Outside the Beltway

Comments

1. charontwo says:
   Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 05:29

   Virginia redistricting, the courts, judicial capture and Republican propaganda:

   “Mike Brock“

   1
2. Scott says:
   Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 08:35

   Announced just a couple of days ago.

   Flu vaccine no longer mandated for US troops, Hegseth says

   Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that the U.S. military will no longer require all American troops to get the flu vaccine, citing “medical autonomy” and religious freedom.

   “The notion that a flu vaccine must be mandatory for every service member, everywhere, in every circumstance at all times is just overly broad and not rational,” Hegseth said in a video posted on social media.

   He said American service members are free to get the flu vaccine but will not be forced to “because your body, your faith and your convictions are not negotiable.”

   Hegseth’s directive does allow for the military services to request to keep the vaccine requirement in place, according to a memo enacting the policy posted online. It says the services have 15 days to make those requests.

   Purely coincidentally, Military Times comes out with this little bit of military history:

   The Spanish Flu — a deadly postscript to WWI — started at a US military base

   In the spring of 1918, as American soldiers prepared to go “over the top” for the first time during World War I, a handful of army physicians began noticing a strange sickness that began to grip service members.

   The virus, resulting in deadly pneumonia, struck down previously healthy young men within days, some within hours. Postmortem exams revealed soggy lungs with evidence of hemorrhaging, according to the National WWI Museum. Unbeknownst to them, influenza was about to ravage the U.S. military — and the world — in a way unseen since the likes of the bubonic plague in the 1350s.

   The origin of the virus is believed to have begun from Haskell County, Kansas. Young men from Haskell County were training at nearby Camp Funston, in what is now Fort Riley, Kansas, according to the Army.

   On March 4, 1918, the first influenza cases were identified at the Army base. Within three weeks, 1,100 of the 56,222 troops at the camp were sick.

   Then, as men boarded crowded transport ships and lived in close quarters —both behind the lines and at the front — influenza struck, killing more lives in just 18 months than the First World War claimed by bullets in four.
   …
   Within the U.S. military, an estimated 116,516 to 117,000 were killed during the war, including 53,402 battle deaths. Of that, approximately 43,000 service members were killed by the influenza virus.
   …
   According to previous Military Times reporting, the incidence rate of hospitalizations for flu among recruits from 2010 to 2014 was 70 per 100,000, compared with the overall military rate of 7.4 per 100,000.

   A footnote: my Grandmother’s first husband died of the Spanish flu on 19 January 1919 at the Great Lakes Naval Station. He was 23.

   1
3. charontwo says:
   Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 08:47

   “Semafor”

   Big Oil is making money but losing sleep. Sure, high oil prices are nice; we’ll find out next week exactly how nice when the majors report first-quarter earnings. But what goes up must eventually come down. And even though US oil executives and insiders are worried that energy market disruption stemming from the war in Iran is poised to get significantly worse, they’re not ready to ramp up drilling to counteract it.

   “The real problem is the back end of the curve is lying to us,” Kaes Van’t Hof, CEO of Texas independent producer Diamondback Energy, said during an energy summit at Columbia University this week. He was referring to the widening gap between the high price for oil delivered today, and the significantly lower price for oil futures contracts, a gap that reflects Wall Street’s sanguine view that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened soon.

   1
4. Jay L. Gischer says:
   Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 10:15

   @charontwo: I remember listening to an interview of William Black where he was discussing control fraud.

   This sounds very similar. Not too long ago I read a court opinion with regard to a Trump defamation lawsuit where the judge says that the legal system is not well equipped to deal with someone who uses the courts for publicity and fundraising, which was what Trump was doing.

   It’s a big mess. I do not know where we are going to find a river Alpheus and Peneus to use to clean it up, or who is going to play the role of Hercules.

   3
5. charontwo says:
   Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 10:52

   It’s not just gasoline and jet fuel. Pharmaceuticals are impacted also, shortages already showing up in the UK.

   “Omission”

   Cancer patients get hurt first and they get hurt worst.

