FAIL 3 COVID

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SEE FAIL FOUR 3/22

see DELTA COVID 5 8/21

SEE WUHAN LAB BS

see fox covid fail

this is not just covid

see super-spreader

see plandemic

see herd immunity

see polar 2 americas

see dereg libtard free mkt BS

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ODD UPTICK? TRUMP VS DESANTIS ON VAX?

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REF 3

Scientist searching for a coronavirus cure exposes right-wing “disinformation campaign” that led to Trump cutting his funding

60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley: “There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab”

Written by Eric Kleefeld

:{Published 05/11/20

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Fox-Trump feedback loop has been a dangerous factor undermining the United States’ response to the crisis. Now, as CBS News’ *60 Minutes* documented on Sunday night, right-wing media misinformation about the coronavirus’s origins — the idea that it originated in an infectious disease research laboratory in Wuhan, China — has even resulted in the Trump administration shutting down funding for actual pandemic research.

CBS anchor Scott Pelley spotlighted infectious disease researcher Dr. Peter Daszak, head of the New York-based nonprofit medical organization EcoHealth Alliance, which just recently lost a $3.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As CBS noted, Daszak's “work is helping in the search for a COVID-19 cure.”

The broadcast traced the chain of events back to when Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said during an April 14 appearance on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight: “The NIH gives this $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They then advertise that they need coronavirus researchers. Following that, coronavirus erupts in Wuhan.”

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Citation

From the April 14, 2020, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Newsmax correspondent Emerald Robinson then asked President Donald Trump about the supposed grant during a White House briefing on April 17 — attributing this grant to actions by the Obama administration — to which Trump said he would end it “very quickly.”

But these allegations were untrue.

“There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab,” Pelley explained. The grant was actually to EcoHealth, of which about $100,000 per year went toward working with the Wuhan facility — and even that could only take place after careful review by the NIH.

:{Video

Citation

From the May 10, 2020, edition of CBS News’ 60 Minutes

PELLEY: His funding from the NIH, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, was killed, two weeks ago, by a political disinformation campaign targeting China's Wuhan Institute.

...

PELLEY: On April 14, Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz claimed China's Wuhan Institute had, quote, "birthed a monster." Gaetz is a vigorous defender of the president. He's been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for allegedly threatening a witness against Mr. Trump and he led a protest to delay impeachment testimony.

...

PELLEY: There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab. But, the falsehood spread like a virus, in the White House, and without verification, in the briefing room.

The specific claim that $3.7 million was sent to the Wuhan lab has been spread by a variety of sources, such as when the U.K.-based Daily Mail on April 11 mentioned “documents” it obtained that it said showed scientists in Wuhan had “experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health”; the article featured comments from Gaetz regarding the Wuhan Institute.

And on April 26, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani tweeted:

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PolitiFact rated the claim as “False,” noting, “The grant was made in 2014, and the amount that went to the lab was a bit under $600,000. The grant restriction did not apply to identifying naturally occurring viruses.”

In an interview on a New York talk radio show on April 26, Giuliani opened a new rhetorical front to pin the blame on another target: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and a target of right-wing ire since the crisis began. Outlets such as The Washington Times, RedState, and Gateway Pundit all picked up on Giuliani’s false allegations attempting to tie Fauci to this supposed large grant of money to the lab.

Fauci has repeatedly dismissed the right-wing media’s conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19, and in an article published last week in National Geographic, he reaffirmed not only that the virus was not manipulated artificially in a lab, but also dismissed the secondary conspiracy theory that it could have been discovered occurring naturally but then leaked from the facility in the course of other research work:

“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” Fauci says. Based on the scientific evidence, he also doesn’t entertain an alternate theory‐that someone found the coronavirus in the wild, brought it to a lab, and then it accidentally escaped.

Fox News has played a key role in spreading these right-wing media conspiracy theories and other coronavirus misinformation throughout the pandemic.

Earlier in the crisis, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) actively pushed the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was released from the Wuhan research facility. They and other voices on Fox News repeatedly cited a study from the respected medical journal The Lancet to allege that the virus did not come from the city’s wet market — and therefore it must have come from a laboratory — even as The Lancet itself has disavowed the very notion that right-wing media are trying to spin.

More recently, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said, “I personally believe it's entirely possible that they engineered the Wuhan virus.” And just last week, Fox host Tucker Carlson claimed that a multinational intelligence dossier “confirms much of what we've suspected” about the virus coming from the Wuhan facility. Intelligence professionals have refuted the fringe theory and the claim that the dossier even supported the idea amid this latest push from Fox and other Murdoch media outlets, such as The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, Australia.

Other right-wing media voices from outside Fox News have also pushed this theory:

• The Washington Times ran an article in late January, titled “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program.” That article now contains a disclaimer at the top: *“Editor’s note (March 25, 2020): Since this story ran, scientists outside of China have had a chance to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They concluded it does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab, though the exact origin remains murky and experts debate whether it may have leaked from a Chinese lab that was studying it.”

• Steve Bannon, Trump’s former Chief White House Strategist, has spread the idea and given interviews to one of his financial benefactors, Chinese billionaire-in-exile Guo Wengui. At one point, however, Bannon interviewed an actual virologist who told him that idea was “a load of crap.”

• Right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who Trump recently awarded the Medal of Freedom, declared in February: “It probably is a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized. All superpower nations weaponize bioweapons. They experiment with them.”

• Sebastian Gorka, far-right political commentator and former deputy assistant to Trump, agreed on the April 27 edition of his radio show that “one of the most likely scenarios” is that China deliberately released the virus to the rest of the world in order to take down other countries’ economies.

• Sinclair Broadcasting host Eric Bolling, who was in regular communications with the White House about the pandemic back in March, has repeatedly asked about this theory in interviews with White House officials and members of Congress. In one example, he told the U.S. assistant secretary for health: “This virus feels to me that it was more engineered than simply someone eating a bat in China in a wet market and it jumping from animal to human.”

• One America News Network, a far-wing outlet repeatedly promoted by Trump himself, has been tying in the idea about the Wuhan lab together with other conspiracy theories about billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and George Soros, the “deep state,” and population control.

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PROJECTION

MMA

October 7, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five

JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST): It's a lot of conspiracy theories with the left. They're constantly hooked on these conspiracy theories like the COVID came from a wet market. I mean, they take Chinese propaganda and then they just regurgitate it on national television or that Trump is some sort of Russian puppet. They did that for two years. These people are like not in touch with reality at all. And this is coming from me. I like conspiracy theories. I seek them out and they're usually right. And they're usually -- the dumb ones are coming from the left.

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MMA Benny Johnson claims Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo were “colluding with the deep state to destroy” Trump with COVID

05/06/25

austin am st

During the Oct. 1 vice presidential debate in New York, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, declined to answer when asked whether he and former President Donald Trump would challenge the results of November’s election if they lost, as Trump did in 2020.

Instead, Vance pivoted to what he said was a much bigger threat to democracy: internet censorship.

"I believe that we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country. … It is the threat of censorship," Vance said.

Vance said Vice President Kamala Harris would "like to censor people who engage in misinformation." He said Harris "is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale. She did it during COVID. She’s done it over a number of other issues."

Then, during a back-and-forth exchange with Democratic vice presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance said Harris "wants to use the power of government and big tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment."

Many PolitiFact readers asked what Vance was talking about when referring to Harris and censorship.

Vance sought to tie Harris to the Biden administration's efforts to push social media platforms to remove what it deemed to be false content about COVID-19 during the pandemic.

The White House declined to comment.

Republicans have long bemoaned social media platforms’ efforts to moderate content, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The "censorship" commentary intensified in August when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress that the Biden administration had pressured the company to censor some posts. But experts have told PolitiFact such pressure doesn’t amount to censorship, and the Supreme Court ruled in Biden’s favor in a lawsuit on the topic. The Trump administration similarly asked Twitter to remove some posts.

Vance’s examples

When contacted for comment, an Republican National Committee spokesperson pointed PolitiFact to several news stories:

• A PBS News story about Zuckerberg’s August letter to the House Judiciary Committee. Zuckerberg wrote that Biden’s administration in early 2021 "repeatedly pressured" Meta to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.

The letter did not mention Harris or any other specific person.

The Republican-led committee shared Zuckerberg’s letter on X, calling it a "Big win for free speech." Zuckerberg in his letter said ultimately it was the company’s decision whether to remove content, but that "the government pressure was wrong" and he regretted not speaking up about it at the time. One of Meta’s decisions Zuckerberg cited — to temporarily demote a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop after an FBI warning about a potential Russian disinformation operation — happened while Trump was still in office.

• An article about former White House Digital Strategy Director Rob Flaherty, now Harris’ deputy campaign manager, emailing a Facebook employee about a COVID-19 vaccine-related social media post by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. We found no evidence that Harris had personally contacted Facebook about any posts.

• A Washington Times article about a March 2021 White House meeting with Amazon officials about the visibility on the online retailer’s website of some COVID-19-related books.

Meta’s fact-checking program during the pandemic spanned the Trump and Biden presidencies.

PolitiFact partners with Meta on its fact-checking program to slow misinformation’s spread. As part of the partnership, Meta flags posts that the company believes might be inaccurate or misleading, and fact-checkers provide feedback with published articles. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, decides what, if any, action to take on its platforms.

The RNC didn’t specify what "other issues" besides COVID-19 Vance was referring to at the debate.

What has Harris said?

Harris has talked about social media platforms’ responsibilities. She said in a May 2019 speech that she would hold them "accountable" for hateful content they shared.

She called for Twitter to suspend Trump’s account in October 2019 because of his posts discussing a whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s president that led to Trump’s first impeachment. This year, X owner Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Trump supporter and former independent presidential candidate, seized on Harris’ 2019 comments to amplify a false claim that Harris plans to shut down X if she’s elected.

An 880-page report in May from the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government detailed what it called the "Censorship-Industrial Complex," referring to what it described as the Biden-Harris administration’s pressure campaign against social media companies.

The report makes no accusations specific to Harris beyond a footnote referring to a September 2019 CNN interview in which she said Twitter should suspend Trump’s account.

Is pressuring social platforms censorship? Experts weigh in

Experts told PolitiFact in April that the Biden administration’s efforts to contact platforms about social media posts weren’t censorship unless they crossed the line into coercion, but that the Supreme Court would ultimately decide.

Sheri Berman, a Barnard College at Columbia University political science professor, said it’s reasonable for citizens and candidates to debate how much social media moderation should happen. But she said attempts to limit the spread of dangerous or false information pertaining to election results or vaccines’ efficacy during a pandemic "is not a threat to democracy."

The Supreme Court in June rejected an effort by Republican-led Missouri and Louisiana to restrict federal employees from pressuring social media companies to remove posts, saying the plaintiffs had no legal standing.

In the court’s 6-3 ruling, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote that although the government factored in some of the platforms’ moderation decisions, "The evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment."

Trump also pressured social media platforms

Vance’s comments ignore evidence that the Trump administration also talked to social media platforms about removing content.

At a February 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing with then-Twitter executives about the Hunter Biden laptop story, one witness testified that the Trump White House had sought to remove a post from model Chrissy Teigen that criticized Trump.

Teigen had responded to Trump’s Sept. 8, 2019, social media post that called her "filthy-mouthed" by calling the former president a derogatory term.

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., asked Anika Collier Navaroli, formerly of Twitter’s U.S. safety policy team: "The White House almost immediately thereafter contacted Twitter to demand the tweet be taken down. Is that accurate?"

Navaroli said: "I do remember hearing we'd received a request from the White House to make sure we evaluated this tweet, and they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement directed at the president."

Our sources21qqq

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steven-brill-social-media-online-misinformation

booktv 7 24

the Death of Truth

225 K KIA xvr disinfo

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MMA 8 24

Fox News is championing RFK Jr's view of public health, even as it puts your kids at risk

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 08/27/24

Fox News hosts like Ainsley Earhardt are overjoyed about notorious anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s purported ability to help former President Donald Trump’s campaign appeal to “moms” concerned with public health.

“I think moms around the country appreciate his stance for trying to make our children healthy again,” she said on Monday.

Earhardt noted that in Kennedy’s speech last week endorsing Trump, “he talked about how 75% of the budget from the FDA comes from pharmaceutical companies” and “said it's very profitable when a child is sick,” adding that Kennedy’s condemnation of “corruption in health care” is “music to every mom’s ears."

The culture warriors at Fox aren’t typically invested in talking about public health issues. But in one key health-related fight on which the network aligned with Kennedy — COVID-19 vaccines — the results have proved disastrous. Their combined assault on what Kennedy falsely termed “the deadliest vaccine ever made” helped trigger plummeting levels of support for childhood vaccinations among Republicans, with ongoing consequences for America’s kids.

Fox’s unique pull with its right-wing audience gave it a moral responsibility to encourage viewers to take the life-saving COVID-19 vaccines. Instead, the network — led by stars like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity — pandered to anti-vaxxers like Kennedy.

Fox conducted a yearslong campaign to undermine the vaccines, which the network falsely portrayed as ineffective and dangerous, while talking up the potential of fake cures for the virus. Its hosts were particularly scathing about public health efforts to require vaccination at schools and workplaces, which Ingraham described as a “crime against humanity.”

The right-wing assault on the COVID-19 vaccines led to lower rates of vaccinations among Republicans — and consequently higher death rates. But the anti-vaccine sentiment unleashed by the likes of Fox and Kennedy was not limited to COVID-19: There have been broader impacts on GOP support for the full range of childhood vaccinations.

Gallup reported earlier this month that the percentage of Americans who say it is important for parents to get their children vaccinated has tumbled since the COVID-19 pandemic — and that Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are responsible for that decline.

Nearly 20% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now say that it’s “not very important” or “not important at all” for parents to get their kids vaccinated, according to Gallup’s polling.

Gallup further found that the percentage of Americans who think the government should require parents to vaccinate their children against deadly contagions like the measles has fallen to 51%, down from 62% in 2019 and 81% in 1991. That decline is largely due to Republicans, 60% of whom now oppose such government mandates.

The result is a looming crisis for America's children. It takes a 95% vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity for measles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But immunization among kindergartners has fallen from 95% before the pandemic to 93% in the most recent school year. In 18 states, more than 4% of kindergartners have vaccine exemptions.

:{:{}:

The result is skyrocketing outbreaks of preventable and dangerous diseases among children — but things can still get so much worse.

Trump is more than willing to prioritize his political future over your kids. Playing to his base, he all but disavowed the COVID-19 vaccines his administration helped bring to fruition, and he vows that his administration “will not give one penny” to schools that require their students to be vaccinated.

He sought Kennedy’s endorsement and is dangling the prospect of rewarding him with a plum post — potentially secretary of Health and Human Services, where the anti-vaccine activist would wield incredible power. Far from trying to hold him back, Fox hosts like Earhardt and MAGA princes like Charlie Kirk are celebrating Kennedy’s supposed health bona fides.

For a glimpse of what an empowered Kennedy might mean for America’s parents, it's worth reviewing his role in “one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent memory,” as FactCheck.org put it:

In 2018, two infants in American Samoa died when nurses accidentally prepared the combined measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine with expired muscle relaxant rather than water. The Samoan government temporarily suspended the vaccination program, and anti-vaccine advocates — including Kennedy and his nonprofit — flooded the area with misinformation. The vaccination rate dropped to a dangerously low level. The next year, when a traveler brought measles to the islands, the disease tore through the population, sickening more than 5,700 people and killing 83, most of them young children.

That doesn’t sound like “music to every mom’s ears."

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6 24 an

How Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump botched the White House's COVID-19 response -- according to Stephanie Grisham

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the lever CMD

earlier this month, as the Omicron variant began to spread, a small liberal arts school on a tree-lined campus in Michigan called Hillsdale College announced it was launching an Academy for Science and Freedom to “educate the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.”

The academy was inspired by the pandemic. “As we reflect on the worst public health fiasco in history, our pandemic response has unveiled serious issues with how science is administered,” noted the college president in a press release.

But the venture isn't exactly an effort to apply science to the COVID-19 crisis. The so-called “fiasco” was government pandemic measures like mask and vaccine mandates, contact tracing, and lockdowns.

Hillsdale is a conservative Christian institution with ties to the Trump administration. And the scholars behind the academy — Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff — are connected to right-wing dark money attacking public health measures.

The trio also has ties to the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-rebuked yet influential missive that encouraged governments to adopt a “herd immunity” policy letting COVID-19 spread largely unchecked, even as the virus has killed more than 800,000 Americans.

The academy is the newest initiative designed to provide intellectual cover to a nearly two-year campaign by right-wing and big business interests to force a return to normalcy to boost corporate profits amid a pandemic that is now surging once again thanks to Omicron.

That campaign’s most recent success came earlier this month when Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats joined together to pass a symbolic measure to repeal a Biden administration rule requiring large corporations to mandate vaccines or regular COVID tests for workers.

This is the story of how that corporate-bankrolled campaign originally started, and how it has continued to supplant public health experts and hijack the governmental response to the pandemic.

The War On Public Health

When COVID began its spread across the United States in early March 2020, states responded by locking down to varying extents. All 24 Democratic governors and 19 of the 26 Republican governors issued weeks-long stay-at-home orders and restrictions on non-essential businesses.

Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover.

One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing.

Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world.

The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.

“We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” it read.

A month later, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business lobbying group partially funded by Koch Industries, published a letter calling on President Donald Trump to enable states to reopen. That letter was signed by over 200 state legislators and “stakeholders,” including leaders from Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the James Madison Institute.

To fight its war, the Koch network also relied on the astroturf roadmap behind the anti-government Tea Party movement, using its dark money apparatus to coordinate anti-lockdown protests.

Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009. Several of the 2020 rallies were also promoted by the Convention of States Action, a group founded by an organization with ties to the Koch network and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. In Michigan, a major event was organized by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a nonprofit funded by the family of Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos.

Groups funded by the Kochs and their colleagues also turned to a more insidious form of combat adapted from Tea Party strategies: building an academic and intellectual network that would create and promote its own “science” to attack COVID mitigation policies.

Tip Jar

“Build Up Immunity… Through Natural Infection”

On October 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was released to the world. Authored by Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor Sunetra Gupta, the declaration recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with COVID-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.”

“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection,” read the declaration.

The document boasted a veneer of academic legitimacy. Its credentialed authors wrote the letter at a conference hosted by the auspicious-sounding American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. According to the declaration’s website, the letter has since been signed by more than 2,700 “Medical and Public Health Scientists,” and “none of the authors or co-signers received any money, honoraria, stipend, or salary from anyone.”

But the declaration arose out of the world of right-wing dark money and corporate interests, and many of its signatories aren’t verified.

AIER, which hosted and filmed the conference and registered the declaration’s website, is a Koch-tied libertarian think tank. From 2018 to 2020, the Charles Koch Foundation donated more than $100,000 to the institute. And before that, the Koch Foundation donated nearly$1.5 million to the Emergent Order Foundation, formerly Emergent Order LLC, a PR firm that engaged in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of marketing consulting for AIER.

