Here is the February call:
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Whoa.
I collected the four audio clips from the Woodward CNN story. Here they are in both video and audio format, and a CNN version of a couple of them:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FQBMXm8UnIPqsYpuPmXZxmP3biZ4tlSm/view?usp=sharing
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More revelations about how much the WH wanted to muzzle Dr. Fauci…minimize the dangers of Covid-19.
Emails obtained by POLITICO show Paul Alexander — a senior adviser to Michael Caputo, HHS’s assistant secretary for public affairs — instructing press officers and others at the National Institutes of Health about what Fauci should say during media interviews. The Trump adviser weighed in on Fauci’s planned responses to outlets including Bloomberg News, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and the science journal Cell.
Alexander’s lengthy messages, some sent as recently as this week, are couched as scientific arguments. But they often contradict mainstream science while promoting political positions taken by the Trump administration on hot-button issues ranging from the use of convalescent plasma to school reopening.
The emails add to evidence that the White House, and Trump appointees within HHS, are pushing health agencies to promote a political message instead of a scientific one.
“I continue to have an issue with kids getting tested and repeatedly and even university students in a widespread manner…and I disagree with Dr. Fauci on this. Vehemently,” Alexander wrote in one Aug. 27 email, responding to a press-office summary of what Fauci intended to tell a Bloomberg reporter.
And on Tuesday, Alexander told Fauci’s press team that the scientist should not promote mask-wearing by children during an MSNBC interview.
“Can you ensure Dr. Fauci indicates masks are for the teachers in schools. Not for children,” Alexander wrote. “There is no data, none, zero, across the entire world, that shows children especially young children, spread this virus to other children, or to adults or to their teachers. None. And if it did occur, the risk is essentially zero,” he continued — adding without evidence that children take influenza home, but not the coronavirus.
In a statement attributed to Caputo, HHS said that Fauci is an important voice during the pandemic and that Alexander specializes in analyzing the work of other scientists.
“Dr. Alexander advises me on pandemic policy and he has been encouraged to share his opinions with other scientists,” Caputo said. “Like all scientists, his advice is heard and taken or rejected by his peers. I hired Dr. Alexander for his expertise and not to simply resonate others’ opinions.”
Neither Alexander nor NIH spokespeople responded to requests for comment.
And here’s Dr. Fauci’s real viewpoint about what he thinks about T.
Fauci Says Trump’s Attention Span Is a ‘Minus Number,’ Only Cares About Getting Re-elected: Woodward Book
The infectious diseases expert told others that Trump “is on a separate channel” and called his leadership "rudderless."
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Hard to really see if that Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was indeed a superspreader. That study was done by economists, and it accounted for the potential hospitalization costs. Yet, so far
only 1 death, and 260 cases showing up in 11 states. It happened Aug 7th - 16th…so there probably will be more.
Based on the increase in case count, the researchers group, estimated that cases connected to the gathering resulted in $12 billion in public health costs, not including the costs associated with any deaths that might be tied to cases from the event. That dollar amount is based on another estimation that an average of $46,000 is spent on each patient who tests positive for COVID-19.
Researchers concluded that more than 266,000 cases were tied to the event attended by more than 460,000 individuals.
Health officials have linked at least one death to the rally: a male biker in his 60s with underlying conditions. At least 260 cases in 11 states have been officially connected to the rally by government officials.
The annual event ran from Aug. 7-16 and drew more than 365,00 vehicles, according to South Dakota’s Department of Transportation.
Now we’re all here together tonight. And we’re being human once again. Fck that COVID sht.”
As is taught in every introductory statistics class, there is a critical difference between correlation and causation. And the four authors of the study are economists, not epidemiologists.
But someone who is an epidemiologist, the highly regarded disease specialist Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, described the results of the study as “plausible” in an interview with The Daily Beast. Prominent virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen used the very same word in describing the study to The Beast. Both Klausner and Rasmussen noted the size of the rally and the crowd’s apparent failure to take mitigating precautions.
Klausner did take issue with the study’s estimate that the additional cases generated public health costs of $12.2 billion. He termed the number “absurd,” observing that it was generated by what the study terms that “the statistical cost of COVID-19 case of $46,000.” Klausner figures that a fair number of those who tested positive would have been either asymptomatic or in need of only minimal medical care.
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Part of the review will include generating a timeline of the participant’s symptoms to see if they match up roughly with when the vaccine was administered. The committee will also investigate other potential causes of the symptoms, in a process of elimination.
After determining whether AstraZeneca’s vaccine is the probable cause, experts will advise the company on whether to resume its trials.
Regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration will also likely collect data and give additional input along the way, said Dr. Mark Goldberger, an infectious disease expert at the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership and a former F.D.A. official.
No further doses of the vaccine will be administered in the interim.
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A hearing on Capitol Hill yesterday with NIH Director and updates on the vaccines.
Can you put under Coronavirus please? @anon95374541 @MissJava Thanks!
N.I.H. Director Undercuts Trumpâs Comments on Covid-19 Vaccines - The New York Times
At the hearing, Democrats on the panel grilled both Dr. Collins and Surgeon General Jerome Adams on the effect of Mr. Trump’s false statements about the vaccine, and whether they would erode trust in the development process. Dr. Collins demurred, however, as Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, asked him point blank whether Mr. Trump’s misinformation would discourage people from taking the vaccine and hurt the effort to distribute it.
“I’m not sure I know the answer to that question,” Dr. Collins said. When Ms. Warren pressed him again, he added, “I just hope Americans will choose to take the information they need from scientists and not from politicians.”
Three companies are in late-stage, Phase 3 clinical trials that seek to enroll 30,000 Americans, half of whom will be injected with the vaccine candidate and half of whom will get a placebo.
Dr. Collins said he had “cautious optimism” that a safe and effective vaccine would emerge by the end of the year, though he added, “but even that is a guess.”
