Frank Thomas, USGA Technical Director, Dies at 81

Frank Thomas, the long-time senior technical director of the United States Golf Association whose carefully measured influence over the game’s equipment stretched across half a century, has died. He was 81.

Thomas led the USGA’s equipment rules-making efforts from 1974 to 2000 and contributed mightily to the way the game is enjoyed today by developing the graphite shaft in 1969, a component that is part of clubs in the bag of nearly every golfer. Its lighter weight enabled golfers to start the game earlier, play the game longer and swing the club faster than they ever had before.

Prior to coming to the USGA, Thomas earned an engineering degree from Western Michigan University and was working for Shakespeare Sporting Goods. He developed the filament winding technique for graphite fibers around a mandrel to control the demanding torsional bending properties of a golf shaft.

But it was at the USGA where Thomas’ influence defined the limits of equipment performance for a generation. It was an era of more equipment upheaval than is likely appreciated today, yet Thomas maintained a respect for tradition with a concerted focus on science for solutions. Under his guidance, there were new methodologies for testing golf-ball flight that came to be the Overall Distance Standard, and he developed the concept that limited the spring-like effect in driver faces. He also wrote rules about the shape of grips, holes in the heads of irons, woods and wedges and made clear the “plain in shape” rule, an interpretation that added broad but clearer limits on what equipment should look like in the interest of keeping the implements of the game of tomorrow recognizable with those of yesterday.

He also helped to conceive the USGA’s Slope system for rating golf courses so handicaps were tied more directly to the relative difficulty of the course.

Thomas earned the respect of both those who worked with him at the USGA and those whose products he ruled on sometimes negatively. “Frank was such an important part of the USGA and the game,” said Mike Davis, CEO of the USGA. “He was an innovator who created golf’s first graphite shaft and played an integral role in creating the Slope System for golf course rating, among many of his incredible achievements. Most importantly, he was a friend of so many in our game. He will be sorely missed.” (...)

Thomas, who with his counterpart and friend R&A technical expert Alastair Cochran kept an academic's focus on equipment guidelines, confessed that while he oversaw more than 6,000 equipment decisions in his time at the USGA, he enjoyed it very little because each one involved nettlesome record-keeping, paperwork and occasionally lawyers.

“Fortunately I had good people working with me, which made the task bearable,” he wrote in his memoir Just Hit It, “but I knew I had to be excruciatingly thorough because I did not want to do something wrong or make a decision that I couldn’t defend later.”

There were notable vexing moments in Thomas’s quarter-century steering the equipment ship. Among them was a decision outlawing the Polara ball, which was designed to self-correct hooks and slices with its pattern of six rows of full dimples around the equator of the ball and extremely shallow ones on either end. Thomas disallowed the ball under a broad interpretation of the rules prohibiting artificial devices that might assist the player making a stroke. Thomas also employed a stipulation that reserved the right of the USGA to change club and ball rules at any time, left the Polara off the list of conforming balls and then added a rule about golf ball symmetry. But the USGA later had to settle out of court with the maker for a reported $1.375 million.

Thomas wanted to stay ahead of a future in equipment in innovation he couldn't always clearly see by defending the game's enduring challenge, said Jerry Tarde, Editor-in-Chief of Golf Digest and global head of strategy & content for Discovery Golf/Golf Digest. “Frank symbolized golf equipment innovation for 30 years and gave terms like 'coefficient of restitution' a popular following to the extent that he became known as ‘Dr. Strangeclub,’ ” Tarde said. “The words that I always associate with him are ‘We don’t want to put a ladder up the Matterhorn,’ which perfectly encapsulated his goal to preserve the challenge while promoting the mountain-climbing spirit of the game.”

But it was the USGA’s knockdown-drag-out fight with Ping and its founder Karsten Solheim over the “square grooves” in his Eye2 irons that was a kind of Cuban Missile Crisis event for equipment rulemaking. It led to a $300 million antitrust lawsuit in 1985 that named Thomas personally and hinged on the interpretation of the measurement of a groove, a measurement that for all intents and purposes constituted the width of a human hair. Thomas initiated a change in the rules that provided updated and practical guidelines that in essence prevented more than half the irons on the market at the time from being ruled non-conforming. But the new specifics on groove width and spacing ran into measurement challenges, and the ruling bodies eventually blinked—albeit with no money changing hands and, perhaps most importantly, the USGA’s authority to make equipment rules was upheld.

Thomas called Solheim a friend, writing, “His tenacity and stubbornness impressed me and made Karsten one of the most successful innovators in the game,” Thomas wrote, remembering fondly how Solheim bought a Thomas self-portrait as part of a Golf Digest charity auction. “I shed more than a few tears at his posthumous—and belated—induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame.”

Karsten’s son, John A. Solheim, who took over the reins for his father, remembered Thomas fondly.

“I’m very saddened to hear of Frank’s passing,” said Solheim, Ping chairman and CEO. “He was a respected friend to both myself and my father. We were on opposite sides of the table with Frank during the ‘square groove’ era and a few other issues over the years, which led to countless disagreements and spirited debates, but in the end, we walked away as friends. We remained close over the years as he continued his passion for golf research and product design. He will be missed.”

Of course, for a time, the grooves controversy may have tempered the ruling bodies’ willingness to aggressively limit equipment companies and their innovations. At least that’s how Thomas saw it. In the mid-1990s, Thomas saw the approach of thin-faced titanium drivers and realized the game was at a kind of crossroads. The thinner faces, Thomas believed, violated the earlier rule he had written to prevent metal drivers from having a spring-like effect. While he said he privately advocated the drivers be disallowed after demonstrating the spring-like effect existed, he helped develop a limit on “coefficient of restitution” in 1998 that was in line with where drivers were at the time. He wrote in Just Hit It, “I was a little upset at being asked to compromise the enforcement of a rule I had written, and especially at being told that I was not really interpreting it correctly. Perhaps I should have just accepted it and kept my mouth shut. This is not my nature.”