AIER has also received $54,000 from the Atlas Network, an anti-regulation group formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation that has received more than a half million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation and the connected Charles Koch Institute. The Atlas Network alsopocketednearly$3.9 million from DonorsTrust, a dark money fund connected to wealthy right-wing donors such as Koch and Mercer, and its sister group, Donors Capital Fund.

In exchange, AIER has provided fellowships to academics in several Koch-funded programs. That includes economist Peter Boettke, the former president of the Mont Pelerin Society, of which Charles Koch has been a member, and Michael Munger, an adjunct scholar at the Koch-backed Cato Institute. AIER’s trustees include Benjamin Powell, director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, which has received millions from the Koch network. Powell is known for his defense of sweatshops.

Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, is a former research fellow at the Hoover Institution, which received $430,000 from Charles Koch’s foundation between 2017 and 2018, as well as $1.4 million from the dark money fund DonorsTrust from 2016 to 2020. Since then, Bhattacharya has appeared in multiple Hoover video programs.

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Bhattacharya, Gupta, and representatives of AIER did not respond to requests for comment. Kulldorff insisted that he has never received money from the Koch network.

“Koch-affiliated foundations funded pro-lockdown COVID research by Dr. Neil Ferguson at Imperial College, but they have never funded me, either directly or indirectly,” said Kulldorff. “Lockdowns have generated huge profits for Koch and other big businesses while throwing children and the working class under the bus.”

“Access To The Very Highest Levers Of Government”

The Great Barrington Declaration and its natural immunity strategy were widely derided by scientists around the world. The strategy was condemned by the Infectious Diseases Society of America and its HIV Medicine Association while World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called it “unethical.” Thousands of medical professionals called on governments to disregard strategies that rely on natural infection.

“Never in the history of public health has anyone suggested infecting the entire population with a pathogen with which we have no long term experience as a strategy for managing a pandemic,” said epidemiologist and physician Robert Morris, who has advised several federal agencies.

Nevertheless, the declaration and its authors were embraced by a number of political leaders, since their arguments provided their laissez-faire approaches to the pandemic with scholarly validity.

This list included President Trump. Two months before the release of the Great Barrington Declaration, Trump welcomed the document’s authors to a White House meeting, even though the administration’s COVID-19 advisor, Deborah Birx, warned colleagues that the doctors were “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health, or on-the-ground common sense experience.”

Trump’s COVID-19 adviser, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no background in infectious diseases, appeared to be one of several staff who supported the declaration’s strategy. While Atlas has denied urging the natural immunity approach, he publicly claimed that masks do not help curb the virus and called the idea of mandating vaccines for young people a “denial of science,” a claim that has been thoroughly disproved.

The president became enamored with herd immunity and the quick fix it promised for his reelection campaign. In mid-September 2020, Trump began trotting out the concepts that would soon be codified in the Great Barrington Declaration. He declared at an ABC News town hall, “And you’ll develop…a herd mentality. It’s going to be — it’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen.”

Following Trump’s lead, a number of Republican-led states adopted hands-off pandemic strategies.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered the resumption of most commerce in November 2020, including indoor dining, and barred localities from enforcing mask mandates and social distancing.

Declaration co-author Bhattacharya advised DeSantis on his approach and called the governor “extraordinary” for his handling of the pandemic. Last month, DeSantis signed legislation banning vaccine mandates statewide.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott lifted his state’s mask mandate and COVID business restrictions in March 2021. The next month, he declared Texas could be close to herd immunity. Recently, Abbott issued an executive order banning mask mandates, which a federal judge recently ruled unenforceable because it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Great Barrington Declaration’s central arguments also found support overseas. In September 2020, co-author Gupta met in London with U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had been slow to impose lockdowns and implement testing after the coronavirus was first identified in his country. A month after this meeting, Johnson sent a series of texts echoing talking points from the declaration, including that the virus wasn’t a real risk to people under 60.

The London meeting was also attended by Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist for Sweden, a country that became well known for its rejection of lockdowns. In April 2020, Sweden’s public health director asserted, “There is no clear correlation between the lockdown measures taken in countries and the effect on the pandemic.”

“You have to hand it to the [authors of the] Great Barrington declaration: They have had extraordinary access to the very highest levers of government,” said Gavin Yamey, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of global health and public policy at Duke University. “They have had a profound impact on policy-making. Time and time again, we’ve seen the [people behind the] Great Barrington Declaration get what they want.”

A Devastating Toll

Despite the Great Barrington Declaration’s claim that it was delineating “the most compassionate approach” to COVID-19, states and countries that embraced its anti-interventionist strategy have all experienced a COVID massacre.

At the time of the declaration’s publication, roughly 200,000 Americans had died from the virus. Since then, that number has quadrupled, the highest known number of any country.

Florida has become a COVID-19 hotspot, accounting for nearly one in five U.S. cases last summer. Virus numbers also surged in Texas, with the two states accounting for one third of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths at the time.

Even with all those infections, herd immunity was never achieved. Last week, University of Texas researchers warned that the Omicron variant could lead to the largest surge to date in the state.

International efforts to reach natural herd immunity haven’t fared much better. A scathing report released in October by British lawmakers — many from Prime Minister Johnson’s own party — found that the country’s failure to respond to the virus quickly and aggressively was “one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced” and led to “many thousands of deaths which could have been avoided.”

And in Sweden, where roughly 11 out every 100 people had been diagnosed with the virus, COVID-19 fatalities stand at 1,476 deaths per million, many times that of its closest neighbors.

“We Are Intent On Not Letting Omicron Disrupt Work & School”

Despite the costs, right-wing messaging against public health measures continues.

At first glance, lockdowns may appear beneficial to some big businesses, especially those that were deemed essential businesses and boasted robust online marketplaces. But social epidemiologist Justin Feldman, of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, noted that “some regulations directly cost businesses money.”

Feldman explained that “paid quarantine and isolation means workers will be paid to stay home instead of working,” vaccine mandates could “make hiring difficult during a labor shortage,” and mask mandates “signal to the public that there is danger and they will then not patronize businesses.”

That’s likely why in March 2021, the dark money fund DonorsTrust spent nearly $800,000 to spread the narrative that the pandemic’s toll was actually due to government interventions. In May, DonorsTrust issued a press release claiming lockdowns hurt workers.

In June, Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank at George Mason University heavily funded by the Koch family, began funding a database run by Emily Oster, an economist who has argued that the drawbacks of school closures outweigh the risks of COVID-19 exposure. Oster’s work was cited by Gov. DeSantis when he signed an order last August allowing parents to defy school mask mandates.

And earlier this month, the Foundation for Economic Education, another Koch-funded nonprofit, claimed that “naive government interventions” were responsible for a rise in global malaria cases and a spike in worldwide poverty.

Such anti-public health intervention narratives have had a lasting impact.

President Joe Biden hasn’t embraced herd immunity through infection the way Trump did, and he instituted a vaccine mandate for large companies that has faced court challenges and pushback from Republican and conservative Democratic lawmakers.

But Biden, whose COVID-19 response team is headed by former investment firm CEO and so-called “businessman’s businessman” Jeffrey Zients, has continued his predecessor’s push to keep the country open, even prematurely declaring “independence” from COVID-19 on Fourth of July last summer.

Earlier this month, Biden assured reporters that lockdowns would not be returning, despite the emergence of the Omicron variant and continued spread of Delta. According to a recent scientific simulation, an eight-week stay-at-home order in response to the new surge could save 300,000 lives.

Last Friday, the White House’s coronavirus response team put out a statement reaffirming its limited approach, a stance Biden reiterated in his remarks on Omicron on Tuesday: “We are intent on not letting Omicron disrupt work & school for the vaccinated.”

The defeat of lockdowns is only part of big business’ takeover of the country’s COVID-19 response.

The country’s eviction moratorium was allowed to lapse after it faced multiple legal challenges funded in part by the Charles Koch Foundation — at the same time as Charles Koch began making new investments in real estate. A subsequent moratorium put in place by the Biden administration was also struck down by the Supreme Court.

And while one of Biden’s first presidential promises was to clarify COVID-19 workplace safety standards, the resulting guidelines ended up limited to a small subsection of workers, following months of lobbying by business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber and other corporate interests have also pushed for a corporate liability shield to protect employers from COVID-19-related lawsuits and have also been fighting against ongoing efforts to release the vaccine intellectual property at the World Trade Organization to speed up global vaccination.

The right-wing push against public health measures shows signs of success. Support for pandemic lockdown measures dropped significantly over nine months from the start of the pandemic. A Gallup poll from November 2020 found that a plurality of 49 percent of Americans said they would shelter in place in response to a serious outbreak, down from 67 percent in March. The decline was mostly due to a “sharp drop” among Republicans.

“A Shining City On A Hill”

The Great Barrington Declaration’s authors continue to push herd immunity through COVID-19 infections. Gupta co-founded a U.K. nonprofit called Collateral Globaldedicated to exposing alleged negative impacts of COVID mitigation measures, which has Bhattacharya on staff.

Bhattacharya, meanwhile, published an op-ed last January claiming that vaccinating people in his native India was “unethical” because most had “natural immunity” and the risk of adverse reactions outweighed the benefits of inoculation. A month later, the country experienced its worst-ever surge.

All three co-authors are also now affiliated with the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit founded by former AIER editorial director Jeffrey Tucker in May 2021 to prevent “the recurrence of lockdowns.” Bhattacharya serves as the organization's senior scholar, Kulldorff is a senior scientific director, and Gupta is an author.

According to Yamey at Duke University, the institute has been actively promoting vaccine disinformation.

“Time and time again, they have peddled dreadful misinformation and disinformation about vaccines,” he said. “They are, for example, vehemently opposed to vaccinating children, even though we know that unvaccinated children are 10 times more likely to be hospitalized. They very sadly went on television to say that health workers don't need to be vaccinated because they falsely claimed vaccination has no effect on transmission.”

Now declaration co-authors Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, as well as former Trump advisor Scott Atlas have surfaced yet again, as the first three “fellows” at the new Academy for Science and Freedom at Hillsdale College.

Hillsdale, a private non-sectarian Christian school, has long been a factory for conservative thought. In 2016, during a Hillsdale commencement speech, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called it a “shining city on a hill.” Statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher adorn a section of its campus known as “Liberty Walk.” Hillsdale President Larry Arnn chaired Donald Trump’s reactionary 1776 Commission, which sought to craft American history curriculums around America’s strengths.

Hillsdale refuses to accept public funds so it can be free from government mandates. Instead, it accepts large sums from the foundations and donor conduits of right-wing corporate executives and their families. The Charles Koch Foundation has donated over $300,000 to Hillsdale since 2015, and DonorsTrust gave over $3.6 million since 2014, including $2.5 million in 2020. The school has also found generous benefactors in the DeVos family, known for their Amway fortune, and Betsy DeVos’ parents, the Princes.

According to the academy’s recently launched website, the new academy will work “to educate policymakers and the general public about important discoveries and ideas that might otherwise be ignored by scientific journals and corporate media.” To do so, the academy plans to host scientific workshops and conferences, publish academic papers, and engage in “media and government outreach.”

But Feldman isn’t buying it.

“They have no interest in science,” he said. “They have been wrong about the pandemic time and time again. They use their stature as 'experts' to push for policies that are indifferent to ongoing mass death.”

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// Arizona Republicans convene a COVID hearing chock full of misinformation — again - Alternet.org

an 10 23 no lnx

Arizona Republicans convene a COVID hearing chock full of misinformation — again

Jerod Macdonald-Evoy, Arizona Mirror

October 21, 2023

For the second time in five months, Republican state lawmakers listened intently and offered no pushback during a day-long special hearing at the Arizona Senate billed as examining the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic that was instead rife with conspiracy theories, misinformation and fear-mongering around vaccines and public health.

In May, the Novel Coronavirus Southwestern Intergovernmental Committee featured testimony from a group of supposed health experts who spread myriad misinformation about vaccines and the pandemic during the committee’s time. On Friday, the committee convened again, bringing some of the same people to speak.

The committee had previously faced criticism for its awkward name, which has been promoted in abbreviated form by the QAnon-friendly political nonprofit The America Project. The abbreviated name, NCSWIC, is a commonly used abbreviation in the QAnon world, where it means “Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming,” alluding to predictions of arrests and executions of members of the “deep state.”

Although the official name of the panel spells the word “southwestern” correctly, the committee was listed as “NCSWIC” on the Arizona Legislature’s website and the abbreviation was used by outside boosters.

The Republican elected officials on the panel were state Sens. T.J. Shope and Janae Shamp, the chair and vice-chair, respectively, of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee; state Rep. Steve Montenegro, who chairs the state House of Representatives’ Health and Human Services Committee; and U.S. Reps. Andy Biggs, Eli Crane and Paul Gosar.

While the state legislators were in attendance, Biggs, Crane and Gosar only appeared electronically and delivered pre-recorded video addresses. All three were in Washington, D.C., Friday as Republicans are locked in a fight over who should lead the U.S. House of Representatives.

“It’s disheartening to see Arizona’s elected officials once again provide a platform for spreading dangerous disinformation about vaccines for children,” Becky Christensen, founder and state campaigns director of SAFE Communities Coalition, the nation’s first pro-vaccine political advocacy organization, said in a statement to the Arizona Mirror. “Public health should be guided by fact-based information, not misinformation. Their actions undermine efforts to safeguard our communities.”

Christensen added that lawmakers should seek “responsible and informed discourse” to help better guide public health decisions.

Misinformation returns

Dr. Peter McCoullough once again boldly proclaimed that the COVID-19 virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China. There is no consensus on the origin of the virus.

McCoullough is known for spreading unfounded claims, especially around the origins of the virus. He previously has stated that he believed the pandemic was “planned” and has promoted the QAnon conspiracy film “Plandemic.”

McCoullough has become a darling to those in both QAnon and the broader conspiracy world, appearing regularly on shows like the one hosted by conspiracy theorist Stew Peters, who said the COVID vaccine is a “bioweapon.” Peters also was behind multiple QAnon conspiracy documentaries that made dubious claims about the vaccine, including that it included snake venom.

McCoullough has also appeared on disgraced retired Gen. Michael Flynn’s “Reawaken America” tour, where he has denounced drag shows and gender identity issues.

During Friday’s hearing, McCoullough spread even more falsehoods around COVID-19 and vaccine efficacy.

“It is called ‘turbo cancer’ for a reason,” McCoullough said, adding that he believes it is “theoretically possible” that multiple vaccines “could be related to cancer.”

The term “turbo cancer” comes from people who have spread false information about the COVID vaccine, attempting to link it to an aggressive form of cancer. There is no established link between the vaccine and cancer, and studies have found either no association or found a decreased risk of lymphoma.

McCoullough also continued to spread a false claim that 17 million people have been killed by the vaccine. The notion comes from a highly flawed analysis of data claiming that mortality rates were spiking because of the vaccine. McCoullough also spread other similar claims, such as saying that more than 500,000 people in the United States were killed by the vaccine, an idea based on a misrepresentation of United Kingdom data.

And McCoullough appeared to make claims that alluded to a conspiracy theory widely adopted by QAnon adherents, which was featured in a discredited film, claiming that blood clots found in people’s bodies were caused by the COVID vaccine.

The film, “Died Suddenly,” suggests it is all part of a shadowy plot to depopulate the world. But experts who have examined the film’s claims have said that many of the clots appear to be post-mortem clots. Cases of clots caused by the vaccine are “very rare,” according to one study that found only approximately 1,000 cases out of 2 million. The movie also featured incidents that occurred before the pandemic in 2020, but presented them as consequences of vaccination.

A member of the panel also has a direct connection to the conspiracy film.

Dr. Peter Chambers, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, appears in the film speaking about the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database, or DMED, which he claimed showed a spike in medical conditions in the military which he attributed to COVID-19 vaccines.

Chambers’ claim has been debunked since 2021 by multiple fact-checkers.

The former military doctor is also a believer in the debunked conspiracy theory that 5G cellular technology is connected to the COVID-19 virus. Chambers also was part of a failed lawsuit seeking to prevent the military from implementing a COVID vaccine mandate.

Chambers’ presentation to the committee included a slide that referred to the “globalists.”

The globalist conspiracy theory is a far-right conspiracy theory with roots in antisemitism and is also often connected to the idea of a “New World Order” and a one-world government, most often with the Jewish people at the center of the conspiracy. Peters, the conspiracy theory talk show host and the man behind “Died Suddenly,” frequently works with antisemites and white supremacists. Chambers has also been supported by the America Project, which boosted the hearing and helped fund the Arizona Senate’s partisan “audit” of the 2020 election.

Also returning to the committee was Aaron Siri, an attorney who is most well known for his work with an organization called the Informed Consent Action Network, or ICAN.

ICAN has been on the frontlines of anti-vaccine misinformation and is led by Del Bigtree, a television and film producer who has become an anti-vaccine activist. ICAN was listed as one of the “key organizations” tied to the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s “The Disinformation Dozen,” the anti-vaxxers who play leading roles in spreading digital misinformation about COVID vaccines. Chambers mentioned that he worked with Bigtree on anti-vaccine issues.

Siri claimed that “you can’t say vaccines have reduced chronic health issues” among children.

“I’m not saying vaccines cause those,” he said, sharing a misleading claim on chronic illness in children. “Something is definitely going on.”

The committee also heard from Arizona resident Calli Varner, who claimed that she had a stroke due to the COVID vaccine.

Varner had an ischemic stroke when a blood-clot made its way to her brain. Strokes have been on the rise in younger populations, with doctors theorizing that one cause could be patent foramen ovale, which is present in between 24 to 40% of the population and generally goes unnoticed.

Varner told the committee that she has had various health problems develop, including an autoimmune issue, since she got vaccinated. McCoullough said he had been consulting with the Scottsdale resident about her experience and used the opportunity to say that strokes, infertility and immune disorders are being caused by the vaccine.

Studies have shown that those who contracted COVID-19 have an increased risk of stroke, while those who got the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines and did not contract COVID -19 have “no difference in stroke risk.” There is also no evidence that the vaccine causes infertility and no conclusive evidence to suggest a link between the vaccine and autoimmune disorders.

McCoullough also once again spoke about the scientifically unsound plan to help people remove spike proteins from people’s bodies.

Shamp, a former nurse who has claimed she was fired because she refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine, came up with the idea for the hearing and those in attendance applauded her for putting it together.

Shamp, who was present during the events of Jan. 6, has spread a multitude of QAnon conspiracy theories online for years, including a post with “NCSWIC” in it. Shamp said at the end of the hearing Friday that another one will be happening “sometime in December.”

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

an 7 23

kentucky MAGA Republican James Comer, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, has been exposed as basically a con manwith his phony Hunter Biden bribe witness. Now he is trying to rewrite the history of Trump and Covid.

Comer’s latest stunt to try to whitewash Trump’s role in the unnecessary death of at least a half-million Americans is to argue — nonsensically — that the virus came out of the Wuhan virology lab and therefore something, something, something Trump is not responsible. He’s doing this with House Oversight Committee hearings this week.

The reason Comer and other MAGA Republicans are working so hard to push this perennial theory (which may be true, but so what?) is that they think directing the nation’s attention to the Wuhan lab — which got collaboration and minor funding from Anthony Fauci’s realm of the government — will point us at Fauci and thus distract us all from how many Americans Trump let die and why.