Even as the trials proceed, there are huge questions about who will get a vaccine first and how it will be distributed. Dr. Adams told the panel that the administration intended to release guidelines later Wednesday that would allow state-licensed pharmacists to vaccinate anyone older than age 3.
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Coronavirus-related deaths of young teachers raise alarm as new school year begins
Teachers in at least three states have died after bouts with the coronavirus since the beginning of the new school year. The deaths have left a teachers’ union leader worrying that the return to in-person classes will have a deadly impact across the U.S. if proper precautions aren’t taken.
In Missouri, AshLee DeMarinis was just 34 when she died Sunday after three weeks in the hospital. She taught social skills and special education at John Evans Middle School in Potosi about 70 miles southwest of St. Louis.
“The kids absolutely adored her. She was a brilliant special ed teacher,” former coworker Mandy Blanks told CBS affiliate KMOV.
In South Carolina, officials with Richland School District 2 say 28-year-old Demi Bannister was diagnosed with the virus on Friday and died Monday. Bannister was a third grade teacher starting her fifth year of teaching at Windsor Elementary School in Columbia.
Officials say Bannister was at the school on Aug. 28, during a week of teacher workdays before the school year began.
Two other educators died recently in Mississippi. It’s unclear how many teachers in the U.S. have become ill with COVID-19 since the new school year began, but Mississippi alone has reported 604 cases among school teachers and staff.
The news comes amid grim new data about COVID-19 cases in children: More than 500,000 kids in the U.S. have tested positive for the coronavirus since the pandemic began. The American Academy of Pediatrics said children represented 9.8% of all COVID-19 cases in the U.S., where more than 6.3 million total cases have been reported, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said schools need guidelines such as mandatory face coverings and strict social distancing rules to reopen safely.
“If community spread is too high as it is in Missouri and Mississippi, if you don’t have the infrastructure of testing, and if you don’t have the safeguards that prevent the spread of viruses in the school, we believe that you cannot reopen in person,” Weingarten said.
Johnny Dunlap, a 39-year-old drama and forensics teacher at Dodge City High School in Kansas, said he considered quitting before the district made masks mandatory for teachers and students. Still, his history of bladder cancer and high blood pressure have left him with some angst about being around so many people. Existing health conditions can put people at higher risk for severe illness and death from the virus.
“I’m at a high school with close to 2,000 students so it kind of runs against the advice we have been given for half a year now,” Dunlap said.
The early phase of the pandemic claimed the lives of dozens of teachers. The New York City Department of Education alone lost 31 teachers among 75 employees whose deaths were blamed on the coronavirus.
Across the U.S., the American Federation of Teachers lists 210 union members who have died. The list includes support staff and retirees as well as teachers.
The start of the new school year brought with it new fatalities.
In Oxford, Mississippi, 42-year-old Nacoma James taught at a middle school and helped coach high school football. He died Aug. 6 during the first week of classes, but was self-quarantining when teachers and students returned to the classroom, said Lafayette County School District Superintendent Adam Pugh.
Pugh recalled that James was a seventh-grade student when he began teaching 30 years ago.
“It was a hard punch to my stomach, when I heard,” Pugh said.
James worked with football players during summer workouts, but an investigation found no new cases linked to him, Pugh said.
Another Mississippi teacher died Sunday. History teacher Tom Slade recently posted on Facebook about his battle with pneumonia caused by the coronavirus. On Tuesday the American flag in front of Vancleave High School was flying at half staff, CBS affiliate WLOX reported.
Slade was teaching in-person when the academic year started on Aug. 6, Principal Raina Holmes said, but began quarantining after he had contact with someone who was positive at a church meeting. His last day of teaching was Aug. 21.
Slade was known for jokingly using a judge’s gavel to quiet noisy students.
“He always brought humor into his classroom and his students loved that part about him,” said Holmes.
In Potosi, in-person classes started Aug. 24. DeMarinis was already hospitalized by then but had been in the school preparing for the year a couple of weeks earlier, her sister, Jennifer Heissenbuttel said.
Superintendent Alex McCaul said contact tracing determined she had no close contact with any teachers, students or staff.
DeMarinis grew up near New York but developed a passion for her rural school and Potosi, a town of 2,600 residents, Heissenbuttel said.
DeMarinis had wanted to teach special education since she was a child, when a special education teacher helped her overcome mild dyslexia.
“She had the patience of a saint. She was really meant for it,” Heissenbuttel said. “The kids loved her. She touched so many lives.”
DeMarinis had asthma, which can put someone more at risk from severe illness from COVID-19. She began feeling poorly around mid-August, Heissenbuttel said. After developing fever and shortness of breath, she was tested for the coronavirus and was soon hospitalized.
It’s unclear where DeMarinis picked up the virus.
Heissenbuttel is a nurse who works in a New York area hospital’s intensive care unit. Somehow, she managed to avoid the illness that her sister couldn’t.
“I thought it would be me, not her,” Heissenbuttel said.
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Summary
What is already known about the topic?
Community and close contact exposures contribute to the spread of COVID-19.
What is added by this report?
Findings from a case-control investigation of symptomatic outpatients from 11 U.S. health care facilities found that close contact with persons with known COVID-19 or going to locations that offer on-site eating and drinking options were associated with COVID-19 positivity. Adults with positive SARS-CoV-2 test results were approximately twice as likely to have reported dining at a restaurant than were those with negative SARS-CoV-2 test results.
What are the implications for public health practice?
Eating and drinking on-site at locations that offer such options might be important risk factors associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection. Efforts to reduce possible exposures where mask use and social distancing are difficult to maintain, such as when eating and drinking, should be considered to protect customers, employees, and communities.
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Yeah, don’t take your mask off with people outside your household. Anyplace where people are crowded and talking a lot, that’s where a mask should be worn. Eat outside or at home to be safe.