The new enforcement procedure for the rule required a limit on spring-like effect involved a somewhat complicated air cannon test and a numerical average for coefficient of restitution that carried to the third decimal. He later wrote, “I came to realize that the rules should in most cases express principles that cover intents and purposes rather than trying to anticipate every innovation that may arise someday and specify it out of existence. The rules that do this are effective and tend to remain so; the ones that are overly specific often have unintended consequences.”

by Mike Stachura and E. Michael Johnson, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: John B. Carnett

[ed. See also: The Great Square Groove Controversy (Dave Tutelman)]

Our Strange Addiction

The 1610s were a key decade in tobacco’s transformation into a new global obsession. Before long, the gift (or curse) of smoking had given rise to one of the world’s most lucrative industries, emerged as a key driver of the Atlantic slave trade, and initiated a global bad habit that humanity still hasn’t kicked more than four hundred years later.

... The story of smoking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is capacious enough to include the distillation apparatus of the alchemist, the water pipe of the cannabis smoker, and even medicinal smoke enemas.

This diversity is not what we would expect from the standard history of smoking, which goes something like this.

Before 1492 smoking was widespread among the tobacco-loving peoples of the Americas but unknown across the Atlantic. Then Christopher Columbus witnessed Taíno men in Cuba puffing on “certain herbs...by which they become benumbed and almost drunk” and, upon further investigation, learned that “they call this tabaco” (this, at least, is what Bartolomé de Las Casas claimed Columbus had recorded in his now-lost journal of his 1492 voyage). By the 1560s a growing number of Spanish authorities began advocating that Europeans take up the practice—particularly the Seville physician Nicolás Monardes, who hailed smoking as a “miraculous” cure for over twenty diseases. And by century’s end tobacco was being grown domestically in areas stretching from Spain to Turkey to Gujarat. Meanwhile, tobacco plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil were emerging as hubs of the Atlantic slave trade. All were in the service of an enormous growth in consumer demand for tobacco that stretched beyond Europe and into Asia and Africa. (...)

By the 1650s the tobacco pipe was perhaps the most widespread emblem of globalization and European empire. Smoking had gone global.

Versions of this account of the globalization of smoking have been told countless times. Broadly speaking, they’re true. But they can also be misleading.

Tobacco is indeed native to the Americas, and early modern Europeans, Africans, and Asians did encounter tobacco smoking as a new practice without precedent in ancient texts or preexisting social conventions. But, as archaeologists and anthropologists have been documenting for decades, tobacco was not the only drug that the peoples of the Old World smoked—even before the voyages of Columbus.

While tobacco was becoming a global drug, cannabis was, too—just in a stealthier and far less heralded fashion. Archaeological evidence points to cannabis smoking in Central and South Asia since at least 1000 bc, probably linked to the migrations of proto-Indo-Iranian peoples. One apparent offshoot of this ancient practice attracted the notice of the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote that Scythian nomads inhaled cannabis smoke inside their woolen tents: “The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp [kannabis] and, crawling in under the mats, throw it on the red-hot stones, where it smolders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor bath.” By circa 800 cannabis use had also crossed the Indian Ocean and become part of daily life in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

As European slave traders and merchants reached the cannabis-smoking regions of both South Asia and East and west central Africa, the phenomenon of “intoxicating” cannabis again attracted notice. The Portuguese Jewish physician Garcia da Orta, living in 1550s India, admitted that cannabis could be “pleasantly intoxicating” but also saw it as a source of “nausea” and “melancholy.” By the seventeenth centuries, however, some European merchants in the Indian Ocean region had become users of the drug themselves, and at least one brought back samples of the drug to Europe with an eye toward growing the plant locally as a new cash crop, following the model of tobacco.

In 1689 the natural philosopher Robert Hooke gave a firsthand report on the effects of Indian cannabis to the Royal Society of London: “The patient understands not, nor remembers anything that he sees, hears, or does in that ecstasy, but becomes, as it were, a mere natural, being unable to speak a word of sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks words without any coherence.” Hooke described cannabis as being “chewed or swallowed” but specified the dose only ambiguously, as “about as much as may fill a common tobacco-pipe.” It is still not clear to what extent cannabis smoking, as opposed to edible or drinkable preparations, was practiced in Hooke’s time outside of the cannabis-smoking regions of South Asia and Africa.

Hooke also never specified if the anonymous “patient” of his report was, in fact, himself. But he did end his address on a decidedly upbeat note. “Here are diverse of the seeds,” Hooke said, presenting them to the Royal Society at their final weekly meeting before Christmas, “which I intend to try this spring, to see if the plant can be here produced.” If he succeeded in this labor, Hooke believed the drug could prove to be “of considerable use for lunatics.” He concluded: “There is no cause of fear, tho’ possibly there may be of laughter.” 

by Benjamin Breen, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Monkey Trick, by David Teniers the Younger, c. 1670

Stock Market Leverage Spikes

In the current craze that encompasses everything from sneakers and NFTs to stocks, where valuations don’t matter because of widespread certainty that valuations will be even greater in a few days, and where folks are chasing lottery-type returns, supported by the Fed’s interest rate repression and $3 trillion in asset purchases, and by the government’s trillions of dollars of handouts and bailouts – well, in this perfect world, there is a fly in the ointment: Vast amounts of leverage, including stock market leverage.

Margin debt – the amount that individuals and institutions borrow against their stock holdings as tracked by FINRA at its member brokerage firms – is just one indication of stock market leverage. But FINRA reports it monthly. Other types of stock market leverage are not reported at all, or are disclosed only piecemeal in SEC filings by brokers and banks that lend to their clients against their portfolios, such as Securities-Based Loans (SBLs). No one knows how much total stock market leverage there is. But margin debt shows the trend.

In February, margin debt jumped by another $15 billion to $813 billion, according to FINRA. Over the past four months, margin debt has soared by $154 billion, a historic surge to historic highs. Compared to February last year, margin debt has skyrocketed by $269 billion, or by nearly 50%, for another WTF sign that the zoo has gone nuts:

But margin debt is not cheap, especially smaller amounts. For example, Fidelity charges 8.325% on margin balances of less than $25,000 – in an environment where banks, money market accounts, and Treasury bills pay near 0%. Margin debt gets cheaper for larger balances, an encouragement to borrow more. For margin debt of $1 million or more, the interest rate at Fidelity drops to 4.0%

“Whether you need extra money for a short-term financing need or buying more securities, a margin loan may help you get the money you need,” Fidelity says on its website. In other words, take out a margin loan to buy a car or much needed bitcoin or NFTs.

Every broker has its own margin interest rate schedule. Morgan Stanley charges 7.75% for margin balances below $100,000, compared to Fidelity’s 6.875% for balances between $50,000 and $99,999. For margin balances over $50 million, Morgan Stanley charges 3.375%.

