Category Archives: politics

Did Hitler sue papers for calling him an “anti-semite”?

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Dara Horn writes in The Atlantic that Hitler “brought libel lawsuits against newspapers that accused him of anti-Semitism, and won them”, listing historian David Nirenberg as a source who had said in a Cornell University lecture:

So during his rise to power, Hitler brought libel lawsuits against newspapers that accused him of antisemitism. And he won.

I found this very surprising, not only because this was the first time ever I had came across this claim.

The only report of any libel lawsuit against a newspaper won by Hitler that I could locate were English language reports in September 1923 that are referenced in a Wikipedia article.

It would be totally out of character for Hitler to defend against a charge of anti-semitism as libel because that was his brand. Hatred of Jews was at the very core of his ideology, as was clearly stated in the party program of the NSDAP and in Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, which he wrote in prison in 1923/24 after a failed coup that he staged in Bavaria in November 1923. Hitler suing someone for calling him anti-semitic is like the pope suing someone for calling him a Catholic.

So what’s the evidence?

According to a brief note published in the New York Times of September 5, 1923, Hitler won an award of 6 million mark against “Vorwärts”, the German Social-democratic daily, for having claimed that he had been financed by “American Semitic and Bolshevistic funds.”

Furthermore, the Canadian Jewish Review, September 14, 1923 stated the libelous claim had been that he received money from “American Jews and Henry Ford”. Neither of those reports explicitly mentions “anti-semitism”.

While Henry Ford was indeed infamous for spreading anti-semitism, he certainly was no communist, so these two media reports clearly don’t align. It also makes no sense to claim that Hitler was supported both by Jews and by anti-semites like Ford, whose views were diametrically opposed.

I find it interesting that while these reports are referenced in the English Wikipedia article on Vorwärts, the other language versions (including the German one) make no mention of this. I have also never heard any German historian bring up this rather interesting anecdote. Searching the German language web for any references to libel suits against German publishers won by Hitler, I came up empty handed. There does not appear to be any record of any such thing ever having happened. Also, while 6 million mark sounds like a large amount of money, this was during Germany’s infamous period of hyper-inflation. Who would sue a paper for the equivalent of three loaves of bread (the reported equivalent at the time)?

My guess is, the brief media reports that made it over the Atlantic were based on a single and less than credible source and that this “Vorwärts” libel suit (or any other libel suits by Hitler against the charge of anti-semitism) never happened. If you come across any evidence to the contrary, please let me know!

Putinism, the anti-imperialism of fools

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German socialist Agust Bebel is supposed to have called antisemitism the “socialism of fools” (“der Sozialismus des dummen Kerls”). By that he meant people who recognize capitalist exploitation only if the exploiter happened to be Jewish but who would otherwise turn a blind eye to the economic realities. The German Nazi party did call itself “national socialist” but the only businesses it expropriated were those of Jewish owners while other big industrialists benefited from government contracts for rearmament and from cheap slave labour during World War II.

A similar phenomenon is at play in the response to Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine. Russia is receiving support from people around the world, both on the far left and the far right. These Putin apologists spread Russian talking points and other propaganda. They often paint Ukraine as a mere pawn of an imperialist West dominated by the USA, which according to them is using the war to marginalize Russia and push it aside in the post-cold war order. These people will accuse the US of past crimes and other immoral actions in Iraq, Serbia, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere while ignoring torture, rape and killing perpetrated right now by Russia. According to them, your right to criticise Russian crimes in Ukraine depends on you first joining their condemnations of past actions of the west.

Let’s be real: These apologists of the Russian war of aggression are not anti-imperialists, far from it: These people are not guided by a moral compass or by concern for the victims of imperialism but by suspicion and hatred of specific countries. They are merely anti-western. Russia is an imperialist power of its own that over several centuries grew from the small Muscovite principality to the largest country in the world by intimidation and military conquest and even genocide. From the Holodomor genocidal famine in Ukraine in the 1930s to the deportation of Crimean tartars to deportations of Poles and Balts in the 1940, it has used utmost brutality. To this day Russia treats its neighbours not as a sovereign countries but as the “near abroad”, a sphere of influence in which governments can make independent decisions only at their own peril. Should their choices run counter to Moscow’s wishes, anything can happen!