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Woodward Interviews Shallow Throat
The most damaging revelations about this president come not from shadowy bureaucrats but from the people closest to him.
For years, President Donald Trump and his allies have warned about his adversaries in the “Deep State.” The phrase evokes images of anonymous officials with hidden motives buried deep in the government.
Recent days have made it clearer than ever that the real hazard to Trump is actually the Shallow State.
The people saying mean things about Trump aren’t lurking in the shadows. They are well-known names whom Trump recruited to work by his side. Their motives aren’t mysterious. They are obvious: A transactional president encourages transactional behavior in his midst. These sources have shocking stories to tell, but no longer any genuinely surprising ones.
The plot is playing out now in familiar ways. Prominent people typically went to work for Trump thinking he seems like a jerk but, hey, he was elected, after all. So they calculated that maybe he’s not so bad and that the compensations in power and status of an important job were worth the trade. They believed the Republic would be better off with their wise counsel helping curb Trump’s worst instincts. Once there, they discovered that the president is more self-absorbed and less tethered to public interest than they had previously imagined. Having been lured into the inner circle to enhance their reputations, they fear—often with good reason—that they are leaving soiled by Trump’s splatter.
So they write books, like former Trump lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen. Or they talk to magazine journalists, like the senior military officers who told damaging tales to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg or dispatched surrogates to do so. Above all, they sit with Washington’s legendary confessor priest, Bob Woodward, for his new book, “Rage.”
The entire notion of the Deep State rests on soil tilled by Hollywood, in decades of movies and television shows in the genre of the paranoid thriller. In these conspiracy dramas, the plot tension flows from a slowly building, creepy realization that Things Are Not What They Seem .
Woodward, based on Wednesday’s barrage of publicity for next week’s official release of “Rage,” has once again delivered the goods with plenty of news-driving revelations. But these scoops are like so many in the Trump years: They reveal that things are pretty much Exactly What They Seem .
It seemed last winter and spring that Trump was prattling on with a lot of happy talk that he couldn’t possibly believe about how the coronavirus wouldn’t be that serious—even as his own government officials were warning that it would be—because he was desperately trying to create reality by proclamation. Months later, Woodward has confirmed that to be true.
What’s more, his source was not a latter-day Deep Throat skulking around garages on behalf of the Deep State. The most damaging source for Woodward is on the record and on tape: Trump himself.
It had previously seemed that Trump, despite his constant attacks on the “Fake News” media, had a compulsive fascination with establishment media figures and the coverage they give him. Now the president has confirmed that to be true, giving 18 (!) interviews to Woodward. Think of him as Shallow Throat.
“Rage,” like The Atlantic piece, also includes material developed through the more conventional way that important people unload their feelings about Trump: On “deep background.” This is the same practice by which we have learned startling accounts about the decision-making and internal battles surrounding previous presidents.
Only this time, the revelations are much more sensational, much more about defects of presidential character than the behind-the-scenes dynamics of policy debates.
The revelations are also much more perishable.
This summer alone there have been a half-dozen—or more? What’s missing?—damning, all-consuming, now-it-can-be-told firestorms about Trump and his governing style, including revelations that would have been monthslong showstoppers in any previous presidency.
It may seem like a year ago, but former national security adviser John Bolton’s devastating book, “The Room Where It Happened,” came out in mid-June. August brought Mary L. Trump’s devastating book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” This month brought Goldberg’s devastating article, “Trump: Americans Who Died in War are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’” And also Michael Schmidt’s devastating book, “Donald Trump v. the United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President.” A couple days later brought Cohen’s devastating book, “Disloyal,” which includes allegations of racially bigoted remarks and conniving with the National Enquirer . It is unclear how much publishing oxygen there will be for this or whether it will be sucked up by Woodward’s devastating “Rage.”
Some of the passages from Woodward promoted on Wednesday highlight the nature of the Shallow State’s dealings with Trump. It turns out former Defense Secretary James Mattis regards Trump as “dangerous” and “unfit,” with “no moral compass.” Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats allegedly agrees, and has “deep suspicions” that Russian President Vladimir Putin “had something” damaging on Trump since he saw “no other explanation” for some of Trump’s behavior.
Where does this come from? Possibly the Deep State has bugs in Mattis’ and Coats’ offices or computers, and figured out some way—no fingerprints—to get the material in Woodward’s hands. Or perhaps Mattis and/or Coats told Woodward things they thought and said on condition of “deep background.”
The first question in the spate of new books and articles in which people once in Trump’s orbit tell their stories is whether they are believable. In most cases, the news coverage, citing previous patterns in Trump’s behavior, tends to accept the anecdotes as credible. This raises a secondary question—less important but interesting—what do we think of the people who raise their voices to share critical information or character appraisals of their boss?
Should they be hailed as brave truthtellers? Or do their actions raise uncomfortable questions about their own values, no less than Trump’s?
As a journalist, I certainly have no interest in making censorious judgments about people’s reasons for speaking their truths. But there is no need to assign valorous motives to decisions that often seem to have more prosaic explanations: self-interest, vanity, revenge and so on.
In some cases, one suspects that loathing of Trump is merged with self-loathing for investing hope in Trump or ever believing that joining his circle on his terms would be a worthwhile transaction.
Mary Trump has offered valuable insights into what seems to be the president’s dysfunctional upbringing. But she also makes plain that she was wounded by family disputes over her grandfather’s will.
Jim Mattis joined the Trump administration at the beginning and can plausibly say he thought he was performing a patriotic duty. But John Bolton joined the White House as national security adviser in April 2018—a year after Trump had fired his first FBI director and publicly humiliated his first attorney general, and months after he had warned on Twitter his nuclear button is “much bigger” and “more powerful” than North Korea’s.
Bolton took the job, anyway, without knowing Trump well at the personal level, because it was a position that anyone with his ambitions and career path might reasonably covet. No problem. But, no doubt like many of Woodward’s sources—and like current administration officials whose memoirs we will read in due course—he can’t claim that his subsequent disillusionment came with no warning or context.
