Also
The relative numbers are astounding.
The Trump regime is running an ad taking video of Dr. Fauci talking about the response out of context. He has stated he was not consulted, demanded it be taken down, and they have refused.
Trump himself is gaslighting about this.
Long view and a bit of optimism on the end of Coronavirus from respected science writer at NYT.
NYTimes: A Dose of Optimism, as the Pandemic Rages On
Today, and despite the president’s own resistance, masks are widely accepted. Various polls show that the number of Americans who wear them, at least when entering stores, went from near zero in March to about 65 percent in early summer to 85 percent or even 90 percent in October. Seeing the president and many White House staffers stricken by the virus may convince yet more Americans to wear masks.
The slow but relentless acceptance of what epidemiologists call “non-pharmaceutical interventions” has made a huge difference in lives saved. The next step is pharmaceutical interventions.
Some are already modestly successful, such as the antiviral drug remdesivir and steroids like dexamethasone. But in the near distance are what Dr. William Schaffner, a preventive medicine specialist, has called “the cavalry” — vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. They are likely to be far more effective.
Since January, when I began covering the pandemic, I have been a consistently gloomy Cassandra, reporting on the catastrophe that experts saw coming: that the virus would go pandemic, that Americans were likely to die in large numbers, the national lockdown would last well beyond Easter and even past summer. No miracle cure was on the horizon; the record for developing a vaccine was four years.
Events have moved faster than I thought possible. I have become cautiously optimistic. Experts are saying, with genuine confidence, that the pandemic in the United States will be over far sooner than they expected, possibly by the middle of next year.
That is still some time off. Experts warn that this autumn and winter may be grim; indoor dining, in-classroom schooling, contact sports, jet travel and family holiday dinners may all drive up infections, hospitalizations and deaths. Cases are rising in most states, and some hospitals already face being overwhelmed.Even if the cavalry is in sight, it is not here yet. To prevent deaths reaching 400,000, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci has warned, “We all need to hunker down.”
…
The Whole World Must Be Safe
In September, the actress Jennifer Garner conducted an entertaining interview with Dr. Fauci on her Instagram feed, during which she asked when it would be safe to attend live theater again. “The end of 2021 or maybe even the middle of 2021,” he replied. By then, he explained later, so many Americans would be vaccinated — or immune by virtue of having survived an infection — that it would be safe to sit unmasked in a crowded theater.
Until then, masks and caution are our best alternative. If we rigorously protect ourselves and each other, we can starve the virus of new hosts until our national epidemic finally evaporates.
Then we must help other countries get vaccines too; until they are protected, we cannot venture beyond our borders as tourists or business travelers, nor can others come here. No country can be forgotten; charitable motives aside, their tourists fill our hotels.
We will have competition — or help, if we take a generous view of a global effort. China claims to already have five vaccines in phase 3 trials, and Russia is already marketing its vaccine abroad, although it has not even conducted a phase 3 trial.
Many economists think our national recovery will be rapid, like those that followed the first and second world wars, rather than what followed the financial crashes of 1929 and 2008. China, having beaten the virus, has a growing economy again. Among Americans who have not lost their jobs, personal savings are at record levels. Despite loan defaults in this recession, banks are flush with cash and, if need be, can borrow from their thriving Asian counterparts. When the moment is safe, loans to revive restaurants, hotels and other small businesses should flow.
In the interim, as we hunker down, Congress must find ways to ensure that millions of Americans who are out of work do not go hungry or get evicted.
And once the pandemic is over, one more mission lies ahead: to make sure this does not happen again. We must search for the viruses in nature that are most likely to infect us, and spend the billions of dollars necessary to create vaccines and designer antibodies against them. So that next time we are ready.
Dr. Fauci has been marginalized by the Trump WH, and now used without his consent in a Trump ad on TV, which Dr. F asked to have come down. I wonder if Dr. Fauci’s words are considered at all when he says that when there are campaign gatherings, there should be masks.
Nah, the WH will not listen to anything.
President Donald Trump’s planned campaign rallies this week – starting with one on Monday night in Florida – threaten to advance the spread of the coronavirus, warned Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert.
“Look at it purely in the context of public health,” Fauci said on CNN. “We know that that is asking for trouble when you do that. We’ve seen that when you have situations of congregant settings where there are a lot of people without masks, the data speak for themselves.”
Trump’s rallies often feature supporters who are standing close together without masks.
The president returns to the campaign trail on Monday night for the first time since he was hospitalized for the coronavirus, with an outdoor rally planned at the Orlando Sanford International Airport. He is expected to travel to Pennsylvania on Tuesday night, visit Iowa on Wednesday, and go to North Carolina for an event Thursday afternoon.
