Dear Commons Community,

The pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, announced this morning positive early results from its coronavirus vaccine trial with a 90 percent effective rate for subjects taking part in its testing.

Pfizer, which developed the vaccine with the German drug-maker, BioNTech, released only sparse details from its clinical trial, based on the first formal review of the data by an outside panel of experts.  As reported by the New York Times:

“The company said that the analysis found that the vaccine was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of prior coronavirus infection. If the results hold up, that level of protection would put it on par with highly effective childhood vaccines for diseases such as measles. No serious safety concerns have been observed, the company said.

Pfizer plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization of the two-dose vaccine later this month, after it has collected the recommended two months of safety data. By the end of the year it will have manufactured enough doses to immunize 15 to 20 million people, company executives have said.

“This is a historical moment,” Kathrin Jansen, a senior vice president and the head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, said in an interview. “This was a devastating situation, a pandemic, and we have embarked on a path and a goal that nobody ever has achieved — to come up with a vaccine within a year.”

The news comes just days after Joseph R. Biden Jr. clinched a victory over President Trump in the presidential election. Mr. Trump had repeatedly hinted a vaccine would be ready before Election Day, Nov. 3. This fall, Pfizer’s chief executive, Dr. Albert Bourla, frequently claimed that the company could have a “readout” by October, something that did not come to pass.

Independent scientists have cautioned against hyping early results before long-term safety and efficacy data has been collected. And no one knows how long the vaccine’s protection might last. Still, the development makes Pfizer the first company to announce positive results from a late-stage vaccine trial, vaulting it to the front of a frenzied global race that began in January and has unfolded at record-breaking speed.

Eleven vaccines are in late-stage trials, including four in the United States. Pfizer’s progress could bode well for Moderna’s vaccine, which uses similar technology. A Moderna spokesman said that it expected interim findings from its study this month.

Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to rush a vaccine to market, has promised Pfizer $1.95 billion to deliver 100 million doses to the federal government, which will be given to Americans free of charge. But Dr. Jansen sought to distance the company from Operation Warp Speed and presidential politics, noting that the company — unlike the other vaccine front-runners — did not take any federal money to help pay for research and development.

“We were never part of the Warp Speed,” she said in an interview on Sunday. “We have never taken any money from the U.S. government, or from anyone.” On Monday, a spokeswoman for Pfizer clarified that the company is part of Operation Warp Speed as a supplier of a potential coronavirus vaccine.

Dr. Jansen said she learned of the results from the outside panel of experts shortly after 1 p.m. on Sunday, and that the timing was not influenced by the election. “We have always said that science is driving how we conduct ourselves — no politics,” she said.

The data released by Pfizer Monday was delivered in a news release, not a peer-reviewed medical journal. It is not conclusive evidence that the vaccine is safe and effective, and the initial finding of more than 90 percent efficacy could change as the trial goes on.

“We need to see the actual data, and we’re going to need longer-term results,” said Jesse Goodman, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at Georgetown University. Still, he said, “it’s a testament to hard work and science that we’re getting results that are so good and so fast.”

Other scientists were stunned by the data so far.

“This is really a spectacular number,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. “I wasn’t expecting it to be this high. I was preparing myself for something like 55 percent.”

If the final vaccine ends up with that level of efficacy, it “would be higher than your regular flu vaccine, and this vaccine could have a serious impact on bending the curve of this outbreak,” said Dr. Saad B. Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.

Dr. Jansen said that because the trial is continuing, an independent board reviewing the data has not told her or other company executives other details, such as how many of the people developed mild versus more severe forms of Covid-19 — crucial information that the F.D.A. has said it will need to evaluate any coronavirus vaccine. The agency has also asked for other detailed data that could take weeks to review, including about how the company plans to manufacture millions of doses and ensure that the product is consistent and safe.

The trial is expected to continue until 164 people in the 44,000 person trial have developed Covid-19, and will also evaluate how well it protects against developing severe forms of the disease, and how well the vaccine protects people who have already been infected with the coronavirus.

Half of the participants received two doses of the vaccine, and half received a placebo. The first analysis was based on 94 volunteers who developed Covid-19. Dr. Jansen said the outside board did not say how many of those cases came from participants who had been vaccinated. But with a rate of more than 90 percent effectiveness, most had to have been in the placebo group.

