Thread by @charles_gaba

Some may recall I got into a brief disagreement with @jfeldman_epi a few weeks back about whether or not it's *always* appropriate to adjust for age when running COVID death rate numbers. Having said that, he makes some valid points here:
jmfeldman.medium.com/a-year-in-how-…

For me, the single biggest mistake made by the Biden Administration (or at least the CDC...but the buck stops w/the WH) was on May 13th when @CDCDirector Walensky issued her "fully-vaxxed can take of their masks!" guidance, which was a TERRIBLE change.
abcnews.go.com/Politics/fully…

Many people, including myself, roasted the @CDCgov at the time for this change at the time (I wrote a whole thread about it), but the moment the words left her mouth it was too late anyway; genie out of the bottle/etc:

Having said that, I think he also does a lot of hand-waving away of the political realities with statements like this:

He *does* acknowledge the political/polarization factor later on, but again, I think he vastly understates just how "entrenched" that Republican opposition is:

I've posted the graph below many times over the past 8 months or so, but I don't think people fully understand that it's not just how steep the slope is NOW, it's how it's CHANGED over time:

This animation only runs from February 2021 - August 2021, but you can clearly see that the Red/Blue vaccination divide only started AFTER most senior citizens had gotten vaxxed:

THESE graphs tell the story all the way from February through the end of December. The first is the R^2 (correlation strength). The second is the slope itself (the angle of the trend line).

Notice what happened the moment the vaccines became available to all adults?

The moment grandma & grampa were fully vaxxed, the GOP/MAGA/FOX went into overdrive on a robust anti-vaxx campaign. It worked like a charm, though the effect started to flatten out around mid-September...only to start up again as soon as 5-11 yr olds were approved.