On Monday afternoon, the physician to the president, Sean Conley, said Trump had tested negative for the virus “on consecutive days.”
In the CNN interview, Fauci also said a Trump television commercial that took comments he made about the president’s response to Covid-19 “completely out of context” should be taken down. Fauci said the advertisement was “disappointing” and it would be “terrible” if his comments were used in another ad.
The ad includes a brief clip of Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, saying, “I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more.” His comment was made during an interview in March with Fox News. When he made those remarks is not shown in the ad.
“These are Dr. Fauci’s own words,” said Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman. “The video is from a nationally broadcast television interview in which Dr. Fauci was praising the work of the Trump administration. The words spoken are accurate, and directly from Dr. Fauci’s mouth.”
The president continues to face criticism, from his Democratic opponent Joe Biden and other critics, over holding events that could spread Covid-19.
“We should be doubling down and implementing what we’ve been talking about, which are keeping a distance, no crowd, wear masks, washing hands, doing things outside as opposed to inside in order to get those numbers down,” Fauci said in the CNN interview.
Trump’s decision to resume large-scale rallies risks reinforcing perceptions that he’s been cavalier about a disease that has killed 215,000 Americans and sent the economy into recession.
Asked about Fauci’s remarks about the rallies, Courney Parella, another Trump campaign representative, said, “We take strong precautions for our campaign events. Every attendee has their temperature checked, is provided a mask they’re instructed to wear, and has access to plenty of hand sanitizer. We also have signs at our events instructing attendees to wear their masks.”
Yes, take care of yourself and travel separately from.T.
As Trump Flouts Safety Protocols, News Outlets Balk at Close Coverage - The New York Times
Major news organizations have become increasingly wary of sending journalists to travel with President Trump to White House events and campaign rallies, as the president and his aides continue to shun safety protocols after an outbreak of the coronavirus within their ranks.
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post are among the major outlets that have declined to assign reporters to travel with Mr. Trump as he returns to the trail this week, saying they do not have assurance that basic precautions will be taken to protect reporters’ health.
Foremost among the flouters is Mr. Trump himself, who, despite recently contracting the virus and spending three nights in the hospital, has shown little willingness to change his habits: On Saturday, he said the virus would soon “disappear,” and on the way to a rally in Florida on Monday, he boarded Air Force One — where reporters were seated in the cabin — without wearing a mask.
At least three White House correspondents have tested positive for the coronavirus in the past two weeks, including a Times reporter who had traveled on Air Force One, Michael D. Shear.
A pause for Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine trial…in Phase 3
The study of Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine has been paused due to an unexplained illness in a study participant.
A document sent to outside researchers running the 60,000-patient clinical trial states that a “pausing rule” has been met, that the online system used to enroll patients in the study has been closed, and that the data and safety monitoring board — an independent committee that watches over the safety of patients in the clinical trial — would be convened. The document was obtained by STAT.
Contacted by STAT, J&J confirmed the study pause, saying it was due to “an unexplained illness in a study participant.” The company declined to provide further details.
“We must respect this participant’s privacy. We’re also learning more about this participant’s illness, and it’s important to have all the facts before we share additional information,” the company said in a statement.
J&J emphasized that so-called adverse events — illnesses, accidents, and other bad medical outcomes — are an expected part of a clinical study, and also emphasized the difference between a study pause and a clinical hold, which is a formal regulatory action that can last much longer. The vaccine study is not currently under a clinical hold. J&J said that while it normally communicates clinical holds to the public, it does not usually inform the public of study pauses.
The data and safety monitoring board, or DSMB, convened late Monday to review the case. J&J said that in cases like this “it is not always immediately apparent” whether the participant who experienced an adverse event received a study treatment or a placebo.
Though clinical trial pauses are not uncommon — and in some cases last only a few days — they are generating outsized attention in the race to test vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
Given the size of Johnson & Johnson’s trial, it’s not surprising that study pauses could occur, and another could happen if this one resolves, a source familiar with the study said.
“If we do a study of 60,000 people, that is a small village,” the source said. “In a small village there are a lot of medical events that happen.”
On Sept. 8, a large study of another Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University was put on hold because of a suspected adverse reaction in a patient in the United Kingdom. It’s believed that the patient had transverse myelitis, a spinal cord problem. Studies of the vaccine resumed roughly a week after it was paused in the United Kingdom, and have since been restarted in other countries as well. It remains on hold, however, in the United States.
