US president angers progressives by saying he will not veto Congress bill to block justice reform in Washington, DC.

A New York man who assaulted former Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol pleaded guilty on Friday to several felony charges.

Give President Joe Biden democracy, self-rule, and statehood for Washington, D.C. But not yet.

Yesterday, Biden announced he would not veto Congress’s override of a new criminal code for D.C. passed by its city council. “I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule—but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections—such as lowering penalties for carjackings,” Biden tweeted. “If the Senate votes to overturn what D.C. Council did—I’ll sign it.”

If you support self-rule for jurisdictions only so long as they do not make choices you oppose, you do not actually support self-rule. The bill is meant to streamline and update D.C.’s criminal code; the city council passed passed it unanimously, despite Mayor Muriel Bowser’s opposition. Bowser said she agreed with “95 percent” of the bill, excepting some of its lower maximum penalties for certain crimes and its expansion of jury trials to include misdemeanors, arguing that the latter would overburden the system.

[Anne Applebaum: A real place deserves real rights]

The changes to the city’s criminal code are, as Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern writes, much less dramatic than advertised. For example, the bill “lowers penalties for carjacking” in the sense that it changes the maximum sentence from a never-imposed 40 years to 24, which is still a very long time, and to which years can be added based on other potential offenses associated with the same crime. Some Senate Democrats are expected to vote to overturn the D.C. law, an indication of just how seriously they take their own rhetoric about democracy. One need not believe that the changes are a good idea to find this appalling. That’s how democracy works: Sometimes the people make the wrong choice. The virtue of the system is that they make it, and it is not made for them.

Unfortunately, this is just the latest episode in a long history of the federal government’s contempt for D.C.’s right to govern itself. In the 1870s, the city became a haven for the newly emancipated after the Civil War, and extended suffrage rights to all regardless of race. But as Reconstruction ended, the city became the fiefdom of outright white supremacists who plundered it for profit and exploited its Black residents. In 1890, the former Confederate general, plantation owner, and Democratic senator John Tyler Morgan of Alabama took to the Senate floor to explain why D.C. could not be allowed to govern its own affairs.  

Now, the historical fact is simply this, that the negroes came into this District from Virginia and Maryland and from other places; I know dozens of them here now who flocked in from Alabama … They came in here and they took possession of a certain part of the political power of this District. There was but one way to get out—so Congress thought, so this able committee thought—and that was to deny the right of suffrage entirely to every human being in the District and have every office here controlled by appointment instead of by election … in order to get rid of this load of negro suffrage that was flooded in upon them.

As the reporters Tom Sherwood and Harry Jaffe wrote in Dream City, their history of Washington, D.C., “It’s impossible to dismiss the fact that raw discrimination against blacks was for years at the root of Congress’s relationship with the District of Columbia.”

Although the Constitution grants Congress power over the seat of government, the longstanding hostility toward the very idea of home rule in D.C. stems from the belief that Black people are incapable of governing themselves. In most cases, the rationales for denying representation to residents of the capital of a nation ostensibly founded on the idea that taxation without representation is tyranny have shifted to become more partisan than overtly racist, but some of them remain essentially Morganist. In 2009 Tucker Carlson said D.C. was not “ready for democracy,” because it had elected Marion Barry as mayor. Barry was an extremely common American type—a corrupt ethnic machine politician who was simultaneously an effective practitioner of patronage politics. But he was also Black; the alchemy of racism ensures that the flaws that transform Irish machine politicians into beloved and colorful characters turn Black machine politicians into proof of Black inferiority.

This argument, though, has persisted even as the city’s Black majority has become a plurality: D.C. cannot be allowed to govern itself, because its voters might make decisions its overlords do not like. In some states legislators who could not count to 20 without taking off their shoes make a show of passing idiotic and cruel legislation that violates their constituents’ most basic rights, but no one ever suggests that the voters who elected them be denied democratic self-determination as a result. The people of Washington, D.C., have no less a right to govern their own affairs than the people of Texas or Florida.

[Read: D.C. statehood is more urgent than ever]

Far from proving that D.C. cannot govern itself, Congress’s interference with the city illustrates the necessity of D.C. statehood, even as it exposes the underlying reasons that the dream of statehood remains remote. Without real federal representation, there is no one to stand up for the city’s interests in Congress, and those who make decisions about the District’s affairs are accountable to constituents elsewhere, who have no reason to defend the city’s interests or autonomy. The Republican commitment to “local control” is entirely superficial; I grew up in D.C. and live in Texas, and it is very clear to me that the principle applies only to GOP-run jurisdictions, which are mysteriously always deemed fit for self-governance.

The ease with which the Democratic supporters of D.C. statehood have been manipulated into parroting the arguments of pundits and politicians who support disenfranchisement is pathetic, but unsurprising: Because D.C. residents are disenfranchised, it costs Democrats nothing to look tough on crime by disregarding home rule. After all, what are DC residents going to do, send a Republican to the Senate?