Any “anti-imperialism” that is blind to Russian or Chinese acts of imperialism is anti-imperialism in name only. It must therefore be called anti-imperialism of the fools. Anyone who can condemn acts of imperialism only if they are committed by western countries but not if the perpetrator happens to be Russia or China is not really anti-imperialist but merely anti-western. Claiming the mantle of “anti-imperialism” for supporters of a post-fascist aggressor such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia is laughable.

Ukraine is a sovereign democratic country. On multiple occasions Russia committed to respecting its existing borders from the 1991 breakup of the USSR, which include Crimea and the Donbas. By first threatening and then invading Ukraine, Russia has violated the UN Charta, the Budapest memorandum and other obligations under international law. Wars of aggression are a war crime, separate from any crimes against humanity committed in their course. The Russian government should remember that leading Nazis and Japanese militarists were charged, convicted and executed after the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials for preparing a war of aggression.

Past US governments have made many bad and sometimes criminal choices, such as supporting anti-democratic coups in Iran, Guatemala and Chile, the bombing of Cambodia or the invasion of Iraq under flimsy and made-up evidence. However, no country gets a free ticket entitling it to commit war crimes every time some other country violates international law. That’s not how it works in domestic criminal law and that’s not how it works in international law either. Ukraine needs our solidarity to defend its borders and citizens against an imperialist aggressor.

I am thankful the US is stepping up to help Ukraine as much as they have, regardless of their own checkered past.

Japan’s new energy minister: More of the same

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In his initial press conference, newly appointed Japanese energy minister Nishimura Yasutoshi called for restarting nuclear power stations to secure stable energy supplies. He announced there would be no policy change regarding Japan’s involvement with the Sakhalin-2 LNG project in the Russian Far East.

This choice of main topics of the news conference is typical for the public discourse here about energy policy and security:
1) Talk about whether to restart nuclear power or not
2) Talk about securing fossil fuel imports
3) Do not mention investment into offshore wind
4) Do not mention investment into grid expansion

Topics 3) and 4) are critical for weaning Japan off fossil fuel. 1) is a mere stop gap solution at best. Many nuclear stations shuttered after 2011 are too old for operators to make the necessary investments to bring them up to current safety codes. It wouldn’t be economically viable. The reactors whose restart is being promoted are equivalent to about 1/3 of the pre-2011 nuclear generation or roughly 10 percent of the pre-2011 annual electricity generation. While not trivial, it’s not a game changer. For that, Japan would have to embark on construction of new stations, which would be likely to run into political resistance at the local and national level.

Construction of new nuclear power stations will run into cost issues (see Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, Flamanville/France, Plant Vogtle/Georgia USA, Hinkley Point C/UK, etc). Many of these high profile nuclear projects by different companies in various countries have been billions of euros, dollars and pound over budget and years behind schedule. This seems to be a common theme. To build nuclear power stations takes a decade or more, which means capital is tied up for years and years before the first power flows ever into the grid. For example, construction at Flamanville started in 2007 while fuel loading will not take place before 2023, i.e. 16 years later. Or take Olkiluoto 3, where construction started in 2005 and as of 2022 i.e. 17 years later it still is not operating.

By contrast, large solar or wind projects tend be completed in 2-3 years at most.

As a country with a long coast line Japan has huge wind power potential which will complement its solar potential but it is way behind the curve compared to China, European nations or the US. Almost all renewable energy other than hydro power in Japan has been photovoltaic.

To maximize the potential of renewal energy which will often be found far from population centers, Japan needs to build long distance High Voltage DC (HVDC) lines so power from Kyushu and Hokkaido can supply Tokyo and Osaka.