Dr. Jansen said the global surge in coronavirus infections contributed to the speed with which participants in the trial got infected with the virus. “You can see for yourself, the rates are going up everywhere,” she said. “So we think based on our predictions, it shouldn’t take us very long” to get to 164 cases of Covid-19.

Dr. Paul Offit, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the F.D.A.’s vaccine advisory panel, said the news that Pfizer’s trial was progressing quickly was a good sign for other trials, too.

“If there’s any silver lining in the fact that our country is currently on fire with this virus, it’s that these trials can reach a conclusion much quicker than otherwise,” he said.

Work on the vaccine began in Mainz, Germany, in late January, when Ugur Sahin, the chief executive and co-founder of BioNTech, read about the virus in the Lancet that filled him with dread. “I almost instantly knew that this would affect us,” Mr. Sahin said in an interview. That same day, the first European cases were detected, in France.

Mr. Sahin assembled a 40-person team to work on the vaccine. Many employees canceled vacations and Mr. Sahin authorized overtime pay. They called it Project Lightspeed.

BioNTech used a technology that had never been approved for use in people. It takes genetic material called messenger RNA and injects it into muscle cells, which treat it like instructions for building a protein — a protein found on the surface of the coronavirus. The proteins then stimulate the immune system and are believed to result in long-lasting protection against the virus. Other companies, including Moderna, are also using messenger RNA technology.

BioNTech quickly identified 20 vaccine candidates, and began testing them on rodents. But the company lacked the experience and resources to rapidly conduct a major clinical trial. So Mr. Sahin called Pfizer. The two companies had been working to develop a flu vaccine since 2018, and within a day of Mr. Sahin calling Dr. Jansen at Pfizer, the companies agreed to partner on a coronavirus vaccine. In mid-March, the companies announced their partnership.

After early human trials, they determined that two vaccine candidates produced a robust immune response, including antibodies against the virus and powerful immune cells known as T cells. They chose the one with fewer side effects to start a trial with more than 30,000 volunteers in the U.S., Argentina, Brazil and Germany. In September the company expanded the trial to 44,000 participants.

Even before it began, the Trump Administration placed a bet that Pfizer and BioNTech would succeed, announcing its advance purchase deal on July 22. At the time, it was the largest such commitment from the U.S. government.

From time to time over the past seven months, while working from his home in the affluent suburb of Scarsdale, New York, Dr. Bourla spoke with Mr. Trump, who had tied progress on a vaccine to his election hopes. Dr. Bourla said the president pressed for details about when the vaccine might be ready.

“Every time I spoke with the president I told him that he should not worry about us compromising safety or efficacy, but that we would do it as quickly as science allows us,” he said.

Late this summer, as the president made public pronouncements about a vaccine coming soon, Dr. Bourla boarded a Pfizer jet to Frankfurt to pick up Mr. Sahin. The two men were meeting face-to-face for the first time, but there was little time for pleasantries, or even science.

As they descended toward a factory in Austria that would produce their vaccine, they discussed how to ensure a wary public would trust their vaccine. Days later, Pfizer organized an effort by major drug companies to pledge that any coronavirus vaccine would stand up to scientific scrutiny.

In another move to shore up public confidence and after criticism from outside researchers, Pfizer and other companies took the unusual step of releasing their trial blueprints, known as protocols, revealing typically secret details about how it was evaluating its vaccine.

Two days after Mr. Trump called out Pfizer by name in the first presidential debate, saying it and other vaccine makers were being hampered by politics, Dr. Bourla emailed Pfizer employees.

“We are approaching our goal,” he wrote. “And despite not having any political considerations with our pre-announced date, we find ourselves in the crucible of the U.S. Presidential election.”

The trial’s protocol allowed four interim analyses — early looks that would give the outside board of experts a chance to identify safety concerns, and assess whether the vaccine was working. Outside of this panel, no one — not doctors or company officials — were allowed to know which participants received the vaccine or a placebo.

The first interim analysis was supposed to have taken place after 32 people in the study developed Covid-19, although regulators at the F.D.A. had always been skeptical that would be enough data to merit an authorization. The company said that, after discussing the matter with the F.D.A., it decided that the virus was spreading fast enough to wait until the pre-scheduled second analysis — at 62 cases. By the time it had finished discussions with the agency and the independent board was ready to look at the data, 94 cases had accrued.