And it’s risky leverage for the borrower. It seems like risk-free leverage when stocks go up, but when your stocks do the unheard-of and tank below a certain level, your broker will ask you to put more cash into your account or sell stocks into the tanking market, whereby you then join the legions of forced sellers.

In the past, a big surge in margin balances tended to precede history-making stock market declines:

Over the two-decade period of the chart, the long-term changes in the dollar amounts are less important since the purchasing power of the dollar with regards to stocks has dropped.

But short-term, the changes show what is happening to margin debt in the run-up before the sell-off, and what is happening during the sell-off when margin requirements turn investors into legions of forced sellers. (...)

The historic surge in margin balances in recent months is another indicator of how hyper-speculative and blindly courageous the mega-bubble has become. All kinds of new theories are being proffered why fundamentals and valuations are meaningless, and why prices of all assets will shoot to the moon, no matter what.

by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street |  Read more:

Images: Wolf Street

Piet Blom, Cube houses, Rotterdam, The Netherlands 1980s
via:
[ed. See also: this]

Jacek Yerka, Bathyscaphe
via:

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Americans About to Binge on 'Revenge Spending'

Shoppers are out for vengeance.

A year into a pandemic that’s devastated lives, jobs and the economy, those who are lucky enough to have disposable income are ready to go out and splurge — even if they still have nowhere to go in that stunning dress or those brand new sneakers. Some are calling this “revenge spending.”

U.S. retail sales are near record highs and employment and vaccinations are on the rise. Americans have amassed a massive stockpile of excess savings — Bloomberg Economics estimates it to be about $1.7 trillion since the beginning of the pandemic through January. And that’s about to be bolstered by a new round of stimulus payments. As the economy reopens, consumer spending over the next two quarters is likely to be the strongest such period in at least 70 years with a rebound in services leading the way, according to economists at Wells Fargo & Co.

“A lot of the snapback in spending will come from those more leisure expenditures — your discretionary expenditures,” said Shannon Seery, an economist at Wells Fargo. Those are the areas that “we really expect to bounce back once the economy returns to some semblance of normal."

Revenge spending was seen as early as last April in China after the government began easing back to normalcy after the nation was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in its early days. The impact on companies was clear: U.S. jeweler Tiffany & Co.’s China sales surged 90% in May from the year prior, while Hermes, the French luxury label known for its $10,000 handbags, raked in $2.7 million in one day from a store reopening in Guangzhou.

China has been recovering ever since, even as the virus continues to rage across Europe and North America. The reopening of the nation’s domestic travel corridors sparked a tourism revival, with locals visiting destinations like Macau and Hainan. They’ve been spending so much there that brands like Ralph Lauren Corp., Estee Lauder Cos. and Coach are all scrambling to open more stores. There’s universal hope that there’ll be a similar fervor in the U.S. too.

While the U.S. economy will likely reopen gradually over the course of 2021, the federal government is already starting to distribute stimulus checks. Research suggests one-time payments boost spending more than steady payments that lead to a higher income.

“This round of stimulus is coming at the same time that the economy is properly reopening," said Michelle Meyer, head of U.S. economics at Bank of America Corp. “If you have a lot in your bank account already, you don't have very much debt to pay off, you probably do feel more comfortable spending the stimulus check.” (...)

It may take slightly longer for the wealthiest to shell out cash like they once did. The top 10% of earners account for nearly half of personal outlays in the U.S., according to calculations by Wells Fargo. These consumers, who have been forced into saving because of social distancing, are likely to come out in full force as the health crisis subsides and herd immunity is reached, Meyer said. Almost half of U.S. consumers, meanwhile, said they’d buy little luxuries in the next six months. Over a third said they’d go in on even bigger, more expensive products, according to a survey from Accenture.

 

by Kim Bhasin, Reade Pickert, and Gerald Porter Jr., Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Noam Galai/Getty Images

Tax Evasion and Money Laundering in the Art Market

Governments in advanced economies are getting more serious about chipping away at hidden wealth. Admittedly, they have a long way to go. Gabriel Zucman, in his The Hidden Wealth of Nations, estimated that 8% of household wealth, which was $7.6 trillion when he published his book in 2013, was in tax havens. Sometimes people with lots of dough hidden in these lockboxes want to use it, hence the use of shell companies and other devices to make use of the funds without tipping off the tax man. Although real estate has been a big fave for stashing foreign, and sometimes secret, funds in nice safe places like London and New York, art has been another vehicle.

As we’ll soon explain, the UK looks like it is about to crack down on anonymous purchases of art beyond a fairly low threshold amount. The US hasn’t yet joined but as we’ll explain below, the US has recently implemented measures ending hidden ownership of companies so it may not need to do much more with respect to art.

For instance, the last time I was in Paris, I attended a art show at a museum with a top tax maven friend. She recognized quite a few of the paintings, to the degree that she knew which “anonymous owner” pieces never went to the US because the US did have a pretty good idea as to who the owner actually was and would impound them.

The US started down this path with post 9/11 anti-money-laundering and “terrorist finance” reforms, and was able to crack open Switzerland’s bank secrecy. Americans who held Swiss bank accounts were given an amnesty: confess, and pay the taxes and interest due and you won’t be subject to penalties and prosecution. Experts speculate the reason Mitch Romney showed only one year of tax returns was that individuals who had held Swiss bank accounts were require to refile past returns, with the front page of the return “stapled,” making the changes obvious. Had Romney or his wife held a Swiss bank account and filed amended returns, the last year filed would have been the one for the year prior to the one he did publish.

Another click of the ratchet has come with the effective end of anonymously-owned shell companies in the US at the start of 2021. A big impetus for this change came with the publication in 2018 of a New York Times series, Towers of Secrecy, by Louise Story and Stephanie Saul, on condos owned by shell companies in the super luxury development, the Time Warner Center, at the old Coliseum site at the southwest corner of Central Park South. Lloyd Blankfein lived there, for instance. The reporters found quite a few shell-company owned units and for most of them, as intended, they could not find who the actual owners were. But they were successful more often than I would have anticipated, and in every case, the person behind the shell looked pretty unsavory.

The article kicked off a call for reforms, with first New York City and eventually New York State too requiring all real estate purchases by LLCs report who the beneficial owners are (if press accounts are correct, the info is only kinda hidden, it’s not public but can be obtained by FOIL, New York’s version of FOIA).

