It's Time for a New American Story
Why "shots, checks and jobs" isn't enough. Plus, why it's way too soon to be talking about "vaccine passports."
Nicco Mele, former director of the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School and current managing director of the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation (and an old pal of mine since we first worked together at Arianna Huffington’s 2000 “Shadow Conventions” !!), writes in his periodic newsletter with thoughts very much in tune with my own about the “Phoney War” period we are in now. “Given the sanity of the Biden Administration you may be inclined to relax your vigilance,” he writes. But, invoking “Rule 1: It will get crazier,” he reminds us “that things are not as they seem and we must act with urgency. The world order we see as stable is in fact fragile and not doing the job it should.”
Like me, Nicco thinks President Biden is doing a very good job prioritizing big policy initiatives that can be boiled down to “shots, checks and jobs.” But he warns that without great storytelling, all these initiatives may get undone 18 months from now. And that’s not only because the out-party does well in midterms, or because Republicans are pushing new voter suppression laws in many states. It’s also because while the Republicans have a conservative media system that consistently projects and reinforces a counter-narrative with reach and staying power, the older mainstream media does not play that role for Democrats. (The fact that not a single question about the pandemic was asked of Biden during his White House press conference last week is a good example of what’s wrong with mainstream media, in that regard.) We need a “New American Story to help us believe in each other again,” Nicco writes. Amen brother.
Another smart observer of current events, Dan Pfeiffer, former Obama White House speechwriter, writes in his newsletter that one aspect of this problem is that the White House press corps isn’t interested in positive narratives. “I can promise you that if Biden were failing to meet (as opposed to exceeding) his vaccination goals, the topic would have dominated the [press conference]. This dynamic is not unique to the press conference. … With each day, the passage of the American Rescue Plan fades further into the past, and more of the media moves onto the next crisis du jour.” Pfeiffer has a larger point: “Utilizing the media as the primary communication vehicle means the success or failure of our political strategy depends on the whims of news executives who do not share our interests. Think of it this way. Our message is the product, and the voters are the customers. A business would never entrust the distribution of its product to a competitor. Yet, that’s exactly what Democrats do when they rely on the New York Times and others to tell voters about our accomplishments and agenda.”
Pfeiffer is heartened to see that Democratic donors are funding ads promoting the American Rescue Plan this far out before the mid-terms, and he also argues that regular people have a role to play too. “We can share positive stories, remind our networks about the positive accomplishments, and post the ads on social media. Every one of us can be curators and amplifiers.” Well, yes, but I don’t think that sharing well-made ads will be enough to counter the deeply felt resentment that the Republicans and the rightwing media system constantly stoke. As I wrote a month ago in “Joy to the Vaccination Centers,” we need something bigger, built in tandem with the massive mobilization already underway as millions of Americans get vaccinated now—a sign of governmental competency that could be our saving grace. Biden himself put this well the other day as he celebrated the passage of the American Rescue Plan, saying, “We need to remember, the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us, all of us, we the people.”
Can we make this the meta-message of our time? I don’t know. Critiques of power are so built into the DNA of today’s left, we may not be capable of recognizing when—broadly speaking—our side is in power. It’s very hard to shift from the constant vigilance and opposition of the last four years to something like shared governance. But the scale of the changes now being contemplated by Democrats in Congress go way beyond anything we’ve seen Democrats do in most of our lifetimes, and people need to recalibrate when righteous opposition is needed and when solidarity is more important. If we don’t, we may miss our last and best opportunity to turn this divided, dysfunctional and diseased country in a better direction.
Your Pandemic Passports, Please?
It looks like digital vaccination certificates (no one in the US Government wants to call them “passports”) are coming, The Washington Post’s Dan Diamond, Lena Sun and Isaac Stanley-Becker report. At least 17 such initiatives are under way and the White House is busy trying coordinate them. For example, the Vaccination Credential Initiative includes the Mayo Clinic, Microsoft and more than 225 other organizations who are all planning to use standardized data to build digital vaccine records.
“The busboy, the janitor, the waiter that works at a restaurant, wants to be surrounded by employees that are going back to work safely — and wants to have the patrons ideally be safe as well,” Brian Anderson, a physician at Mitre, a nonprofit company that runs federally funded research centers, who is helping lead the Vaccination Credential Initiative, told the Washington Post. “Creating an environment for those vulnerable populations to get back to work safely — and to know that the people coming back to their business are ‘safe,’ and vaccinated — would be a great scenario.”
Note how often Anderson uses the word “safe,” a term that is peppered throughout VCI’s verbiage too. The truth is no one knows for sure if current vaccines confer long-lasting immunity. So the rush to talk about vaccine passports comes with real dangers.