Johnson and Johnson began enrolling volunteers in its Phase 3 study on Sept. 23. Researchers planned to enroll 60,000 participants in the United States and other countries.
More from Dr. Fauci…and he’s right in their face with this. But he has too much integrity to ever stoop to considering leaving his position. He knows he’s the expert and America is relying on him. T’s hamfisted, highly politicized handling of the Coronavirus left the rest of the country flat footed, and Fauci stays because he knows he is essential to our future health.
The nation’s top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci demanded that the Trump campaign refrain from using him in future campaign ads, saying Monday that it would be “outrageous” and “terrible” if he was featured in another commercial and it could “come back to backfire” on Team Trump.
Asked by The Daily Beast if his comments were a thinly-veiled threat to leave his post if he ended up in a new campaign spot, Fauci: “Not a chance.”
“Not in my wildest freakin’ dreams,” he said, “did I ever think about quitting.”
From there, Fauci went on to explain what he meant by “backfire.”
“By doing this against my will they are, in effect, harassing me,” Fauci said. “Since campaign ads are about getting votes, their harassment of me might have the opposite effect of turning some voters off.”
Fauci comments underscore the heightened level of tension that has erupted between the White House and the president’s COVID task force as the election comes to a dramatic close and with COVID infections spiking across the country.
NYTimes: Coronavirus Reinfections Are Real but Very, Very Rare
Normally I would say “you can’t make this up”, except, well, they did.
The White House has reportedly embraced a declaration by a group of scientists arguing for a “herd immunity” strategy to deal with America’s coronavirus pandemic—days after the validity of the declaration came under question due to a number of apparently fake names among its expert signatories, including “Dr. Johnny Bananas.” According to The New York Times , on a call convened Monday by the White House, two anonymous administration officials cited the petition, titled The Great Barrington Declaration, which argues that COVID-19 should be allowed to spread through the population. The declaration’s website claims the petition has been signed by more than 15,000 scientists, but, last week, Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, including Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename, and Dr. Johnny Bananas.
Is Bill Barr truly missing if nobody misses him?
And when you add in this administration’s “Herd Immunity” adherence, it is even more frightening. Most people do not die, BUT the ‘wild card’ aspect to it, it some suffer and die
in greater rates than the average flu incident, and depending on comorbidities Just
During this pandemic, people in the United States are currently dying at rates unparalleled elsewhere in the world.
A new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that over the last 5 months per capita deaths in the U.S., both from COVID-19 and other causes have been far greater than in 18 other high-income countries.
“It’s shocking. It’s horrible,” says Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a professor of health policy and medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the study.
“The United States really has done remarkably badly compared to other countries,” he says and then adds, “I mean, remarkably badly.”
The study looks at per capita death rates in 2020 in 18 countries with populations larger than 5 million people and per capita gross domestic product levels above $25,000 per year. It breaks out deaths attributed to COVID-19, but also examines how total deaths in the U.S. are higher than normal this year. This so-called “all-cause” mortality takes in to account fatalities that may have been due to the coronavirus but were never confirmed or were due to other factors such as people not seeking medical care during the crisis.
Overall deaths in the United States this year are more than 85% higher than in places such as Germany, Israel and Denmark after adjusting for population size. Deaths in the U.S. are 29% higher than even in Sweden, “which ignored everything for so long,” Emanuel says. Sweden made a point of refusing to order strict social restrictions and never went in to a full lockdown. “We have 29% more mortality than we should have if we’d followed Sweden’s path and Sweden virtually did nothing.”
Even looking just at confirmed COVID-19 deaths, the number of people dying since May 10th — again after adjusting for population size — is on average 50% higher than every other country in the study. In addition the rate people are dying in the U.S. has stayed far above everywhere else. Emanuel says the current elevated mortality rates are important because they eliminate the chaotic early months of the pandemic when testing, treatment and reporting varied dramatically around the globe.
The rate of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. since June 7th is 27.2 per 100,000 people. In contrast in Italy the death rate is down to 3.1 per 100,000.
As you’ve heard, Wolf Blitzer and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had a very contentious exchange on Tuesday, in which the CNN anchor demanded to know why the House Speaker was not prepared to support the White House’s offer of a $1.8 trillion stimulus package.
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Blitzer told Pelosi, thus seeming to suggest that the real holdup to any deal is Democratic opposition.
But new reporting from Bloomberg News strongly suggests another angle worth investigating, if the goal is to truly get to the bottom of what might end up holding up an agreement.
And this angle points to an even bigger story: how Republicans may already be laying the groundwork to try to destroy a Joe Biden presidency, should he win the election.
