The Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee met recently to discuss future coronavirus booster shots.
Happy Thursday! The last surviving World War II Medal of Honor recipient died yesterday, at the age of 98. Woody Williams received the medal for his fighting in the Battle of Iwo Jima, where an officer asked him to break through a line of pillboxes. “I’ll try,” Williams responded. And over the next four hours, he destroyed seven pillboxes with six different flamethrowers.
“It was just another day of battle, as far as I was concerned,” he later remembered. “I was just the guy who was trained to do the flamethrower.”
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
NATO formally invited Sweden and Finland to join the security alliance Wednesday at its Spain summit, the culmination of a swift change of heart for the two countries, which were content to remain outside the alliance until Russia invaded Ukraine. The move still needs final ratification from all 30 member countries, but Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has withdrawn his opposition. President Joe Biden also announced Wednesday that the U.S. will further boost its military presence in NATO allies, including sending two more destroyers to Spain and two more F-35 squadrons to the United Kingdom.
Ukrainian intelligence officials said Wednesday 144 Ukrainian soldiers captured by Russians have been released in a prisoner exchange—including 95 who defended Mariupol during Russia’s months-long siege of the city. This is the largest of more than a dozen prisoner swaps since the war began.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta Wednesday that the states can prosecute non-Native Americans who commit crimes against Native Americans on reservations, narrowing a 2019 decision that had held only federal or tribal courts could prosecute crimes committed on Indian territory. “As a matter of sovereignty, a State has jurisdiction over all of its territory, including Indian country,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will formally step down shortly after the Court releases its remaining opinions today, making room for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be sworn in as the Court’s black female justice at noon. “It has been my great honor to participate as a judge in the effort to maintain our Constitution and the Rule of Law,” Breyer wrote to Biden.
Revised Commerce Department numbers released Wednesday show that consumer spending rose 1.8 percent year-over-year in the first quarter, not 3.1 percent as previously estimated. The contraction suggests Americans were more pinched by inflation than previously estimated.
The latest round of negotiations to restore the 2015 Iran nuclear deal ended Wednesday without progress. “Two intense days of proximity talks in Doha,” European Union mediator Enrique Mora wrote. “Unfortunately, not yet the progress the EU team as coordinator had hoped-for.” Iran has rapidly advanced its nuclear program since the U.S. left the deal and talks previously stalled over its insistence that the U.S. remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from its terror blacklist.
Texas police have arrested four men in connection with the deaths of 53 migrants found in a tractor-trailer in San Antonio. The Department of Justice said one has been charged with conspiracy to transport illegal alliances resulting in death. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said state police will resume inspecting vehicles crossing the border, targeting similar tractor-trailers to prevent similar deaths.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot subpoenaed former White House lawyer Pat Cipollone Wednesday. Cipollone has been mentioned repeatedly at previous committee hearings, witnesses testifying he warned about potential legal liability from former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Cipollone gave an “informal interview” to the committee April 13 but has declined to cooperate further, the subpoena says.
Former R&B star R. Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison and a $100,000 fine Wednesday for racketeering and sex trafficking after he systematically sexually abused underage fans for decades. He will stand trial for child pornography and obstruction-of-justice charges in August.
Are Our COVID-19 Vaccines Still Up to the Task?
(Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
All things considered, you could credibly argue the United States’ pandemic situation is better today than it’s been at pretty much any point over the past two-plus years. About 80 percent of the country has received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, and nearly 25 million children between six months and five years of age are now eligible for the shots if their parents so choose. The national average number of daily confirmed cases may not be at its all-time low, but the virus is no longer wreaking the havoc it once was: Admissions to intensive-care units (ICUs) have plummeted and stayed low for months, and the average number of daily deaths attributed to the virus has stayed below 400 since mid-April after peaking at nearly 4,000 this past winter.
But we’ve been here before—almost exactly one year ago. On June 23, 2021, the seven-day rolling average for new COVID-19 cases in the United States fell, by one count, to just 11,284, a 22-fold decrease from the national peak up to that point. We all know what happened next: The country was hit, back to back, by two of the deadliest waves of the entire pandemic. The Delta and Omicron variants have claimed more than 420,000 American lives since that late-June low.