D.C. deserves statehood because its residents, who outnumber those of Wyoming and Vermont, have their own political and cultural identity and have the same right as every other American to determine their own fate. The city’s residents should be able to govern themselves without interference from politicians looking to burnish their reputations with their performative contempt for the people who actually live and work there.

To those who say that D.C. statehood is simply a matter of naked partisan interest (as if the opposition to it is not), I would say that is also the reason we have two Dakotas. It was only a month ago that the Biden administration put out a statement urging Congress to “respect the District of Columbia’s autonomy to govern its own local affairs.” Until D.C. has the shield of statehood and federal representation, neither party has any reason to listen.

President Joe Biden's decision to allow Congress to potentially nix reforms to the criminal code of Washington, DC, has left him facing criticism from his own party as he prepares to launch his reelection campaign.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

In the past few weeks, the conventional wisdom about COVID seems to have been upended.

Early in the pandemic, several mainstream news outlets dismissed theories that COVID came from a Chinese lab. But recently The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that the Department of Energy reversed its prior judgment by announcing that the coronavirus probably did emerge from a laboratory. The FBI shares that assessment.

What’s more, for the past three years, many scientists and writers—including me!—have reported that masks are effective at reducing the transmission of COVID. But last month, the lead author of a comprehensive analysis of masks boldly and unequivocally asserted that “there’s no evidence that many of these things make any difference.”

That settles things: The elites got everything perfectly backwards; the lab-leak conspiracy theory was true, and the mask mandates were a fraud!

Well, not quite. The deeper you dig into the details of each case, the murkier the story becomes. In fact, the deeper you dig, the more you realize that murkiness is the story.

Start with the lab-leak hypothesis. Three years ago, many journalists and scientists rushed to condemn a theory that deserved a fair and open trial. But let’s not replace one nutty take (The lab-leak theory is racist) with another (We know for sure that COVID came from a lab). Although the Department of Energy and FBI say the virus likely emerged from a lab rather than a wet market, four other agencies and the National Intelligence Council have come to the other conclusion: that COVID likely started with natural exposure to an infected animal. By this count, the lab-leak theory is still an underdog, trailing 5–2 among government institutions. Adding to the confusion is the fact that none of the agencies reached their conclusion with much conviction, even with access to untold stacks of top-secret information. As my colleague Dan Engber pointed out, “Only one [assessment], from the FBI, was made with ‘moderate’ confidence; the rest are rated ‘low,’ as in, Hmm, we’re not so sure.”

In an ecosystem of doubt and paranoia, spooky factoids breed. Have you read about those sick researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology back in November 2019? Have you read the response to the response to the rumor about an earlier alleged biosafety breach at WIV? Bro, can you even spell “furin cleavage site”? Tantalizing leads, all. But they add up to a tug-of-war between a clever hunch and an educated guesstimate.

The frustrating truth is that we’ll probably never know for sure how the pandemic started. China’s refusal to grant access to global investigators is sketchy, but we don’t know what they’re trying to protect or conceal.

In the absence of certainty, we should proceed as if both theories are true. That means much more federal scrutiny of gain-of-function research in U.S.-backed labs. That also means reconciling ourselves to the probability that COVID will not be the last pandemic of the century—or, perhaps, the decade. After more than 1 million American pandemic deaths, “taking the pandemic seriously” seems to mean civilians posting condemnations of other people’s behavior online rather than the federal government laying out a clear and comprehensive anti-pandemic strategy to ensure, for example, the accelerated manufacture of vaccines and other antivirus therapeutics.

And speaking of civilians continually screaming at one another, let’s talk about masks.

The review by Cochrane, a London-based health-research organization, looked at 78 studies in total, including 18 trials focused solely on mask use. Their stated objective was simple: “to assess the effectiveness of physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of acute respiratory viruses.” In short, do masks work? The authors concluded that they don’t. “There is just no evidence that [masks] make any difference, full stop,” a co-author, Tom Jefferson, said.

Sounds definitive. So I called several sources whom I’ve found to be honest and informed on the issue of masks in the past three years. Jason Abaluck is a Yale professor who ran a massive, multimillion-dollar study on community masking in Bangladesh. Possibly the most comprehensive masking study ever undertaken, it found that community-wide mask wearing provided excellent protection, especially for older Bangladeshis. “The press coverage” of the Cochrane review “has drawn completely the wrong conclusions,” he told me. Jose-Luis Jimenez, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the transmission of airborne diseases like COVID, is one of the country’s most cited researchers on the nature of aerosols. “I think it’s scientific garbage,” he said of the review.

Abaluck, Jimenez, and other like-minded researchers have an extensive list of grievances with the Cochrane paper. One criticism is that some of the most convincing evidence for masks from laboratory and real-world studies was left out of the review. The best reasons to believe that masks “make a difference” as a product, Jimenez said, are that (1) COVID is an airborne disease that spreads through aerosolized droplets, and (2) lab experiments find that high-quality face masks block more than 90 percent of aerosolized spray. Meanwhile, observational studies during the pandemic did find that masking had a positive effect. For example, a 2020 study comparing the timing of new mask mandates across Germany found that face masks reduced the spread of infection by about half.