Offshore wind and HVDC are near absent in the public energy debate in Japan. The Japanese economy suffered “lost decades” after the burst of its 1980s’ investment bubble. Unless it invests in offshore wind (and also geothermal power) and a HVDC grid backbone, it will suffer another lost decade in a delayed energy transition.

So why is the government not acting? The interests of Japanese utility companies on one side and of Japanese power consumers and of the planet as a whole on the other are not aligned and politicians of the ruling LDP-Komeito coalition are picking the wrong side.

Japanese utility companies own existing assets such as old nuclear power stations and thermal power stations. The longer they can utilize these assets to generate and sell power, the more money they will make. If they were forced to buy zero-carbon wind power from third-party offshore wind farms in Hokkaido or Kyushu they won’t be able to sell as much power from their own coal-burning or nuclear power stations in the Kanto or Kansai. Utility companies are still building new coal-burning power plants today. They don’t want to see these plants shuttered but to contribute to their profits for the next 20 years and more.

If we let them get away with it, it would be disastrous for trying to minimize the scale of the climate change threat. Climate change will devastate Japan through hurricanes, flooding, landslides and rising sea levels. The political leaders of Japan need to prioritize the interests of the power consumers and of everyone threatened by climate change. Currently they are acting as lobbyists for the utility companies.

Links:

Russia’s Gas Blackmail

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Under Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany’s dependence on Russia for gas supplies rose as high as 55% in 2020.

The first gas pipeline connecting Germany to the Soviet Union crossed the then Czechoslovak border at Waidhaus. The Transgas pipeline crossed the former Soviet (now Ukraine) border at Uzhhorod (Russian: Ushgorod). Via Ukraine it connects to Belarus and Russia. Even during the cold war it reliably supplied Germany with cheap Soviet gas.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, its largest successor state Russia has had disputes with several of its ex-Soviet neigbours, including Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. These countries were earning transit fees from gas exported through their territory while also buying some Russian gas for their own use. As long as large consumers in the west were relying on the same pipelines as Russia’s immediate neighbours it wasn’t possible for Russia to halt gas supplies for example to Ukraine as a method of blackmail without jeopardizing long-term lucrative contracts with Western European customers.

That is why Russia came up with the plan to essentially duplicate the existing pipelines through these countries with a more costly set of new pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic sea that went directly from Russia to Germany, without crossing other countries.

The primary purpose of Nord Stream 1 (NS1) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) was to destabilize the European countries hosting the existing transit pipelines and to expose to Russian energy blackmail. When Germany signed up for NS1 and later NS2, it clearly understood this motivation on Russia’s side but, with active lobbying by ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, it chose to turn a blind eye to the implications. To Germany it was somebody else’s problem.

Well, the chickens have come home to roost: Now it is Germany that is being blackmailed and extorted by Russia while the Baltic states and Poland are already independent from Russian supplies as they have sought out supplies of LNG instead. Germany is still working on making that switch.

On June 13, Russia cut the flow of gas through NS1 by 60%. It blamed this on a turbine at the Russian compressor station in Vyborg (between Finland and St Petersburg) that needed to be refurbished in Canada. The Canadian government was reluctant to return it to Russia because of sanctions.

Eventually a deal was reached between Canada and Germany to return the turbine to Germany, which could then send it to Russia. However, that is not the real story: Germany’s economy minister Robert Habeck made clear that this is just Russia’s excuse and not the actual reason for cutting supplies. Germany can also receive gas from Russia via pipelines that terminate in Mallnow (Yamal-Europe pipeline) and Waidhaus (Transgas). Right now, no gas enters Germany through Mallnow and all the gas that enters via Waidhaus is fed via NS1 in the north, not Transgas in the east. As separate pipelines, Yamal and Transgas do not depend on the NS1 compressor station and turbine. On top of that there are also multiple turbines at Vyborg, which is why any single one being out of service is no cause for major disruption.

What Russia is doing is to intentionally throttle gas supplies to Germany to prevent it from refilling its gas storage sites. Germany is aiming to fill its storage sites to 90% or more of capacity by November 1 so that it can get through the winter without being subject to Russian blackmail. The less gas it receives now when demand is relatively low the more difficult that goal becomes.

