Sensemaker: Winning streak

• The Taliban claimed to have taken full control of Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley.
• MPs prepared to return to parliament in London, where Boris Johnson braced for a mutiny over plans to raise National Insurance (more below).
• The army staged a coup in Guinea, less than a year after disputed elections.

Seven minutes into yesterday’s football World Cup qualifier between Brazil and Argentina, Brazilian health officials invaded the pitch and stopped the game. Four Argentinian players, all playing in England’s Premier League, were accused of trying to side-step Brazilian anti-Covid rules, which bar entry to the country to anyone who’s been in the UK within the past 14 days. (The four came via Venezuela and according to Brazil were less than fully forthcoming about where they were before that.)

An impartial observer without access to the latest stats might conclude Brazil was in the grip of a Covid surge and panicked. Not so. For now, South America is beating Covid.

• Really? Yes. After a year of desperate losses, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Uruguay and Paraguay are reporting low or steeply falling infection and death rates. Better yet, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects continuing steady declines in daily deaths to near zero by the end of the year in Argentina and Uruguay, and to around 200 in Brazil, down from 630 now and more than 3,000 when rates peaked there in April. 
• Why? Simple. Vaccines. Falling death rate graphs intersect neatly with those showing fast-rising vaccination rates since March in almost every South American country except Venezuela, where barely 8 per cent have had one dose. Elsewhere, rates range from 50 per cent (Colombia) to 77 per cent (Uruguay), with second doses closely tracking first. Neither politics nor conspiracy theories have significantly affected uptake, even in Brazil, where President Bolsonaro has switched from making light of the virus to boasting about his country’s vaccine roll-out.
• What about immunity conferred by infection? That too. One virologist from the World Health Organization tells the NYT ($) very high infection rates across the continent may have boosted natural defences, including against the Delta variant. 

So? South America has a very obvious lesson for North. Keep faith with vaccines and fatalities will fall. Instead, in the US, where Covid vax-resistance is a new religion despite the near-universal acceptance of vaccinations for children as a condition of going to school, daily death rates have risen from a low of 226 in July to just under 1,400 now. They’re not forecast to start falling again until later this month.

What about Israel? Israel’s experience confirms that the protection from symptomatic infection afforded by the Pfizer vaccine declines after five to six months, and if at that point you welcome back planeloads of Israeli holidaymakers from countries where the Delta variant is widespread, infections will spike. But you are still nine times more likely to get seriously ill if unvaccinated than if fully vaccinated. 

As to what was going on at the football match… unclear. It’s possible Anvisa, the Brazilian health agency, was trying to send a signal to Bolsonaro that beating Covid means enforcing rules. Or Brazil may have feared losing. Messi and Neymar were on the pitch and they looked baffled.

Abortion drivers’ costs
Lyft and Uber have said they’ll pay any legal costs incurred by their drivers as a result of the new Texan anti-abortion law. The law provides bounties for citizens who successfully sue others for providing or helping to provide abortions to women more than six weeks pregant. What if a court decided driving a pregnant woman to a clinic constituted helping get an abortion? Lyft was first. The new law “threatens to punish drivers for getting people where they need to go – especially women exercising their right to choose,” its CEO tweeted. Uber thanked Lyft for the push and made the same promise of legal costs an hour later. They weren’t the first companies to pick sides (two dating sites have set up a fund to help Texas staff forced to seek abortions out of state) but they are the first to commit to something so potentially expensive. 

Facebook lies
China has landed a crew of six on Mars. This is not true, but you might have shared it with friends if we’d pretended it was. New research has confirmed what we sort of all knew: misinformation travels further and faster ($) on Facebook than information from outlets that make an effort to check facts. The study, conducted in New York and Grenoble, found that fake news on Facebook gets six times more clicks than the real thing. Its methodology, not helped by Facebook’s efforts to limit researchers’ access to its data, was to compare interactions with thousands of pages categorised by two fact-checking organisations as either broadly reliable or broadly not. The made-up stuff spread like wildfire. Facebook’s defence, per the Washington Post, is that the study looks at engagement, not “how many people actually see” the content. But engagement is what matters, no?