And now….drumroll…the Feds get in on the act. From Gothamist in January:

On January 1st, Congress passed a measure to end the secrecy around shell companies that has fueled a boom in high-priced New York condominiums. The new law could discourage the flow of international capital into Manhattan real estate, while giving investigators powerful new tools to detect money laundering and other financial crimes.

The National Defense Authorization Act, passed over a veto by President Donald Trump, empowers the Treasury Department to create and maintain a registry of the “beneficial” or true owners of most businesses created in the United States, including limited liability companies. LLCs are a popular vehicle for purchasing real estate, in part due to the secrecy they confer…. (...)

Note that we have repeatedly and energetically stressed that the real estate seller is not responsible for ascertaining if the payment he is getting for his property comes from dirty money or not if it comes via the banking system. Cash in paper bags are another kettle of fish. But I am nevertheless surprised to learn that all cash payments weren’t considered to be covered by “know your customer” rules. This is clearly a regulatory matter and I’m surprised this wasn’t addressed via the Treasury’s new rules. But foreign banks typically have a New York branch, which puts them under the New York state banking regulator. (...)

Now to the UK art market wrinkle, from the Financial Times’ John Dizard:

The art market’s high rollers have created a serious image problem for themselves. Over the past 30 years, and particularly at the beginning of this century, they sold the story of mystery international billionaire buyers and their glamorous hangers-on at flashy evening auctions. Answering slight nods in packed sale rooms, mellifluous auctioneers would post gasp-inducing record prices for works by artists most middle-class people only ever see in museums…

Now the auction houses, art dealers and private advisers face the prospect of emerging from Covid-19 lockdowns only to be enlisted as enforcers of anti-money-laundering (AML) regulations as strict as those in the banking industry. They are not entirely ready for this. They signed up to be courtiers, not investigators.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Zoom Escaper Lets You Sabotage Your Own Meetings

Had enough Zoom meetings? Can’t bear another soul-numbing day of sitting on video calls, the only distraction your rapidly aging face, pinned in one corner of the screen like a dying bug? Well, if so, then boy do we have the app for you. Meet Zoom Escaper: a free web widget that lets you add an array of fake audio effects to your next Zoom Call, gifting you with numerous reasons to end the meeting and escape, while you still can.

via: The Verge

Image: Zoom Escaper

Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma

President Joe Biden wants all adults to be eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine by May 1. In a speech last week, he suggested that Americans should be able to celebrate July 4 with (smallish) barbecues. For many people, this was the first hopeful vision in a while. We still have a ways to go, but the speed of the vaccination process in recent days makes quasi-normalcy by July seem not completely out of reach.

At least one group feels left adrift, however, and potentially behind: parents. Vaccines for children under 16 are not yet available. Trials have begun, but realistically, children won’t receive a shot in the arm until the fall or winter. Parents are wondering if, after a year of remote school, no playdates, and a lack of grandparent visits, they’ll still have to socially isolate while everyone else enjoys their BBQ.

But the best available research indicates that families with young children don’t, in fact, have to live like it’s 2020 until 2022. Parents can go ahead and plan on barbecues and even vacations. The explanation for why lies in the resilience of kids to COVID-19, and in herd immunity.

Children are not at high risk for COVID-19. We’ve known since early in the pandemic that they are much less likely to fall ill, especially seriously ill. Although scientists don’t quite understand why, kids seem to be naturally protected. As a result, you can think of your son or daughter as an already vaccinated grandparent.

Hear me out.

Think about a grandmother who’s received, say, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Trial research indicates that the second shot reduces her risk of serious illness by about 95 percent. Her risk of death goes way down too, although the trials were not geared toward reaching a conclusion on that point. (The Pfizer control group recorded zero deaths.)

Different vaccines yield different results, but all of the vaccines approved by the FDA (Pfizer-BioNTech’s, Moderna’s, and Johnson & Johnson’s) are very effective, which is why the CDC has indicated that vaccinated individuals can interact unmasked with other vaccinated individuals. It hasn’t yet commented on flying, but I’m guessing the CDC will relax its flying advisories for vaccinated individuals in the next few weeks. It will continue to recommend masks, for the sake of protecting the unvaccinated population, because the science on transmission by the vaccinated is still hazy.

Now think about your child. The CDC has published some risk assessments by age. For comparison’s sake, I’ll phrase the findings the way I would the results of a vaccine trial: Being a child aged 5 to 17 is 99.9 percent protective against the risk of death and 98 percent protective against hospitalization. For children 0 to 4, these numbers are 99.9 percent (death) and 96 percent (hospitalization).

The central goal of vaccination is preventing serious illness and death. From this standpoint, being a child is a really great vaccine. Your unvaccinated first grader appears to have about as much protection from serious illness as a vaccinated grandmother.

by Emily Oster, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Annice Lyn/Getty

[ed. I don't care. Please vaccinate parents and children -families- as soon as possible. It's the biggest step we can make toward getting life back to normal. We shouldn't be waiting for (and trying to convince) every age cohort to finally feel comfortable before moving forward.]

James Corner, “Taking Measures Across the American Landscape”,  1996

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Cloudbusting

Eight States Are Seeding Clouds to Overcome Megadrought (Scientific American)

[ed. See also: The Dimming, Full Length Climate Engineering Documentary ( Geoengineering Watch- YouTube )]

Video: Kate Bush, Cloudbusting, with Donald Sutherland

What a Talking Filibuster Could Look Like

When President Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, the filibuster was rarely deployed, and when it was, it could be beaten back by a vote of two-thirds of the Senate. That almost never happened, and instead the threat of a filibuster would sink legislation, not because the majority couldn’t overcome it but because they didn’t want to waste a few weeks on it and had other pressing business to get to. In 1975, the rule was reformed to lower the threshold from 67 down to 60, though it was still rarely used.

The Senate that Biden grew up in — remember, he was 29 when he was elected — largely passed bills by a simple majority vote, including controversial bills. When the debate was over, even senators who opposed the underlying bill would vote yes on what’s known as “cloture,” which means closure of the debate. That began to change, first with Harry Reid, D-Nev., as Senate minority leader, determined to fight President George W. Bush, but went into overdrive under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. McConnell effectively raised the threshold any legislation needed to 60 votes in order to undermine President Barack Obama. (For more on the history, this Deconstructed episode from last month has you covered.)