“When everything was done and dotted, and we could actually do the analysis, it turned out we had even far more than what we expected,” Dr. Jansen said. So the outside panel reviewed 94 cases — more than half the number needed to complete the trial.

Wide distribution of Pfizer’s vaccine will be a logistical challenge. Because it is made with mRNA, the doses will need to be kept at ultra cold temperatures. While Pfizer has developed a special cooler to transport the vaccine, equipped with GPS-enabled thermal sensors, it remains unclear where people will receive the shots, and what role the government will play in distribution. Adding to the challenge, people will need to return three weeks later for a second dose to complete the immunization.

Most experts say the world will need many treatments and vaccines to bring an end to the pandemic.

“There’s a lot at stake for humanity,” Dr. Bourla said. “If we get it right, the world can be saved.”

This can be a game-changer.  Congratulations to Pfizer and its collaborators!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

My wife, Elaine, and I have been watching Jeopardy for decades. We play along and even compete with each other in  a friendly manner.  It is the only regularly scheduled entertainment television program that I watch.  So it was with great sadness that we learned that Alex Trebek died yesterday at age 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.  He had been the host of Jeopardy for a record-setting 37 years.  We will miss him.  Here is a tribute and obituary courtesy of the New York Times.

One major appeal of the show, apart from its intellectual challenge, was its consistency. Over the years its format stayed reliably familiar, as did Mr. Trebek, though he trimmed back his bushy head of hair, grew grayer and occasionally sported a mustache, beard or goatee. Otherwise he was the model of a steady and predictable host — a no-nonsense presence, efficient in his role and comforting in his orderliness.

Mr. Trebek’s death was confirmed by the show’s producers. They said that episodes of the show he hosted would air through Dec. 25 and that they had not made plans for a replacement.

Mr. Trebek had announced in a video on March 6, 2019, that he had received a diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer that week. He said that like many others with the disease, he had no symptoms until it had spread throughout his body. He delivered the news from the show’s set, wearing, as usual, a bandbox-fresh suit and tie as he spoke straight to the camera without sentiment or histrionics.

When he commanded a game, he might occasionally raise an eyebrow and say “Oooh, noooo, sorry” or repeat a clue with a whiff of condescension; he told New York magazine that when contestants missed obvious answers, he deliberately struck a tone that was meant to convey: “How can you not get this? This is not rocket science.”

Through it all, he kept the game running on its strict timetable.

He started hosting in 1984, when the show returned to the airwaves after a hiatus. Since then he has been the only host, helming every episode except one, on April Fools’ Day in 1997, when he swapped places with Pat Sajak, the host of “Wheel of Fortune.”

Mr. Trebek and Mr. Sajak had a friendly rivalry over the years as they led two of the longest-running game shows in television history. For years, “Jeopardy!” was the top-rated quiz show in America and usually the No. 2 game show, behind “Wheel of Fortune.”

A few weeks after Mr. Trebek announced that he had cancer, the ratings for “Jeopardy!” coincidentally began to soar when a contestant, James Holzhauer, a sports gambler from Las Vegas, roared through the game on a winning streak that captivated the nation.

Each night, more and more viewers tuned in to see whether Mr. Holzhauer could beat the record set by Ken Jennings, a computer programmer, who scored 74 straight victories in 2004. With Mr. Holzhauer on the buzzer, “Jeopardy!” even blew past “Judge Judy,” long the top-rated show in syndication.

In the end, Mr. Holzhauer fell just $58,000 shy (over 32 games) of breaking Mr. Jennings’s record win of $2.5 million. But he boosted the show’s ratings to a 14-year high, drawing 13.3 million daily viewers. He later donated some of his winnings to charitable causes, including research into pancreatic cancer in Mr. Trebek’s name.

Mr. Trebek said later that while he was taping some of the shows with Mr. Holzhauer, he had been in excruciating pain.

Unlike many celebrities who conceal illness, Mr. Trebek was transparent about what he was going through. Sometimes his pain would shoot “from a three to an 11” during tapings, he told CBS’s “Sunday Morning” in May 2019.

“I taped the show, and then I made it to the dressing room on one occasion, just barely, before I writhed in pain and cried in pain,” he said.

In March 2020, he gave a one-year video update on his status, noting that just 18 percent of people with pancreatic cancer live that long.

The chemo treatments were almost too much, he said.