And it’s the “why” Trump intentionally let a half million Americans die unnecessarily where our media, and the Democrats, are really missing the story.

April 7, 2020 was the day everything changed in America. And hardly anybody realizes it.

It was the day that caused Jared Kushner to decide that letting Black and Hispanic Americans in Blue states die of Covid — yes, intentionally using the force of law and social pressure to push people into death’s jaws — could become part of what he called “an effective political strategy” to help them win the 2020 election, and Donald Trump signed off on it.

The most unreported story of the pandemic, the one that seems destined to be overlooked as histories are being written, is what Trump did when he learned the Covid coronavirus was largely killing Black and Hispanic people and mostly sparing whites.

The moment he came to that realization he completely altered the US response to the pandemic, leading to the unnecessary death of 300,000 to 500,000 Americans.

Deaths that he and his advisors apparently believed (correctly) would be, outside of nursing home residents, disproportionately Black and Hispanic people.

It’s an amazing story and the evidence is easily found. But even Congressman Jamie Raskin missed an opportunity to point it out when he corrected Comer during yesterday’s hearing to say:

”[E]ven if the virus came from a lab, as indeed it could have, we don't know that yet, that would only deepen Donald Trump’s culpability because he was the one who repeatedly and enthusiastically praised China’s early handling of the pandemic and assured us that he was working closely with President Xi on the response to it.”

But when you line up the timeline and events of 2020, a much more sinister picture of Trump’s willingness to let Americans die — and the reason why he was willing to let particular Americans die — emerges that is pretty damn compelling.

Here’s how it played out. It’s the story of the crime of mass death done entirely for political purposes.

Through January of 2020, Covid was limited to a few clusters in the US.

Trump — who’d privately told Bob Woodward the disease was a “killer” that “rips you apart” — kept downplaying its severity and assuring Americans there was nothing to worry about.

On January 30th the World Health Organization declared the outbreak “a public health emergency of international concern.”

Louise and I joined two of my brothers and several of their and our kids on a family cruise the next day; when we left the ship and flew home on February 8th most of us were sick (we still don’t know if it was Covid) and the 3,700 passengers and crew of a different ship, the Diamond Princess, were getting headlines around the world, quarantined off the coast of Japan for two long weeks with hundreds of cases of Covid.

March 2020 was the month when things went to hell here in the United States. On March 5th there were 129 known cases and only 11 deaths in the US: just 33 days later, hospitals were using refrigerated trucks as morgues and over 10,000 Americans were dead of Covid.

Fear ran through communities and stalked our homes. We were washing our groceries with bleach after picking them up at the store’s parking lot from people wearing masks, goggles, and gloves. We bought up all the air filters in the country. We worked from home when we could. We isolated ourselves from other people as much as was humanly possible.

Within those few weeks in March and early April, serious Covid outbreaks were showing up across the Northeast and Trump — who had two years earlier shut downboth of the two federal pandemic task forces Obama had put into place after the Ebola scare — charged Jared Kushner with responding to the crisis.

Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes.

By March 7th, US deaths had risen from 4 to only 22, but that was enough to spur federal action. Trump’s official emergency declaration came on March 11th, and most of the country shut down during the following week.

The skies and highways fell silent, the Dow collapsed, and millions of Americans were laid off but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration.

Jared Kushner put together a task force of preppie 30-something white men he knew from college to coordinate getting Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) from Trump buddies and companies close to Republican members of Congress into hospitals.

They even had a plan for the Post Office to distribute 650 million masks — 5 to every American household — to slow the pandemic.

But then came April 7th, just one month later, when the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States. It was followed the day later with the all-caps headline across the top of the front page: BLACK AMERICANS BEAR THE BRUNT AS DEATHS CLIMB.

It hit conservative media, Donald Trump, and Jared Kushner like a lightning bolt.

Most of the non-elderly people dying from Covid, the report found, were Black or Hispanic, not White people.

As The New York Times reported on April 7th:

“The coronavirus is infecting and killing black people in the United States at disproportionately high rates…

“In Illinois, 43 percent of people who have died from the disease and 28 percent of those who have tested positive are African-Americans, a group that makes up just 15 percent of the state’s population. African-Americans, who account for a third of positive tests in Michigan, represent 40 percent of deaths in that state even though they make up 14 percent of the population. In Louisiana, about 70 percent of the people who have died are black, though only a third of that state’s population is.”

Republicans responded with a collective, “What the hell?!?”

Limbaugh declared solemnly that afternoon:

“With the coronavirus, I have been waiting for the racial component.”

And here it was:

“The coronavirus now hits African Americans harder,” Limbaugh intoned, “harder than illegal aliens, harder than women. It hits African Americans harder than anybody: disproportionate representation.”

It didn’t take a medical savant, of course, to figure out why, and it had nothing to do with the biology of race or Covid: it was purely systemic racism. African Americans die disproportionately from everything, from heart disease to strokes to cancer to childbirth, and arealso over-represented in low-paid public-facing service jobs where they would more easily catch Covid.

It’s a symptom of a racially rigged economy and a healthcare system that only responds to money, which America has conspired to keep from African Americans for over 400 years. Of course Black people are going to die more frequently from coronavirus.

But the New York Times and the Washington Post simultaneously publishing April 7th front-page articles about that disparity — followed by it leading or making the news that night on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox — echoed across the rightwing media landscape like a Fourth of July fireworks display.

Tucker Carlson, the only prime-time Fox “News” host who’d previously expressed serious concerns about the dangers of the virus, changed his tune the same day, as documented by Media Matters for America.

Now, Tucker said:

“[W]e can begin to consider how to improve the lives of the rest, the countless Americans who have been grievously hurt by this, by our response to this. How do we get 17 million of our most vulnerable citizens back to work? That’s our task.”

“The rest” are white people. Those “vulnerable citizens” Tucker wanted to get back to work appear to be disproportionately minorities. As a report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus noted:

“Essential workers who needed to work in person, and their family members, were significantly more likely to contract the coronavirus early in the crisis. These essential workers disproportionately earned low wages and were more likely to be people of color.

“Black and Latina women were particularly ‘overrepresented as essential workers’ at greater risk of coronavirus infection ‘with Latina women making up 22% of women grocery store workers and Black women making up 27% of women home health aide workers’…”

On the other hand, salaried workers — overwhelmingly white — were telecommuting. For over a year I did my show from home, for example, as did all my peers at SiriusXM, Free Speech TV, and in most media operations around the country. Everywhere people could work from home, most employers were making accommodations.

But Trump wanted the rest of the economy to recover from the election-year shutdown shock because he knew presidents running for reelection during economic bad times almost always lose. He knew that if he wanted to win in 2020, that meant getting “essential” workers like transit drivers, store clerks, and people in slaughterhouses back to their jobs.

Particularly if they were Black or Brown.

Brit Hume joined Tucker’s show and, using his gravitas as a “real news guy,” intoned:

“The disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.”

Left unsaid was the issue of for whom it was “not quite as dangerous,” but Limbaugh listeners and Fox “News” viewers are anything but unsophisticated when it comes to hearing dog-whistles on behalf of white supremacy.

Only 12,677 Americans were dead by that April day, but now that Trump and his rightwing media believed most of the non-elderly dying people were and would be Black and Hispanic, things were suddenly very, very different.

Now it was time to quit talking about people dying and start talking about getting those Black and Brown people back to work, even if it meant exposing them to a deadly disease!

On April 12th, Trump retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci and declared, in another tweet, that he had the sole authority to open the US back up and would announce a specific plan to do that “shortly.”

On April 13th, the ultra-rightwing, nearly-entirely-white-managed US Chamber of Commercepublished a policy paper titled Implementing A National Return to Work Plan.

The next day, Freedomworks, the billionaire-founded and -funded group that animated the Tea Party against Obamacare a decade earlier, published an op-ed on their website calling for an “economic recovery” program including an end to the capital gains tax and a new law to “shield” businesses from Covid-deaths and -injuries lawsuits.

Three days after that,Freedomworks and the House Freedom Caucus issued a joint statement declaring that “[I]t’s time to re-open the economy.”

Freedomworks published their “#ReopenAmerica Rally Planning Guide” encouraging conservatives to show up “in person” at their state capitols and governor’s mansions, and, for signage, to “Keep it short: ‘I’m essential,’ ‘Let me work,’ ‘Let Me Feed My Family’” and to “Keep [the signs looking] homemade.”

One of the first #OpenTheCountry rallies to get widespread national attention was April 19th in mostly-white New Hampshire. Over the next several weeks, rallies filled with angry white people had metastasized across the nation, from Oregon to Arizona, Delaware, North Carolina, Virginia, Illinois and elsewhere.

One that drew particularly high levels of media attention — complete with swastikas, confederate flags, and assault rifles — was directed against the governor of Michigan, rising Democratic star Gretchen Whitmer.

This was around the time long-standing rightwing networks began to awaken and coordinate with each other. They reached out to members of Congress and the Senate and found allies. Trump explicitly encouraged them to require low-wage essential workers to return to their jobs.

Suddenly things began to change as the federal government stopped trying to save lives and started promoting policies that would eventually kill — unnecessarily — a half-million Americans.

NBC News, when they’d gotten hold of April emails from within the White House, ran the headline:

“Trump Administration Scrapped Plan to Send Every American a Mask in April, Email Shows.”

When Rachel Maddow reported on meat-packing plants that were epicenters of mass infection, theconservative Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Courtpointed out that the virus flare wasn’t coming from the “regular folks” of the surrounding white community: the sick people were mostly Hispanic and Black.

He essentially said, “No big deal.”

The Republican meme was now well-established and was being repeated virtually daily on Fox “News” and rightwing talk radio. Working-age white people were far, far less likely to get less sick, more likely to be asymptomatic, or — even if they were unlucky and got sick — most likely to survive a trip to the hospital.

Then came news that bigger outbreaks than we realized were now happening in meat packing plants, places with few white people (and the few whites in them were largely poor and thus disposable).

Trump’s response was to issue an executive order using the Defense Production Act (which he had refused to use to order production of testing or PPE equipment) to order the largely Hispanic and Black workforce back into the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.

African Americans were dying in our cities, Hispanics were dying in meat packing plants, the elderly of all races were dying in nursing homes.

But the death toll among working age affluent white people (who could telecommute and/or were less likely to be obese, have hypertension, or struggle with diabetes) was relatively low.

It took a lot of pressure off Trump and his Republicans. They could now politicize the virus, and, if they did it right, they could do so publicly with a “wink” to their white supremacist base. And if they could get the economy back to cranking along within the next few months, they might be able to pull the 2020 election out of the bag.

As an “expert” member of Jared Kushner’s team of young, unqualified volunteers supervising the administration’s PPE response noted to Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban:

“The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”

It was, after all, exclusively Blue States that were then hit hard by the virus: Washington, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. And there was an election coming in just a few months.

At year’s end, the United States was ranked 5th worst in the world in our response (behind Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Iran); we had about 20% of the world’s Covid deaths, but only 4.5% of the world’s population.

The lasting legacy of Trump’s changes in policy and encouraging Covid skepticism is that today we’re the world’s worst in terms of death and sickness, period. He’d thrown his unqualified slumlord son-in-law Jared Kushner at something even a professional would’ve found the challenge of a lifetime. And then manipulated it to help him in the upcoming 2020 election.

More people have died of Covid in America, as a percentage or in absolute terms, than any other developed country in the world.

Why? Because Trump and his Republican enablers and co-conspirators were just fine with getting the economy back on track to win an election over the bodies of dead Black and Hispanic people, particularly when they could blame it on Democratic Blue-state governors.

Former Attorney General Kennedy’s grandson Max Kennedy Jr, 26, was one of the administration’s volunteers, who blew the whistle to Congress on Kushner and Trump. As Jane Mayer wrote forThe New Yorker:

“Kennedy was disgusted to see that the political appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as ‘a marketing genius,’ because, Kennedy said they’d told him, ‘he personally came up with the strategy of blaming the [Blue] states.’”

As that report released from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus reported just a few months ago:

“In the first half of 2020, African Americans and Latinos had death rates from coronavirus that far outweighed those of whites. While 62% of the population age 45-54 in 2020 was white, this population accounted for only 22% of coronavirus deaths in that age range. …

“Disparities were even more pronounced in some states such as Louisiana, where where in April 2020, African Americans represented 70% of coronavirus deaths despite being only one third of the state’s population.”

And once Trump and Kushner put that death-based reelection strategy into place in April, it became politically impossible to back away from it, even as more and more Red state white people became infected.

As Trump told Dr. Deborah Birx in mid-April and she reported in her book Silent Invasion: The Untold Story…:

“‘We will never shut down the country again. Never.’ His pupils hardened into points of anger… I felt the blood drain from my face, and I shivered slightly.”

Trump’s change — from a policy of prevention to a policy of “herd immunity” once he realized on April 7, 2020 that healthy white people were largely immune from death by the coronavirus — put the US on-course to have the worst Covid death rate in the world.

That was the day everything changed because Trump and Kushner were willing to let Black and Hispanic people die on a gamble they could still put the economy back together fast enough to win the 2020 election.

Over a million Americans have died so far, more than any other nation. Multiple studies show that up to 500,000 of those deaths wouldn’t have happened if Trump had just promoted masks and lock-downs through the year before the vaccine was available and, since then, if he had condemned the anti-vax movement that emerged in the last months of his presidency.

But he didn’t do either. All because he knew the virus disproportionately killed Black and Brown people and he was willing to do anything to win the election.

And sure enough, as Congress reported last December, a massive number of those deaths were — as a clear result of Trump’s policy ­— among Black and Hispanic people.

If that’s not racial mass slaughter, aka genocide at a Serbian war crimes level, then the phrase has lost much of its meaning.

Jack Smith: are you listening?

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note covid fail

odd for HOST to ref satan? vs guest?

https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-anchor-fabricating-story/

no lnx twt

'Complete lie': Fox News anchor allegedly fabricated story during primetime guest hosting gig

David Badash andThe New Civil Rights Movement June 07, 2023

After firing its star host, Tucker Carlson, Fox News has been scheduling its other anchors to fill in as guest hosts on a week-by-week basis, with some viewers, if not network brass, seeing these as auditions.

This week Harris Faulkner, host of the far-right network’s “The Faulkner Focus” and co-host of “Outnumbered,” filled in during what was once Carlson’s slot.

Reaction online has not been positive.

On Monday, Faulkner claimed she had been kicked out of a restaurant for praying, in what The Wrap called a “blistering, biblical monologue about the ongoing ‘attack’ on the Christian faith in America.”

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“We know who we are. And we know who’s we are,” Faulkner told the dwindling Fox News audience. “For those of us who believe, we must be bold in our faith right now. When you gather in public spaces pray thankfully over your food, even when the server gives you the stink-eye, or tells the manager that your peaceful grace is triggering them. Had it happen to me. I’ve been asked to leave a restaurant for openly bowing my head in prayer hands. In America. It’s all good. They don’t deserve my money anyway.”

Many demanded Faulkner name the restaurant, or provide proof. Among them, The Daily Beast’s senior media reporter Justin Baragona, who tweeted, Monday night, “I’m going to ask Fox News PR if Harris Faulkner can provide the name of the restaurant and date when this happened. Will update if I receive a response.”

READ MORE: Pence Presidential Launch Mocked for Suggesting Drag Queens Are Assaulting ‘American Values’ – With No Mention of Trump

Baragona has yet to state he’s received a response.

Another doubter is Republican former Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who wrote: “We need the name of this restaurant and when it happened. If true that’s awful. IF it’s not true… which seems most likely the case… then there needs to be accountability. Lies are not the tool of the Lord. And the USA isn’t his god.”

During that same monologue, as The Daily Beast noted, Faulkner told Fox News viewers: “Women and children are being redesigned by some sort of mad leftist science experiment.”

“It’s as though people on the left have more free time than anybody else. They want to acronym and pronoun us to death,” she said, apparently taking a swing at the LGBTQ community. “Well know this: the Lord has determined I am a woman, and my pronouns are U.S.A.”

“We are in a spiritual fightfor the soul of America,” she also claimed, “and if you think that’s not true, take a look around at what’s going on.The devil has gotten into some people. The worst part of experiencing our country ripping at the seams is that our enemies are massing, feasting on the tastiness of our weaknesses.”

Baragona pointed out, “In her first night on primetime filling in for Tucker’s old timeslot, Harris Faulkner drew 1.59 million total viewers and just 105,000 in the 25-54 advertising demographic, finishing behind CNN and MSNBC in the demo. Tucker averaged 3.26 million total viewers last quarter.”

READ MORE: ‘Isn’t There a Beach in Mexico Waiting for You?’: Cruz Mocked for Claiming Garland Will Indict Trump Over SCOTUS Seat Loss

Former CNN media reporter Brian Stelter added, “And Jen Psaki was filling in at 8 on MSNBC,” suggesting MSNBC might have had fewer regular viewers during that time slot.

But the real outrage came on Tuesday, when Faulkner delivered what many deemed an outright “lie,” and served up proof of their accusations.

Faulker told Fox News viewers, “You know, we didn’t actually close schools in 1918, during the Spanish flu pandemic.”

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That’s false. Provably false.

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“And sometimes we make dangerously bad decisions, like pandemic lockdowns and keeping our own children home from schools when a virus was hurting them far less often than adults,” she said, ignoring the fact that family transmission often started with children (see below.) “You know, we didn’t actually close schools in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic. We didn’t even have penicillin back then. We did sacrifice. We suffered but then we pressed on. Our enemies hate us for surviving, but they would love to be like us.”

“This is blatantly untrue and takes about 3 seconds to fact check,” observed Media Matters for America’s Kat Abu.

And fact check many did.

Some noted that penicillin is an antibiotic, not an antiviral, and would have had no effect on the “Spanish flu,” an erroneous term (the first case identified was in the U.S.) for what is broadly known as the 1918 flu pandemic. The CDC says, “The 1918 H1N1 flu pandemic, sometimes referred to as the “Spanish flu,” killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, including an estimated 675,000 people in the United States.”

READ MORE: Buttigieg: Republicans Are Targeting LGBTQ People Because They ‘Don’t Want to Talk About’ Their Own ‘Radical Positions’

Attorney Brad Moss, calling Faulkner’s claim a “complete lie,” also tweeted: “Utter and total falsity. You would think these fools would have some shame after paying Dominion hundreds of millions of dollars.”

And he came with receipts, including a screenshot of a New York Times article from October, 1918, noting the entire state of Pennsylvania had “indefinitely” shut down all schools, churches, theaters, and “all places of public assemblage.”

Others pointed to a PBS article from 2020 that reads: “During the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, when an estimated 675,000 people died in the United States alone, the majority of public schools were closed for weeks to months on end. But three major cities — New York City, Chicago, and New Haven — kept their schools open amid valid questions and concerns about safety.”

So false was Faulkner’s claim, a readers’ note was added to video of it. It points to a study that states: “During the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, many local authorities made the controversial decision to close schools.”

Others on social media pointed to an article published last week by theUniversity of Minnesota: “More than 70% of US household COVID spread started with a child, study suggests.”

