Mar 5, 2022 | World
From "Hybrid Immunity Kept Omicron Deaths Low in Countries Where Millions Aren’t Fully Vaccinated" in the WSJ:
When the highly infectious Omicron variant reached Asia a few months ago, India and Indonesia had a major gap in their defenses: Two-thirds of their populations were yet to be fully vaccinated.But the countries are emerging from their most recent Covid-19 waves with a fraction of the deaths they recorded during the onslaught of the earlier Delta variant. Their deaths per capita are even lower than more vaccinated places that have better healthcare systems such as South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong.
A big part of the reason, epidemiologists say, is that developing nations hit hard by the Delta wave last year acquired high levels of immunity through infection. And that protection appears to have endured. Studies in India, Indonesia and South Africa show widespread prevalence of Covid-19 antibodies, far outstripping their vaccination rates.[...]Natural immunity, which refers to antibodies acquired through infection, was widespread in Indonesia when Omicron arrived. One study from October to December of roughly 20,000 Indonesians found that 74% of unvaccinated Indonesians had protective antibodies, according to Pandu Riono, a University of Indonesia epidemiologist who worked with government researchers on the study.[...]Government serological surveys in India conducted last year have similarly shown that 97% of New Delhi residents and 87% of Mumbai residents have antibodies against Covid-19.[...]Some research suggests that immunity from infection lasts longer than immunity from vaccination. Dorry Segev, a professor of surgery and population health at NYU Langone Health, an academic medical center, led a team that published a research letter last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found that unvaccinated people maintained natural immunity up to 20 months after infection. He said that further research under review shows that this immunity was substantially protective against Omicron. Research from Israel and the U.K. show waning immunity from vaccination after a few months.
Mar 3, 2022 | World
Historian Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, speaking on Bari Weiss podcast on "Russia's War on Ukraine: A Roundtable":
In Russian literature, there is a great novel: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.Biden is the idiot.The reason this happened is because the Biden administration slowed down deliveries of armaments to Ukraine, lifted the sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was supposed to bypass Ukraine, signaled to Russia that the U.S. would not support Ukraine militarily, and therefore made it clear to Putin that he had an opportunity to take military action with only sanctions to fear.The administration’s strategy was to threaten the worst sanctions—as if sanctions were going to deter Putin. Then they tried something even crazier, which was to say, “You’re going to invade, and we know the date”—as if that was somehow going to stop him from invading. And the worst thing they tried was to get the Chinese to dissuade him from invading, when the Chinese had given him the green light on the condition that he didn’t go until after the Beijing Olympics.This has been a debacle that has allowed a massive war to break out, one that could have been prevented had there not been such clear signs of weakness.
(Joe Biden apologist, Francis Fukuyama, disagrees.)Ferguson later adds:The problem is that we created the possibility of Ukraine’s joining NATO and joining the European Union. But our actual attitude was like that New Yorker cartoon of the guy on the phone who says, “No, I can’t do Thursday. How about never?” We never seriously meant for them to join NATO or the EU. We didn’t supply nearly enough armaments for them to deter Russia from attacking. And as a consequence, we have a massive geopolitical crisis that could have been avoided. Telling people that you saw it coming is not an act of strategic genius. It’s an act of strategic feebleness.The consequences of this are far-reaching indeed. First of all, in the administration’s anxiety to avoid even higher inflation, they’re desperately trying to resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal and get Iranian oil back onto the world market in the process, making all kinds of concessions that I think will come back to haunt them. Meanwhile, in China, Xi Jinping is watching this fiasco and saying to himself, “Well, if the most I have to fear is the threat of sanctions, then if I decide to take control of Taiwan, I’m in good shape.” And when Putin took out his little nuclear saber and rattled it, we were immediately deterred. The Europeans were so terrified that they immediately canceled the plan to make fighter jets available to the Ukrainians, which they had offered in the early days after the invasion.
Listen to the podcast.***
As an aside:https://twitter.com/alessabocchi/status/1498811089676558337
Feb 27, 2022 | World
From "Lawmakers fear Russian invasion could increase Chinese threat to Taiwan" (Washington Examiner):
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm that Russia's attack on Ukraine could increase the threat of China invading Taiwan, with some calling for the United States to ramp up its efforts to deter an incursion. These concerns spiked after China's foreign ministry said on Wednesday that “Taiwan is not Ukraine,” arguing it has “always been an inalienable part of China” and refusing to call Russia’s actions an invasion.[...]House Foreign Affairs ranking member Micheal McCaul said he believes it is “only a matter of time” before China invades Taiwan, noting that at least nine Chinese military jets have already been seen crossing into the self-governed island’s airspace. “I think we all saw this unholy alliance coming together at the Beijing Olympics, where Putin and [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] were hand-in-hand condemning NATO's 'aggression' and calling for the West to stay out of the South China Sea and Taiwan,” the Texas Republican said in an interview.“So these two events are interconnected and intertwined, and I think Putin has always wanted to do this, it was all about the right time. And I think Xi has always wanted to take Taiwan — it's about basically going back to the glory of their empires.”[...]McCaul said that after speaking with military officials, he believes the U.S. needs to help provide Taiwan with the resources necessary for the island to prepare for an attack.“Deterrence is always a key. I didn't really see any deterrence with respect to Ukraine. In fact, waving the Nord Stream 2 sanctions [last May] was, in my judgment, a really bad mistake and emboldened Putin,” he said in an interview.
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