   Cold chain biologics and biosimilars for chemotherapy are temperature-sensitive and transit through Gulf logistics hubs that lost seventy-nine percent of their air cargo capacity in the first week of the war. These aren’t generic pills sitting in a warehouse with a three-month buffer. They are manufactured under strict conditions, shipped under strict conditions, and administered on strict timelines to patients who cannot wait. There are no generic alternatives for many oncology biologics. When the cold chain breaks, the treatment stops, and for a Stage 3 lung cancer patient on a biologic regimen that took months to calibrate, stopping is not a pause. It is a potentially irreversible setback. Their oncologist may not know the supply chain is compromised. Their pharmacy may not know yet. Their insurance company hasn’t told them.

   Diabetes medications hit next. Metformin is the most prescribed drug in America and it is a perfect storm candidate with high volume, thin margins that have been declining five to seven percent annually from generic competition, and a synthesis process that depends on petroleum-derived dimethylamine. When a manufacturer operates on razor-thin margins and input costs spike because the petrochemical feedstock they depend on was cut by thirty-five percent at the source, they don’t absorb the loss. They slow production or halt unprofitable runs. CNBC flagged metformin as one of the first generics to show stress from the Hormuz closure.

   Heart medications follow the same pattern. Metoprolol, one of the most prescribed cardiovascular drugs in the country, operates on the same supply chain profile as metformin. High volume, thin margins, generic-dominated, petrochemical feedstocks, India-dependent. Blood pressure medications are daily-use drugs with no stockpile behavior from patients, so shortages show up at the pharmacy counter faster than drugs that patients sometimes skip or stretch.

   Antibiotics have a different vulnerability on top of the petrochemical one. Jordan produces roughly forty-eight percent of the world’s amoxicillin oral suspension and twenty-four percent of doxycycline capsules. Jordan is in the conflict zone. These drugs aren’t just downstream of the petrochemical chain. They have direct production exposure to the war itself.

   …

   The United Kingdom is showing what this looks like before it reaches the United States. The NHS warned it is weeks away from drug shortages linked to the war. Wholesale prices for paracetamol have already tripled, from 41p to £1.99 per hundred tablets in March alone. Pharmacists report struggling to source certain strengths of aspirin and co-codamol, and some chemists have stopped selling aspirin altogether because they cannot restock it. Generic drugs make up eighty-five percent of NHS medications and they run on the same supply chain documented in this assessment, the same feedstocks, the same Indian manufacturing base, the same strait. The UK is not a different system. It is the same system on a shorter timeline, and what is happening in British pharmacies now is what will happen in American pharmacies next if the conditions documented here do not change.

   …

   The war is also delaying the medications that don’t exist yet.

   Nearly seven percent of active clinical studies worldwide, over four thousand three hundred trials across almost eight thousand sites, have been disrupted by the conflict. Turkey, Israel, and Egypt account for most of the affected sites. Oncology trials are disproportionately impacted, with non-small cell lung cancer, breast cancer, heart failure, and multiple myeloma among the leading affected indications. Phase 3 trials, which involve the largest patient populations and are closest to producing approved treatments, are particularly burdened.

   A cancer drug facility in Iran was hit by Israeli-US strikes. The drugs that were being developed there are gone. The patients who were enrolled in those trials have lost access to experimental treatments that may have been their last option. This is future harm, not current shortage, but the patients affected are real and the timeline of their diseases doesn’t accommodate a ceasefire negotiation.

   The time to worry is now. Not panic. Worry. Be concerned enough to take steps to limit your impact and buy yourself time to adapt to a landscape that may change faster than the systems you depend on can keep up with.

   If you take a daily medication, talk to your doctor about a ninety-day prescription instead of thirty. Most insurance covers it and many mail-order pharmacies offer it at a lower per-unit cost. Once a shortage hits, pharmacies ration to thirty-day supplies or less and the ninety-day option disappears. The time to get ahead of that is before the shortage is confirmed, not after.