In 2015, a year after Russia seized Crimea in Ukraine, a subsidiary of Russian gas monopoly Gazprom bought Germany’s biggest gas storage site in Rehden near the northern city of Bremen. Rather than fill the site before winter as is usual to insure against supply disruptions, Gazprom has kept this site nearly empty for the past year or so. Normally companies use cheap gas in Summer to fill storage sites to have sufficient gas available when demand is high. Without storage, if gas flow through the pipelines is stopped there will be no immediate alternative to keep homes warm and the economy running. Germany has now taken control of the storage site and had been steadily refilling it until the recent supply cuts.

Right now gas flow through NS1 is completely suspended for annual servicing but the big question is if supplies will resume after 10 days or if Russia will come up with a different excuse. It is playing mind games with Germany. If Germany can not fill its storage and Russia chooses to cut supplies during the winter then this will create political pressure on Germany to do whatever Putin wants it to do. It’s an effort designed to split the Western alliance and to end Germany’s support for Ukraine, which already is somewhat half-hearted compared to eastern NATO members or the United States.

Unlike the former Soviet Union, Russia’s highest priority with gas supplies is not to make money but to project imperial power. Gazprom is part of an empire, not a business. Russia has already sacrificed its position as a reliable energy supplier for political purposes, i.e. an attempt to restore Imperial Russia. There is no going back now. Even if Putin were to lose power, Europe will never again make itself dependent on Russian supplies. It will transition to alternative gas supplies and non-fossil energy as quickly as possible. Russia’s biggest cash cow will soon become worthless, long before gas wells would normally have run dry.

The transition to a non-fossil future may be difficult and expensive, but it is necessary because of climate change and Putin’s blackmail of several countries may end up greatly accelerating it. To get through the transition, Europe needs to work together to maximize alternatives to Russian oil and gas. It must not give in to blackmail.

Lend-Lease for Ukraine

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The US has revived its historic Lend-Lease policy to help Ukraine. This was a World War II era policy in support of the enemies of Nazi Germany.

When the UK and France declared war on Nazi Germany after its invasion of Poland, the US initially remained neutral. After the fall of France, Britain remained the only major power resisting Germany. This changed only when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. From 1939 to 1941, the Soviet Union had been an ally of Nazi Germany under the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty and had supplied Germany with oil for its invasion of Denmark, Norway, France and Benelux.

After the fall of Dunkirk, Britain had been almost on its own (it was still supported by Australia, Canada, New Zealand and British colonies). It could buy supplies from the US but it had to pay in cash (i.e. silver) and transport the goods to Britain on its own ships. With the passage of Lend-Lease in March 1941, the US could supply arms, ammunition and other goods to Britain without requiring payment and it sent them to Britain on American ships.

After the German attack on the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), the USSR was also supplied by the US with tanks, trucks, ammunition, food and many other materials for the war effort. These supplies were sent via Persia, Murmansk and the Far East. When Putins’s Russia today talks about the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, it consistently remains silent about the US contribution to the Soviet war effort, without which the country may have collapsed.

Lend-Lease was controversial in the US. Isolationists and nazi sympathisers argued it would put the US on a slippery slope towards entering the war in Europe. However, the US still officially remained neutral and not at war with Germany and its allies. This only changed in December 1941 when Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. A few days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the US in support of its ally in the Far East. Thus it was not Lend-Lease that got the US involved in World War II but the Japanese attack.

This holds a message for today. Countries do not automatically become parties in war if they support another country with supplies.

Wars of aggression are a violation of the UN Charter which guarantees the territorial integrity of all states and requires them to use peaceful means to settle any disputes. Every country has a right of self-defense. Under International law, countries worldwide have every right to support countries exercising their right of self-defence against aggressors and invaders. That is as true in 2022 as it was in 1939 or 1941.