For somebody like Biden, that phenomenon — that legislation needs 60 votes to pass — is a relatively new innovation, not the beating heart of the Senate as some people claim. And nobody knows that better, perhaps, than Biden himself. He alluded to his old-school cred in an interview with George Stephanopolous published Tuesday evening by ABC.

“I don’t think that you have to eliminate the filibuster, you have to do it what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days,” Biden said. “You had to stand up and command the floor, you had to keep talking.”

“You’re for bringing back the talking filibuster?” Stephanopulos asked.

“I am. That’s what it was supposed to be,” Biden said. “It’s getting to the point where, you know, democracy is having a hard time functioning.”

Notice that Biden is using the credibility he owns as a Senate traditionalist — he was elected six years before I was even born, and I’m getting old — to make the case that reform is necessary to defend democracy and return the Senate to the working condition it was in when he got there. It’s no secret that Biden was far from progressives’ first choice to win the Democratic nomination, but he may possess a unique ability to disarm centrist and conservative Democrats who otherwise might oppose the same project or program if it was proposed by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., or, really, anybody but Biden.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recently criticized Biden as “boring but radical.” While Cruz is never serious about anything, and Biden is far from a radical, there’s some truth, even if Cruz doesn’t recognize it, behind that point. A $1.9 trillion stimulus just scans among the public as more “reasonable” when coming from Biden than it would from a Democrat whom Republicans could more easily paint as a radical, a task that they managed to accomplish with Obama even though he governed as a centrist. There is a genuine only-Nixon-could-go-to-China element to Biden’s gentle evisceration of the filibuster.

Had Sanders or Warren suggested changes to the filibuster, you can be sure that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the self-styled exemplar of the moderate Democratic centrist, would be hearing none of it. Instead, in his interview Tuesday night, Biden was merely following Manchin, who has recently opened up to the idea of bringing back the “talking filibuster.”

How Biden Can Do It

So what would these new filibuster rules look like?

Nobody yet knows, but from conversations with Senate sources over the past few weeks, months, and years, I can take a few stabs. First of all, the 60-vote threshold for cloture has to go. The current rules put the onus on the majority to marshal 60 votes, which no majority is likely to have for the foreseeable future.

If Democrats do manage to reform the filibuster, you have to assume this much: They will not go through all that trouble simply to leave McConnell with a veto over their agenda. How they strip that veto remains to be seen, but the new rules would shift the onus from the majority, which today needs 60, to the minority, which today barely has to show up. As Manchin says, you have to extract a cost for the minority to obstruct, to make them actually be there on the floor. “Maybe it has to be more painful, maybe you have to make them stand there,” Manchin told Fox News earlier this month.

So if cloture can’t stay at 60, how do you get it to a place where a majority can reasonably reach it? One solution is to deploy the “present-and-voting” approach. The possible rule goes like this: If three-fifths of senators present and voting support cloture, then cloture is invoked, and the debate is over. Democrats who support the notion of 60 for cloture could think of three-fifths as a synonym. That would mean that if all 50 Democratic senators showed up at 3 a.m. to call the vote, Republicans would need, by my math, 34 senators ready to vote no. They can do that sometimes, but eventually Democrats — or any future majority — would wear them down and find a moment where enough of them are literally sleeping that they can move it across the floor.

Another approach could be to require 41 votes to sustain a filibuster at any time. Under the current rules, if a cloture vote gets 59 yes and zero no votes, the no votes still win. You could flip that to say that unless 41 senators insist that the talking continue, the debate is over. And again, if that vote is called at 3 a.m., there may not be 41 senators able to get there within the allotted time.

The present-and-voting standard has a long Senate tradition — longer, in fact, than the 60-vote threshold. In 1917, as the U.S. was gripped with war fever, a handful of anti-war senators filibustered their way into Senate adjournment, blocking a vote on a declaration of war against Germany, a story recounted by longtime Senate aide Adam Jentleson in his new book “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.” Amid an uproar, the Senate implemented a cloture rule that allowed two-thirds of those present and voting to bring debate to an end. When the threshold was moved down to three-fifths in 1975, the present-and-voting standard was replaced by an affirmative need to hit 60. Biden and Manchin’s reform would return it to how it was when Biden entered the Senate.

by Ryan Grim, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Dietsch/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Joe Biden – the Progressive President We've Been Waiting For?

OK, fine, I was wrong. But, in this case, I’m very happy to be wrong: it seems that Joe Biden may be shaping up to be a progressive president after all. I supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, but I can now see that Biden was the better choice.

When Biden announced he was running for president, I was dismayed. I thought he was Hillary Clinton 2.0 and we were going to see a repeat of 2016. (And I maintain that, had it not been for the pandemic, which changed everything, then it probably would have been.) Then, when Trump lost, I was relieved but not exactly thrilled by the prospect of a Biden presidency. He largely campaigned on a platform of returning the US to “business as usual” – but business as usual just wasn’t working for most people.

Instead of simply turning back the clock four years, however, Biden has been pushing forward undeniably progressive policies. The $1.9tn pandemic relief bill that just passed is expected to reduce US poverty in 2021 by more than a third. And many of its provisions won’t be temporary: the Biden administration has indicated that it will aim to make permanent the increase in child credits contained in the bill, which could cut child poverty in half.

How is all this going to be paid for? Partly by – get this – taxing the rich. Biden’s next big move may be the first major federal tax hike since 1993. The White House is expected to propose raising the corporate tax rate, increasing capital gains tax for people earning more than $1m annually, and raising income tax for those earning more than $400,000. Whether all this will get passed by the Senate is yet to be seen, of course, but it’s a big shift in the right direction.

I don’t want to go overboard here. Biden is far from perfect. It only took him a month, for example, to start doing what American presidents love doing best: bombing the Middle East. And a number of things he is being effusively praised for also don’t really stand up to scrutiny. Biden’s executive order pausing new oil and gas drilling on federal land, for example, is riddled with loopholes; one industry analyst told the Financial Times it presented a “best-case scenario for the oil industry under a Biden administration”. Indeed, Biden issued at least 31 new drilling permits in his first few days of office.

Nevertheless, he is advancing a far more progressive agenda than I expected. And, while I was rooting for Sanders to be president, I think Sanders would have got a lot more pushback than Biden from Republicans on the same policies. Sanders is a brilliant agitator: he has helped to bring into the mainstream a lot of progressive thinking in the US. In the end, though, I think he is probably more effective at putting pressure on Biden to move to the left than he would have been as the president.

by Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Democrats, Pushing Stimulus, Admit to Regrets on Obama’s 2009 Response (NYT).]