It was with this context in mind that the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) met earlier this week to discuss the state of COVID-19 vaccines ahead of another likely surge later this year. The biggest question before the committee: Given how much the virus has mutated over the years, are our current vaccines—which were designed off of the original strain—still up to the task?
We’ve generally been pretty skeptical that the January 6 Committee hearings would, at this point, change anyone’s mind about what happened that day—but now we have evidence that we were wrong in at least one (1) instance. “I still believe that the Democrats are hoping these proceedings save them from having to compete with Trump on the campaign trail,” Newsweek deputy opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon writes for Common Sense. “And yet, I’ve come to believe that the question of what exactly happened on January 6 matters. It matters because there is a lot of talk flying around about the weakness of our democracy. Most people making that argument point to the violence of January 6 as Exhibit A. But the picture that’s emerging from these hearings is quite the opposite: Institutions, staffed by patriotic Americans, held against a massive onslaught from without and perhaps a greater one from within.”
With all the talk of the world going in the toilet, take a moment to consider that, in many ways, we’re better off than previous generations. Cars are safer, homeownership has actually gotten more affordable, and we eat way more blueberries than our forebears. Don’t take our word for it—Timothy Lee unpacks the data in 24 charts at Full Stack Economics. That’s enough charts to rival an edition of Capitolism.
Don’t call it karma: The cryptocurrency crash has likely depleted North Korean coffers full of stolen cryptocurrency. To raise revenue while skirting sanctions, the country has invested in bands of hackers to steal hundreds of millions in crypto heists in recent years, Josh Smith reports for Reuters. The U.S. Treasury put the value of one theft at nearly $615 million pre-crash. It’s hard to estimate how much of that haul the crash has wiped out. “If the same attack happened today, the Ether currency stolen would be worth a bit more than $230 million, but North Korea swapped nearly all of that for Bitcoin, which has had separate price movements,” Smith writes. $230 million is still nothing to sneeze at, but North Korea has some major expenses to cover. “One estimate from the Geneva-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons says North Korea spends about $640 million per year on its nuclear arsenal. The country’s gross domestic product was estimated in 2020 to be around $27.4 billion, according to South Korea’s central bank.”
It’s a dog eat dogma world out there, Jay Nordlinger and Jonah conclude on Wednesday’s episode of TheRemnant. With the requisite rank punditry and Nordlinger’s linguistic acumen, they blaze through the Dobbs decision, what it means to be a conservative, and a bit of etymology. And on today’s Remnant, fan-favorite Megan McArdle returns to talk abortion, crime, and gender.
We reported a few weeks ago that it’s miserable to fly in the U.S. right now—but Scott actually has some ideas about the root causes and implied solutions. He explores them in Wednesday’s Capitolism(🔒), starting with the success of airline deregulation efforts and then explaining the “cabotage” restrictions bringing us all down.
Is Dobbs a blow to our democracy? Let’s consider what that “our democracy” line means, Jonah suggests in Wednesday’s G-File (🔒), and what actually threatens our system of government. “The dysfunction of our entire political system stems from the fact that too many people make the wrong decision for the long run because they think they can maximize the benefits for themselves in the short run,” Jonah writes. “The only way ‘our democracy’ can die is when we reach a critical mass of leaders who think that way.”
On the site today, Brent Orell takes a look at why 47 million members of the workforce quit their jobs in 2021, and what employers can do to retain their employees and attract people back to work.
The Texas GOP added some interesting planks to its platform this year—among them, a resolution declaring the 2020 presidential election fraudulent. Augustus Bayard breaks down what else you need to know about what Republican delegates got up to in Texas.
Russia has had control of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant since March, and the International Atomic Energy Agency says the situation is dire. Every day the “risk of an accident or a security breach increases.” Anthony Ruggiero and Andrea Stricker explain the situation, plus what President Biden can do to help.
Nandita Bose @nanditab1
James A. Gagliano @JamesAGagliano
Fourth of July BBQ price up $10 one year after White House celebrated 16-cent discountAmericans are dishing out 17% more this year on the average Independence Day barbecue, according to a new report from the American Farm Bureau Federation.foxbusiness.com
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June 30, 2022
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