Tokyo in a power crunch

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On March 22, 2022 the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation (Tepco) warned electricity consumers in east Japan about the risk of rolling blackouts from a tight supply situation. The recent M7.3 quake near Sendai had knocked several of Tepco’s thermal power plants offline, which left the company in a difficult situation when a cold spell with snow flakes hit the region of the capital. Demand at times exceeded generation capacity and only the availability of pumped hydro storage saved the day before measures to curb demand such as turning down heating and switching off lights averted an outage.

No doubt this experience will increase pressure to restart more nuclear power stations that have been shuttered since the tsunami and nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima in March 2011. Before the nuclear disaster about 30% of Japanese generating capacity were nuclear; now only about 10% comes from restarted nuclear reactors. The current high prices of natural gas will further enhance the attraction of nuclear, at least in the eyes of anyone whose financial interests are tied to the balance sheet of the utility companies, such as their individual and institutional shareholders.

However, that is not the whole story.

While eastern Japan was in a power crunch, western Japan has ample spare capacity, as did Hokkaido. Why could this power not be used in Tokyo? You would have thought Japan would have learnt its lesson from the 3/11 disaster in 2011 and addressed it in the decade since then, but you would be wrong: Japanese electricity markets are still split between a handful of regional near-monopolies with minimal interchange capacities between them. For example, the Hokkaido grid has a generating capacity of 7.5 GW but only 0.6 GW of interchange capacity with Honshu (8% of the total). Tepco supplies up to 47 GW to customers in its area but can only exchange up to 1.2 GW with major utilities in the west of Japan. This leaves little margin when earthquakes or weather events with a regional impact hit supplies.

By contrast, China has built huge high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines between the industrialized coastal cities on one side and hydroelectric power stations near the Tibetan plateau and solar and wind farms in the arid north on the other. Many of these lines are longer than the distance from Tokyo to Hokkaido, let alone Tokyo to Kansai. The Chinese government understands that if it wants to wean itself from the dependence of dirty coal or imported oil and gas then it will need to vastly increase power transfer capacity from the interior of the country where renewables are available to the densely populated urban areas near the coast lines.

Japan is actually in a similar situation. The elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about is offshore wind. While European countries and the US are building up tens of Gigawatts of offshore wind power capacity, Japan has very little installed capacity, particularly offshore. The entire conversations seems to be about nuclear vs. solar vs. gas vs. coal, leaving out one of the most promising renewable energy sources available to Japan. So far the regulatory hurdles for erecting and connecting wind turbines in Japan have been high and that has left wind as an also ran compared to much more widely deployed solar. However, solar does not provide power at all hours. Wind would complement it.

Much of the European wind power capacity is installed offshore where wind speeds tend to be high and more consistent than onshore. This is where the largest and most economical turbine models tend to be used. By contrast, almost 99% of Japan’s wind power capacity is still onshore. A cumulative total of only 51.6 MW of offshore wind capacity was installed at the end of 2021 while total installed wind power capacity was 4.6 GW. Meanwhile the UK had 24.7 GW of wind power capacity, Spain 27.1 GW and Germany 62.2 GW. China is in a league of its own with 282 GW, more than all of Europe combined. Japan’s installed wind power base is less than that of small European countries such as Belgium (4.7 GW) that have relatively short coast lines and tiny EEZs: Japan’s EEZ of 4,479,388 km2 is over 1000 times larger than Belgium’s at 3,447 km2!

Japan is really only starting to build up offshore wind capacity, with projects off the coasts of Akita, Chiba and Nagasaki getting under way in the last two years. By 2030 its goal is for 10 GW of offshore capacity either installed or under construction which is still tiny compared to the already installed base of Germany, Spain or the UK.

Unlike fossil fuel or nuclear power stations, wind turbines are not location independent. They will be installed where wind conditions are favourable, where the sea is not too deep and connections to the coastal grid are cost-effective. To make the most of the wind conditions, the grid will need to be greatly expanded to allow large amounts of power to be transferred from regions with plenty of wind to regions with many consumers. This will be quite different from the current model where utility companies try to generate all the power they need within their own region, which is why there is only limited interchange capacity to help out if one company loses a large part of its generating capacity as happened in the recent quake or after 3/11.