But most important, the researchers identify a mismatch between what Cochrane set out to discover and what the studies in its meta-analysis actually examined. Cochrane looked at randomized control trials, where, in many cases, researchers split a population in two, gave one half a bunch of masks and information about proper masking, then came back a few months later to see if the intervention group was any healthier. For the most part, Abaluck and Jimenez said, these studies don’t really ask the question Do masks work? Instead, they ask: When you hand out masks and information to an intervention group without much enforcement, does it make them healthier? That’s a subtle but important difference, because the frustrating truth is that, without encouragement and social norms, people tend not to wear face coverings properly.

In one famous Danish study, which concluded that urging people to wear surgical masks failed to reduce infections, fewer than half of the people in the masking group said they fully “wore the mask as recommended.” In a 2022 study that distributed masks in Uganda, more than 97 percent of participants reached by phone said they “always or sometimes” wore masks. But at the end of the study, researchers concluded that just 1.1 percent of people they observed “were seen wearing masks correctly”—88 times less than the phone survey. Another study from Kenya found that participants were roughly eight times more likely to report mask usage than to actually wear them.

See how complicated this is? Many people who claim to wear masks actually don’t. Many people who do wear masks wear them improperly. The questions Do masks work? and Does merely asking people to wear masks do much? are not interchangeable.

Failing to pick nits like these can lead to very wrong conclusions. Imagine you found 100 papers showing that it’s hard to get kids to replace sugary snacks with broccoli. You write up the results in a meta-analysis, with the conclusion: Broccoli “does nothing” and “makes no difference” and is metabolically equivalent to Twinkies. But wait, that’s absurd, and you have not discovered anything like that! What you might have discovered is that, in the absence of highly informed and conscientious parenting, federal broccoli mandates will be mostly ignored by many families. That’s an important finding, but it’s very different from “BREAKING: SCIENTISTS SAY VEGETABLES ‘DON’T WORK.’”

“Poor-quality masks, worn poorly, work poorly, and high-quality masks, worn properly, work well,” Jimenez offered as a summation of the evidence. For that reason, I think it is reasonable to say that mask mandates probably reduce COVID in settings where high-quality masks exist and social norms of mask wearing can be maintained. Abaluck’s Bangladesh study achieved a roughly 30-percentage-point increase in community-level mask wearing by not only distributing free masks but also telling people how to wear them, modeling effective face-covering, and encouraging people out and about to put their masks on. By contrast, as even Abaluck acknowledged, “if Alabama tomorrow mandated mask wearing, it would do nothing.”

So what are you supposed to do about all this? The lab leak is neither a fact nor a myth. Masks work, except very often they don’t, and asking people to wear masks can work, except very often it doesn’t work at all.

Meanwhile, we—you, me, governments—have to make discrete and sometimes irreversible decisions within these clouds of uncertainty. I’m trying to navigate that uncertainty myself, reaching provisional conclusions as I constantly reassess the evidence.

I share the Department of Energy’s assessment, even though I don’t have access to its information. I think the lab leak is probable, by the slimmest of margins, and have also reconciled myself to the fact that I’ll never know for sure. I think the government should proceed as if the lab leak is 100 percent true and push for global gain-of-function limitations that reduce the likelihood of future catastrophic lab leaks. I’m going to keep wearing N95 masks in public indoor spaces during periods of elevated COVID transmission. I think that my neighborhood, in Washington, D.C., would benefit from an indoor mask mandate during high-transmission periods, even as I suspect that many unenforced mask-mandate policies around the world don’t do much, because of poor adherence and no enforcement.

The lab-leak and mask debates touch on a broader theme, which is the relationship between science and modern media. In a fragmented and contentious media environment, scientific communication is a mess. An abundance of crappy or confusing research gives audiences access to an armory of factoids, from which they can construct and defend any narrative they choose. For every position, there is an ostensible expert, an apparent paper, and an alleged smoking gun. Thus, the internet tends to serve as an infinity store for pop-up conspiracy theorists.

My advice in navigating this mess is: Do not trust people who, in their handling of complex questions with imperfect data, manufacture simplistic answers with perfect confidence. Instead, trust people who allow for complexity and uncertainty. Trust people who change their mind when the evidence changes. Trust people who, when they say “Believe the science!” put their trust in science, with a small-s, which is the dynamic reevaluation of complicated truths, rather than SCIENCE, in weird caps-lock font, which has come to mean the faith that for every random political position, there exists an official-looking study to permanently justify it. I wish the field of epidemiology was made up of immutable laws as settled as the roundness of the Earth and the power of gravity. It’s not. Its priors are vulnerable to reevaluation. If you want to stay right in this space, you have to be curious enough to potentially prove yourself wrong. You have to keep paying attention. For better or worse, that’s science.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the 89-year-old Democrat from California, announced Thursday that she was hospitalized and receiving treatment for shingles, hoping to return to Washington later this month.