Martin Margiela S/S 1991
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Why COVID-19 Vaccines Aren’t Yet Available to Everyone

About a year ago, Chaz Calitri, the head of operations for sterile injectables at Pfizer, was at home in suburban Philadelphia, when he got a call from his bosses. The company was moving forward with an experimental covid-19 vaccine. Calitri, a chemical engineer by training, was in charge of Pfizer’s manufacturing site in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where the constituent parts of the vaccine would eventually be assembled before being shipped across the country. “At first, I was really excited,” he told me. “And then, after I sat down on the couch and started thinking about it, I was horrified, because I knew that it was going to take the full force of everything we could throw at it.”

Typically, vaccine manufacturing doesn’t begin until a candidate has proved to be both safe and effective in animal and human testing. In the past, that process could take ten years; Pfizer’s vaccine, which was developed in collaboration with BioNTech, a German biotechnology company, took a record ten months. The vaccine received emergency-use authorization from the F.D.A. on December 11th; two days later, the company began shipping tens of thousands of doses, all of which had been made while clinical trials were still under way.

In Kalamazoo, on a campus larger than Central Park, Calitri’s team worked around the clock. Pfizer hired roughly seven hundred workers, reassigned experienced engineers to the vaccine effort, and increased the number of vials that it could produce by installing additional “fill and finish” machines. Even so, by the end of 2020, the company had delivered only half of its initial production goal of a hundred million doses. A Pfizer spokesperson told me that, among other things, “securing enough raw materials took longer than we expected.”

Five days after his Inauguration, Joe Biden set a goal that a hundred and fifty million vaccinations would be administered in the first hundred days of his Presidency. At the time, about eight hundred thousand Americans were receiving a vaccine each day, most of them health-care and other front-line workers. The Trump Administration had left distribution planning up to the states; as vaccine appointments were made available to older Americans in many states, in mid-January, some vaccination sites were flooded with requests, but others sat relatively empty. “It was like running out on the field during the Super Bowl and telling the players to just do whatever they want,” Bruce Y. Lee, a professor of health policy and management at the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, told me. “So it’s actually not a big surprise, given the apparent lack of planning, that we’ve run into a lot of problems with the vaccine distribution.” (...)

The White House has sounded particularly optimistic this week. On Wednesday, the President announced a plan to secure an additional hundred million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. On Thursday, during his first prime-time Presidential address, he directed states to make all adults eligible for the vaccine by the beginning of May. The catch: none of the increased supply that has been established since Biden’s Inauguration will be available until late spring, at the earliest, and most of it will not arrive until the end of the year. All adults may be eligible to receive a vaccine in a couple of months. But whether doses actually will be available will depend on a lot of things going right.

***

When the President of the United States places an order for millions of doses of a covid-19 vaccine, they do not simply appear, like Amazon packages, two days later. For much of the past year, it has taken Pfizer a hundred and ten days to produce each vial of vaccine. The time line starts at the company’s plant in Chesterfield, Missouri, outside St. Louis, which houses a cell bank of frozen E. coli bacteria. Scientists extract DNA from the E. coli cells to grow the template, called a plasmid, on which the vaccine’s mRNA will be built. Once the plasmid is made, purified, and tested, the double-helix structure of the DNA has to be linearized—literally, made linear. The process takes about ten days, after which it goes through additional testing. “We’re going twenty-four hours a day with three manufacturing shifts,” Christine Smith, the Chesterfield-site leader, told me. “And then there’s another shift making all the buffers and media to grow the cells in and getting ready for the next day. It’s a very regimented process. It’s not like we can just open up a door to the room next door and start making it.”

From Missouri, the plasmid is flown to Pfizer’s campus in Andover, Massachusetts, where it is incubated in a bath of enzymes and nucleotides—the building blocks of RNA—for several hours. The process, called in-vitro transcription, synthesizes the genetic material, the RNA, which carries the instructions to make a modified form of the spike protein that causes covid-19. (These reëngineered spikes are what trick the immune system into creating antibodies to defend against the coronavirus.) A few days later, the RNA is placed in specially designed bags, frozen, and flown overnight to Kalamazoo, where Calitri’s team puts the final drug product into vials, and inspects and labels them before freezing them at ultra-low temperatures. When it’s time to ship them out, the vials are packed with dry ice—Pfizer has its own dry-ice-manufacturing facility on site—in thermal containers created specifically for this vaccine, each with its own G.P.S. unit and temperature alarm. (When the initial vaccine drive is over, one of Pfizer’s shipping containers will be sent to the Smithsonian, Tanya Alcorn, the company’s head of biopharma supply chain, told me.)

Both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccine candidates require rare ingredients that are in short supply, such as the lipids used to encase the mRNA and the enzymes used to transcribe it. Calitri, meanwhile, had been grappling with a series of engineering puzzles. “There’s a step in which the mRNA is coated with these lipids, and it’s done in a specialized mixer,” he told me. “The mixers we were using to develop the process are very small”—about the size of a silver dollar. His team didn’t have time to design a larger mixer, so they tied together a hundred of the silver dollars. When the filters on some of the filling equipment needed to be replaced, switching to a different filter was not an option, because any adjustment to the process would have to be approved by the F.D.A. Instead, the team had to learn how to “regenerate” the ones they had. It took six months and numerous prototypes to figure out how to store and ship a frozen product that needed to be kept at subzero temperatures. There were some misses, too. They thought the vaccine would need to be frozen as soon as it came off the filling line, so they installed blast freezers; the data have since shown such precautions to be unnecessary. “We needed to have options,” Calitri explained.

Even before the clinical trials were completed, it was obvious that Pfizer’s domestic operation would not have enough capacity to meet the U.S. demand. In July, Pfizer ordered two prefabricated modular manufacturing suites, but they took eight months to build and finally arrived in Kalamazoo in mid-February. “This is not like a production line for making cars or trucks,” Tim Manning, the supply coördinator for the Biden Administration’s covid-19 response team, told me. “This is extraordinarily complex biochemistry. And it happens at the molecular level. . . . It’s really complicated, and made on extremely rare and difficult-to-make machinery.”