Japan needs to start building high capacity long distance HVDC power lines like China has in order to enable a transition to zero carbon electricity. The fragmented power markets dominated by local utility companies are an obstacle to this transition as the interests of the regional companies seeking profits from existing investments in their area are not aligned with the interests of the consumers who want reliable green energy regardless of where it comes from.

Japan quickly needs to remove regulatory obstacles to expanding wind power and then invest to build a HVDC backbone to connect renewable power generation with consumers.

Reiwa Shinsengumi and Putin

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On February 28, 2022 the Japanese left-wing populist opposition party Reiwa Shinsengumi led by actor turned politician Yamamoto Taro refused to support a resolution by the Japanese Diet to condemn the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

LDP politician Kono Taro wrote on twitter the next day:

Parliamentary Resolution to denounce the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was passed in the House of Representatives. Surprisingly, the three Reiwa Shinsengumi members voted against the Resolution.

I was curious why they would refuse to join an anti-war resolution and checked their party website.

What I found there was a statement that repeated a Putin talking point, blaming the war on NATO expansion into eastern Europe that supposedly violated a promise made to the Soviet Union not to admit now members from the former Soviet bloc:

今回の惨事を生み出したのはロシアの暴走、という一点張りではなく、
米欧主要国がソ連邦崩壊時の約束であるNATO東方拡大せず、を反故にしてきたことなどに目を向け、この戦争を終わらせるための真摯な外交的努力を行う
(“We don’t want to make the blanket statement that it was Russia’s outburst that created the current catastrophe.
Make a sincere diplomatic effort to end this war, focusing on the fact that the U.S. and major European countries have reneged on their promises made at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union not to expand NATO eastward.”)
(【声明】ロシアによるウクライナ侵略を非難する決議について（れいわ新選組 2022年2月28日）, 2022-02-18)

This Putin talking point that has been repeated by Russian propagandists over and over seeks to repaint the violent assault on a neighbour country as an act of self-defense. It is revisionist history and has been widely discredited as a myth. No such promise was ever made and Russia has not provided any evidence for its claim.

According to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, there was no such agreement. What did happen was that during the negotiations leading up to the reunification of Germany western powers agreed not to deploy NATO troops other than troops from Germany itself into parts of the former GDR (East Germany) once Germany was unified. NATO countries have kept this promise to this present day.

Admission of new NATO members was a subject not even talked about back in 1990. As sovereign nations, it is the right of former Warsaw pact states to apply for NATO membership just as it is the right of NATO members to accept or reject their applications to this mutual defense treaty. After the annexation of Crimea and support for a separatist war in eastern Ukraine by Russia it is now quite clear why eastern European countries have been seeking safety in numbers by wanting to join NATO.

Putin justifying his invasion of Ukraine by its desire to join NATO to keep him off is like a guy justifying the rape of a woman by her calling the police last time he beat her.

Frankly, I don’t expect anything better of Vladimir Putin who is more akin to a mobster than to a regular politician but I am disappointed by Reiwa Shinsengumi whom somehow I had expected to be on the side of democracy and human rights and not of a right-wing dictator.

Waiting for Vaccine Boosters in Japan

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In the spring of 2021 Japan was running about 4 months behind the US and much of Europe vaccinating its population against Covid-19. Vaccinations for senior citizens did not start ramping up significantly until May when other countries had started in December 2020 or January 2021.

After Israel and then the US decided to go for 3rd shots to boost immunity after antibody levels dropped months after 2nd shots of Pfizer and Moderna, Japan also negotiated for booster shots from Pfizer and Moderna. The government went for an 8-month interval and planned for 3rd shots for healthcare workers from December 2021 and the general population from January 2022, with eligibility starting 8 months after the second shot.

Then came Omicron which significantly escapes immune system responses from antibodies. Without boosters protection against symptomatic infection drops significantly with this new variant, as it takes a much higher concentration of antibodies in the blood serum to achieve sterilizing immunity. Long term T-cell immunity, which still protects against hospitalization and death, is much less affected.