It could be that Trump understands the transactional nature of the Shallow State better than the people who aim to take him down.
Hannity Delivers Most Absurd Defense Yet of Trump on Woodward’s Tapes
Following Wednesday’s blockbuster revelation that President Donald Trump admitted to journalist Bob Woodward that he intentionally misled the American public about the dangers of COVID-19, a number of Fox News personalities attempted to run cover for the president. Sean Hannity’s defense of the president, however, was perhaps the most ridiculous one yet.
Comparing Trump’s handling of the pandemic to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt leading the nation through the Great Depression, Hannity—sometimes referred to as Trump’s “shadow chief of staff”—brought up FDR’s most famous quote while simultaneously mangling it.
“Did President Roosevelt fan the flames of misery? Did he call for panic and anxiety? No, he actually rallied a nation in a time of need and focused on making Americans stronger by staying positive, and he got to work and rolled up his sleeves,” the Fox ghost proclaimed. “During World War II, with the country on the brink, FDR proclaimed, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Well, those were brutally tough times. Did the media attack him? Of course not.”
The quote Hannity was attempting to reference was Roosevelt declaring that “the only thing to fear is fear itself,” which FDR said during his first presidential inauguration in 1933. The on-air graphic during the Fox segment read: “Hannity’s History Lesson.”
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What a very positive reward and recognition for frontline workers in Michigan who worked all frontline jobs during the pandemic…wow.
A new program announced by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will provide tuition-free community college for an estimated 625,000 of Michigan’s frontline workers.
Inspired by the GI Bill, the “Futures for Frontliners” program is for adults without high school diplomas or college degrees who provided essential services during the height of the pandemic in Michigan, between April and June.
Eligible workers include those in the medical field, as well as those in manufacturing, nursing homes, grocery stores, sanitation, delivery, retail, and more.
According to a statement from the governor, it’s the first program of its kind in the nation for frontline workers during the coronavirus pandemic**. Whitmer first proposed the program** in April.
“This initiative is Michigan’s way of expressing gratitude to essential workers for protecting public health and keeping our state running,” Whitmer said in a statement. "Whether it was stocking shelves, delivering supplies, picking up trash, manufacturing PPE, or providing medical care, you were there for us. Now this is your chance to pursue the degree or training you’ve been dreaming about to help you and your own family succeed."
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Cross-posting for relevance
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I want this in my President.
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It’s Hard to Keep a College Safe From Covid, Even With Mass Testing
The University of Illinois had a state-of-the-art reopening, and then the virus cases piled up.
And this is from my city:
UPDATE: NIU has announced that undergraduate classes will move online for two weeks beginning Monday.
Public health officials say large parties since the return of NIU students have pushed DeKalb County into the warning level for COVID-19 activity.
The Illinois Department of Public Health says DeKalb County is one of 30 in Illinois (shown in orange on map) that are now at warning level, which means there is an increased COVID-19 risk locally.
A county reaches warning level when two or more COVID-19 activity indicators increase. For DeKalb County, that’s new cases and positivity rate.
The DeKalb County Health Department says new cases are now at 122 per 100,000 people when the target is 50. Also, the county’s positivity rate is 8.4 percent when eight or less is the target.
Like other university-host counties, public health officials say the return of students to campus has caused a spike in positives cases.
The DeKalb County Health Department says their case investigations have “determined that a large majority of the cases are specifically linked to large gatherings/parties that have taken place on or around campus.”
It’s expected that NIU today will be announcing new mitigation efforts, and the health department says, “it takes all of our community to decrease the number of cases,” by wearing masks watching social distancing and washing hands.
The health department also announced 11 new positive tests on Friday bringing the county’s total to 1,350. Also, 960 people have now recovered, 37 more than last week.
I am staying away from anybody under 30. And maybe older than 50, given how many idiots I saw out today with their masks on below their noses, mostly 50 and up.
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Trump heads into flu season amid pandemic mocking masks, holding packed campaign rallies
He’s choreographed scenes experts warn could lead to illness or even death.
New report exposes how Trump used COVID-19 to enact a dangerous right-wing mission
Crucial Testing for Child Lead Poisoning Has Plummeted During Pandemic
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We suspected this all along: Trump’s politically appointed HHS spokesperson & his team demanded & received the right to review & alter CDC’s scientific reports on COVID-19 to health professionals.
Trump officials interfered with CDC reports on Covid-19
The politically appointed HHS spokesperson and his team demanded and received the right to review CDC’s scientific reports to health professionals.
The health department’s politically appointed communications aides have demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.
In some cases, emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump’s optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to emails reviewed by POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation.
CDC officials have fought back against the most sweeping changes, but have increasingly agreed to allow the political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on the wording, according to three people familiar with the exchanges. The communications aides’ efforts to change the language in the CDC’s reports have been constant across the summer and continued as recently as Friday afternoon.
The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports are authored by career scientists and serve as the main vehicle for the agency to inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk. Such reports have historically been published with little fanfare and no political interference, said several longtime health department officials, and have been viewed as a cornerstone of the nation’s public health work for decades.
But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the health department’s new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.
Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC’s findings, including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior, according to the individuals familiar with the situation and emails reviewed by POLITICO.
Caputo’s team also has tried to halt the release of some CDC reports, including delaying a report that addressed how doctors were prescribing hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence. The report, which was held for about a month after Caputo’s team raised questions about its authors’ political leanings, was finally published last week. It said that “the potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks.”
In one clash, an aide to Caputo berated CDC scientists for attempting to use the reports to “hurt the President” in an Aug. 8 email sent to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other officials that was widely circulated inside the department and obtained by POLITICO.
“CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration,” appointee Paul Alexander wrote, calling on Redfield to modify two already published reports that Alexander claimed wrongly inflated the risks of coronavirus to children and undermined Trump’s push to reopen schools. “CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school re-opening . . . Very misleading by CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear.”
Alexander also called on Redfield to halt all future MMWR reports until the agency modified its years-old publication process so he could personally review the entire report prior to publication, rather than a brief synopsis. Alexander, an assistant professor of health research at Toronto’s McMaster University whom Caputo recruited this spring to be his scientific adviser, added that CDC needed to allow him to make line edits — and demanded an “immediate stop” to the reports in the meantime.
“The reports must be read by someone outside of CDC like myself, and we cannot allow the reporting to go on as it has been, for it is outrageous. Its lunacy,” Alexander told Redfield and other officials. “Nothing to go out unless I read and agree with the findings how they CDC, wrote it and I tweak it to ensure it is fair and balanced and ‘complete.’”
CDC officials have fought the efforts to retroactively change reports but have increasingly allowed Caputo and his team to review them before publication, according to the three individuals with knowledge of the situation. Caputo also helped install CDC’s interim chief of staff last month, two individuals added, ensuring that Caputo himself would have more visibility into an agency that has often been at odds with HHS political officials during the pandemic.
Asked by POLITICO about why he and his team were demanding changes to CDC reports, Caputo praised Alexander as “an Oxford-educated epidemiologist” who specializes “in analyzing the work of other scientists,” although he did not make him available for an interview.
“Dr. Alexander advises me on pandemic policy and he has been encouraged to share his opinions with other scientists. Like all scientists, his advice is heard and taken or rejected by his peers,” Caputo said in a statement.
Caputo also said that HHS was appropriately reviewing the CDC’s reports. “Our intention is to make sure that evidence, science-based data drives policy through this pandemic—not ulterior deep state motives in the bowels of CDC," he said.
Caputo’s team has spent months clashing with scientific experts across the administration. Alexander this week tried to muzzle infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci from speaking about the risks of the coronavirus to children, and The Washington Post reported in July that Alexander had criticized the CDC’s methods and findings.
But public health experts told POLITICO that they were particularly alarmed that the CDC’s reports could face political interference, praising the MMWRs as essential to fighting the pandemic.
“It’s the go-to place for the public health community to get information that’s scientifically vetted,” said Jennifer Kates, who leads the Kaiser Family Foundation’s global health work. In an interview with POLITICO, Kates rattled off nearly a dozen examples of MMWR reports that she and other researchers have relied on to determine how Covid-19 has spread and who’s at highest risk, including reports on how the virus has been transmitted in nursing homes, at churches and among children.
“They’re so important, and CDC has done so many,” Kates said.
The efforts to modify the CDC reports began in earnest after a May report authored by senior CDC official Anne Schuchat, which reviewed the spread of Covid-19 in the United States and caused significant strife within the health department. HHS officials, including Secretary Alex Azar, believed that Schuchat was implying that the Trump administration moved too slowly to respond to the outbreak, said two individuals familiar with the situation.
The HHS criticism was mystifying to CDC officials, who believed that Schuchat was merely recounting the state of affairs and not rendering judgment on the response, the individuals familiar with the situation said. Schuchat has made few public appearances since authoring the report.
CDC did not respond to a request for comment about Schuchat’s report and the response within the department.
The close scrutiny continued across the summer with numerous flashpoints, the individuals added, with Caputo and other HHS officials particularly bristling about a CDC report that found the coronavirus spread among young attendees at an overnight camp in Georgia. Caputo, Alexander and others claimed that the timing of the August report was a deliberate effort to undermine the president’s push on children returning to schools in the fall.
Most recently, Alexander on Friday asked CDC to change its definition of “pediatric population” for a report on coronavirus-related deaths among young Americans slated for next week, according to an email that Caputo shared with POLITICO.
“[D]esignating persons aged 18-20 as ‘pediatric’ by the CDC is misleading,” Alexander wrote, arguing that the report needed to better distinguish between Americans of different ages. “These are legal adults, albeit young.”
Caputo defended his team’s interventions as necessary to the coronavirus response. “Buried in this good [CDC] work are sometimes stories which seem to purposefully mislead and undermine the President’s Covid response with what some scientists label as poor scholarship — and others call politics disguised in science,” Caputo told POLITICO.
The battles over delaying or modifying the reports have weighed on CDC officials and been a distraction in the middle of the pandemic response, said three individuals familiar with the situation. “Dr. Redfield has pushed back on this,” said one individual. “These are scientifically driven articles. He’s worked to shake some of them loose.”
Kates, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s global health expert, defended the CDC’s process as rigorous and said that there was no reason for politically appointed officials to review the work of scientists. “MMWRs are famously known for being very clear about their limitations as well as being clear for what they’ve found," she said.
Kates also said that the CDC reports have played an essential role in combating epidemics for decades, pointing to an MMWR posted in 1981 — the first published report on what became the HIV epidemic.
“Physicians recognized there was some kind of pattern and disseminated it around the country and the world,” Kates said. “We can now see how important it was to have that publication, in that moment.”
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This remark from CNN’s fact checker extraordinaire could fit many categories…
Sigh
Yes, why…beyond imagination and presidential duty.
From nbc…
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Stanford medical community denounces Dr. Scott Atlas, the Dr making all the speeches w/ T now and recommending more of a herd immunity approach and getting kids back to schools and
colleges. This community is alarmed at Dr. Atlas lack of experience in the infectious disease area
and their effort to insist that all Dr’s must “do no harm.” (see letter below)
What good this ever does…we will never know. But at least they voiced their very strong opinion.
In the tight-knit world of academic medicine, scientists pride themselves on presenting a united and unflappable face to those outside their ranks.
But this week, in a scathing letter, dozens of Stanford University Medical School’s top faculty denounced former colleague Dr. Scott Atlas for promoting what they called “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science.”