Funding social care
Boris Johnson’s plan for an increase of around 1.25 per cent in National Insurance rates to pay for an overhaul of social care will be welcomed almost nowhere today. It breaks his 2019 manifesto commitment not to raise taxes, which offends manifesto purists in his own party (who choose to ignore the argument that a pandemic can shift the terms of the debate). It enrages his northern Red Wall MPs who note that low and middle income earners are being asked to subsidise the inheritances of the already well off, because wealth stored in house values is a big alternative source of funding for social care. And it should enrage Labour’s Keir Starmer for both these reasons, if he was the sort to get properly enraged. One thing Johnson has got right is that decent funding for social care cannot be delayed. But for someone who can’t bring himself to back a structural increase in tax on wealth or the wealthy, this is a trap.

Total energy
Total is going to invest $27 billion in Iraqi energy. The press release couches the deal as a progressive mix of support for an economy undermined by instability and a planet in need of renewables (it will include funding for a solar plant). But it’s really a big boost for Iraqi oil and gas with a solar figleaf, and probably a sign of things to come: as western jurisdictions make it harder and riskier to invest in oil and gas, non-western jurisdictions that don’t will get the money. Iraq is the second-biggest oil producer in the Opec+ group. Its economy depends utterly on hydrocarbons, but Iraq isn’t short of sunshine either. Truly visionary leadership would see 2021 and Cop 26 as an opportunity to break with the past and challenge the rich North to make good on its talk of a Great Energy Leapfrog. It’s never too late.

What price a CBE?
About £1.5 million, apparently. That’s what Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz, a Saudi businessman, gave to Prince Charles’s charities on the understanding the Foreign Office would look kindly on his quest for honours. He did get an honorary CBE but probably considered it a bad deal since according to correspondence seen by the Times he was assured the donations would be considered a downpayment on a knighthood, UK citizenship and a full membership of the House of Lords. None of these transpired. Does that mean the system’s working? Not exactly. Selling an honour is a criminal offence. Norman Baker, the Lib Dem ex-minister, has called for an investigation by the Metropolitan Police, and the Times reports today that Charles himself was said to be “100 per cent” behind the citizenship bid. So who should be investigated if no one is above the law? 

UK:
06/09 – House of Commons returns from summer recess, with Boris Johnson expected to give statement on Afghanistan; inquest takes place into 2019 death of Charlie Todd at HMP Durham, 07/09 – Public Health England publishes annual figures on sexually transmitted infections across the country; Office for National Statistics publishes statistics on suicides in England and Wales; Commons select committee session on space defence, 08/09 – UK hosts meeting of G7 interior ministers; 43-year-old man appears in court charged with posting racist social media message after Euro 2020 final, 09/09 – Tony Blair takes part in Washington Post discussion on 9/11, 10/09 – Scottish National Party holds autumn conference; Manchester City footballer Benjamin Mendy appears in court charged with rape and sexual assault, 11/09 – Last Night of the Proms, 12/09 – annual Trades Union Congress begins

World:
06/09 – Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins; Labor Day public holiday in US; trial continues in the Netherlands for four men charged over Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crash, 07/09 – bitcoin becomes legal tender in El Salvador; Brazilian Independence Day, 08/09 – International Gaming Awards; New York Fashion Week begins, 09/09 – North Korea national independence day; Vladimir Putin meets Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko; NFL season begins, 11/09 – 20th anniversary of 9/11; US Open women’s tennis final, 12/09 – US Open men’s tennis final

Thanks for reading, and do share this around.

Giles Whittell
@GWhittell

Xavier Greenwood
@XAMGreenwood

Produced by Sophia Sun and edited by Xavier Greenwood.

Photographs by Getty Images