In the city of Setagaya, Tokyo where I live, those who have received their second dose at the end of June will receive tickets by the end of January that will allow them to make vaccination appointments some time in February. So far no date has been announced for the group I’m in but having received my shots in July, I probably won’t be getting those tickets before late February and no booster appointment before March. It’s going to be a very long three months when some European countries are expecting to be Omicron-dominated by Christmas, within 4 weeks of the WHO having awarded B.1.1.529 its new name!

Japan is talking to Pfizer about moving part of the 78 million booster doses due for delivery in Q1 2022 forwarded so they can be dispenses sooner. However, former vaccine czar Kono Taro recently pointed out on his personal blog that Japan has enough leftover vaccines still in stock to give 56 million booster shots without waiting for any supplies from Pfizer or Moderna.

In order to protect the public from the new coronavirus, efficiency and speed are more important than equality and fairness.

Some people say that if the vaccine is brought forward, the supply of the vaccine will not be sufficient in time.

At present, Pfizer and Moderna have about 10 million doses of vaccine in stock in the market.

There may be a few doses that have been discarded, but there is no way that 1 million doses were discarded.

In addition, 4 million doses of Pfizer have already been distributed to local governments.

Another 12 million doses of Pfizer will be distributed next week and the week after.

In addition, we have 15 million doses of Moderna in stock for this year, and since the third dose of Moderna is only half the amount of the first and second doses, we will need 30 million doses for the third dose. This will be 30 million doses.

This means that 56 million doses of vaccine could be distributed by the end of the year.

In the first quarter of next year, Pfizer will distribute 30 million doses and Moderna will distribute 24 million doses. In the first quarter of next year, Pfizer will receive 30 million doses, Moderna will receive 24 million doses, and the third dose will be 48 million doses, for a total of 7.8 million doses. In the first quarter of next year, Pfizer will receive 30 million doses, Moderna 24 million doses, and 48 million doses for the third dose, for a total of 78 million doses.
(３回目のワクチン接種, 2021-12-09 [translation by DeepL])

The Japanese government can not blame a slow booster vaccination campaign on a lack of supplies. It needs to act as quickly as possible. The day before yesterday, Germany gave about 1.3 million booster shots in one day.

While officially no community spread of Omicron has been detected in Japan yet, that may simply being because they are not looking for it hard enough.

On Wednesday, 2021-12-15 the Philippine government reported its first Omicron case, a Philippine resident of Japan who had arrived from there on December 1 and tested positive. He had symptoms of a cold at the time. After the positive test the sample was sequenced and determined to be Omicron. This suggests that most likely Omicron was already circulating within Japan two weeks ago. Regardless, it will officially be here very soon.

Once it hits the hospitals, many nurses and doctors are likely to get infected and may have to quarantine. As of today, only about 149,884 of about 5 million healthcare workers (about 3 percent) who had been fully vaccinated have received a third shot. That’s after two weeks of booster campaign. 97 percent are yet to receive their booster. Only 0.11 percent of the Japanese population have received a 3rd shot. In many European countries it’s 20 percent and more.

The vaccination of the elderly is not even due to start until another two weeks from now. There are 52 million people in Japan who have received two doses and are age 50 or above. We should use the doses that we have now as soon as we can.

We really have no time to lose.

Handling Vaccine Stocks like Toilet Paper

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The sky is not falling and Japan is not about to run out of vaccine any time soon. There is enough vaccine already in the country (either in national government freezers or in municipal/local clinic freezers) or scheduled to be delivered at regular intervals over the next 3-4 months that Japan will be able to vaccinate all of its residents age 12 and above by the end of November. Pfizer/BioNTech shipments run until October, Moderna shipments until September. Japan can maintain a rate of about 1.4 million doses a day (i.e. higher than now) until the final month, when mostly only second doses will be needed and the pace could drop by half from the peak. All this while not even tapping into its supplies of 120m doses of AstraZeneca, of which it is giving away millions to Taiwan (2x), Malaysia, Indonesia (both July 1), the Philippines (July 8) and Thailand (July 9) so far and undoubtedly will give away a lot more.