Atlas, a diagnostic radiologist and senior fellow at the conservative think tank Hoover Institution, was recently appointed by President Donald Trump to the White House coronavirus task force.
As an adviser counselor to the president about the virus, he has made controversial statements about controlling the pandemic, which has killed more than 178,000 Americans, through “natural immunity.” He also has urged the reopening of schools and businesses.
“Many of his opinions and statements run counter to established science and, by doing so, undermine public-health authorities and the credible science that guides effective public health policy,” according to the letter, signed by Dr. Philip A. Pizzo, former dean of Stanford School of Medicine; Dr. Upi Singh, chief of Stanford’s Division of Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Bonnie Maldonado, professor of epidemiology and population health, and 105 others.
Among the letter’s signatories are many national experts in the university’s departments of infectious disease, epidemiology and microbiology, including Dr. David Relman, who pioneers methods for discovering new human pathogens, and Dr. Lucy S. Tompkins, who leads Stanford’s Department of Infection Prevention and Control.
“Our goal with this letter was to provide a science-evidence based commentary on some core issues that Scott Atlas has addressed and to provide context and clarity,’said Pizzo, who now leads The Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute.
“We are motivated by our responsibility to do all we can to protect and promote public health and wellbeing,” he said.
Letter
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Yes.
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The Other Way Covid Will Kill: Hunger
Worldwide, the population facing life-threatening levels of food insecurity is expected to double, to more than a quarter of a billion people.
Long before the pandemic swept into her village in the rugged southeast of Afghanistan, Halima Bibi knew the gnawing fear of hunger. It was an omnipresent force, an unrelenting source of anxiety as she struggled to nourish her four children.
Her husband earned about $5 a day, hauling produce by wheelbarrow from a local market to surrounding homes. Most days, he brought home a loaf of bread, potatoes and beans for an evening meal.
But when the coronavirus arrived in March, taking the lives of her neighbors and shutting down the market, her husband’s earnings plunged to about $1 a day. Most evenings, he brought home only bread. Some nights, he returned with nothing.
“We hear our children screaming in hunger, but there is nothing that we can do,” said Ms. Bibi, speaking in Pashto by telephone from a hospital in the capital city of Kabul, where her 6-year-old daughter was being treated for severe malnutrition. “That is not just our situation, but the reality for most of the families where we live.”
It is increasingly the reality for hundreds of millions of people around the planet. As the global economy absorbs the most punishing reversal of fortunes since the Great Depression, hunger is on the rise. Those confronting potentially life-threatening levels of so-called food insecurity in the developing world are expected to nearly double this year to 265 million, according to the United Nations World Food Program.
Worldwide, the number of children younger than 5 caught in a state of so-called wasting — their weight so far below normal that they face an elevated risk of death, along with long-term health and developmental problems — is likely to grow by nearly seven million this year, or 14 percent, according to a recent paper published in The Lancet, a medical journal.
The largest numbers of vulnerable communities are concentrated in South Asia and Africa, especially in countries that are already confronting trouble, from military conflict and extreme poverty to climate-related afflictions like drought, flooding and soil erosion.
At least for now, the unfolding tragedy falls short of a famine, which is typically set off by a combination of war and environmental disaster. Food remains widely available in most of the world, though prices have climbed in many countries, as fear of the virus disrupts transportation links, and as currencies fall in value, increasing the costs of imported items.
Rather, with the world economy expected to contract nearly 5 percent this year, households are cutting back sharply on spending. Among those who went into the pandemic in extreme poverty, hundreds of millions of people are suffering an intensifying crisis over how to secure their basic dietary needs.
The pandemic has reinforced basic economic inequalities, none more defining than access to food.
‘Shock upon shock upon shock’
In South Africa, more than a quarter-century has passed since the official ending of apartheid, yet the Black majority remains overwhelmingly confined to poor townships that are far removed from jobs and services in the cities. When the pandemic emerged in March, the government ordered the shutdown of informal food vendors and township shops, unleashing the military to detain merchants who violated orders. That forced residents to rely on supermarkets — suddenly farther away than ever, given the lockdown of already woeful bus service.
At the same time, South Africa closed its schools, eliminating school lunches — the only reliable meal for millions of students — just as breadwinners lost their means of getting to jobs. By the end of April, nearly half of all South African households had exhausted their funds to buy food, according to an academic study. Social unrest eventually prompted a loosening of the country’s restrictions.
Far from a danger confined to the world’s poorest countries, hunger is a growing scourge even in the wealthiest countries. Previously working people who have never felt compelled to seek help are now lining up at food banks in the United States, Spain and Britain. Even people of relative means are cutting their purchases of fresh fruits and vegetables, while relying more on the cheap calories of fast food.
In wealthier countries, the economic strains are cushioned by government programs like unemployment benefits, subsidized wage plans and cash grants for food. In the poorest countries, the coronavirus is intensifying a litany of already potent afflictions.
“Covid has been yet another shock in what has been a terrible year in this region,” said Michael Dunford, regional director for East Africa at the World Food Program. “In addition to already having 21 million people acutely food insecure at the beginning of the year, we’ve then had flooding, locusts, and now we’ve got Covid. So it’s shock upon shock upon shock, which is just increasing vulnerability throughout the region.”
Just as the need for help intensifies, the threat of the virus is forcing relief agencies to scrap public health campaigns and limit their outreach. Lockdowns imposed to halt the pandemic will this year deprive 250 million children in poor countries of scheduled supplements of Vitamin A, elevating the threat of premature death, according to UNICEF. The supplements strengthen the immune system, limiting vulnerability to diseases that opportunistically exploit malnutrition.
The virus has also forced the delay of other immunization programs, which are typically combined with doses of deworming medicine — another bulwark against malnutrition.
“I’m increasingly concerned about the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic on the nutrition situation of children,” said Victor Aguayo, chief of nutrition programs at UNICEF in New York. “It’s a perfect storm to see an increase in malnutrition rates if appropriate measures and programs are not put in place.”
