. Immunity from vaccines also wanes over time. “What we’re still seeing right now is that omicron is undermining the protection that we had previously seen from both vaccines and natural infection,” Fitzpatrick said.

While the US has leaned hard on vaccines in its Covid-19 strategy, it has neglected other ways to limit the impacts of the infection. The US government has only recently begun to distribute free rapid Covid-19 tests and high-quality face masks on a large scale. Much of the infrastructure for reporting tests and tracing contacts of infected people remains an ad hoc patchwork, making it difficult to track and respond to outbreaks. Public gatherings have resumed across the country and mask mandates have been lifted, even in places where Covid-19 transmission remains high.

Without these so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions, the shortcomings of the vaccination program have become more apparent as new variants have emerged. “It really was a problem of too much hubris, that [many believed] vaccines would be the only thing we needed,” said Fitzpatrick. “It’s not ‘either/or,’ it’s ‘both-and.’”

These lessons extend beyond the current pandemic. Covid-19 vaccines are an example of what’s possible with enough urgency, resources, and know-how. Deploying the same tactics to other illnesses could prevent even more suffering.

Looking at the pandemic through the lens of saving lives is a case for not giving up. We may not be able to prevent every death, every new mutation, or every future pandemic. But we have far more agency than we may realize, and with a more thoughtful public health strategy, many more lives can be saved.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Australian Open 2022 | Top seed Barty crushes Keys to make final - Barty has been unassailable in Melbourne, dropping her serve just once through six matches and is yet to drop a set.

• Kovalam’s star surfer Murthy Megavan opens a new school for surfing, kayaking and stand up paddle - After almost 35 years of riding the waves, surfer Murthy Megavan opens a new surf school in the coastal fishing village known for its young talent

• Roach returns to West Indies squad for ODIs in India - The ODIs against India will be played at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad on February 6, 9 and 11

• Powell’s 51-ball hundred powers Windies to victory over England in third T20 - After losing the second match by one run, the hosts posted a challenging 224-5 in 20 overs with Powell’s 53-ball knock including 10 sixes and four boundaries.

• Beijing 2022 says 23 new COVID-19 cases found among Games-related personnel - The Beijing Winter Olympics begin on February 4

From The Hindu: National News

• Renowned writer-physician, de-addiction activist Anil Awachat passes away - He was founder-director of the Muktangan de-addiction centre in Pune

• Voice clip seeking bribe puts MVD in a fix - Probe under way to identify official

• Kollam Corpn. starts biomining to eliminate legacy waste - Landfill adjacent to Ashtamudi Ramsar site will be cleared

• Naqvi rebuts Ansari remarks on cultural nationalism - Minister alleges conspiracy to belittle India

• Early signs of COVID-19 case plateauing reported but need to be observed, says govt. - 59% of adolescents in the 15-18 year age group have so far received the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

From BBC: Europe

• Ukraine crisis: US rejects Russian demand to bar Ukraine from Nato - Russia says the response does not address its concerns about Nato, but “gives hope” over other issues.

• Ukraine crisis: BBC tries to track down official bomb shelters in Kyiv - Ukrainian authorities have mapped out Kyiv’s bomb shelters, but can the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford find them?

• Ukraine: What sanctions could be imposed on Russia? - Western diplomats are refusing to be explicit about specific penalties to keep the Kremlin guessing.

• Catalonia pardons women executed for witchcraft - The regional parliament pardons hundreds of women executed during the 15th to 18th centuries.

• Lithuania-China row: EU escalates trade dispute with Beijing - Brussels says China is acting illegally in a dispute with Lithuania, one of the EU’s smallest states.

From Ars Technica

• Spotify says it will remove Neil Young’s music instead of dropping Joe Rogan - Spotify “regrets Neil’s decision”; Young objected to COVID misinformation. - link

• Omicron’s wave is at least 386% taller than delta’s—and it’s crushing hospitals - Omicron wave’s hospital admissions are 76% higher than delta’s, CDC reports. - link

• Android malware can factory-reset phones after draining bank accounts - First found in 2019, Brata keeps adding new forms of malice to its toolbox. - link

• AG says he forced Amazon to shut down “unlawful price-fixing” program - Amazon suspended program amid investigation, is now forbidden from restarting it. - link

• Valve confirms Steam Deck shipment, review dates: By the end of February - If your preorder landed in the first wave, Valve has payment instructions for you. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• Antiwork did an interview on Fox News to try to create a good public image of their sub -

  It didn’t work.

  submitted by /u/Raevix
  [link] [comments]

• Two Deaf People Get Married -

  Two Deaf people get married During 1st week of marrige they found they are unable to communicate in bedroom with the lights out as they can’t see each other signing and lipsing. After several nights of fumbling and misunderstanding they finally came up with a solution The wife said Why don’t we agree on simple signs for instance if you want to have sex with me squeeze my left breast once. If you don’t want to have sex squeeze my right breast once. The husband said ok, then asked her if she want to have sex pull his penis once and if she doesn’t want to have sex,pull his penis two hundred and fifty times.

  submitted by /u/Due-Percentage69
  [link] [comments]

• If girls with big boobs work at Hooters where do girls with only one leg work at? -

  IHOP!

  submitted by /u/fooking_awesome
  [link] [comments]

• A pirate walks into a bar … -

  … and the bartender says, “Hey, I haven’t seen you in a while. What happened, you look terrible!”

  “Arrh – Not at ‘tall.” the pirate replies, “I be fine.” The bartender says, “But what about that wooden leg? You didn’t have that before.”

  “Arrh!,” says the pirate, “We were in a battle at sea and a cannon ball hit me leg. But the surgeon fixed me up, and I be fine, really.”

  “Yeah,” says the bartender, “But what about that hook? Last time I saw you, you had both hands.”

  “Aye,” says the pirate, “We were in another battle and we boarded the enemy ship. I was in a sword fight and me hand was cut off. But the surgeon fixed me up with this hook, and I be feeling great, really.”

  “Oh,” says the bartender, “What about that eye patch? Last time you were in here you had both eyes.”
  “Arrh,” says the pirate, “One day when I was swabbing me deck, some gulls were flying over the ship. I looked up, and one of them–arrgh, he, pooped–in me eye.”

  “So?” replied the bartender, “what happened? You couldn’t have lost an eye just from that!”

  “Well,” says the pirate, “’Twas me first day with me hook.”

  submitted by /u/LesPolsfuss
  [link] [comments]

• Four nuns die and go to the heaven -

  They line up in front of the gates of heaven, and an angel asks them some questions to let them in.

  The first nun comes, and the angel asks “What do you know about a dick?”. She replies “I’ve heard of it.” The angel shows her a bowl of holy water and tells her to wash her ears with it. Nun does it and enters heaven.

  The second nun comes, and the angel asks again: “What do you know about a dick?”. She replies: “I’ve seen it, but I swear I did nothing more.”. The angel shows her the holy water and tells her to wash her eyes. Nun does it and enters heaven.

  The fourth nun figures out the procedure and tries to get ahead of the third. But, angel catches her and asks: “What are you doing?”

  Nun replies: “I just wanted to gargle before my friend washes her ass.”

  submitted by /u/arnavut_boregi
  [link] [comments]