“There were moments of great pain,” he said, “days when certain bodily functions no longer functioned and sudden, massive attacks of great depression that made me wonder if it really was worth fighting on.”

But to give up, he said, would have been to betray loved ones who were helping him survive.

Model of Decorum

Mr. Trebek hosted more than 8,000 episodes of “Jeopardy!” In 2014, he claimed the record for hosting the most episodes of a single game show, surpassing the record set by Bob Barker, who had led “The Price is Right” for 6,828 episodes between 1972 and 2007.

Mr. Trebek once said he thought game shows did well because they avoided conflict.

“In this day and age, when there is so much societal tension, game shows are valuable because they’re pleasant,” he told New York magazine in 2018.

“As we get further into the 21st century, and we become more aware of the relativism of truth, there is something satisfying about Alex telling you it’s right or wrong,” Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, said in a phone interview.

“I love that there is no discussion, no panel of experts,” he said. “Just Alex with his cards.”

Mr. Trebek spurned being called the star of “Jeopardy!” He wanted viewers to focus on the material. The show derived its drama not from any antics of his, but from the contestants and the possibility that at any moment fortunes could shift, with an apparent loser becoming an instant winner, and vice versa.

“You have to set your ego aside,” Mr. Trebek said of his role. “If you want to be a good host, you have to figure out a way to get the contestants to — as in the old television commercial about the military — ‘be all you can be.’ Because if they do well, the show does well. And if the show does well, by association, I do well.”

The show did well. “Jeopardy!” has won more Emmy Awards — 35 — than any other game show. They included the 2017 Daytime Emmy for outstanding game show — remarkable for a program on the air for more than three decades. Mr. Trebek himself won six Emmys for outstanding game show host and an additional lifetime achievement award.

“Jeopardy!” won a 2011 Peabody Award, the first time in more than 50 years that a television quiz show had been so recognized. The citation said the award, given in 2012, was “for decades of consistently encouraging, celebrating and rewarding knowledge.” It said that “Jeopardy!” was “a model of integrity and decorum.”

The nod to integrity was significant. Quiz shows had fallen into disrepute after cheating scandals in the 1950s; the 1994 film “Quiz Show” dramatized the deceit.

In reaction to those scandals, the idea for “Jeopardy!” was born.

Merv Griffin, the talk show host and media mogul who created the show, recounted in “The ‘Jeopardy!’ Book” (1990) that he had been talking to his wife in 1963 about how much he missed the old quiz shows. But, he said, he recognized that the format had lost all credibility after revelations that contestants on some programs had been secretly fed the answers.

Well, then, his wife, Julann, had said, Why not give contestants the answers to start with and make them come up with the questions?

It was a light bulb moment. Ms. Griffin said, “79 Wistful Vista.” And Mr. Griffin replied, “What is Fibber McGee and Molly’s address?” — a reference to characters on a long-running radio comedy.

The mechanics of the game, initially called “What’s the Question?” went through a few iterations before “Jeopardy!” made its debut on NBC on March 30, 1964, with Art Fleming as the host.

Initially a hit, the show was canceled in 1975 as NBC sought to reach a younger demographic. “Jeopardy!” returned in 1978, disappeared again, then underwent a high-tech face lift. The low-tech game board was replaced with a bank of video monitors. The theme music, composed by Mr. Griffin, was updated using electronic synthesizers. And in 1984, the show came back for good.

‘Part of Americana’

Mr. Trebek has said that he was chosen as host because he had made a good impression when he filled in on “Wheel of Fortune” in an emergency when the original host, Chuck Woolery, was hospitalized. Merv Griffin Enterprises, which created both shows, appreciated Mr. Trebek’s seamless performance on “Wheel” and offered him “Jeopardy!”

Mr. Griffin also wrote the show’s highly distinctive “Think” theme, which is played during “Final Jeopardy!” as contestants write down questions that usually make or break them. Its 30-second countdown has become synonymous with any deadline pressure, with a wood block timekeeper and a harp glissando finish as well as pizzicato strings at the very end.

Mr. Trebek enjoyed hearing the theme music played at ballparks and football games when managers huddled or time was otherwise stopped. That meant that the music was instantly recognizable, that “Jeopardy!” had arrived, he said — that it had become “part of Americana.”