As for Faulkner’s claim that, “Our enemies hate us for surviving, but they would love to be like us,” the U.S. ranks 15th worst among all countries around the world in COVID deaths per capita.

Meanwhile, Baragona also weighed in, noting: “Throughout the height of the pandemic, Harris Faulkner would only broadcast her show from the safety of her house.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/**how-fox-paved-way-desantis-anti-vax-hit-trump**

Thanks to Fox News, the Republican Party is embroiled in a furious debate over whether it was a good idea to save millions of American lives.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ nascent campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is floundering in the early going. He entered the race last month with a sizable polling deficit behind former President Donald Trump, his Twitter Spaces announcement event was a disaster, and his initial rollout hasn’t produced a bump in his support. DeSantis has seemed reluctant to go after his chief opponent, and when he has the results have been lackluster.

But on Thursday afternoon, his campaign opened a new line of attack, targeting the former president for his role in the development of the COVID-19 vaccines. The “DeSantis War Room” posted a video on Twitter of an Iowa town hall attendee telling Trump “we have lost people because you supported the jab.” The DeSantis account reported that Trump responded “by praising the COVID mRNA shots, doesn't acknowledge any of the adverse effects" [twit vid]

the DeSantis camp’s anti-vax attack on Trump speaks to the influence of right-wing media outlets like Fox in shaping the battlefield for the 2024 primary campaign.Their reflexive support for Trump over the years on issues like his role in the January 6 insurrection, his noxious racism, and his various alleged crimes put those topics off-limits for his opponents. But while some at Fox with ensuring the development of the vaccines, the network paved the way for the DeSantis campaign’s salvo by spending much of the last two-plus years stoking fears among its viewers about the shots.

Fox emerged as the most ferocious opponent of the COVID-19 vaccines, which provide crucial protection with a minimal risk profile and have prevented millions of American deaths from the virus since their initial U.S. deployment in December 2020. The network’s most popular figures regularly denounced the shots as dangerous and ineffective and the vaccination campaign as a nefarious plot to control Americans. Fox’s coverage worsened over time, and by the early weeks of 2023 a whopping 78% of the network’s vaccine segments included claims undermining vaccinations. The results have been devastating, with Republicans getting vaccinated against COVID-19 at lower rates than other Americans and dying from it at higher ones.

Fox’s lethal coverage of COVID-19 vaccines presented an opportunity for ambitious politicians like DeSantis, who is particularly attuned to what happens on the network and in the broader right-wing press. DeSantis once touted his own efforts to distribute the vaccines, which he credited with “saving lives.” But as the right’s discourse changed, he changed with it.

DeSantis cozied up to the GOP’s anti-vax wing — and used his power as governor on their behalf.DeSantis’ Florida is the only state that does not recommend the COVID-19 vaccine for children, and it “recommends against males aged 18 to 39 receiving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines” after a flawed study that was politically tainted by the vaccine skeptic DeSantis appointed as the state’s top medical officer found the shots were harmful for that group. DeSantis even called for a grand jury to investigate “any and all wrongdoing” related to the vaccines and “bring legal accountability to those who committed misconduct.” 

Now DeSantis’ campaign is deploying the vaccines as a wedge issue,trying to make the case that the GOP electorate should oppose Trump due to his involvement in their development. The conservative reaction has been diverse, with Never Trumpers criticizing DeSantis for promoting “anti-vax nonsense,” anti-anti-Trumpersmaking excuses, and right-wing anti-vaxxers denouncing Trump.

One person who hasn’t weighed in is Rupert Murdoch, the Fox head and reported DeSantis supporter who was among the first to get the shot — then abandoned his viewers to the virus.

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aha NOTE DATE reboot// fauci target, CCP, WHO // WEF klaus  //Soros

:{https://coloradotimesrecorder.com/:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:**2023/05**:{/boebert-promotes-globalist-conspiracy-at-rally-opposing-world-health-organization/53533/}:

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• Erik Maulbetsch @ Colorado Times Recorder: Boebert Promotes ‘Globalist’ Conspiracy at Rally Opposing World Health Organization.

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NEWS

Boebert Promotes ‘Globalist’ Conspiracy at Rally Opposing World Health Organization

by

Erik Maulbetsch

posted on

May 18, 2023

Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO) joined many of her Freedom Caucus colleagues in a full-blown “globalist” conspiracy press conference yesterday.

In addition to a dozen or so members of Congress, the “Exit the WHO [World Health Organization]” event at the Capitol featured organizer Frank Gaffney, a notorious Islamophobe whose Center for Security Policy is an anti-Muslim hate group.

Gaffney and the lawmakers, including Boebert, made numerous unsubstantiated claims, from the World Health Organization being controlled by China, to blaming it for the COVID pandemic, to claiming it is the vehicle for a plot to force all nations under a single worldwide government.

Image created by Gaffney’s Sovereignty Coalition blames the WHO for all American COVID deaths.

Gaffney kicked off his remarks with a claim that has been repeatedly debunked:

“The Chinese Communist Party runs the World Health Organization,” said Gaffney. “It runs the World Health Organization in furtherance of its long-standing objective of global governance- that’s one world government.”

In advance of the rally, Gaffney’s Sovereignty Coalition has created a “meme library” for the purpose of attacking the WHO. The images are rife with unsubstantiated conspiracies, including one that says: “The W.H.O. killed over One Million Americans?” presumably blaming the organization for all American COVID deaths.

None of this is true. The fact checks debunking the various claims are legion, and longstanding. Here’s a line from the Associated Press:

“CLAIM: A legally-binding World Health Organization ‘pandemic treaty’ will give the organization the authority to control U.S. policies during a pandemic, including those on vaccines, lockdowns, school closures and more.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The voluntary treaty, which is in draft form and is still far away from ratification, does not overrule any nation’s ability to pass individual pandemic-related policies, multiple experts, including one involved in the draft process, told The Associated Press.”

Boebert mentioned several classic conspiracy tropes in her brief speech. As the fact-check above makes clear, the U.S. is not surrendering its sovereignty to the WHO. She then lists three reasons the WHO is bad: she claims it’s controlled by China, it’s linked to the World Economic Forum, and it sabotaged the investigation of COVID’s origin. None of these are true. The WHO is a specialized agency of the United Nations, governed by an executive board of 34 countries that currently includes the United States and China.

While there are disputes over how aggressively the WHO pursued the COVID origin investigation, it’s Boebert’s second point that raises the conspiracy red flag. Without any context or follow-up, she links the WHO to the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is a dog-whistle reference that “globalist” conspiracists no doubt heard loud and clear.

“On Day One Biden made it clear he wasn’t fit for the job when he brought the United States back into the World Health Organization,” said Boebert. “The results of Biden’s failed foreign policy is absolutely astonishing. The Biden Administration plans to surrender U.S sovereignty to unelected bureaucracy— [interrupted by heckler]. To paint a clear picture the Biden Administration is giving the same organization that is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, the same [that has an] affiliation with the World Economic Forum, and the same organization that sabotaged an investigation into the origin of COVID, more control over the American people’s lives. The WHO continues to spread lies and disinformation by praising China’s response to the virus as transparent, which frankly isn’t true.

“Before Biden took office the WHO was unable to do anything without written permission from our government. Now, if Joe Biden gets his way the WHO will have even more control over the most most private parts of our lives. This is not about public health! The WHO made it very clear they will censor anyone who does not agree with their agenda to control every aspect of people’s lives. They want total control over vaccinations, digitalization of health records, and your travel. Under this plan the Biden Administration is adopting Marxism by distributing medicine based on “equity.” This is not what a constitutional republic looks like. This is a dictatorship and we must defund the WHO and stop this radical agenda being put forward by the Biden Administration.”

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Sovereignty Coalition tweet promoting John Birch Society’s petition to defund the WHO.

Responding to an email request for evidence of her claims and comment on her participation in the rally, a spokesman for Congresswoman Boebert sent a number of links to previous statements and two published reports.

With regards to why she references the World Economic Forum, the spokesman offered five previous tweets she wrote attacking the WEF.

Those include:

“Rather than trying to please Klaus Schwab and George Soros, the people elected to serve our nation should try and actually make the lives of the American people better.”

“Klaus Schwab: ‘The future is being built by us.’ Take it from me, you don’t want to be a part of ANY FUTURE designed by the WEF – because globalism isn’t about YOU, it’s about THEM CONTROLLING YOU.”

Another tweet references a conspiracy that “the WEF announced they hired hundreds of thousands of “information warriors” to police the social media narrative.” The conspiracy was debunked the same day as Boebert’s tweet.

Conspiracies accusing the World Economic Forum of attempting to control the planet and place all humans under a single global government are widely understood to be antisemitic.

Her office also shared a May 2022 opinion column by former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson that contained nearly all the points Boebert made in her speech, some in nearly identical language.

A week prior to yesterday’s rally, Gaffney’s group also shared content from another organization making the same “call: “defund and withdraw” call: the infamously racist and conspiracist John Birch Society.

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U.S. Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Chip Roy (R-TX) urged the public to call Congress and demand passage of a pair of bills they have introduced that would end American payments to the WHO and withdraw the United States from the agency.

The John Birch Society also supports their legislation, as well as the overall “Exit the WHO” demand. It echoes the Sovereignty Coalition’s conspiracist claims on its own website:

“The WHO’s threat to national sovereignty and individual freedom is becoming increasingly blatant and obvious,” claims the John Birch Society. “Not only is the WHO effectively controlled by Communist China and other subversive globalist interests, but it is actively seeking greater, totalitarian control over its member nations, along with all of humanity. If the WHO gets its way, U.S. national sovereignty will become a thing of the past, and the WHO will have total power to mandate vaccinations, impose vaccine passports, and implement a digital health ID— worse, the Biden administration is trying to help the WHO achieve its tyrannical goals.”

Another Sovereignty Coalition meme links the WHO to drag queens, apparently implying some sort of international plan to introduce LGBTQ content to children.

Boebert isn’t the only Coloradan connected to the Sovereignty Coalition. Dede Laugesen, a former Trump campaign staffer and wife of Colorado Springs Gazette editorial page editor Wayne Laugesen works for Gaffney.

She promoted the rally on social media and was praised by longtime anti-WHO activist James Roguski, who after the event wrote “All the credit for the press conference goes to Frank Gaffney, Reggie Littlejohn, DeDe Laugesen, everyone at Sovereignty Coalition.”

The full video of the press conference is available to watch here.

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arizona Senate Republicans began a two-day convening of hearings Thursday morning centered around "supposed 'atrocities' committed by public health officials in response to the Covid-19 pandemic," Rolling Stone reports.

Planned by the newly formed Novel Coronavirus South Western Intergovernmental Committee (NCSWIC), "the QAnon-inflected, anti-vaccine circus" according to Rolling Stone, will involve "appearances from a murderers' row of hard-right federal congressmen, including Reps. Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, and Eli Crane."

Additionally, the publication reports "The NCSWIC committee will take testimony from a panel of notorious doctors who have touted unproven and discredited treatments for Covid — includingone doc who preaches that Covid public-health restrictions were, in fact, 'Satan's Wholistic Health Care Plan.'"

READ MORE: 'Duct tape people to a tree!' Arizona GOP goes further off the rails

In 2021, according to AZCentral, Arizona State GOP Senator Ron Johnson tweeted a false claim saying, "in England, more vaccinated than unvaccinated individuals are succumbing to the disease."

Additionally, Arizona Republican Party Chair Dr. Kelli Ward retweeted the claim.

AZCentral reported, "According to the latest studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention individuals who are unvaccinated are 11 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than those who are vaccinated," adding, "Likewise, vaccinated individuals are five times less likely to get infected and 10 less likely to end up in the hospital if they do."

Furthermore, the publication added "As factcheckers at Reuters concluded, 'Suggestions that higher numbers vaccinated individuals are dying in England than unvaccinated omits context that most of the population has been vaccinated. Evidence shows that COVID-19 vaccines reduce the risk of serious illness, hospitalization and death.'"

Per Rolling Stone, State Senate president pro tempore T.J. Shope insisted in a "teaser video" for the hearings, he and fellow state GOP leaders would "expose all the atrocities committed during the pandemic response, and Senator Janae Shamp added "she lost her" nursing "job for refusing to take the 'jab,'" claiming "lives and livelihoods were lost for no other reason than horrific government overreach."

READ MORE: How far-right MAGA conspiracy theorists are causing a 'near-civil war within the Arizona GOP': report

Refusing to elaborate further on the "atrocities" claim, Shope said, "Many of our citizens have had an evolution of thought on the pandemic — myself included. And that is why I believe it's so important for those of you feeling this way to tune in. You're not alone."

"Appealing directly to the mindset of conspiracy theorists," according to Rolling Stone, "the NCSWIC hearings promise to reveal hidden truths about the dark reality of the medical establishment, and implore viewers to trust their guts over mainstream scientific evidence."

Furthermore, Rolling Stone reports:

A look at the 'expert panelists' engaged by the committee does not reveal a lineup of overt QAnon proponents. But it shows the NCSWIC committee’s abiding interest in unproven cures and treatments for Covid, as well as the unhinged belief that public health interventions to curb the pandemic were more harmful than the disease itself, which has killed more than a million Americans.

Rolling Stone also notes:

In recent years, QAnon has transcended its origin story, and now lives on as a belief system for nearly anyone who believes that the world is run by nefarious, powerful forces who pose as virtuous, but are actually pure evil, whether they be in government, Big Tech or, specifically, Big Pharma.

READ MORE: 'Unqualified handover': Arizona AG sues Republican county for giving GOP recorder election power

Rolling Stone's full report is available at this link (subscription required).AZCentral's report is here. no lnx

Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona Republican Party and (according to her website) still a practicing physician, has joined fellow high profile Republicans whose aim, it seems, is to put as many members of the GOP as possible in…the morgue.

Over the weekend Ward retweeted something from Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, one of the most ardent anti-vaccine misinformation spreaders in the land.

Here is the bottom line.

According to the latest studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention individuals who are unvaccinated are 11 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than those who are vaccinated. Likewise, vaccinated individuals are five times less likely to get infected and 10 less likely to end up in the hospital if they do.

The science is clear. The numbers don’t lie.

What about 'first do no harm'?

Given that, you’d think that high ranking members of a political party would do everything in their power to protect their voters by encouraging them to get vaccinated.

And you’d particularly think that of a physician.

But, no.

Sen. Johnson published a tweet speaking about how, in England, more vaccinated than unvaccinated individuals are succumbing to the disease.

What he doesn’t point out is that a vast majority of that country has been vaccinated, so such a statistic shouldn’t be surprising. He also doesn’t point out that many more individuals would be dying if so many of England’s citizens weren’t vaccinated.

As factcheckers at Reuters concluded, “Suggestions that higher numbers vaccinated individuals are dying in England than unvaccinated omits context that most of the population has been vaccinated. Evidence shows that COVID-19 vaccines reduce the risk of serious illness, hospitalization and death.”

Still, Johnson published his tweet and Ward retweeted it.

As a result of conspiracy-driven misinformation like this there is an excellent chance that more Republicans will follow the apparent guidance of their leaders and…die.

Polls already show that the most unvaccinated group of individuals in the United States are members of the GOP, particularly those who were big supporters of former President Donald Trump.

I thought Kelli Ward liked those people.

Unvaccinated encourage new mutation

As for those who say we shouldn’t care if Dr. Ward transforms herself into Dr. Death, that we shouldn’t care about the unvaccinated, or who say the unvaccinated are only hurting themselves, I would defer to Patrick Remington, a former epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's preventive medicine residency program.

He said, "There’s no question that people who are unvaccinated are the main contributor to the continued transmission of COVID-19 and every transmission presents an opportunity for the virus to mutate to a more contagious and more lethal variant."

Not politics. Science.

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

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florida man

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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/cdc-fda-eviscerate-doctor-antivax/?anplus

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo went mask-off (so to speak) at a press conference in Winter Haven, Florida, Thursday, revealing himself to be an unvarnished antivaxer.

"These vaccines have a terrible safety profile at this point in the pandemic," Ladapo said of the covid vaccines, "You know, I'm not sure anyone should be taking them and that's the honest truth."

"Respectable" antivaxers are normally at pains to convince the public that they're only concerned about the mRNA vaccines, or the use of vaccines in certain populations. For example, they'll say they're not against covid vaccines per se, they're just worried that the risks don't justify the benefits for young men, or for boosters, or whatever. That was Ladapo's tack until the CDC and the FDA eviscerated him in a letter last week, debunking his insinuation that an uptick in reported adverse events is an indication that the covid vaccines are unsafe.

READ MORE: DeSantis to run on 'We were right, they were wrong' COVID results slogan when Florida ranks among the worst

Last month, Ladapo wrote to the heads of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Like so many antivaxers, Ladapo has been doing his own research. Unlike most cranks, he briefly came under investigation for allegedly falsifying the data his department put out about covid vaccines. In his letter, pointed out that reports of adverse vaccine events to the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database had risen since the covid vaccines were introduced.

Judging by his grumbling about federal health agencies at the press conference, Ladapo's feelings were hurt by the reply he got last week from FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. Anyone would be. The two agency heads neatly dismantled Ladapo’s claim that an increase in adverse event reports since the advent of the covid vaccines is an indicator that the covid vaccines are unsafe. The two agency heads also accused Ladapo of fuelling vaccine hesitancy and undermining public health.

"The claim that the increase of VAERS reports of life-threatening conditions reported from Florida and elsewhere represents an increase of risk caused by the COVID-19 vaccines is incorrect, misleading and could be harmful to the American public," the commish and director wrote. They went on to explain exactly why Ladapo's inflammatory statistics are misleading.

"Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination do not mean that a vaccine caused the event," Califf and Walensky said, zeroing in on the logical fallacy behind Ladapo's inflammatory claims, and adding that "The Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for the COVID-19 Vaccines require sponsors and vaccine providers to report certain adverse events through VAERS, so more reports should be expected."

rEAD MORE: 'I obviously don't have evidence': House Republican has a wild new conspiracy about COVID-19 origins

In other words, anyone can submit a report to VAERS if they think there's any connection between a vaccine and a symptom. Moreover, covid vaccines are special because healthcare providers are required to report adverse events even if they don't believe there's any link between the shot and the symptoms. This extra-low reporting threshold is part of the most intensive vaccine safety monitoring program in US history. As Califf and Walensky pointed out in their letter, the CDC and FDA are already well aware of the VAERS reports and that they've been actively looking into them to make sure they're not signs of a larger safety problem.

"Both FDA and CDC have continued to collect outcome data from multiple sources that demonstrate the clear benefit of COVID-19 vaccines in preventing death, serious illness, and hospitalization from SARS-CoV-2 infection, along with indicating a modest benefit in the prevention of infection and transmission that wanes over time, even as new variants have emerged."

ladapo's shift to a hardcore antivaxery may also reflect the presidential ambitions of his boss, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis believes that antivax is the fast lane to the White House, and Ladapo is his eager co-pilot.

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis and Florida's Doctor Antivax

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Jamie Raskin (D-MD) blasted a House Select Committee on Covid-19 by noting that former President Donald Trump had refused for months to investigate the virus's origins but praised China President Xi Jinping instead.