***

Most years, the health-care supply chain is fairly stable. Hospitals anticipate how many N95 masks, nitrile gloves, and various medications and vaccines they will need based on what they’ve needed in the past. The pandemic year exposed the fragility of that system. In early 2020, with a covid-19 vaccine still on the distant horizon, Rick Bright, the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, warned the Trump Administration that, once there was a vaccine, there would likely be a shortage of syringes, needles, and glass vials. At the time, manufacturers were producing around fifteen to twenty billion glass vials, for all of the world’s medications, in a typical year. Bright was fired in April; in a searing whistle-blower complaint filed in May, he predicted that it could take up to two years to produce enough vials just for the U.S. vaccination effort. “They can’t just crank out more vials,” Kelvin Lee, the director of the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (niimbl), told me. “That glass gets manufactured through very specialized processes. And, ultimately, glass comes from sand. Their raw-material suppliers have to think about where they are going to get the right kind of sand to make sure the vial is of appropriate quality.”

The government has been able to use the Defense Protection Act to secure a sufficient number of vials so far. Some recent advancements in glass technology will likely help, too. The same month as Bright’s whistle-blower complaint was filed, Pfizer signed a multiyear contract with Corning, which is based in New York and manufactures a super-strong pharmaceutical-grade glass called Valor. In June of last year, the Trump Administration awarded Corning more than two hundred million dollars to scale up production. But that deal will address only a fraction of the need. Chandra Brown, who was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Manufacturing in the Obama Administration, recently wrote in an online editorial, “By this time next year, I predict Americans will covet borosilicate glass”—the material used in traditional vials—“the same way they do N95 masks.”

The vials also need rubber stoppers. Last fall, tropical storms in rubber-producing regions of Thailand, Vietnam, and India led to shortages that could have jeopardized the vaccination effort. The government used the Defense Protection Act to round up sufficient supplies, but it was clear that a tremendous strain had been placed on the world’s rubber supply. “The D.P.A. is allowing the U.S. to hoard some of these materials for production of U.S. vaccines, but is causing other shortages globally,” Robert Handfield, the executive director of the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative, and a professor of supply-chain management at North Carolina State University, told me. He also said that there is “very little visibility into the manufacturing bottlenecks that are occurring.” On March 5th, the Times reported that officials in the United States and Europe say that they may not have enough syringes to administer the vaccine.

The supply of lipids used in both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines continues to be precarious, too. Vox recently reported that, even among the few companies whose facilities can be repurposed to make lipids, “not nearly enough of them are ready to make the kind of lipid nanoparticles we’d need to distribute billions of mRNA vaccine doses quickly.” As Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s C.E.O., told investors in January, if “there’s one raw material missing, we cannot start making products, and that capacity will be lost forever because we cannot make it up.”

Recently, the Biden Administration has used the Defense Protection Act to acquire enough low-dead-space syringes to be sent out with every Pfizer-vaccine shipment. (Such syringes enable a sixth dose to be extracted from Pfizer’s vials, automatically increasing the company’s vaccine doses by twenty per cent.) With government support, a company called ApiJect is building a “Gigafactory” in North Carolina to manufacture single-dose injectables to reduce waste and simplify the distribution of vaccines. (It is expected to come online in 2022.) The White House is also investing in the construction of factories that would be able to make more than a billion surgical gloves a month. The goal is to move enough production Stateside, so that the domestic health-care supply chain is not dependent on other countries, which, in a crisis, will likely choose to prioritize their own citizens.

Perhaps most crucially, the government brokered a deal between Johnson & Johnson and Merck, paying Merck up to $268.8 million to upgrade two of its manufacturing facilities. But it will take months for Merck to retrofit its facilities; the vaccines it will be making for Johnson & Johnson are not expected to be ready until the second half of the year. Meanwhile, the company that Johnson & Johnson currently contracts with to produce its vaccines domestically has yet to receive F.D.A. approval. (The four million or so Johnson & Johnson vaccines that are now being distributed were made abroad.)

The most hopeful news is that Pfizer has cut the time it takes to make a batch of its vaccine to sixty days. As of mid-March, the company expects to deliver more than thirteen million doses a week, up from around five million last month.

by Sue Halpern, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: misplaced

[ed. See also: Drug Lobby Asks Biden to Punish Foreign Countries Pushing for Low-Cost Vaccines (Intercept).]

Chris Maggio, Scenes from the Last Day on Planet Earth

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New Nukes Are Coming

America is building a new weapon of mass destruction, a nuclear missile the length of a bowling lane. It will be able to travel some 6,000 miles, carrying a warhead more than 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It will be able to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a single shot.

The US Air Force plans to order more than 600 of them.

On September 8, the Air Force gave the defense company Northrop Grumman an initial contract of $13.3 billion to begin engineering and manufacturing the missile, but that will be just a fraction of the total bill. Based on a Pentagon report cited by the Arms Control Association Association and Bloomberg News, the government will spend roughly $100 billion to build the weapon, which will be ready to use around 2029.

To put that price tag in perspective, $100 billion could pay 1.24 million elementary school teacher salaries for a year, provide 2.84 million four-year university scholarships, or cover 3.3 million hospital stays for covid-19 patients. It’s enough to build a massive mechanical wall to protect New York City from sea level rise. It’s enough to get to Mars.

One day soon, the Air Force will christen this new war machine with its “popular” name, likely some word that projects goodness and strength, in keeping with past nuclear missiles like the Atlas, Titan, and Peacekeeper. For now, though, the missile goes by the inglorious acronym GBSD, for “ground-based strategic deterrent.” The GBSD is designed to replace the existing fleet of Minuteman III missiles; both are intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. Like its predecessors, the GBSD fleet will be lodged in underground silos, widely scattered in three groups known as “wings” across five states. The official purpose of American ICBMs goes beyond responding to nuclear assault. They are also intended to deter such attacks, and serve as targets in case there is one.

Under the theory of deterrence, America’s nuclear arsenal—currently made up of 3,800 warheads—sends a message to other nuclear-armed countries. It relays to the enemy that US retaliation would be so awful, it had better not attack in the first place. Many consider American deterrence a success, pointing to the fact that no country has ever attacked the United States with nuclear weapons. This argument relies on the same faulty logic Ernie used when he told Bert he had a banana in his ear to keep the alligators away: The absence of alligators doesn’t prove the banana worked. Likewise, the absence of a nuclear attack on the United States doesn’t prove that 3,800 warheads are essential to deterrence. And for practical purposes, after the first few, they quickly grow redundant. “Once you've dropped a couple of nuclear bombs on a city, if you drop a couple more, all you do is make the rubble shake,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Robert Latiff, a Bulletin Science and Security Board member who, early in his career, commanded a unit of short-range nuclear weapons in West Germany.