George Alexander Trebek was born on July 22, 1940, in Greater Sudbury, Ontario, north of Toronto. His father, George Edward Trebek, was a chef who had emigrated from Ukraine as a child, and his mother, Lucille (Lagacé) was French Canadian. Alex grew up in a bilingual French-English household.

He attended Jesuit schools until the age of 12, when his parents divorced; he then left Sudbury to attend boarding school at the University of Ottawa High School in Ottawa, graduating in 1957. Afterward he enrolled at the University of Ottawa.

By his junior year he needed money to pay for college and found a job at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a summer relief announcer. He took on other announcing gigs. After graduating in 1961 with a major in philosophy, Mr. Trebek stayed at the CBC, where his interests turned to hosting.

His first such job was for a Canadian music program called “Music Hop” in 1963. He then hosted a high school quiz show called “Reach for the Top” and other miscellaneous programs until 1973, when he moved to the United States. There he started out on a short-lived game show called “The Wizard of Odds.” A dizzying series of other shows followed, including “High Rollers,” “Double Dare” and “The $128,000 Question.”

In 1974 he married Elaine Callei, a businesswoman and former Playboy bunny. They had no children and divorced in 1981. In 1990, he married Jean Currivan, a real estate project manager from New York.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Several people close to Donald Trump are making predictions of what he will do once he accepts the fact that he will no longer be president.  He will have “meltdowns upon meltdowns” until he leaves the White House, his niece Mary Trump warned in an op-ed in The Guardian yesterday.

Trump is “not going to concede. … He’s not going to engage in the normal activities that guarantee a peaceful transition. All he’s got now is breaking stuff, and he’s going to do that with a vengeance,” she wrote.

She argued that Trump has never won anything “legitimately” in his life but has never before lost anything either.

He “thinks that even if you steal and cheat to win, you deserve to win,” said Mary Trump, a psychologist who wrote the Donald Trump tell-all book “Too Much and Never Enough.”

The irony is that the tactics the president used to cheat may have doomed his race, Mary Trump said. Republicans heeded the president’s warning not to vote by mail, so he was subjected to a “slow drip-drip of disaster” as mail ballots from Democrats were counted, she said. “It must have been like slow torture, but he set up this failure for himself.”

The next months could be “dangerous,” she warned. Donald Trump will do nothing about COVID-19, escalating the death toll, she argued 

He’ll also “go as far as he can to delegitimize the new administration, then he’ll pass pardons that will demoralize us — and sign a flurry of executive orders,” Mary Trump predicted.

Though Donald Trump faces ongoing investigations into suspect finances and taxes, that’s not what the narcissist-in-chief is most concerned about, Mary Trump said.

The “worst thing Donald’s looking at isn’t financial difficulties or the prospect of jail,” she said. “It’s becoming irrelevant. I don’t think he would ever recover from that.”

Interesting insights!  Others such as Trump’s former attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, believe that legal troubles and the prospect of jail is very much on his mind.

I think both Mary Trump and Michael Cohen are right.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Saturday Night Live last night featured a monologue (see video above) given by Dave Chappelle during which he addressed issues of race in our country.  His last few minutes are especially touching and provide insight on how we “feel” about these issues and that we can overcome the “hate” we might have. The entire monologue is entertaining but the last two minutes are most affecting (starting at about the fifteen minute mark).

Tony

Michelle Goldberg

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg in her New York Times column this morning, reviews the ups and downs of our presidential election.  She cautions that while we should not undersell the triumph of Donald Trump’s defeat, the fact that “the election came down to the wire in the swing states, that around 70 million Americans looked at the last four years and opted for more, is an ominous sign for the future of the Republic. It is also a reminder of how much worse this could have been.”

She adds: “Yet for now, an existential threat to liberal democracy in America has been vanquished. … he will no longer be able to rule over us. He will be cast out of the White House, disgraced, to meet his creditors and New York criminal investigators.”

The full text of Ms. Goldberg’s column is below.

Tony

 ————————————————————————————

New York Times

We Are Finally Getting Rid of Him

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Nov. 7, 2020

Before Democrats begin their reckoning over their apparent failure to take the Senate and their reduced numbers in the House, before the intraparty recriminations between centrists and progressives, let’s take a moment to appreciate what’s before us. After four grueling years, Donald Trump has been defeated.

The fact that the election came down to the wire in the swing states, that around 70 million Americans looked at the last four years and opted for more, is an ominous sign for the future of the Republic. It is also a reminder of how much worse this could have been.