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At a hearing to determine the origins of Covid on Wednesday, Raskin wondered why Republicans were not more upset with Trump's mishandling of the pandemic.

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"The COVID-19 pandemic came to America in 2020, of course, when Donald Trump was president," Raskin told the committee. "And that president's policy failures, magical thinking, and total recklessness caused, according to his own special advisor on COVID, Deborah Birx, the unnecessary death of hundreds of thousands of Americans."

Raskin said that answers "must come from objective, fact-based investigations informed by doctors, scientists, and public health experts."

"Whatever the origins of COVID-19, whether it is bats or bureaucrats, no finding will ever exonerate or rehabilitate Donald Trump for his lethal recklessness in mismanaging the crisis in America, which cost us more than a million lives," he continued. "Indeed, if COVID was actually the product of a lab leak, or the worst bioweapon of mass destruction ever invented, as some have argued, and obviously we don't have the scientific evidence to say any of this yet, it would not only not remove Donald Trump's culpability, it would only deepen his culpability in the most profound way."

The congressman offered a list of tweets in which Donald Trump praised Xi in the early days of the pandemic.

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"I'm just giving the committee a tiny taste of Donald Trump's fawning, star-struck, sycophantic embrace of everything the Chinese government was telling him in 2020," he explained. "He could have directed the intelligence community to lead a COVID-19 origins investigation back in March of 2020, three years ago. He did not. He wasted precious time minimizing the risk of the virus and lavishing his praise on President Xi."

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Raskin concluded: "He could have pushed back against the CCP for interfering with the WHO's investigation into its origins, and he could have asked our intelligence community to intervene. He did none of those things. And everyone should remember that. Let's take the politics out of it, and let's get to the bottom of what happened."

Watch the video below from the U.S. House.

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In February 2020, the late far-right radio host Rush Limbaugh insisted that COVID-19 was no more dangerous than “the common cold” and that it was “being weaponized” by Democrats “as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump.” Limbaugh, who repeatedly claimed that smoking cigarettes wasn’t dangerous before dying of lung cancer in February 2021, believed that mainstream media reporting on the dangers of COVID-19 was overblown. But according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, COVID-19 has killed more than 6.8 million people worldwide; that includes over 1.5 million deaths in the United States.

Three years after Limbaugh tried to convince his listeners that COVID-19 was a political issue instead of a health/medical issue, the MAGA far right is still politicizing the pandemic. Libertarian/conservative journalist Cathy Young, who is very much a Never Trumper, calls out MAGA “covidiots” and “conspiracy theorists” in an article published by The Bulwark on January 31.

Young isn’t without criticism of Democrats, liberals and progressives in her article, pointing out that some of them are now acknowledging that they were overly “aggressive” in 2020 when it came to “school closures and lockdowns.” But Young is much more critical of MAGA “covidiots” who continue to push unscientific claims, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and Twitter owner Elon Musk.

READ MORE: **How right-wing 'bloviation' over 'military wokeness' may harm the US armed forces: journalist**

“The covidiot ecosystem on the right — and, to some extent, in ‘anti-woke’ and ‘cultural dissident’ circles that don’t always explicitly identify as right-wing — continues to flourish,” Young observes. “Most recently, it’s been manifesting itself in the rather fanciful notion that people didn’t ‘suddenly’ die of heart attacks and strokes before ‘the jab’ came along.”

By “the jab,” Young is referring to COVID-19 vaccines, which even Donald Trump credits with saving lives. MAGA “covidiots,” she notes, are pushing anti-vaxxer claims while saying that Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s top White House health official, deserves criminal prosecution for his response to the pandemic.

“Once again,” Young writes, “covidiocy — usually dressed up as ‘COVID dissent’ — is not just the province of some radical and marginal right-wing fringe: It also implicates mainstream figures on the right. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s nowadays being touted as kinder, gentler, saner heir to the MAGA mantle, falsely claimed earlier this month that people who get the bivalent booster shot are ‘more likely to get infected.’ And in December, he threw a big, juicy chunk of red meat to the conspiracy theorists by asking the Florida Supreme Court to investigate ‘wrongdoing’ related to the COVID vaccines, including supposedly false claims about their safety and efficacy.”

READ MORE: How right-wing 'bloviation' over 'military wokeness' may harm the US armed forces: journalist

Read The Bulwark’s full article at this link. ==

an 1 23

A new report is shedding light on text message conversations between Fox News' Tucker Carlson and InfoWars influencer Alex Jones.

According to an exclusive report by HuffPost, the timeline of the conversations began at the onset of the pandemic.

HuffPost reporter Sebastian Murdock —who received copies of the conversations from Houston, Texas-based attorney Mark Bankston after he retained them in connection with the Sandy Hook case— offered context into the messages and how Carlson and Jones devolved into the world of conspiracy theories.

READ MORE: Adam Kinzinger blasts Tucker Carlson & Kevin McCarthy following Malcolm Nance's decision to fight in Ukraine

Although the two eventually developed a reputation for diminishing the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic by way of conspiracy theories and misinformation, their early conversations appear to contradict their later reporting on the virus.

Initially, there was a report about Carlson warning former President Donald Trump about the severity of the virus; something he actually discussed with Jones. However, their tune quickly changed.

"Yet by the following month, as Trump continued to minimize the seriousness of the virus, the two right-wing media personalities appeared to follow the president’s lead, texting conspiracy theories with each other that downplayed the threat even as thousands of Americans were dying daily," Murdoch wrote.

He also highlighted details from a particular conversation between the two that took place on April 27, 2020.

READ MORE: 'Cowardly' Alex Jones blasted by Sandy Hook families’ attorney after filing for bankruptcy to avoid paying damages

"Early on the morning of April 27, Jones texted Carlson a link to an Infowars article that complained about a pharmaceutical company that was briefly suspended from Twitter after it posted a video that depicted an experimental ultraviolet technology designed to kill the coronavirus," he wrote. "YouTube also removed the video from its website for promoting unsubstantiated claims, but not before the video racked up more than 17 million views."

In a statement to HuffPost, Bankston weighed in on the text messages saying, "We have always favored public transparency in this litigation, and we think it’s clear that these conversations between Mr. Jones and one of the nation’s most widely watched political pundits are newsworthy and a matter of genuine public interest."

READ MORE: 'I don't tell lies': Alex Jones blabbers of 'self-fulfilling prophecy' after bankruptcy bid blows up in court

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mofo moore

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/foxs-flagship-straight-news-show-promotes-bogus-covid-study-boost-republican

fox’s flagship “straight news” show promotes bogus COVID study to boost Republican policies

Right-wing apparatchiks want you to believe red states outperformed blue states during the pandemic — after they literally rewrote the death statistics

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD

PUBLISHED 04/13/22

murdoch media outlets are promoting an economic report declaring that Republican-led states did better than their Democratic-led counterparts in the COVID-19 pandemic. But the supposed “study” is simply an engineered conclusion produced by a political front group, which gives extra credit to Republican policies to not implement public health guidance or restrict normal life. And on top of that, it manipulates the typically higher death rates in red states by artificially adjusting them downward, while dishonestly fabricating higher death statistics in blue states.

The report, with the grandiose title “A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID-19,” is the brainchild of right-wing pundit Stephen Moore, along with conservative political organizer Phil Kerpen and libertarian University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan. (Both Moore and Mulligan served as political appointees in the Trump administration.) The report was released through theCommittee to Unleash Prosperity, a conservative group advocating the discredited principles of “supply-side” economics that has also promoted “pro-growth and liberty-based responses to COVID-19.”

The report, which is not peer-reviewed, also includes a note on the first page thanking Dr. Jay Bhattacharya “for his review of this study and his instructive advice.” Bhattacharya is a Stanford medical professor associated with the right-wing Hoover Institution, who has also informally advised Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) — a potential GOP presidential candidate in 2024 — and has appeared multiple times on Fox News and undermined the COVID-19 vaccines and public vaccination campaigns.Bhattacharya also co-authored the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a reckless libertarian proposal for loosening public health measures in the midst of the pandemic to achieve global “herd immunity.”

Fox’s Special Report covered this rigged “study” as if it were straight news

The study was touted on Monday’s edition of Fox’s flagship “straight” news program, Special Report with Bret Baier. A chyron on screen claimed, “Red states fare better on economic and health outcomes.” But as a close examination of the study reveals — briefly alluded to by Fox News correspondent Jonathan Serrie — this conclusion exists only after the authors made some creative adjustments “for age, obesity, and diabetes.”

Video Citation From the April 11, 2022, edition of Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier

Thestudy was also promoted in stories on Fox’s website, as well as in the editorial pages of the network’s corporate cousins: the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. FoxNews.com and the New York Post both mentioned the metric of “age-adjusted death rates,” while the Journal was a bit more forthcoming in noting that the study also made adjustments for “the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (leading co-morbidities for Covid deaths).”

The reports in these three Murdoch publications all pointed to the report’s praise of Florida as supposedly one of the best-performing states — a possible sign of Bhattacharya’s influence on both Florida’s policies and this report’s verdict. By contrast, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has run through numbers from health care analyst Charles Gaba, which found that Florida is actually one of the worst-performing states in COVID-19 death statistics, even accounting for the state’s older population.

Moore also appeared on Monday morning’s edition of Fox Business’ *Varney & Co.*, during which he claimed, “The big takeaway is that the lockdown strategy was pretty much a total failure. … States that remained open did not have higher death rates from the virus than states that completely shut down.” Serrie later mentioned Moore’s study again, on Tuesday morning’s edition of *America’s Newsroom*.

Moore has built a career as possibly the worst economist in the media, making serially wrong pronouncements and false calculations in service of his political agendas.In March 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced his nomination of Moore to the Federal Reserve Board, only for Moore to eventually withdraw from consideration due to multiple controversies over his past political comments.

Committee to Unleash Prosperity rewrites death numbers in red states with a fake statistic: “Metabolic-health adjustment”

In order to arrive at the favored conclusion, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity report actually looked at more than just health outcomes. The group’s press release explains that it used three metrics for its findings  — COVID-19 deaths, economic performance, and school openings — and declared they were “equally weighted” in the analysis. The result is that the question of saving lives accounts for only one-third of the calculation. The study also essentially just rehashes in pseudo-scientific form Moore’s long-standing contention that saving lives in the pandemic might not be “worth trillions of dollars of losses” and that simply allowing the virus to spread was “a better strategy” than enduring the economic costs of lockdowns.

The concept of age-adjusted deaths across populations is a tricky issue. While it is a legitimate line of inquiry, Fox News has exploited it ever since the start of the pandemic to create a nonchalant response to COVID-19 deaths among the elderly. Looking at this metric from a neutral source does show some interesting effects, but the ranks of worst-performing states would still be Republican-led ones such as Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Moore and his compatriots at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity have gone even further, however,by setting up a new metric in the fine print of their supposed study. They call it an adjustment for “metabolic health” in different populations — “the pre-pandemic prevalence of obesity and diabetes.” But what it really amounts to is a manipulation of the statistics to declare that higher death tolls should be discounted in populations that were less healthy to begin with, and toact as if public health responses can be separated from the overall health of the public.

Much of the discourse around the role of obesity in COVID-19 deaths has framed it as “another ongoing pandemic,” and the role of diabetes has been addressed in media as a “public health train wreck” and evidence of “America’s diabetes crisis.” But the Committee to Unleash Prosperity instead treats these deaths as somehow a mitigating factor in the public health responses of the states most affected. It’s almost as if, by the standards of Moore and his co-authors, the deaths of unhealthy people are not a problem at all.

As a result of this statistical chicanery, death rates in the South and some other Republican-led states were magically revised downward, while deaths were “adjusted” drastically higher in many Democratic states — skewing the data to make blue states look like the worst offenders.

“NV, NY, NJ, and DC were the four states with the highest metabolic-adjusted mortality, even though none is in the top four without the adjustment,” the report says — as if that were a good thing for the authors’ credibility — because those four places all have obesity and diabetes rates that are below the national average. By contrast, in the real-world statistics they began with, the worst contenders were all red states.

Fox News has waged a two-year propaganda campaign against public health, in which it has lied about COVID-19 vaccines, promoted fake cures, encouraged the spread of the virus, and turned people defying public health measures into culture war heroes even as their actions have gotten them killed. Fox also clearly does not believe any of what it preaches — see its own corporate vaccination and testing policies — but the network nevertheless pursues this framing because it is “great for ratings.”

Who knows, perhaps the network will be able to come up with a study showing that watching Fox News is good for surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, once the analysts can adjust for the comorbidities associated with watching Fox News.

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6 22

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/deborah-birx/

admits trump fail?

apology cya tour 321/

Her name should live in infamy': Conservative writer slams Dr. Birx for whitewashing her Trump support

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post ukraine invasion

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/trump-s-new-right-wing-social-media-app-tanks-with-93-decline-report/

https://www.alternet.org/**2022/05**/trump-administration-meat-industry-covid/

former President Donald Trump's administration colluded with top-level meatpacking industry executives to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic in order to drive up prices and downplay the severity of the emergency, according to an exhaustive investigation released on Thursday by the United States House Select Oversight Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

Representative Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina), the House Majority Whip and chairman of the Subcommittee, said in a statement that "the shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated."

The probe began last year and uncovered a spider web of corruption and flagrant disregard for human life involving American corporate titans and individuals in the highest ranks of the federal government.

Officials at the Department of Agriculture – including Secretary Sonny Purdue and Under Secretary for Food Safety Mindy Brashears – "collaborated" with corporate bigwigs to prioritize profits and production over the safety of employees and the public despite being fully aware of the hazards.

"Infections and deaths among workers for five of the largest meatpacking companies—Tyson Foods, Inc. (Tyson), JBS USA Holdings, Inc. (JBS), Smithfield Foods (Smithfield), Cargill, Inc. (Cargill), and National Beef Packing Company LLC (National Beef)—were significantly higher than previously estimated, with over 59,000 workers for these companies being infected with the coronavirus andat least 269 dying," the report states.

The powerful cadre also "engaged in a concerted effort with Trump Administration political officials to insulate themselves from coronavirus-related oversight," it explains.

In one instance, the chief executive officers of the conglomerates told Purdue on a phone call that their workers “should not be entitled to unemployment benefitsif they are otherwise able to work through the pandemic” and cautioned against “creat[ing] an incentive, much less a path, for food industry workers to choose unemployment overproducing food.”

In that same conversation, they "implicitly acknowledged how dangerous plants were, asking for liability protection against lawsuits if workers were infected on the job."

There was also an aggressive campaign to skirt "pesky" local, state, and federal regulations that would have kept workers and their products safe and healthy.

"Companies lobbied the White House to make clear that—despite concerns by state and local health departments—meatpacking companies should not have to address coronavirus risks if it would impact productivity," the investigation revealed.

Alarmingly, the CEOs managed to successfully lobby Trump to draft and sign an executive order in April of 2020 that "would insulate meatpacking companies from oversight by state and local health departments and provide legal protection against lawsuits for worker illnesses and deaths."

The edict led to Trump "invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure meatpacking plants 'continue operations.'"

Shortly thereafter, records handed over to the Subcommittee show that "meatpacking industry representatives and companies—Smithfield and Tyson in particular—engaged in constant communications with Trump appointees at USDA, the National Economic Council, and the White House, including calls between Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; a joint call with Sullivan, Meadows, and Tyson CEO Noel White;a call between White and Vice President Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short; and a call from Meadows to White asking if White would be willing to meet with President Trump."

Trump subsequently "held a call with officers of the meatpacking companies who had lobbied for it on the morning the order was issued."

After Trump granted their wish, an effort was undertaken between the administration and the industry to "coordinate closely on messaging concerning the order and its effects, apparently hoping to generate positive press coverage" for the ex-commander in chief.

Worker fatalities, meanwhile, were swept under the rug.

In a particularly egregious example, an outbreak at Foster Farms in Livingston,California that infected "at least" 392 workers and killed eight in August of 2020 prompted the company to "intimidate" the Merced County Department of Public Health from shutting down the plant.

"Foster Farms attempts to obfuscate the death count by labeling fatalities as 'resolutions,'" investigators learned. "MCPH officials told the Select Subcommittee that an unidentified person on the call from either Foster Farms or USDA said these cases could be considered 'toe tag resolutions,' referring to the toe tag that is often put on a corpse at the morgue. MCPH said that Brashears asked this individual to 'stop' and said they would 'talk about this separately.'"

Operations at Foster Farms in Livingston were eventually temporarily suspended on August 31st.

Read the full report here.

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https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-march-11-2022/

3/11 covid crims, ---- profiteers bk nichols

trump was going to do mask mandate but MM stopped b/c it was off freedom brand

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https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/fox-has-pushed-covid-propaganda-two-years-cost-has-been-staggering

matt g

many lnx vids

fox News, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, has lied to its audience throughout the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic – first for partisan political gain, then for ideological reasons, and finally for ratings and money. There is no way to avoid the conclusion that the network has been killing its viewers.

On February 27, 2020 -- two days after a top federal health official warned that COVID-19 was approaching worldwide spread and could have a “severe” impact on the United States -- Fox star Sean Hannity tried to emphasize then-President Donald Trump’s brilliant handling of the nascent pandemic. “Today, thankfully, zero people in the United States of America have died from the coronavirus. Zero,” he said, as an on-screen graphic hammered home that figure. “Now, let's put this into perspective,” Hannity continued. “In 2017, 61,000 people in this country died from influenza, the flu. Common flu. And around 100 people die every single day from car wrecks.”

Nearly two years later, the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 stands at nearly 950,000, with more than 100,000 dead since the start of 2022 alone. Fox’s coverage drove an untold number of those tragic losses.

Fox had a unique moral responsibility as the virus spread across the globe. The network spent decades instructing its viewers not to trust reporting from other news sources. Its success ensured that the resulting ratings would make its stars and top executives millionaires and its owners phenomenally wealthy. It counted the president of the United States as one of its most fervent viewers, giving the network’s on-air talent unrivaled influence over the workings of the federal government.

When the pandemic struck, Fox’s propagandists could have used their coverage to help their viewers [ELDERLY, SOME POOR?] protect themselves from the deadly virus, and theirinfluence to keep an erratic president on track in a moment of crisis. Instead, they betrayed their audience and inflamed Trump.

First, Fox tried to bolster Trump’s political standing by telling its viewers – and the president – that the virus was nothing to worry about. When Americans started dying and that position became untenable, Fox pivoted to decrying the measures taken to stop the pandemic on the grounds that they were too damaging to the economy – and to propping up purported miracle cures for the virus that didn’t actually work. And as safe, miraculously effective vaccines [TRUMP'S FREE MKT WARP SPEED] were rolled out across the country, Fox’s biggest stars prioritized their ratings, warning viewers that the shots were dangerous and didn’t work, and that requiring them was tyrannical.

This coverage had a significant indirect impact on how the U.S. would come to grapple with the virus. Trump treated the network's hosts as trusted advisors and made federal policy in response to their statements, and the pandemic was no exception. And Fox's slant gave ambitious Republican officeholders across the country a strong incentive to dismantle their states' pandemic safety measures as quickly as possible.