The short version: A Senate GOP strategist privately confided to Bloomberg that a key Republican goal right now is to lay the groundwork to revert hard to austerity, should Biden prevail, crippling the possibility of any serious stimulus efforts next year, even amid continued economic misery.
As of now, Senate Republicans are hostile to supporting a deal even if the White House and House Democrats can reach one. The White House’s $1.8 trillion offer includes some things Democrats want, such as $1,200 checks to individuals, but Pelosi wants more money for aid to states and a national strategy against the novel coronavirus, among other things.
Senate Republicans may not even accept spending levels that the White House is proposing. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is planning a vote on a far smaller package — $500 billion for extended assistance for the unemployed and small businesses, among other things.
The Senate bill appears designed to do the minimum while giving vulnerable GOP senators a way to say they’re doing something at a moment of deep economic peril, in hopes of salvaging McConnell’s majority.
But Trump undermined that strategy by tweeting: “Go big or go home!” Now Senate Republicans risk getting split between the conservative impulse to spend as little as possible (at least on aid to distressed Americans) and Trump’s demand (for now, anyway) for more spending.
But, given that spending more now would likely boost Trump’s reelection chances, why aren’t Senate Republicans on board?
The Bloomberg report offers this remarkable clue:
A GOP strategist who has been consulting with Senate campaigns said Republicans have been carefully laying the groundwork to restrain a Biden administration on federal spending and the budget deficit by talking up concerns about the price tag for another round of virus relief. The thinking, the strategist said, is that it would be very hard politically to agree on spending trillions more now and then in January suddenly embrace fiscal restraint.
This is an anonymous source. But it accords with what all our intuitions and our understanding of recent U.S. political history tell us. Republicans almost certainly suspect Trump will lose even with a big stimulus and already hope to put an incoming President Joe Biden in a fiscal straitjacket, saddling him with the terrible politics of a grueling recovery.
A big package now under a GOP president would make that harder to get away with. That’s bad enough, but the evolving strategy here may be worse than this suggests. The calculation is probably not just about avoiding the hypocrisy of spending big now and embracing austerity under a Democratic president.
It’s also likely that a big package now would put the economy in a somewhat better position early next year, when Biden (should he win) would take over. This, too, is probably what Republicans want to avoid.
Indeed, as Eric Levitz points out, if Republicans can scuttle a robust package now, that would hand Biden a “deepening recession.” If Republicans hold the Senate and can block big stimulus measures at that point, Levitz continues, “Biden’s presidency would be over before it starts.”
And so, when McConnell chortled with glee at this week’s debate in Kentucky about the failure to pass more aid at a desperate national moment, it telegraphed what’s coming. And we’ve already lived through what happened when Republicans, led by McConnell, tried to cripple the recovery from a previous economic calamity that a Democratic president inherited from a Republican one.
Back then, McConnell calculated that if Republicans adopted a strategy of openly tailoring everything around the overarching goal of denying Barack Obama bipartisan support, Obama would take the blame for it. It’s likely McConnell is already thinking the same.
Obviously Republicans might theoretically oppose more spending to address a recession during a Biden presidency out of adherence to principle, however egregiously misguided. But notably, the GOP strategist above also telegraphs a strategy of constraining Biden by suddenly claiming to care deeply about deficits.
That’s particularly galling, given that Trump and the GOP passed a massive corporate tax giveaway that lavished enormous benefits on top earners while helping to explode the deficit. Now concern over that deficit will be used to try to cripple a Biden presidency through austerity.
Which leads to a final point. As I’ve noted, Trump campaigned in 2016 on a (fraudulent) promise to break with orthodox conservative economics, including opposition to big expenditures in the public interest, vowing to preserve safety nets and invest in job-creating infrastructure.
In many ways Trump tossed that vow aside and embraced GOP plutocracy. But now he’s suddenly desperate to secure another huge spending infusion, because he needs one to salvage his reelection hopes. So it would constitute a perverse form of poetic justice if a GOP refusal to go along — one rooted in a strategy of hamstringing a Democratic president from addressing deep national challenges — ends up contributing in some small way to Trump’s political demise.
Since we don’t have social calendars anymore, a big part of my day has become deciding how much of it I am going to spend being terrified and sad versus how long I’ll allow myself to get so angry my ears bleed. I could probably do the latter 24/7 most days, but in the interest of self-care, I try to ration it out a bit. “Totally Under Control,” the infuriating new documentary from directors Alex Gibney, Suzanne Hillinger and Ophelia Harutyunyan, is the kind of movie that really messes with your rage ratio. Shot in secret over the past few months and rushed into theaters (well, virtual ones anyway) ahead of Election Day, it’s a sober, step-by-step recounting of the Trump administration’s catastrophically bungled response to COVID-19. There are no big revelations here, the movie’s mostly stuff we already knew. Yet seeing it all laid out end-to-end like this made me so furious I had to go walk it off for a little while.