Trump, it turned out, was far better at pumping up his side’s turnout than we might have assumed from polling data. The president lost Pennsylvania, but he received far more votes in the state — close to 3.3 million, when last I checked — than he did in 2016, when he won it. Joe Biden got more votes in Texas this year than Trump did in 2016 and it still wasn’t nearly enough for a flip. There was in fact a red wave; it just wasn’t big enough to carry Trump to victory.

This increased red turnout was a boon to down-ballot Republicans in some states. They appear to have benefited both from people who love the president but haven’t been consistent Republican voters in the past, and from the smaller share of anti-Trump Republicans. Republican senators outperformed Trump in Maine, Texas and, in the case of David Perdue, very slightly in Georgia.

A Republican Senate is not yet a lock — races in Alaska and North Carolina still haven’t been called, and there will be two runoffs in Georgia — but it’s a likelihood. The implications for Biden’s first term are dire, and the sort of pro-democracy reforms that would stave off a future of minority rule are, for the moment, off the table. It’s understandable that many on the left are dispirited.

But that should not distract from the monumental accomplishment of ending Trump’s malignant presidency. It is rare for American presidents to be defeated after a single term. This is the fifth time it happened in a century. It’s also, we shouldn’t forget, the first time a woman, in this case a Black woman, will become vice president.

Because of the Electoral College, the deciding states in this campaign were to the right of the country at large. The president tried to muster the power of his office against his opponent. He pressed Ukraine’s government to defame Biden and got his allies in Congress to launch bogus investigations. He corruptly used government resources for his re-election, even turning the White House into a stage set for the Republican National Convention. In an unprecedented move, he put his name on stimulus checks, making it seem as if the money came from him.

Trump installed a lackey atop the Postal Service who slowed down mail delivery during a pandemic in which a disproportionate number of Democrats were relying on mail-in ballots. The president stacked the courts with judges who would likely rule his way if his margin in tipping- point states were close enough to challenge.

This year, V-Dem, an international project tracking democracy around the world, wrote, “The United States of America is the only country in Western Europe and North America suffering from substantial autocratization.” As The Washington Post reported, the group’s data shows that only one in five democracies that start down such a path is able to right itself before full-blown autocracy takes hold. Another Trump term would have furthered America’s transformation into an illiberal state like Hungary, Poland and Brazil.

Beating the odds required an extraordinary coalition that ran from Angela Davis to Bill Kristol. It required young progressives disappointed by the losses of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to nevertheless mobilize for Biden. It required some traditionally Republican suburbanites to put the good of the country over partisanship.

And while exit polls showed that Trump improved his margins among Black and Latino voters — especially Cuban-Americans in Florida — we still owe Biden’s win to people of color. As I write this, he’s ahead in Arizona, which is possible only because he got an enormous share of the Latino vote there. He has a tiny lead in Georgia — a state that was solidly red when Trump took office — in large part because of the heroic work of Stacey Abrams and her New Georgia Project, which has registered and organized Black voters in the face of relentless voter suppression.

Because of the perversities of the Electoral College, and because some pivotal states counted mail-in ballots last, the election was a nail-biter — but it wasn’t close. As Nate Silver tweeted, “Going by the popular vote, this will probably be the second-least-close election since 2000.” The American people decisively rejected Trump.

There will be time later on to argue over what, if anything, Democrats can do to win back people who like demagogic strongman politics. There will be time to start thinking about how to address the damage wrought by a president who, along with Fox News celebrities and other right-wing figures, is going to convince a large part of the country that their loss is illegitimate.

Trumpists believe that they represent “the people” in a quasi-mystical sense; they speak as if they have an organic connection to the country that their enemies lack. Reconciling them to a system in which they are but a loud minority won’t be easy, if it’s even possible.

Yet for now, an existential threat to liberal democracy in America has been vanquished. Trump will almost certainly continue to vandalize the country during the lame-duck phase of his presidency, but soon he will no longer be able to rule over us. He will be cast out of the White House, disgraced, to meet his creditors and New York criminal investigators.

Dear Commons Community,

The coronavirus does not care about electoral college counts and continues to devastate the country as media outlets focus almost entirely on the presidential election.  Right now the coronavirus is surging out of control and more than 121,000 cases were reported on Thursday, more new cases than on any other day of the pandemic. In 43 states, new infections are climbing steadily higher. To many Americans, the pandemic’s march feels inexorable.  As reported by the New York Times.