But Fox’s coverage also had a direct, deadly impact on how its audience responded to the pandemic. As the network's stars downplayed the risk posed by the virus and told their viewers that vaccines were ineffective and dangerous while other drugs were miraculous cures, polls and other data suggest that some of those viewers ended up treating the pandemic less seriously and taking the drugs that didn't work rather than the vaccines that did. Two years into the pandemic, the result is drastically higher death tolls in Republican areas of the country.[YET IOWA GOV REYNOLDS BOASTS IN ~SOTU?]

Fox executives – led by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and Suzanne Scott – take the pandemic very seriously for themselves and their employees, putting an array of safety measures in place at the network’s headquarters, including strict vaccine and testing requirements. But they do not care how many deaths their programming causes, as long as the network’s ratings keep the money rolling in.

In recent weeks, as various pandemic two-year-anniversaries have passed, the network’s hosts have been laser-focused north of the border, devoting more than 20 hours of coverage to Canadian truckers and their allies who blockaded international crossings and besieged that nation’s capital city in pursuit of an end to vaccine mandates and other COVID-19 safety measures. In the weeks to come, they will likely turn their attention to promoting similar actions in the United States if those become viable.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 death toll will continue to rise.

Inventing the coronavirus “hoax”

Sean Hannity

President Donald Trump signaled that he had the situation in hand as the coronavirus spread from where it was first identified in Wuhan,China, to dozens of other countries, including the United States, in the early weeks of 2020. While then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was sounding the alarm about how the nation was unprepared for a pandemic, Trump stressed the small number of U.S. cases in his public statements and mused that the virus would “[go] away in April with the heat,” even as he privately acknowledged the danger posed by the virus. His Fox propagandists nodded along, praising what then-Fox Business host Lou Dobbs described as the “amazing job” Trump's administration was doing “in constraining the spread of the virus into this country.”

Then on February 25, 2020, top CDC official Dr. Nancy Messonnier publicly warned of potentially “severe” disruptions and urged U.S. schools and businesses to make plans to shut down. Stock markets swooned in response as investors worried about the impact of a global pandemic. But Trump heard a very different message while tuning in to his favorite Fox shows as he returned from an international trip that night. His trusted confidants Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham explained on their programs that Democrats and the press were “politicizing tragedy,” using the coronavirus as a “new pathway for hitting President Trump.” The next day, Trump adopted their message on Twitter and during a press conference.

This feedback loop fueled Fox’s coverage of the pandemic – and Trump’s lax response to it – over the next several weeks, as the network’s stars minimized the risk the disease posed in order to provide political cover to their beloved president. Fox personalities falsely claimed the virus was no worse than the flu, a significantly less deadly, less contagious virus for which there are known vaccines and treatments. They also frequently suggested that Trump’s foes were exaggerating the risk for political gain, with then-Fox Business host Trish Regan earning notoriety for an unhinged rant in which she said Trump’s enemies had deployed the coronavirus as “yet another attempt to impeach the president.” Trump listened to them, reportedly scorning public health planning, shunning aides who came to him with negative information about the virus, and continuing to publicly downplay the risk.

Then – briefly – everything changed. Trump, partly in response to counsel he had received from Tucker Carlson, adopted a “newly somber tone” and took action. He declared a national emergency to deal with the pandemic on March 13, 2020. Three days later, the White House released coronavirus guidelines, urging Americans to stay home, avoid unnecessary travel, and refrain from social gatherings to slow the spread of the virus. Fox’s own tone shifted sharply as its on-air talent began describing the pandemic as a “crisis” and social distancing on the network’s sets.

But the damage to the network’s audience had already been done. Poll after poll from that time period revealed that Fox’s viewers were taking the pandemic less seriously than people who get their news from other sources, and that they believed the press had exaggerated the risk the virus posed. One Republican pollster reportedly considered the situation so dire that he warned GOP leaders that the network’s coverage was endangering the lives of the party’s base voters by influencing them not to take steps to protect themselves from the virus.

Fox went into defense mode as critics accurately pointed out that its coronavirus coverage was getting its viewers killed. Fox spokesperson Irena Briganti decried the “cherry picking of clips from our opinion programs” by other outlets, while Hannity threatened to sue the “media mob” for the criticism of his coverage. Fox offered up a scapegoat, benching and then cutting ties with Regan over her “impeach the president” screed.

There were no major changes to Fox’s programming, however, with the network’s brass either unable or unwilling to rein in its biggest stars. By the end of March 2020, its coronavirus coverage was once again overflowing with conspiracy theories and pro-Trump propaganda, and by early April, the network’s stars were declaring that the crisis was over, with some even falsely claiming that the official COVID-19 death count was inflated.

Wholesale opposition to COVID-19 safety measures

chyron reads: "Experts" ignoring the science on wearing masks

Fox hosts do not treat the virus as particularly dangerous, often downplaying or ignoring the U.S.’s COVID-19 death toll. That made it easy for them to make an ideological pivot in the early months of the pandemic, relentlessly fighting a wide array of measures intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus and limit its devastating consequences on the grounds that they caused too much economic or social damage. As network hosts like Carlson explained, such policies were unnecessary because COVID-19 “just isn't nearly as deadly as we thought it was.”

The end of the initial phase of the U.S. pandemic response began with a Fox live-tweet. “You know that famous phrase, ‘The cure is worse than the disease’?” Fox host Steve Hilton asked on his March 22, 2020 broadcast. “That is exactly the territory we are hurtling towards.” His argument that stay-at-home orders were more destructive than the virus had become commonplace on the network, but this time, it caught the attention of the president.

A few hours later, Trump tweeted, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”

Two days later, to the horror of public health experts, he told a Fox interviewer that he wanted the country “opened up” by Easter Sunday. Trump’s aides were able to restrain his Fox-fueled desire to reopen without ensuring widespread testing and contact tracing for a few more weeks. But in mid-April, as Fox heavily promoted right-wing protests aimed at overturning the restrictions, a watching Trump tweeted about the need to “LIBERATE” the states. The Trump administration’s “Stay at Home” guidelines ultimately expired at the end of April 2020.

But Fox’s opposition to COVID-19 safety measures went far beyond the likes of the stay-at-home orders seen in the early weeks of the pandemic. They have taken aim at a wide array of policies, including drastically increased coronavirus diagnostic testing capacity (“totally ridiculous”); contact tracing to identify infected people (a “new threat to our rights”); closures and other restrictions at high-risk locations like bars, restaurants, gyms, and hair salons (“authoritarian”); additional funding for state and local governments facing empty coffers due to the pandemic (“blue state bailouts”); and calls to voluntarily stay home rather than travel for holiday gatherings. They also called for a “rebellion” of civil disobedience aimed at ending such restrictions.

Carlson and Ingraham in particular helped turn mask usage into a culture war flashpoint, making false claims of masks’ ineffectiveness a frequent refrain on their programs. Notably, both hosts had initially acknowledged that masks worked, before flipping their views as public health experts and mainstream journalists called for diligent masking.

Fox's coverage produced a strong incentive for ambitious Republican governors to eliminate their states' COVID-19 safety measures as quickly as possible. When they rolled back those policies, they could count on favorable coverage and airtime on the network to proclaim their successes, giving them a national audience and earning the support of the network's GOP kingmakers.

Fox propagandists targeted experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, urging their dismissal over their support for COVID-19 safety measures. Instead, they propped up a motley crew of dissidents, loons, and conspiracy theorists who sympathized with their more lax approach to the pandemic.

None gained more public influence than Scott Atlas, a radiologist and right-wing think tanker with no prior expertise in infectious diseases or pandemic response who nonetheless became a frequent and dishonest presence downplaying the risk of the coronavirus on Fox’s programming beginning in spring of 2020. Those appearances reportedly “caught Trump’s attention,” resulting in Atlas’ appointment to the White House coronavirus task force that August. In that role, Atlas advocated for allowing the virus to spread in order to reach “herd immunity,” helping to ensure a catastrophic death toll in the winter months of that year, when vaccines were just weeks away from deployment.

Promoting drugs that don’t fight COVID-19

FDA authorizes emergency use of hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine

Fox hosts, even as they diminished the risks posed by the coronavirus, nonetheless offered their viewers alternatives to the COVID-19 safety measures that they decried. They lauded the purported effectiveness of a series of drugs, and urged their viewers to take them if they became infected. This effort apparently had some success, with one study finding new prescriptions for them were higher in counties that supported Trump in 2020. The problem is that those drugs don’t actually work against the virus.

In March 2020, just days after the Trump administration rolled out its initial “stay at home” guidelines, Fox hosts began pushing for an end to those policies and the “reopening” of the economy. As part of that effort, they zealously promoted chloroquine and its derivative hydroxychloroquine – drugs approved by the FDA to treat malaria, lupus, and arthritis – as treatment and prophylaxis for COVID-19. Touting vague anecdotes and dubious studies, the network promoted those drugs nearly 300 times over a single two-week period in late March and early April of 2020, even as experts maintained there was no definitive evidence that they were actually effective.

But Fox hosts eager for a “reopening” suggested this “miracle drug” was evidence that anyone infected with the virus could be easily treated, and denounced anyone standing in the way of its use.

Fox’s coverage captured the attention of its most powerful viewer. Then-president Trump began talking up hydroxychloroquine after the network began promoting its use, and tweeted in response to a segment he was watching that it could be “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine” and should “put in use IMMEDIATELY” to treat the virus. In response to Fox’s coverage -- and a White House meeting with Ingraham -- Trump pushed the FDA to authorize the off-label use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as a COVID-19 treatments and reportedly pressured federal agencies to focus on the drugs as potential therapies.

If Fox had been correct that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for COVID-19, this would have been a huge victory not only for Fox, but for the world. But the network was wrong. Randomized clinical trials subsequently showed “no evidence of benefit for mortality or other outcomes” and the suggested dosing regimens are “unlikely to produce an antiviral effect,” as the FDA’s chief scientist Denise Hinton wrote in a June 2020 letter explaining why the FDA was pulling its authorization. Further studies have provided more proof that the drug doesn’t work against COVID-19.

The same cycle played out the following year.

During the summer of 2021, Fox hosts regularly touted ivermectin’s purported effectiveness as a COVID-19 treatment. Carlson hosted a guest who claimed that “the evidence is strong that ivermectin works both as a prophylactic and as a treatment if given early.” Ingraham called it a drug “used all over the world with some pretty good results.” Hannity plugged it as an “incredible therapeutic.” And Will Cain described it as one of “many, many promising treatments out there that can save lives.”

Again, if ivermectin had been an effective treatment, Fox’s promotion would have been a win for both the network and the public. But the World Health Organization, European regulators, the ivermectin manufacturer Merck, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the FDA had all warned against its use against COVID-19, citing a lack of evidence that it works. A major study purportedly demonstrating ivermectin’s effectiveness was retracted over concerns that it relied upon fabricated data. Instead of protecting their viewers from the coronavirus, Fox had left them vulnerable to a familiar right-wing con.

Then in January 2022, federal agencies removed two monoclonal antibody therapies from the list of approved therapies for treating COVID-19 and stopped distributing them – with manufacturers’ approvals – after finding that they were ineffective against the dominant omicron variant. But Hannity and Ingraham rallied to the support of the ineffective treatments, decrying “Biden's medical authoritarianism” for depriving the public of “lifesaving COVID therapeutics.”

Fox was giving its viewers something they could do in lieu of supporting the COVID-fighting strategies that public health experts preferred and the network’s propagandists opposed. Rather than supporting the loathed “stay at home” measures in the pandemic’s first year, Fox viewers thought they could take hydroxychloroquine if they were infected with the virus. Ivermectin and monoclonal antibodies, meanwhile, became substitutes for the COVID-19 vaccines deployed during the pandemic’s second year.

The anti-vax abomination

Tucker Carlson vaccines 5/5/21

As President Joe Biden took office in January 2020, the U.S. was suffering its deadliest months of the pandemic. The nation recorded 4,300 deaths on Inauguration Day, after cold weather, holiday travel, and relaxed safety protocols triggered a massive spike in cases. But hope was on the way – just weeks before, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorizations to mRNA vaccines for the coronavirus developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna after finding that they were safe and remarkably effective, particularly in preventing serious cases of COVID-19.

Fox hosts could have used their propaganda megaphone to encourage their viewers to get vaccinated – indeed, they had a moral responsibility to do so in order to preserve the health of the audience that trusted only them.

It should not have been a difficult sell: The vaccines had been developed and approved in record time under their beloved Trump’s administration, and the former president and Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch were among the first people on the planet to get shots.

The hosts could have trumpeted the effectiveness of the drugs, constantly and directly urged viewers to take them, received the vaccine on-air themselves, and even bashed the Biden administration for their slow initial rollout and the lengthy wait before granting them full approval. If Fox’s propagandists felt the need to pump out conspiracy theories, they could have questioned why the Biden administration wasn’t doing enough to get vaccine shots in Republican arms.

But that isn’t what happened. Instead, facing unusually stiff ratings competition from further right rivals at the time, Fox decided to pander to anti-vaxxers.

For more than a year, Fox’s biggest stars have waged a nightly sabotage campaign against the vaccination effort. They and their guests regularly suggest the vaccines may not work, stoke baseless fears about their safety, use incendiary rhetoric about their deployment, and  denounced door-to-door campaigns to urge residents to get vaccinated as akin to the tactics of the Gestapo.

Carlson emerged as perhaps the nation’s foremost coronavirus vaccine skeptic, using his massive platform to argue that the vaccines are less effective and more dangerous than advertised and that his viewers should be deeply concerned about the campaign to get the public to take them.

Ingraham’s primetime show delves into many of the same themes and she is particularly focused on suggesting that the vaccines are useless by mocking prominent people who were infected despite being vaccinated. And Hannity briefly received some unearned plaudits for simply saying that he “believe[s] in the science of vaccination,” but wildly backpedaled in the face of a right-wing backlash and drastically increased his promotion of anti-vaccine talking points.

A handful of Fox employees have told their viewers the truth about the vaccines. But their statements were overwhelmed by a constant drumbeat which extends far beyond Fox’s primetime block. Media Matters found that over a two-week period last summer, 57% of the network’s segments about vaccines included claims that either undermined or downplayed immunization efforts. We also determined that Fox aired at least one claim undermining the vaccination efforts on all but two days from April through September of 2021.

It was easy to predict where Fox’s stand against vaccination would lead: Its viewers would believe the network’s misinformation about the vaccines and refuse to take the life-saving shots. That is precisely what happened, and deaths have concurrently soared in Republican parts of the country.

Having successfully driven down support for voluntarily taking the vaccine, Fox pivoted to sabotaging efforts by companies, universities, and government agencies to mandate their use. Such requirements, they claimed, amounted to a declaration of war against the unvaccinated by authoritarian elites. And they lionized people who refused to get vaccinated in the face of those rules as culture war heroes, hosting such individuals dozens of times. But those Fox heroes were disposable – when one of them died of COVID-19 in January, his passing went unmentioned on the network that had touted his story.

This campaign against life-saving drugs is ongoing. When I returned from three months of parental leave last month, I found that nothing had changed.

Why did they do it? Why did Fox hosts risk the lives of their viewers by slandering life-saving drugs, even as evidence mounted that they were killing their viewers?

It wasn’t a matter of principle – more than 90% of Fox’s staff is vaccinated, and the network implemented its own vaccine requirement without its hosts making a peep.

It was cash. They sold out their viewers for money. As a Fox insider explained, the anti-vax commentary is “great for ratings,” and that’s what matters to the network’s employees. It matters to them whether their viewers tune it. It doesn’t matter to them if they die.

===

Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers

:{

Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis

by John Nichols

}:

furious denunciation of America’s coronavirus criminals

Hundreds of thousands of deaths were caused not by the vicissitudes of nature but by the callous and opportunistic decisions of powerful people, as revealed here by John Nichols. 

On March 10, 2020, president Donald Trump told a nation worried about a novel coronavirus, “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” It has since been estimated that had Trump simply taken the same steps as other G7 countries, 40 percent fewer Americans would have died. 

And it was not just the president. His inner circle, including Mike Pence and Jared Kushner, downplayed the crisis and mishandled the response. Cabinet members such as Betsy DeVos and Mike Pompeo undermined public safety at home and abroad to advance their agendas. Senators Ron Johnson and Mitch McConnell, governors Kristi Noem and Andrew Cuomo, judges such as Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Rebecca Bradley all promulgated public policies that led to suffering and death. Meanwhile, profiteer Pfizer (and anti-government propagandists such as Grover Norquist) fed at the public trough, while the billionaire Jeff Bezos added pandemic profits to a grotesquely bloated fortune. 

John Nichols closes with a call for a version of the Pecora Commission, which took aim at what Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the “speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, and profiteering” that stoked the Depression. There must be accountability.

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ivermectin idw joe rogen

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neo-lib fail covid

the conv

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/capitalism/

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note ayn libtard free mkt BS: 200K dead is NOT A MKT FAIL?

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-covid-positive-test-hospital-plane-train-mask-mandate-transportation-1070629/

RS andy kroll

no lnx many

wASHINGTON —In a little-noticed ruling on Friday evening, the Trump administration rejected a petition by a coalition of labor unions that had asked the federal government to require passengers to wear masks on airplanes, trains, and other major forms of transportation.

The Department of Transportation told the Transportation Trades Department of theAFL-CIO labor federation that the agency would not proceed with a regulation to mandate that passengers wear masks on modes of major commercial transportation used by tens of millions of Americans. Right now in the U.S., a patchwork of airport authorities, cities, counties, and states are deciding whether to require people to wear masks on mass transit, in airports, and on planes. France, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and other major countries have enacted national mask mandates for people using public transit.

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“It is unfathomable that in the midst of a global pandemic which has killed more than 209,000 Americans, and left millions more sick and potentially facing lifelong side effects — including the president of the United States — that the U.S. Department of Transportation would outright reject such a simple, science-backed, lifesaving measure,” Transportation Trades Department president Larry Willis said in a statement. “The DOT’s decision is heartbreaking, and in light of yesterday’s news, frankly, shocking.”

Deregulation is one of the hallmarks of the Trump administration, even amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of the biggest backers of Trump’s 2016 campaign were corporate executives who pushed then-candidate Trump to embrace a full-on deregulatory agenda. Since taking office, the Trump administration has sought to weaken or reverse hundreds of existing policies and regulations related to energy, the environment, labor rights, health care, manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture.

What makes the Transportation Department’s mask-mandate rejection so telling is that it happened only hours after the White House revealed that President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump had tested positive for Covid-19.Other White House and senior GOP officials who have tested positive in recent days include senior aide Hope Hicks, adviser Kellyanne Conway, reelection campaign manager Bill Stepien, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel, and Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), andRon Johnson (R-Wisc.).

In a July letter to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Larry Willis, the president of the Transportation Trades Department, a coalition of 33 labor unions, said many of its workers — which include bus drivers, ferry operators, pilots, flight attendants, TSA employees, and more — were on the front lines of the Covid-19 pandemic. “Regrettably, these employees have not been spared the effects of the disease, and each TTD union involved in passenger transportation has reported infections and deaths among their frontline workers,” Willis wrote to Chao.