Only the latest plague
In Juba, the capital of South Sudan, the pandemic was merely the most recent form of grave danger.
A sense of crisis has prevailed since a paroxysm of violence four years ago in a long-running civil war fueled by ethnic division. Amid the fighting, people fled the surrounding countryside for refuge in camps inside the city. Without access to their fields, many became dependent on food distributed by relief agencies along with anything they could buy at the market.
South Sudan was already one of the world’s poorest countries, with 80 percent of its roughly 11 million people living in a state of absolute poverty, surviving on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank. The reinvigorated conflict posed an economic shock. As the government printed currency to pay its bills, runaway inflation resulted, dropping teachers’ salaries from the equivalent of $100 a month to $1.
Food prices soared. Most items were trucked in from neighboring Kenya and Uganda and priced in dollars, making them more expensive as the nation’s currency plunged. A 50 kilogram (110 pound) bag of corn flour that fetched $20 four years ago was more than $30 by late last year.
Poverty and hunger proved mutually reinforcing. As mosquito nets increased in price, that enhanced the risks of a lethal strain of malaria, which itself reduced appetites and worsened malnutrition among children.
Last year, heavy rains that fell in too short a time created torrential flooding that decimated crops and killed cattle.
By the beginning of 2020, roughly six million people in South Sudan were technically food insecure, meaning they could not reliably count on satisfying their dietary requirements.
“Nutrition is a lot more than food,” said Mads Oyen, chief of field operations for UNICEF in South Sudan, speaking by videoconference from Juba. “You’ve got malaria and measles and a lack of nutrients and other health issues. It’s about lack of clean water, which means cholera.”
This was all before the arrival of the worst pandemic in a century.
As the virus sowed chaos in transportation networks across East Africa, the price of staple foods sold in Juba leapt another 25 percent. At the same time, a lockdown imposed by the government derailed local businesses like food stalls, decimating incomes.
These were the forces that brought Mary Pica to a primary health care center in Juba in early May. It was run by the international relief organization World Vision. She carried her then-10-month-old son. He weighed only 5.4 kilograms (11.9 pounds), well below healthy.
Ms. Pica lived with her husband’s family in a household of nine people. Her husband had worked loading baggage onto buses. That job was a casualty of the fighting, as bus service largely shut down.
Her mother-in-law grew greens on a small plot of land outside Juba, using the proceeds to buy other items that balanced their diet — yogurt, fruit, fish and eggs. With the market closed, she could not earn cash. The family was subsisting almost entirely on greens. Ms. Pica, who had become pregnant again, was no longer breastfeeding her baby. He was wasting away.
The clinic provided her with a peanut-based paste donated by UNICEF. Every two weeks, she goes back to pick up another supply. The baby has been gaining weight.
But Ms. Pica sees dangers everywhere. Her sister-in-law’s child, a 2-year-old boy, has malaria. The pandemic is unrelenting.
“I’m worried,” she said, speaking in Arabic by phone from Juba. “I have no hope that the situation will change tomorrow. I can only pray to God that it changes.”
‘Money is the law’
Food prices have been rising in much of Africa for the same reason that Samuel Omondi has endured nearly six months without seeing his wife and five children in western Kenya — because of the chaos gripping the roads.
A father of five, Mr. Omondi, 42, makes his living driving a truck, typically hauling wheat. It used to take him four days to complete his usual round-trip from the Kenyan port of Mombasa to the Ugandan capital of Kampala, a distance of 1,400 miles. Now, the same journey requires eight to 10 days.
Drivers cannot enter either country without certificates showing they are free of Covid. Uganda has required that every driver submit to a test at the border, waiting as long as four days for results.
Throughout the region, immigration and customs checks have become so onerous that lines form 40 miles before borders. Trucks progress slowly, in low gear, consuming extra fuel. Drivers submit to the maddening wait while fretting over increased costs.
“You know you are going to spend three days in the truck without taking a bath,” Mr. Omondi said. “You can’t even park on the side of the road and relax. People will pass you.”
Along their journeys, drivers get hostility from communities that view them as disease carriers. They bring their own groceries, fearful of stopping in major towns and drawing attention.
“People are saying we are bringing Covid,” Mr. Omondi said. “There was a child in Uganda who looked at us truck drivers and said, ‘Mama, do you see these people with corona?’”
Yet he cannot go home, knowing that the chief in his area will force him into quarantine. “We are suffering a lot,” he said.
Given the delays and the bothers, he and other truck drivers have been making fewer trips a month, diminishing their income and diminishing the supply of food in many cities.
As convoys roll slowly toward border crossings in the heat, containers full of fish, chicken, bananas and other perishable goods are rotting.
The movement of food has also been hampered by corruption. In many countries, police stop truck drivers to inspect their Covid certificates, engendering a flourishing trade in fake documents. Border officials exploit the pandemic as a fresh opportunity to extract bribes.
“There’s no law at the borders,” said Joel Ombaso, a wholesale fruit dealer in Nairobi. “Money is the law.”
He buys oranges from Tanzania and pineapples and bananas from Uganda. He must usually dispense hundreds of dollars in bribes to get his cargo into Kenya, he said. There, he sells the fruit to local grocery stores. A curfew in Nairobi has prevented delivery at night, imposing further delays that have damaged shipments. Since the pandemic began, Mr. Ombaso’s profits have plunged by nearly three-fourths, he said.
An outbreak of pandemic-related nationalism — with countries blaming one another for the spread of the disease — has produced an escalating wave of trade barriers that has amplified the trouble on the roads. Rwanda has refused to allow Tanzanian truck drivers to haul goods into the country, forcing a time-consuming change of driver at the border.
All of these factors have combined to limit the supply of food, pushing prices higher, just as vast numbers of people have seen their incomes depleted.