Deterrence is the main argument for having a nuclear arsenal at all. But America’s land-based missiles have another strategic purpose all their own. Housed in permanent silos spread across America’s high plains, they are intended to draw fire to the region in the event of a nuclear war, forcing Russia to use up a lot of atomic ammunition on a sparsely populated area. If that happened, and all three wings were destroyed, the attack would still kill more than 10 million people and turn the area into a charred wasteland, unfarmable and uninhabitable for centuries to come.

The GBSD’s detractors include long-time peace activists, as you’d expect. But many of the missile’s critics are former military leaders, and their criticism has to do with those immovable silos. Relative to nuclear missiles on submarines, which can slink around undetected, and nuclear bombs on airplanes—the two other legs of the nuclear triad, in defense jargon—America’s land-based nuclear missiles are easy marks.

Because they are so exposed, they pose another risk: To avoid being destroyed and rendered useless—their silos provide no real protection against a direct Russian nuclear strike—they would be “launched on warning,” that is, as soon as the Pentagon got wind of an incoming nuclear attack. But the computer systems that warn of such incoming fire may be vulnerable to hacking and false alarms. During the Cold War, military computer glitches in both the United States and Russia caused numerous close calls, and since then, cyberthreats have become an increasing concern. An investigation ordered by the Obama administration in 2010 found that the Minutemen missiles were vulnerable to a potentially crippling cyberattack. Because an error could have disastrous consequences, James Mattis, the former Marine Corps general who would go on to become the 26th US secretary of defense, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2015 that getting rid of America’s land-based nuclear missiles “would reduce the false alarm danger.” Whereas a bomber can be turned around even on approach to its target, a nuclear missile launched by mistake can’t be recalled.

William J. Perry, secretary of defense during the Clinton administration (and the chair of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors), argued in 2016 that “[w]e simply do not need to rebuild all of the weapons we had during the Cold War” and singled out the GBSD as unnecessary. Replacing America’s land-based nuclear missiles, he wrote, “will crowd out the funding needed to sustain the competitive edge of our conventional forces, and to build the capabilities needed to deal with terrorism and cyber attacks.”⁠ Russia has about 4,300 nuclear warheads, the only arsenal on par with America’s, and is also trading up for new weapons. Yet as Perry pointed out, “If Russia decides to build more than it needs, it is their economy that will be destroyed, just as it was during the Cold War.” China—a bigger long-term threat to the United States than Russia, in the eyes of many national security analyses—seems to understand that excessive spending on nuclear weapons would be self-sabotage. Even if, as the Pentagon expects, Beijing doubles the number of nuclear warheads in its arsenal—now estimated at less than 300—it will still have far fewer than either the United States or Russia.

For many and perhaps most Americans, nuclear weapons are out of sight and mind. That $100 billion to replace machines that would, if ever used, kill civilians on a mass scale and possibly end human civilization is just another forgotten subscription on auto-renew. But those who do think about the GBSD mostly don’t want it. In a survey of registered voters conducted in October 2020 by the Federation of American Scientists, 60 percent said they would prefer other alternatives to the new missile, ranging from refurbishing the Minutemen to scrapping nuclear weapons altogether. Those results echo a 2019 voter survey, conducted by the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland, that asked if the government should phase out its fleet of land-based nuclear missiles. Sixty-one percent of respondents—53 percent of Republicans and 69 percent of Democrats—said yes.

Which all leads to one question: Given the expense, doubtful strategic purpose, and lack of popularity, why is Washington spending so much to replace the Minuteman III?

The answers stretch from the Utah desert to Montana wheat fields to the halls of Congress. They span presidential administrations and political parties. They come from airmen and farmers and senators and CEOs.

by Elisabeth Eaves, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists |  Read more:

Image: ICBM launch site, Minot, North Dakota. Charlie Riedel/AP

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Vaccine Passports Don’t Have to Work to Be Effective

As more Americans get vaccinated, there is increasing talk of “vaccine passports.” There are strong emotional reactions to this idea, positive and negative, but my attempt at a more analytical view leads me to a conclusion that is not entirely satisfying (even to me): America should work to develop vaccine passports but never actually require them.

First, I am not impressed by the criticisms that vaccine passports will create an unfair two-tier society. Covid-19 already has done that. Not only are the 500,000 dead already in a highly disadvantageous “tier,” but the U.S. has been divided between those who can work at home — often higher earners — and those who cannot. If a vaccine passport system can help clean up this mess and accelerate recovery, it is likely to increase fairness on average.

The biggest advantage of vaccine passports is that they would encourage people to get the vaccine. Many people who are indifferent about getting it but want to be able to fly or attend a sporting event would have a strong inducement to hurry up and claim their doses. Getting vaccinated would also boost their health and job prospects, as well as protect others.

So far, so good. What are the problems?

One issue is what exactly constitutes proof of vaccination. For my vaccinations, I have been issued a rather flimsy, easy-to-forge paper document from the Centers for Disease Control. Unlike a passport or a dollar bill, it has no embedded watermarks or other protections. Anyone with a moderately sophisticated copy machine could create many fake documents, or perhaps steal an existing stash of these documents and sell them on the black market. Once you have the documents, you can simply note that you have been vaccinated, and it is not easy for outside parties to dispute such claims.

Soon enough, of course, it may be easier for most adults to get a vaccine than to forge a vaccine passport. Still, U.S. laws and regulations work better when they can refer to clear, verifiable standards of evidence. It is hard to imagine a set of laws or procedures based on criteria so loose that they basically allow anyone to claim they are vaccinated. A more stringent standard, however, would be hard for most vaccinated Americans to meet.

Another knotty question is which vaccines will count for the passport. Pfizer’s, Moderna’s and Johnson & Johnson’s for sure, but what if you are a U.S. citizen living in Canada who received AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which has been approved by some 15 nations but not the U.S.? Is the federal government willing to tell a whole class of responsible individuals that they cannot fly on U.S. planes? Or will the vaccine-passport bureaucracy be willing to approve vaccines that the Food and Drug Administration will not?

by Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: CommonPass via