Wait, what? Yes, I’m worried about the rush to start issuing and using these certificates as if they are a ticket to some kind of post-COVID freedom. Put aside the obvious inequities that would be reinforced if we start requiring proof of vaccination before everyone has had a real opportunity to get vaccinated. (While about one-third of all New York City residents have been vaccinated, 37 percent are white, 19 percent are Latino, 19 percent are Asian and 14 percent are Black. NYC is roughly 29 percent Latino and 24 percent Black.) There are two big problems with making someone’s vaccination status a formal threshold.
First, as the Ada Lovelace Institute points out in a recent paper, “At present, vaccination status does not offer clear or conclusive evidence about any individual’s risk to others via transmission, so cannot be a robust basis for risk-based decision making, and therefore any roll-out of a digital passport is not currently justified.” This is why health experts keep saying that even after getting vaccinated, people need to practice mask wearing and social distancing. If we somehow convey the message that a vaccination certificate is also a “do your own thing” card we may inadvertently let our guards down too soon.
The second problem is that, at least here in the US, none of the vaccines in use have been fully approved by the FDA. They are all being used under an “emergency use authorization” which is a mechanism when circumstances exist to justify the emergency use of drugs and biological products. This means that employers and other authorities have less legal power to require that people be vaccinated, and they have to offer them to the option to refuse. So, while we can require that someone be temperature screened or show evidence of a negative test result before entering a facility, we can’t (yet) make vaccination status itself a threshold requirement.
Let’s hope we don’t end up with a new kind of “security theater” where these certificates are deemed to prove that someone is “safe” to work or travel—especially if it then causes workplaces or airlines to stop using other measures to make close spaces less conducive to COVID’s spread.
-Related: Dan Hon, whose “Things That Have Caught My Attention” newsletter is a must-read, has a hilarious take-down of New York State’s decision to roll out a COVID-19 vaccination passport smartphone app built on blockchain technology. Yes, the old rule that no one ever got fired for hiring IBM has now been updated to include “especially if the word blockchain is included,” as IBM is building the “Excelsior Pass.” New York’s rush to use an over-hyped technology for a problem that it isn’t even right for, without addressing the real issues of privacy or lack of access (20% of Americans don’t own a smartphone) is a warning sign that decision-makers are more interested in looking smart then being smart. “I’m terrified that vaccine passports will transform health care inequity into digitized segregation,” says Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the New York-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told Sam Biddle of The Intercept. “Gov. Cuomo gave us screenshots of the user interface, but he never even published a privacy policy. We have no idea how this data can be tracked and if it’s accessible to police.”
Odds and Ends
-This is entertaining: Republican opponents of the For the People Act (HR1), which passed the House and is awaiting a vote in the Senate, have discovered from their own internal polling that the legislation isn’t just popular with the center-left. According to a report by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, Kyle McKenzie, the research director for Stand Together, a Koch-brothers-funded advocacy group, told a private Republican conference call that, “the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.”
-Speaking of billionaires and politics, a whole bunch of tech moguls including Laurene Powell Jobs, Ron Conway, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Ev Williams, Marissa Mayer and Mark Pincus are urging their fellow Californians to stay the course with Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who is the target of a recall drive, Carla Marinucci reports for Politico. Here’s their open letter, courtesy of Teddy Schleifer of Recode.
-“This race will not be won on Zoom.” That’s Dianne Morales, a rising progressive star in the crowded field of candidates seeking to win New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary in June. She’s just announced that “effectively immediately, my campaign will halt participation in online forums, making exceptions for forums and debates that reach large, diverse audiences via television and radio, and account for accessibility. Moving forward, we will meet New Yorkers ‘where they are at,’ prioritizing community-centered, on-the-ground organizing strategies to connect with those who have been underserved by this City.”
-More than two-thirds of QAnon followers arrested in the wake of the Capitol insurrection have received mental health diagnoses for things like bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and addiction, social psychologist Sophia Moskalenko reports for the Honolulu Civil Beat.
-Today in artificial scarcity: BMW charges drivers extra to unlock a safety feature built into their cars, a “high beam assistant” that automatically avoids blinding pedestrians, Sean Hollister reports for The Verge. (h/t Jason van Anden)
-New from New_ Public: Terra Incognita: A Study of NYC’s Digital Public Space in the Pandemic. I’m chewing my way through the report and will have more thoughts to share in the next issue of The Connector.
-The brilliant folks at Beautiful Trouble have a launched a dynamic new interface for their trove of organizing tools, case studies and strategic resources.