Willis wrote that the “patchwork of state or local mandates,” combined with “a deeply inadequate federal response,” had left those frontline transportation workers vulnerable to the virus in their workplaces. The transportation union coalition formally petitioned Chao, who is the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the Transportation Department to create a legal requirement for passengers to wear masks. So far, the agency has voiced support for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance that passengers wear masks and has distributed more than 100 million masks, but has stopped short of mandating mask-wearing on a national scale.

:{

}:

Wearing a mask is one of the most effective ways to slow the spread of Covid-19.Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified last month that a mask was “the most important, powerful public health tool we have.” Redfield told Congress that a mask might be even more effective than a vaccine because no vaccine has a 100 percent effectiveness rate.

“I will continue to appeal [to] all Americans, all individuals in our country, to embrace these face coverings,” Redfield said. “I’ve said it: If we did it for six, eight, 10, 12 weeks, we’d bring this pandemic under control. We have clear scientific evidence. They work, and they are our best defense.”

President Trump was asked at an ABC News town hall last month why he had not called for a national mask mandate. He replied with a long-winded answer that blamed former Vice President Joe Biden, who does hold elected office right now, for not calling for a mask mandate. Trump added that “By the way, a lot of people don’t want to wear masks. There are a lot of peoplethat think the masks are not good.”

:{

}:

In its denial letter, the Transportation Department said it shared the transportation union’s concerns about the potential health impact of the pandemic on transportation workers, but said the need to avoid creating new regulations overrode those public-health concerns.

“The Department also embraces the notion that there should be no more regulations than necessary,” the agency’s general counsel, Steven Bradbury,writes. “We emphasize consideration of or regulatory solutions and have rigorous processes in place for optimal reassessment of existing regulations to ensure they remain cost justifiedand narrowly tailored to address an identified market failure.”

The letter continues, “At this time, the Departments view is that the measures discussed above, along with the ongoing efforts of key transportation stakeholders, are adequate to address the concerns identified in the petitionwithout the intention of a rule-making process.”

Read the Transportation Department’s rejection letter here.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/capitalism/

the conv

it's unclear when the pandemic will come to an end. What may be an even more important question is whether the U.S. will be prepared for the next one. The past year and a half suggests that the answer may be no.

As a medical anthropologist who has spent the past 20 years studying how the Chinese government reacts to infectious disease, my research can provide insight into how countries, including the U.S., can better prepare for disease outbreaks.

Researchers agree that a good response starts with a strong public health system. But this is something that has been sidelined by the United States' neoliberal system, which places more value on free markets and deregulation than public welfare.

[vid]

neoliberalism promotes a free market accessible to the wealthy few, making essential services less free for everyone else.

As US neoliberalism evolved, public health devolved

Neoliberal economic policies became popular in the 1980s during the Reagan and Thatcher eras. This new approach aimed to make government leaner and more efficient through measures like market deregulation, privatization and reduction of government provision of public services like health and education – resources that do not necessarily lend themselves to market production.

While neoliberal governments still work to promote the health, welfare and security of their citizens, they place the responsibility of providing those services in the hands of private entities like health insurance companies and nongovernmental organizations. This gives the government space to focus on economic performance.

But placing responsibility for a public good into the hands of a private corporation turns that good into a commodity that people need to buy, rather than a service publicly available to all.

Spending on health care in the U.S., including on hospitals, medications and private insurance, has more than tripled in the past 60 years. But the public health system that helps the nation prepare for the unexpected has been neglected.

U.S. spending on the local health departments that help to avert epidemic outbreaks and protect the health of populations fell by 18% between 2010 and 2021. Two and a half cents of every medical dollar goes toward public health, a figure that has fallen from 1930 levels of 3.3 cents of every dollar. This has allowed the U.S. to manage health risks like chronic diseases that threaten individual's health. But it leaves the nation inadequately prepared for population-level major health threats that have a much bigger effect on the economy and society.

Public health cuts left the U.S with a skeletal workforce to manage the pandemic. Because of this, responsibility fell to individuals. For example, without mandatory workplace COVID-19 safety guidelines, essential workers faced daily exposure to the coronavirus with insufficient to no protective gear and sanitizing supplies. They had to protect both their own health and the health of their families when they returned home, a difficult task without proper resources and support.

And this was not unique to the U.S. There were similar COVID-19 outcomes in other neoliberal countries like the U.K. and India that had shifted priorities away from public health.

How Asian nations learned their lessons

The story was different in many Asian nations where people enjoy the same types of individual liberties as those who live in neoliberal societies. The difference is a collectivist type of mindset that guides these societies and encourages people and government to take responsibility for one another. In her book Flexible Citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong argues that this leads to a societal model where citizens can be independent and self-reliant while also able to rely on a state that supports the collective. Countries like Taiwan and South Korea may have been better prepared to respond to the pandemic because most people are accustomed to protecting themselves and their communities.

Like China, these countries also learned from their recent experience with a pandemic. In 2003, China and much of Asia were caught off guard with the emergence of SARS. Like the U.S., China's public health system had taken a backseat to investment in market reforms for over 20 years. As a result, it couldn't accurately track individual cases of infections.

Following the end of the SARS outbreak, however, the Chinese government improved training for public health professionals and developed one of the most sophisticated disease surveillance systems in the world. This allowed China to respond more quickly to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and late 2019 COVID-19 outbreaks, once it was able to get past the initial bureaucratic and political hurdles that prevented local doctors and government officials from sounding the alarm.

Some have attributed this swift action to China's authoritarian form of government that allows for greater control over individual lives. But prioritizing public health is not new to China. This became official practice as early as 1910 when it adopted the methods of quarantine, surveillance and masking to respond to an outbreak of pneumonic plague.

Could this work in the US?

Much like SARS did with China, COVID-19 has exposed huge holes in the American public health infrastructure.

Take for example contact tracing. SARS taught China and other affected countries the importance of a robust system to identify and track people who may have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus. The Chinese government sent more than 1,800 teams of scientific investigators to Wuhan to trace the virus, which helped their efforts to quickly bring the virus under control.

In the U.S., on the other hand, poorly funded and thinly staffed public health departments struggled to test and notify people who had been in direct contact with infected individuals. This crippled the U.S.'s ability to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

In my home state of Massachusetts, the local government teamed up with the global health organization Partners in Health to start a contact tracing operation. But even then, people were left to fend for themselves. This became all the more evident as people scrambled for vaccines after their initial approval, through Facebook groups and informal volunteer networks that worked to help people secure appointments. Those who had resources learned how to take advantage of the system while others were overlooked.

This is typical of a U.S. health care system that is consumer-oriented and market-based. Americans are often convinced that the solution to a health problem must be technical and costly. The focus was placed on developing vaccines and therapeutics, which are essential for ending the pandemic, while ignoring lower-cost solutions.

But masking and social distancing – non-pharmaceutical interventions that have long been known to save lives during disease outbreaks – fell by the wayside. Uptake of these simple interventions is dependent on strong and coordinated public health messaging.

As seen in several Asian nations like Taiwan and South Korea, a well-thought-out plan for public health communication is key to a unified response. Without clear, coordinated directions from a public health system, it becomes difficult to prevent the spread of an outbreak.

What it takes to be prepared

Anthropologist Andrew Lakoff describes preparedness as more than just having the tools. It's also about knowing how and when to use them, and keeping the public properly informed.

Such preparedness can only happen in a coordinated fashion organized by national leadership. But the U.S. has seen little of this over the past year and a half, leaving pandemic response up to individuals. In an era where emergent viruses are an increasing threat to health and welfare, the individualism of neoliberal policies is not enough. While neoliberalism can be good for an economy, it's not so good for health.

Elanah Uretsky, Associate Professor of International and Global Studies, Brandeis University

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11 21 desmog

Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 ...

DeSmog › 2020/03/16 › climate-science-deniers-downplayed-co...

January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019, which causes the disease COVID-19, was officially a “public health emergency of international concern.” At the time, there were cases confirmed in 19 countries and deaths in China had reached 170.

The very next day, the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) published an article titled, “Coronavirus in the U.S.: How Bad Will It Be?”

“Is coronavirus worse than the flu?” it began. “No, not even close.”

“It already has spread from person-to-person in the U.S., but it probably won’t go far,” ACSH added. “And the American healthcare system is excellent at dealing with this sort of problem.”

ACSH is one of several organizations promoting climate science denial that are now spreading misinformation on the coronavirus, with potentially deadly consequences.

American Council on Science and Health?

The ACSH presents itself to the public as a proponent of “peer-reviewed mainstream science,” in the words of the organization’s mission. Their experts have frequently been quoted in mainstream newspapers and magazines, and they pen columns criticizing journalists who write critically about companies like Monsanto. The group has received funding from oil giants including ExxonMobil, as well as from the agribusiness, chemical and tobacco industries to name a few.

When it comes to climate change, ACSH has published a steady stream of articles downplaying climate science and criticizing efforts to slow carbon emissions — even in the face of a mountain of peer-reviewed research on the climate crisis.

ACSH slammed the medical journal The Lancet as “an ideologically driven outlet with a very clear political agenda where being sensationalist and culturally woke trumps evidence and reasonability” (after the Lancet published an article titled “The carbon footprint”).The purported “pro-science” advocacy group has labeled Greta Thunberg’s activism “doomsday prophesying.” It has (falsely) suggested that climate change is less of a concern because “more people die in winter than in summer” (they don’t).

And that’s all just in the past nine months. The ACSH’s stance against climate action dates back to at least 1997.

When it comes to coronavirus, now a global pandemic, ACSH’s authors rushed to judgment. They assured readers that there was little to worry about, and put some of the same faulty thinking that underlies their stance on climate change on display.

aCSH isn’t alone. Other organizations that have also engaged in climate science denial made similar missteps on COVID-19, including prominent organizations that fanned the flames of conspiracy theories or confidently promoted complacency when circumstances required rapid action.

To be clear: No one should be faulted for failing to foresee precisely how severe of a problem COVID-19 would prove to be. None of us has a crystal ball and few, if any, expected this situation to unfold in this particular way.

But these organizations published positions that not only wound up being laden with false reassurances, but they did so based on claims that they made confidently at the time that now appear to have been false or misleading.

Defending Conspiracy Theorists

Take for example, the American Enterprise Institute’s (:{AEI:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:) publications on COVID-19.

AEI fanned the flames of a conspiracy theory that claims COVID-19 was developed for biological warfare.

AEI resident scholar Michael Rubin published a piece titled, “Was coronavirus a bioweapon? We don’t know, but history shows we can’t trust China.”

[twt]

the article defended Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas for his Fox News interview circulating the theory.

Roger Bate, an AEI visiting scholar, also penned a January 29 piece headlined, “The media is driving the overreaction to the coronavirus.”

The piece argues against action on COVID-19, without citing any evidence about the virus itself, but instead based on characterizations and generalizations. “I’ve seen several news reports essentially implying that, even if quarantining travelers or imposing travel bans to China are overreactions to the risk of the coronavirus, this is ok because it’s better to be safe than sorry,” he wrote. “Companies are so fearful of negative press that they seem to base much of their own rhetoric on what the media and liberal elites demand. While some of this is arguably harmless — note much of the hot air at Davos about climate change — when it becomes corporate policy and is echoed by government policy, it then has real consequences.”

“A contagion will happen at some point, and it’s important we recognize it and react,” he added.

“Unless the coronavirus mutates into something far more dangerous,” he concluded, “this isn’t it.”

To be sure, there was not a visible consensus on those views within AEI. That same day, another AEI fellow published an article calling the coronavirus a “big economic deal,” citing its impact on China’s economy. And a three-paragraph AEI post later labeled claims that COVID-19 is a bioweapon “fake news.”

Those other pieces, however, do not undo any impacts from AEI publishing claims that proved to be baseless.

Reading Comprehension

Other times, articles downplaying the risks from COVID-19, penned by organizations that have adopted climate-science denying stances, present arguments laced with logical fallacies.

In some cases, it’s not clear whether the authors understood the comments they were critiquing.

Take, for instance, the Cato Institute’s March 4, 2020 column on “COVID-19 Deaths and Incredible WHO Estimates.” That piece attacks a statement by the WHO’s director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported :{COVID}:‐​19 cases have died.”

Cato’s column labeled that statistic “sensationalist nonsense.” The number doesn’t take into account the fact that mild cases are more likely to go unreported, Cato’s Alan Reynolds wrote.

Because most #CoronaVirus cases are mild and aren’t reported, the WHO’s alleged 3.4% #Covid19 mortality rate is nothing more than sensationalist nonsense. The actual death rate among infected people outside China may be as low as 0.5%. https://t.co/:{CQ}:mNYEkXsE #CatoHealth pic.twitter.com/nnyUH0DqXe

— Cato Institute (@CatoInstitute) March 8, 2020

That, of course, is exactly why Dr. Adhanom included the word “reported” in his description of the statistic. There’s no ball being hidden here. And in case readers missed that word and its importance, The Times’ report included an explanation of that precise context. (“But the figure came loaded with caveats,” The Times wrote. “Experts, including those at the WHO, say that when more is known about the epidemic, the death rate will be considerably lower.”)

One day later, President Trump took a similar tack to Cato’s, calling the 3.4 precent statistic “really a false number.”

“Now, this is just a hunch, but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this,” Trump added.

It’s not clear where exactly Trump picked up his impression — but then of course, Trump has his own well-known stance on climate science.

‘Not Even Close’

The author of the ACSH piece claiming that coronavirus is “not even close” to as bad as the flu was Dr. Alex Berezow — a PhD in microbiology, according to his bio, not a medical doctor. Berezow has been interviewed about coronavirus precautions by the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Insider, and Yahoo News.

Berezow doubled down on his claim that the flu is a worse threat than coronavirus in a February 18 article. “Influenza is far deadlier than the Wuhan coronavirus, but few people worry about it,” that article begins, referring to the virus with the Chinese city initially at the center of the outbreak (a practice that’s since been viewed as stigmatizing and racist, amid a growing number of cases of stigma-motivated racial violence).

A few weeks later, Berezow changed his tune, offering readers assurances that even if COVID-19 was far more deadly than the flu, there was still little reason for alarm in an article calling media reports “unreliable” and “sensationalism.”

“Even though the Wuhan coronavirus is currently thought to have a case-fatality rate of 2 percent (which would make it 20 times deadlier [than influenza]),” he wrote, “it’s unlikely that it will rack up a similar annual death toll because — at least for the time being — it is not going to infect hundreds of millions of people.”

A week later, on February 27, Berezow admitted he had changed his mind, saying that the facts had changed and writing: “When COVID-19, aka the Wuhan coronavirus, first emerged, it seemed most likely that the virus would fizzle out. But as the disease continues to spread, that outcome now appears nearly impossible.”

But by mid-March, Berezow was back to arguing that, as he wrote on March 11, “[f]or now, influenza remains the far bigger global public health threat.”

In contrast, public health organizations like the WHO have sought to offer information in ways that are both careful and candid. The Centers for Disease Control’s (neglected) guidelines for public health communication call for messaging that’s consistent, accurate, and doesn’t withhold important information.

There’s an enormous amount of uncertainty about what the coming days will bring when it comes to this pandemic. But if we’re all going to make the best decisions possible today, we’d be well-served to pay close attention to medical science.

And when so much of the message that there’s nothing to worry about on climate change comes from think tanks like Cato, AEI, and ACSH that made unsupported and flawed calls on COVID-19, it’s worth taking a moment to pause and think about that as well.

Because as monumental as the impacts of this pandemic are now, the science tells us that if we fail to dramatically cut carbon and methane emissions, the impacts of climate change may be even more profound over the long run.

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omfg,  HOW MUCH OF THIS WAS TEED UP BY CPP BS? ANTI-GUBMINT

no lnx an 11 21

'Pro-death cult strikes back': Right-wing judges block Biden’s vaccine rule for big companies

Kenny Stancil and Common Dreams November 08, 2021

Progressives concerned about workplace safety and public health responded with dismay after a federal appeals court on Saturday temporarily blocked the Biden administration's attempt to require workers at companies with 100 or more employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19 or tested weekly.

Citing "grave statutory and constitutional" problems with the rule, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued the stay in response to a joint petition filed Friday by a coalition of businesses, conservative advocacy groups, and the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah.

That legal challenge, and separate lawsuits from Republican-led states, came just one day after President Joe Biden announced that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would begin enforcing its newly unveiled Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) in the coming weeks. Companies with at least 100 employees have until December 5 to require unvaccinated workers to wear masks indoors, and by January 4, they must require vaccinations or administer weekly tests.

Decrying the decision of the "right-wing Fifth Circuit," labor journalist Steven Greenhouse said on social media that "it's terrible for worker safety and public health that three conservative activist judges have suspended Biden's... new rule requiring workers at companies with more than 100 workers to get vaccinated or tested."

"OSHA's mission is to protect workers' health," Greenhouse continued, "but the appellate judges seem to forget that Covid has killed thousands of meatpacking, retail, and other workers."

More than 750,000 people in the U.S. have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic started last March, and the disease continues to kill nearly 1,100 people per day, most of them unvaccinated, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Recent studies confirm that vaccines save lives.Last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services analyzed the relationship between county-level inoculation rates and Covid-19 outcomes among U.S. seniors and found that vaccines helped ward off 265,000 infections, 107,000 hospitalizations, and 39,000 deaths during the first five months of 2021.

And in September, CDC researchers found that individuals in the U.S. who were not fully vaccinated last spring and summer were 11 times more likely to die after being infected with the coronavirus—and over 10 times more likely to be hospitalized—than those who were fully inoculated.

Greenhouse said that "the judges evidently sympathize with [Texas Republican Gov.] Greg Abbott's let-people-die stance—that it'soverreachfor OSHA to act strongly to protect workers from Covid."

David Michaels, a leader of OSHA during the Obama administration, also rebuked the federal appeals court, describing its decision as legally dubious and politically motivated.

"The same activist court that refused to stay Texas' law that permits bounty hunters to sue anyone who aids an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy has stayed an OSHA rule that is clearly within OSHA's authority, will save lives, and make workplaces safe," he told the New York Times.

According to the Times, "At the core of the legal challenge is the question of whether OSHA exceeded its authority in issuing the rule and whether such a mandate would need to be passed by Congress."

The newspaper reported:

The suit against the mandate stated that President Biden "set the legislative policy" of substantially increasing the number of Americans covered by vaccination requirements, and "then set binding rules enforced with the threat of large fines."

"That is a quintessential legislative act—and one wholly unrelated to the purpose of OSHA itself, which is protecting workplace safety," the suit said. "Nowhere in OSHA's enabling legislation does Congress confer upon it the power to end pandemics."

Corporate executives asked, and the Biden administration agreed, to delay implementation of OSHA's new ETS "until after the New Year, citing concerns about worker shortages during the important holiday season," Reuters noted.

Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda, meanwhile, said in a statement that the Labor Department, home to OSHA, is "confident in its legal authority" to issue vaccine requirements.

The vaccine rule for companies with 100 or more employees "applies to 84.2 million workers at 1.9 million private-sector employers," Reuters reported. "OSHA estimates that 31.7 million of [those] workers are unvaccinated and 60% of employers will require vaccinations, up from 25% today, resulting in another 22.7 million employees getting vaccinated."