In a recent survey conducted by the International Committee of the Red Cross in 11 African countries — among them Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo — 85 percent of the respondents said food was available in their local markets. But 94 percent reported that prices had increased, and 82 percent said incomes were down.
Ethiopians are voracious consumers of onions, folding them into seemingly every dish. Much of this staple is imported from neighboring Sudan. But with the border now shut, the price of onions has skyrocketed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, home to six million.
This has tightened the pressure on Mulunesh Moges, 38, a mother of two who sells clothes at an open air market.
“My customers are almost down to zero,” Ms. Moges said. “I sit at my shop the whole day without doing anything.” Her daily earnings used to run about 200 Ethiopian birr (about $5) — enough to feed her family. Lately, she has earned next to nothing.
“We used to eat three times a day,” she said. “Now it’s once or twice. I’m always calculating what to feed my children.”
Birchat Abdala runs a street-side tea and coffee kiosk. Her daily earnings have dropped by more than two-thirds to 30 birr (about 83 cents).
“In the morning, I used to feed my children eggs and bread,” she said. “Now, I feed them only bread, or whatever is left over from my business. We eat whatever we can get our hands on.”
A counterintuitive problem: Falling demand
Across the Arabian Sea, in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Champa Devi and her family have responded to a loss of income by downgrading their diet.
She earns her living cleaning homes. Her husband lost his job as a driver early in the year. Then the pandemic emerged, prompting Prime Minister Narendra Modi to impose a lockdown, and making it virtually impossible for her husband to find another job. Their favorite fruits, bananas and apples, have become luxuries they can no longer afford.
“We have to squeeze our wallets," said Ms. Devi, 29, the mother of a 9-month-old daughter. “Now, we’re surviving on dal and roti ” — the Indian staple of watery lentils and flatbread.
The shutdown eliminated paychecks for office workers in major cities. Migrant workers lost their construction jobs. The poorest of the poor were deprived of meager livings gained by gathering scraps of metal and plastic from streets. This translated into a monumental reduction of spending power in a nation of 1.3 billion.
And that produced what seems like a counterintuitive problem in the midst of rising hunger: Falling demand for crops.
In the northern Indian state of Haryana, Satbir Singh Jatain last month relinquished his bottle gourds to the elements, allowing them to rot on the vine rather than wasting the effort to harvest them. The price they would have fetched would not have covered the cost of labor or transportation.
“There’s no point in even picking them and taking them to the market,” he said.
Since the lockdown, Mr. Jatain, a third-generation farmer, has lost over 700,000 rupees ($10,000), he said.
Initially, he could not get his tomatoes to market. What little he gained by selling the crop near his village covered less than a third of his costs. As the tomatoes began rotting, he became so enraged that he ran them over with a tractor.
“The lockdowns have destroyed farmers,” he said. “Now, we have no money to buy seeds or pay for fuel.”
Across India, farm laborers complain they are not being paid, forcing their families to cut their spending on food.
Mr. Jatain is on the hook for bank loans reaching nearly $18,000. He owes money lenders in his village. “I can never pay it back, and soon they will come for my land,” he said. “There is nothing left for us.”
The perils of seeking help
In Afghanistan, Ms. Bibi felt a mixture of dread and terror as her 6-year-old daughter, Zinab, sank further into a state of malnutrition. Her skin was going pale as her body diminished. She was losing energy.
“I could see with my own eyes that the child was withering away,” Ms. Bibi said.
She had taken her daughter to several supposed doctors around her village. They administered folk remedies, advised prayer and urged Zinab to eat. But her appetite was minimal. And the family had little food.
The prices of staples like flour, rice, cooking oil and sugar were all rising. Many of these products were trucked in from Pakistan, Iran and Kazakhstan. So long as the market remained closed, Ms. Bibi’s husband was without work.
By the middle of July, Zinab required serious medical attention, necessitating a trip to the capital city of Khost Province. Ms. Bibi was deeply reluctant to make the journey. Getting to the city entailed a 90-minute drive through a forbidding landscape rife with tribal conflicts, the territory controlled neither by the Afghan government nor the insurgent Taliban. The roads were too frequently lined with deadly explosive devices.
And now a new horror was layered atop the usual sources of fear. The coronavirus had killed more than 15 people in her village of perhaps 500. Beyond its confines lay a seemingly infinite number of potential carriers.
This was the calculation that was preventing people from seeking critical care throughout Afghanistan. Between January and May, the number of Afghan children under 5 who were suffering from severe acute malnutrition — a condition requiring hospitalization — increased to 780,000 from 690,000, according to Zakia Maroof, a nutrition expert with UNICEF in Kabul. Since March, the number of children admitted to hospitals has declined 40 percent.
But if Ms. Bibi was frightened to venture out, she was even more disturbed by the alternative.
“It was either be afraid of the coronavirus and watch my child die,” she said, “or at least tell my heart that I did what I had to do.”
Her husband borrowed from relatives to cover their medical bills, and they climbed aboard a minibus.
At a rudimentary hospital in the city of Khost, doctors administered a diet of powdered milk. After three weeks there, with bills mounting, Zinab was still losing weight. The doctors pronounced their capabilities exhausted. The family would have to go to Kabul, another seven-hour ride away.
Her husband went out to the streets and begged, amassing the funds for a ride in a beat-up station wagon headed for Afghanistan’s capital.
They rode through the blazing August heat, arriving in a bustling city they had never visited, and where they knew no one. They beseeched strangers to direct them to a children’s hospital. A kindly soul led them to the Indira Gandhi hospital, which was run by the Indian government and supported by UNICEF.
Zinab was admitted and administered regular feeding by a tube inserted through her nose. She weighed only 8.5 kilograms (less than 19 pounds). Two weeks later, she was still shedding weight, her system struggling to hold food down.
Ms. Bibi sat by her side, keeping vigil, fretting about the bills and wondering how they might find their way home.
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