Nevertheless the media report about local governments cancelling or postponing reservations due to vaccine shortages, while the government blames some municipalities for hoarding vaccine instead of using it. What’s behind all this?

The Japanese government wants municipalities to use all Pfizer doses as soon as possible. They allocate doses for every city and prefecture for every two week period. Pfizer vaccination takes two doses at least three weeks apart. According to Minister Kono, second doses should be taken from later shipments than first doses, as he made clear in a June 1 interview. Instead, municipalities treat first and second doses like Siamese twins, allocating them from the same source and keeping the second in a freezer for 3 extra weeks. That causes artificial shortages down the road, just like back when everybody tried to keep three months worth of toilet paper in stock at home.

By the end of June the government had distributed 78 million doses, more than enough doses for all people aged 65 and above to be completely vaccinated, priming the pipeline. After the allocations in May and June, extra doses were to continue being shipped in allocations every two weeks.

In many places the 65+ group won’t finish vaccinations until the end of July, so first doses will have finished for them around July 10 after which second doses will continue for another three weeks. Once the number of first doses for 65+ has reached a peak and then decreases, first doses for the next groups (people with medical conditions, 60-64, 50-59 etc.) can take over the next vaccination slots using the supplies in stock at that time. This phase would start no later than July 10.

Where the problem arises is that municipalities have this fixed idea that second shots for 65+ in July should still come from the original May/June shipments, kept waiting in a freezer until then, instead of from July shipments.

For example, 65 year old person A gets his first shot in the 4th week of June. The second shot will be due in the 3rd week of July. 60 year old person B wants to get her first shot in the first week of July, after the city has finished first shots for the 65+ group, and her second shot in the 4th week of July. The smart thing would be to let person B go ahead since enough vaccine is still in stock from June. More will arrive in allocations in the first and second half of July and both A and B will get their second doses in the 3rd and 4th week from that fresh supply. Instead what the cities are doing is to reserve the June stocks exclusively for the 65+ group, letting it sit in a freezer for a month while keeping person B waiting to make her reservation only after sufficient July shipments have come in to cover both of her first and second shots. That’s what the 40 million unused doses cited by the government and the cancellation of vaccinations due to “insufficient supplies” as per the mayors is about.

It doesn’t really make sense to let vaccines sit idle while keeping unvaccinated people waiting for their shots. Vaccine should go into arms as soon as possible to protect people against sickness and death.

Navalny tells the truth about Putin

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If agents working for Vladimir Putin had succeeded last August when they tried to murder Alexei Navalny with a cold war era chemical agent, it would have made him only the last of many Putin critics who lost their lives since this crook took power in Russia. Anna Politkovskaya, Boris Nemtsov, Alexander Litvinenko and many others died without their killers or the people behind their deaths ever being brought to justice.

Navalny was lucky to survive because his plane made an emergency landing, he got emergency treatment quickly and was then transported to Germany where he recovered. His courage to return to Russia, despite facing certain arrest, is simply incredible. He is a true hero.

Now Putin, who doesn’t dare mention Navalny’s name in public, has a problem. Too many eyes are on Navalny’s fate now. If he gets killed, there will be retribution. But if he doesn’t get silenced, his courage will inspire others to no longer put up with the theft, lies and oppression.

I watched the powerful two hour documentary that Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation prepared and which was made public after his arrest. It is already on course for more than 100 million views on YouTube. I expect Putin’s Russia will never be the same again. He has finally been exposed for who he really is. I hope the courageous protests of countless brave Russians and pressure from abroad will deter Putin’s regime from murdering Navalny this time.

Putin’s Russia is a prototype for authoritarian regimes in a number of countries that use nationalism as a cover for crooks and their families and friends looting the country. When Putin finally loses power, it will be a game changer for the struggle for democracy, human rights and justice worldwide.