   Ask your pharmacist where your medication is manufactured. If it’s sourced from India, ask whether a domestic alternative exists at the same dosage. Switching now while both options are available is straightforward. Switching during a shortage when the pharmacist has nothing on the shelf is not.

   If you are on a biologic or a cold chain medication, especially for cancer treatment, talk to your oncologist now about supply continuity. Ask whether your treatment center has contingency plans for supply disruption. Ask whether alternative therapies exist that use a different supply chain. Your oncologist may not have this information yet because the pharmaceutical supply chain is not what they were trained to monitor. But they need to know, and the question itself starts the conversation.

   3
6. Sleeping Dog says:
   Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 11:16

   DHS is now sugar baby central.

   1
7. Scott says:
   Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 12:22

   Vasectomy anyone?

   The world’s biggest condom maker hikes prices as the war rattles supply chains.

   The world’s largest condom maker is raising prices of its products by up to 30 percent, warning that shortages of raw materials and chemicals because of the Iran war could disrupt production.

   The Malaysian condom company, Karex, which produces about five billion condoms a year, blamed a surge in raw material prices, global shipping disruptions and higher freight costs for the price increases.
8. Kathy says:
   Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 14:16

   El Taco claims the US controls the Strait of Hormuz.

   My question then is: when is this fucking bastard going to reopen the strait?

   Also, when will the taco delusions grow too flagrant for the GQP to ignore?

   3
9. steve222 says:
   Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 14:42

   @Scott: Unless we get one of the variants that mostly affects younger people this wont increase deaths much if at all. It will leave a lot more people unfit for duty for a week or or longer and more hospitalizations.

   Steve
10. Jen says:
    Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 16:38

    Dear lord. I can’t decide if they really think this is how math works, or they are trying to flatter Trump.

    Either way, based on this, no one should ever believe anything anyone from this administration says if it has a mathematical or percentage component*.

    * Someone is going to say that’s an unnecessary qualifier, but I continue to believe there are still some existing civil servants out there doing their jobs correctly, so saying “never believe anything” is probably too harsh.

    3
11. Kathy says:
    Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 16:41

    Lawsuit accuses JetBlue of surveillance pricing.

    I wonder what will come out in discovery, should it get that far.

    Airline fare pricing is a complicated mess. Largely it’s driven by demand, but also by origin, destination, whether it’s one way or round trip, how much in advance a ticket is bought, etc. Layering personal data mining and AI on top of all that is not just credible, it seems unavoidable in the holy pursuit of share value.

    I would favor laws restricting dynamic pricing, and more so surveillance pricing. It’s bad enough to pay higher transportation fares (Uber and airlines, for now), and accommodation rates, based on supply and demand adjusted to the second. Imagine you go to a store and are charged more than another customer for a widget at the same time of day, or if restaurants raised meal prices at lunch time.

    BTW, on the matter of airlines, as I brought it up yesterday, Spirit hasn’t made a profit since before the trump pandemic.

    2
12. Kathy says:
    Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 16:56

    @Jen:

    The way a lot of people misunderstand fractions and percentages, it’s likely a large chunk of the population think a drop from $400 to $40 is like -4,000%

    I’ve even caught people who work in math fields flub such things. Like this acquaintance who’s a gaming mathematician, once claimed a change in a tax rate from 10% to 11% is a 1% raise. Like hell. It’s 10% higher (albeit one percentage point).

    3
13. Gustopher says:
    Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 20:10

    @Jen: anyone working for this administration under duress will understand that information they provide is surrounded by enough bullshit that no one can take it at face value. I think your qualifier is not needed.

    There are reason to work for the administration, I suppose, to preserve what integrity one can, to help what people one can, etc. But the default assumption should be that all data is compromised unless shown otherwise.

    I would not be surprised to discover that some people are keeping two sets of books — one calculated with the new processes that are wildly suspect, and another with legacy processes.

    3
14. Kathy says:
    Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 21:15

    According to El Taco, Obama was president in 2022, and he was responsible for blocking the merger of Sprit and People Express.

    He also says the US government will buy Spirit.

    Apparently this would not be SOCIALISM!!

    5