Gibney and company begin the picture by showing the safety protocols under which it was shot, with some of the interviewees shipped hi-def cameras they operated themselves at home while others were spoken to from behind giant tents and shower curtains of PPE like Elliott’s house at the end of “E.T.” It’s a striking contrast to the sequences filmed in South Korea with a regular crew, and a lot of the movie is structured as a comparison between the two nations’ responses to the crisis. Both discovered their first patient on the same day back in January. One country trusted their scientists and medical professionals to trace, track and contain the virus. The other bragged, blustered and massaged the markets. South Korea lost 434 of its citizens to COVID-19 and life there has returned nearly to normal. We’re at 215,000 dead with no end in sight.
“Totally Under Control” covers a lot of the same ground as Frontline’s excellent “The Virus: What Went Wrong?” which aired in June, and during certain segments, the timeline can feel a little hurried or incomplete. This sometimes happens with first drafts of history, cranked out after the news has already broken but without much perspective in the rearview. Where the movie excels, however, is in the individual testimonies of its interview subjects, personalizing a crisis that’s too often overwhelmed by numbers and statistics, importantly reminding us that there are still decent people out there trying to do good, even as they’re undercut every step of the way by an incompetent and avaricious administration.
My heart went out to Dr. Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority who blew up his career and became the target of presidential harassment for opposing the administration’s snake oil salesmanship regarding hydroxychloroquine. Former Trump voter Michael Bowen is the executive vice president of America’s leading manufacturer of N95 masks, who spent decades warning one administration after another about an impending shortage, only to watch the CDC simply alter their recommended guidelines to say masks weren’t necessary when the crisis finally hit. “At some point, you’ve got to blame the manager,” he says, providing the movie with its mantra.
But by far the most staggering segment follows idealistic young Max Kennedy — RFK’s grandson — volunteering to assist Jared Kushner’s supply chain task force. Turns out Max and a handful of other 20-year-old novices were actually the entire task force, locked in a basement office all day surrounded by multiple TVs blaring Fox News, untrained and assigned to buy personal protective equipment using their own laptops and personal email accounts. The entire chunk of the film devoted to the PPE debacle is the most effective and infuriating, detailing how savvily these hucksters blamed federal failures on the individual states, drove up prices in bidding wars to benefit private companies and demanded humiliating acts of obeisance from local officials in exchange for life-saving supplies. Gov. Baker makes a cameo via speakerphone, while the smirking president gloats to “Charlie” that he’s never going to be outbid.
It’s a stomach-turning moment, but if anything I’m surprised by how easy the movie otherwise takes it on Trump, perhaps out of interest in appearing “fair and balanced” to imaginary audiences that would never watch a movie like this anyway and probably jam their fingers in their ears and shout “FAKE NEWS!” if you even tried to tell them about it. “Totally Under Control” very clearly aspires to be a portrait of businessmen in over their heads whose free market solutions are woefully inadequate for a medical emergency. Yet the film leaves out some of the most bizarre examples of this behavior, like Trump shoving aside scientists in favor of insane infomercial press conferences with CEOs like the My Pillow guy, or his hijacking of daily task force briefings that culminated in his infamous inquiries about injecting disinfectants and shining UV light inside patients’ bodies. But then I guess maybe the filmmakers figured that if they tried to include every time Donald Trump said something stupid the movie would be longer than “The Irishman.”
The staggeringly prolific Gibney — this is the third film he’s directed in 2020, with his 239-minute “Agents of Chaos” having just aired on HBO three weeks ago — gets a bad rap from a lot of folks I know in the documentary community for his factory-like output. Indeed, most of his movies aren’t really much more than the books or magazine articles they’re based on read aloud with some slick animated graphics and an ominous, bleep-boop synth score. (I’m still baffled that his 2015 “Going Clear: Scientology & The Prison of Belief” was hailed as a bombshell exposé while containing nothing I hadn’t already read in The New Yorker several years before.)
But he is very good at organizing data, and during a deafeningly noisy time in American life when every day is an information blitzkrieg, sometimes it’s refreshing to have someone just lay out the facts clearly and in chronological order. “Totally Under Control” might not tell you anything you don’t already know, but it does so cogently and with compassion. This is a film worth watching, even if you’ll have to go walk around for a while afterward.