Dear  Commons Community,

Arizona voted to boost taxes on high earners in order to provide more money to public schools, marking a major win for the Red for Ed movement that began with a wave of teacher strikes in several states two years ago.

Proposition 208, dubbed Invest in Ed, will go into effect next year to fund salaries and training programs for teachers and support staff at public schools and public charters.

The Associated Press called the race late Thursday, with “yes” votes leading “no” 52% to 48%.

The additional 3.5% tax on income will apply to earnings above $250,000 for single filers and $500,000 for joint filers. It would be added to Arizona’s current top tax rate of 4.54%.

Backers of the measure estimate it will put an additional $940 million annually into the state’s public K-12 school system.

Arizona teachers were part of the historic series of strikes that hit public schools around the country, starting in early 2018. The educators were protesting years of disinvestment in public schools that led to staff shortages and underfunded classrooms. Even though the strikes temporarily shut down schools, the public by and large supported teachers’ efforts to boost funding for the education system.

The results of Tuesday’s vote show Arizonans still like the idea of pumping more money into schools even if it means higher taxes for some residents. Polling ahead of the vote showed broad public support for the proposal crossing party lines, with two-thirds of respondents saying they approved of the tax. But the result ended up much closer.

Teachers and their unions pushed for a tax increase on high earners in 2018, but the Arizona Supreme Court ordered that the initiative be removed from that year’s ballot due to the language used in the petition. This year’s ballot initiative did not run into the same problem.

Teacher unions helped fund the Arizona initiative, saying school districts pay staff too little to attract and retain talent. The average teacher salary in Arizona was $50,353 during the 2018-19 school year, giving it a rank of 43 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the country.

Under Prop. 208, half the money raised would go toward salaries for classroom staff, a quarter toward salaries for school support staff, and the rest toward retention and training programs. According to The Arizona Daily Star, only around 90,000 Arizona residents earn enough money to be hit by the tax surcharge.

The ballot measure drew opposition from state Republican leaders including Gov. Doug Ducey, who said it would hurt small business owners whose earnings top the $250,000 mark.

Business lobbies lined up in opposition to the proposal as well, with the state Chamber of Commerce pouring more than $8 million to fight it in the final stretch. But initiative supporters still outspent the opposition by a healthy margin, according to Ballotpedia.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

To address the growing wage gap between chief executives and workers, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly approved what is believed to be the nation’s first tax aimed at pay inequity. As reported by NBC News.

The “Overpaid Executive Tax,” formally known as Proposition L, will charge any company that does business in San Francisco and has a top executive earning over 100 times more than their “typical local worker,” according to the tax’s author, Matt Haney, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors.

Companies with top executives who fall into this category must pay a 0.1 percent surcharge on their annual business taxes. The surcharge increases by 0.1 percent per factor of 100, topping out at 0.6 percent. So top earners making 200 times more than the average worker pay a 0.2 percent tax and so on.

San Francisco voters embraced this tax at a time when CEO compensation is surging. A study published by the Economic Policy Institute found that chief executive compensation rose 14 percent in 2019 to $21.3 million. Chief executives now earn 320 times as much as a typical worker.

The latest ruling applies to a breadth of companies. While Portland, Oregon, has a similar measure, which passed in 2018, that tax applies only to publicly held companies. This measure affects both privately and publicly held companies. This tax not only affects large, local firms like Salesforce, but also large corporations that do business in the city, like Visa and J.P. Morgan.

Haney wrote on Twitter that the proposition would generate “up to $140 million” that could be used to “support our health and public health systems, which are deeply strained from the consequences of inequality. We will hire nurses, social workers and emergency responders, and expand access and treatment.”

A municipal analysis estimated more conservatively that the tax would bring in approximately $60 million to $140 million, but noted that the amount could vary year to year.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This week’s Science has an article that questions the decision by which the FDA entered into agreement with the company, Gilead Sciences, to develop the drug remdesivir to treat COVID-19.  Essentially the FDA and the European Union entered into the agreement just after a major study found that remdesivir had little value.  It is indicative of how careful our government needs to be NOT to rush the development of drugs needed to combat COVID.

The entire article is below.

Tony