Several million additional workers are covered by the Biden administration's vaccine mandate for employees of the executive branch, federal contractors, and staff at healthcare facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding. OSHA officials say they are considering expanding the jab-or-test rule to include companies with fewer than 100 workers.

"The Occupational Safety and Health Act explicitly gives OSHA the authority to act quickly in an emergency where the agency finds that workers are subjected to a grave danger and a new standard is necessary to protect them," Nanda said. "We are fully prepared to defend this standard in court."

The Fifth Circuit panel's two-page order directs the Biden administration to respond to the request for a permanent injunction against the rule by 5 p.m. ET Monday.

As the Times noted, it remains unclear whether the court's stay "would be a procedural blip for the Biden administration or the first step in the unwinding of the mandate."

The newspaper explained that "after both sides have filed briefs, the court will decide whether to lift the temporary injunction, allowing the rule to proceed as planned, or whether to grant a permanent injunction. OSHA could then take the case to the Supreme Court."

While some legal experts argue that the Labor Department has the regulatory authority to compel private employers to protect the health of workers and the broader public through mandatory vaccination amid a deadly global pandemic,Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, told Reuters that "there will be so much litigation it will never see the light of day."

Twenty-four attorneys general threatened to sue the Biden administration over the rule back in September, and several followed through immediately after it was published in the federal register on Friday.

In addition to the petition filed with the Fifth Circuit, attorneys general in 11 states—Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming—filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

And in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the states of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia sued, with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis saying at a press conference that "the federal government can't just unilaterally impose medical policy under the guise of workplace regulation."

Roughly 70% of U.S. adults are fully inoculated against Covid-19, and about 80% have received at least one shot, according to the CDC. Recent polling shows that a majority of U.S. adults favor Covid-19 vaccination requirements, with only about one-fifth to one-quarter of respondents opposed.

OSHA, Reuters pointed out, is "fighting history. The agency has issued 10 ETS over its 50 years. Of the six that were challenged in court, only one survived entirely intact."

Donald Verrilli, U.S. solicitor general during former President Barack Obama's administration, however, told the news outlet that the Biden administration "wouldn't move forward unless they thought that they could defend it legally... I think the constitutional challenges are all going to fail."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/jared-kushner-and-ivanka-trump/

grisham bk? covid fail

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https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ivermectin-demand-drives-trump-telemedicine-website-rcna1791

no lnx

Clamoring for ivermectin, some turn to a pro-Trump telemedicine website

Much as the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine became an unproven remedy for Covid deniers, ivermectin has emerged in recent weeks as a new false cure.

Some Facebook and Reddit groups offer people ways to buy ivermectin, which health professionals warn can be toxic and do little to stop Covid-19.Chelsea Stahl / NBC News; Getty Images

Aug. 26, 2021, 3:09 PM PDT / Updated Aug. 27, 2021,

By Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny

When users visit the telemedicine website SpeakWithAnMD.com, they are immediately hit with a warning: “Due to overwhelming demand, we are experiencing longer than usual wait times.”

The demand is for ivermectin, a drug primarily used to deworm animals that has become the latest false cure for Covid-19. And the website, in partnership with the organization America’s Frontline Doctors, whose founder stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, has become well-known in the Facebook groups and Reddit communities where anti-vaccination sentiment thrives.

In those groups, people trade dosing directions and purchasing advice for ivermectin.

FDA issues warnings about ivermectin amid spread of disinformation

AUG. 27, 202103:29

“Please consider that even if you can get an Rx for IVM, the pharmacy may not fill it for 1-3 days claiming they don’t have it in stock, which is pure bulls---,” a Reddit user wrote in the ivermectin community this month. “HAVE SOME HORSE PASTE ON HAND,” the user added, referring to the tube form that ivermectin meant for horses comes in.

Originally introduced as a veterinary drug for livestock animals in the late-1970s, ivermectin quickly proved useful in combating certain human diseases caused by parasites, a discovery that won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2015. It comes in pills and pastes, in versions meant for humans and for animals.

Ivermectin has been called a “wonder drug” because of its use in treating parasitic diseases, but it has not shown the same results in studies against viruses.

The drug was the subject of research into possible use as a Covid-19 treatment — including a promising non-peer-reviewed study that was later determined to be “flawed” and taken down by the website Research Square, which hosts preprints of research papers that have not yet been published in academic journals.

The groups highlight the challenge public health officials and tech companies face in cracking down on Covid-19 misinformation — and the lengths some people will go to embrace fringe and misleading Covid advice. NBC News obtained access to several groups that are dedicated to ivermectin or have recently embraced the drug. Some groups have tens of thousands of members and can easily be found through Facebook’s search feature.

More than a year and a half into the coronavirus pandemic, various drugs have had their moments in anti-vaccination communities and among some conservatives in the U.S. — and ivermectin is not particularly different. But it comes at a time when parts of the country are in another Covid wave, this one fueled by the delta variant of the virus and with a safe and effective option available: the vaccines.

Oklahoma stores selling out of horse medicine despite FDA plea not to take the drug

AUG. 24, 202101:41

“It’s hard to understand why people would turn down an[FREE]  FDA-approved Covid preventative in favor of a treatment that’s not only unapproved but has a large body of evidence showing it doesn’t work,” said Dr. Nathan Boonstra, a pediatrician at Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines, Iowa, and co-host of the podcast “Voices for Vaccines.” “But antivax groups will eat up any opportunity to make it seem like a vaccine isn’t needed. This has been true about anti-vaccine groups long before the pandemic.

“There is a lot of shared space between pro-ivermectin and anti-vaccine groups,” he added.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health advisory Thursday warning of a rapid increase in ivermectin prescriptions and reports of severe illness by people using ivermectin products. Data from the National Prescription Audit showed a dramatic spike in ivermectin prescriptions in recent weeks — more than nine times pre-pandemic levels.

Facebook spokesperson Aaron Simpson said in an emailed statement that the company removes any content that "attempts to buy, sell, donate or ask for Ivermectin."

"We also enforce against any account or group that violates our COVID-19 and vaccine policies, including claims that Ivermectin is a guaranteed cure or guaranteed prevention, and we don’t allow ads promoting Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19," he wrote. "Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have removed 20 million pieces of COVID misinformation, labeled more than 190 million pieces of COVID content rated by our fact-checking partners, and connected over 2 billion people with authoritative information through tools like our COVID information center.”

Reddit is reviewing the ivermectin communities,spokesperson Cameron Njaa said in an emailed statement that underscored its commitment to providing accurate information, resources and support to its users.

The groups suggest ways to buy ivermectin and plenty of encouragement to do so. Some commenters push users to online cattle supply companies or pet stores. Others recommend SpeakWithAnMD.com.

The website advertises consultations for $90 and fills prescriptions through Ravkoo Pharmacy, an online pharmacy that America’s Frontline Doctors advertises as “partners,” who provide “the option to have that prescription delivered right to your door, the same day.” On a SpeakWithAnMD.com intake form viewed by NBC News, prospective patients are asked, “What medication do you prefer?” The user is then presented with three options: “Ivermectin,” “Hydroxychloroquine” or “Not sure.”

A user visiting for other reasons may not have much luck. The website makes it clear: “Controlled substances (such as narcotics) will never be prescribed.”

Reached by phone, Ravkoo Pharmacy CEO Alpesh Patel declined to comment about the relationship with America’s Frontline Doctors and hung up. America’s Frontline Doctors and SpeakWithAnMD did not respond to requests for comment.

From hydroxychloroquine to ivermectin

Much as the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine became an unproven remedy for Covid deniers after former President Donald Trump embraced it, ivermectin has emerged in recent weeks as a favorite treatment of some conservatives and anti-vaccination activists.

Ivermectin first drew some attention late last year as a possible Covid treatment, with interest remaining reasonably low until July, according to Google search data.

In recent weeks, a variety of conservative figures and anti-vaccination activists have embraced the drug. Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson have mentioned it.

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Phil Valentine, the conservative radio host who died from Covid-19 this week, also turned to ivermectin after his diagnosis and urged his listeners to do the same. (He later encouraged listeners to get vaccinated.)

“Have a doctor on speed dial who will write you a prescription for ivermectin,” he wrote on Facebook.

While ivermectin is generally safe in low doses, high doses can be toxic in humans. The Food and Drug Administration warned that ivermectin in large doses can cause side effects including “skin rash, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain, facial or limb swelling, neurologic adverse events, sudden drop in blood pressure, severe skin rash potentially requiring hospitalization and liver injury.”

The State Health Department in Mississippi, where at least two people had been hospitalized for ivermectin toxicity, warned residents against taking the medicine this week.

And in perhaps a prime example of the exhaustion with which some public health professionals have confronted ivermectin, the FDA recently tweeted: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

‘Moo juice’

The warnings have done little to stunt enthusiasm for ivermectin in some Facebook groups and Reddit communities. After self-medicating, some community members report back to the group with side effects, like gastrointestinal upset or dizziness, or wonder whether they have overdosed.

The link to the SpeakWithAnMD website has been shared in dozens of public Facebook groups, including Unmask Our Kids, Nevada! It has also been shared by prominent anti-vaccination influencers, including Dr. Christiane Northrup, who posted the link to her 550,000 followers on Facebook with the caption: “To get the right treatment or prevention. No need for fear. Many of us have known this all along.”

America’s Frontline Doctors is not SpeakWithAnMD’s only link to the far right. Conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi also provides his audience with a vanity link to the website, which was created in March 2020 and offers no information about its ownership. 

:{

}:

SpeakWithAnMD is closely tied with America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that went viral last year when its makeshift news conference in Washington got millions of views after one of the physicians, Dr. Stella Immanuel, falsely called hydroxychloroquine a “cure” for Covid-19. Trump retweeted a video of the news conference pushed on social media by the conservative media site Breitbart.

The website for America’s Frontline Doctors directs people to SpeakWithAnMd through a button that reads “Contact A Physician,” and the America’s Frontline Doctors logo is prominent on the SpeakWithAnMD homepage.

Simone Gold, founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, was arrested and charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct after she entered the Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6. She pleaded not guilty to all charges. Gold, who is awaiting trial, spoke at an anti-vaccination protest in Santa Monica, California, last weekend.

Gold has spent the last year barnstorming churches, schools and event spaces throughout the U.S. on “The Uncensored Truth Tour,” in which she gives a presentation sowing doubt about Covid vaccines.

Gold did not respond to requests for comment.

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mirror BS deflection an 921

**Donald Trump, Jr.** is falsely claiming President Joe Biden is responsible for the impending deaths of Americans sick with COVID-19 after the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services bought an additional 1.4 million doses of Regeneron's monoclonal antibody treatments. After discovering that 70% of all monoclonal antibody treatment doses were being ordered by just seven states, HHS announced it is taking over distribution of the life-saving drug.

Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana – states that have some of the highest per-capita cases of COVID-19 and some of the lowest vaccination rates, have been limiting the supply of monoclonal antibody treatments to the rest of the nation, CNN reports.

"Given this reality, we must work to ensure our supply of these life-saving therapies remains available for all states and territories, not just some," an HHS spokesperson said.

"HHS will determine the amount of product each state and territory receives on a weekly basis. State and territorial health departments will subsequently identify sites that will receive product and how much," the spokesperson said. "This system will help maintain equitable distribution, both geographically and temporally, across the country – providing states and territories with consistent, fairly-distributed supply over the coming weeks."

"HHS will determine the amount of product each state and territory receives on a weekly basis. State and territorial health departments will subsequently identify sites that will receive product and how much," the spokesperson said. "This system will help maintain equitable distribution, both geographically and temporally, across the country – providing states and territories with consistent, fairly-distributed supply over the coming weeks."

That's akin to killing people, Donald Trump, Jr. is suggesting.

"Americans will die because of Biden's despicable decision to punish his political enemies in red states by restricting their ability to secure life-saving monoclonal antibody treatments for all that need them," the former president's son, who is not a medical expert, declared on social media. "Their blood is directly on Joe's hands," he added, disrespectfully refusing to address President Joe Biden by his elected position.

When his father was president Donald Trump, Jr. repeatedly praised the coronavirus vaccine and the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed. But after Joe Biden became President Trump Jr. switched tactics, repeatedly attacking any efforts to promote vaccination or help keep Americans safe through social distancing measures including masks. At least 17 times since Biden was elected Trump Jr. has railed against "vaccine passports" and other methods of protecting Americans' health from the coronavirus that has already killed over 650,000 people in the U.S.

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With one of the lowest COVID vaccination rates in the United States, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) has been fighting an uphill battle to get residents vaccinated in his state. The Republican governor has also dealt with his fair share of conspiracy theories which have also created more barriers getting residents to take the jab.

Unlike some members of his party, though, Justice — who ran for office as a Democrat before switching parties — is pushing back against Covid misinformation. On Wednesday, September 8, the governor appeared for his daily briefing where he addressed the conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID vaccine as he lambasted the bizarre ideologies.

"For God's sakes a livin', how difficult is this to understand?" Justice said during his daily briefing on Wednesday. "Why in the world do we have to come up with these crazy ideas — and they're crazy ideas — that the vaccine's got something in it and it's tracing people wherever they go?"

Justice's remarks stem from previous reports about the bizarre claim. Back in May, reports began circulating about the microchipping conspiracy which has been linked to Microsoft business magnate Bill Gates. According to BBC News, "a new YouGov poll of 1,640 people suggests that 28% of Americans believe that Bill Gates wants to use vaccines to implant microchips in people - with the figure rising to 44% among Republicans."

The publication also notes: "Rumours took hold in March when Mr. Gates said in an interview that eventually 'we will have some digital certificates' which would be used to show who'd recovered, been tested and ultimately who received a vaccine. He made no mention of microchips."

That one quote led to the rapid circulation of an article with a headline that read, "Bill Gates will use microchip implants to fight coronavirus." Conspiracy theorists claimed the so-called microchips are a way for the government to keep track of Americans.

However, according to HuffPost, Justice highlighted the one major flaw in the conspiracy theory: the government does not need microchips to know the whereabouts of Americans when the vast majority of Americans carry cell phones. "The same very people that are saying that are carrying their cellphones around," he said. "I mean, come on."

The spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories has greatly contributed to vaccine hesitancy among Americans, mostly members of the Republican party. However, the Biden administration is still working to get Americans vaccinated.

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sturgis 5x spike?!

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/why-kristi-noem-now-qualifies-as-one-of-americas-worst-governors/

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cpac BS for 2024 don't let those other gop govs convince you they did not shut down etc

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how a Los Angeles megachurch became a bastion of evangelical coronavirus denial: 'There is no pandemic'

Alex Henderson

August 17, 2021

Coronavirus denial is by no means universal in Christianity. A wide range of practicing Christians, from Catholics to Mainline Protestants such as Lutherans, Methodists and Episcopalians, have encouraged social...

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BAD TRINITY

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/fox-news-media/

iam sorry to report I've had more than one conversation with progressives who, despite being savvy and well-read, are under the mistaken impression that Fox News has seen the light and has started to promote the COVID-19 vaccine. I've even witnessed speculation that Rupert Murdoch, who is himself vaccinated, had a come-to-Jesus meeting with the Fox News brass about the wisdom of encouraging their own audience to contract a dangerous disease. And while I always enjoy a cheeky opportunity to tell folks they should be reading my work more, overall, it's distressing to see that people are buying into the myth that Fox News has "pivoted" to being pro-vaccine.

But can you blame folks for believing this? Someone who prides themselves on a responsible, fact-based diet of mainstream media sources like CNN, NBC News and NPR likely got exposed in mid-to-late July to misleading stories hyping an out-of-context clip of Fox News host Sean Hannity saying, "I believe in the science of vaccination" and urging viewers to "take COVID seriously." The clip also got shared widely on social media.

Everyone likes a "scared straight" story, and it just felt good to believe conservatives were on the verge of giving up this anti-vaccination nonsense. Unforutantely, the story was B.S.

As Iand reporters who cover right wing media for Media Matters and Vox pointed out at the time, Hannity's show that night was not only bookmarked by two other shows — Laura Ingraham's and Tucker Carlson's — that openly discouraged vaccination, but his supposedly "pro-vaccine" comments came in the middle of a segment that overall portrayed vaccines as dangerous and a threat to freedom. Even in the edited clip, Hannity instructed his viewers to "research like crazy," which is**a common anti-vaxx rhetorical trick**. As with creationists claiming they want to "teach the controversy," it's a way to seem reasonable while slyly directing people to engage conspiracy theories and suggesting those conspiracy theories are on equal footing, credibility-wise, as scientific fact. **As Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times** wrote, Hannity was basically "encouraging listeners to expose themselves to the wide variety of anti-vax conspiracy mongering accessible on social media via 'research.'"

But in case there was any doubt, a perusal of Hannity's programming in the weeks since his supposed conversion shows that, actually, Hannity is still largely focused on stoking confusion, spreading misinformation, and portraying vaccination efforts as a liberal conspiracy against his audience. As Media Matters documented on Tuesday, Hannity gave an entire hour of his radio show over to two anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists — men who use phrases like "the demon needle" and "poisonous jabs." Hannity presented them falsely as medical experts to people calling in looking for advice. He also sneered at Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden's chief medical advisor, calling him "flip-flop Fauci" and declaring that his anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists were better experts. The conspiracy theorists discouraged vaccines for young people, implied that dangerous and unproven drugs are superior prevention to the vaccine, and lied about the breakthrough infection rate, implying it's high when it is not.

This in in line with the general approach to the vaccine question on Hannity's show. From the moment that his misleading "pro-vaccine" clip went viral, Hannity has aggressively downplayedthe claim that he's promoting the vaccine, declaring two days after the initial clipthat, "I'm not urging people to get the COVID-19 vaccine" and "I have never told anyone to get a vaccine." In the past few weeks, he's attacked vaccine passport programs, portrayed vaccine advocacy as "threats coming from Democrats," exaggerated the risks of breakthrough infections, and even claimed that vaccine passport programs are racist against Black people. (In reality, Black people are at a higher risk of dying of COVID-19, which is one reason why aggressive public health measures are necessary.)

A visit to Hannity's Facebook page is more of the same. It features a post mocking New York City mayor Bill De Blasio for supposedly playing doctor by instituting a vaccine passport system, **Blames undocumented immigrants for the COVID-19 spread** when the medical establishment is quite clear that the problem is willfully unvaccinated people, and celebrates Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is selling merchandise mocking vaccine advocates and whose state is paying the price for his idiocy with some of the highest rates of COVID-19 in the country.

Overall, Hannity viewers get a strong message that vaccines are ineffective, dangerous, and getting one is just giving into those damn Democrats. And his firehose of anti-vaccination demagoguery is in line with the rest of Fox News, which continues to take the stance that vaccines are "a menace", ineffective, and that refusing vaccination is a good way to prove one's right wing bona fides.

And yet, this notion that the network has changed its tune has become received wisdom in much of the mainstream media.

Googling "Hannity vaccines" turns up a darkly funny mix of Fox News headlines demonizing vaccination and mainstream media headlines praising Fox News for being pro-vaccination. One of those more recent ones, from Morning Consult, even announces, "Fox News Personalities Started to Promote COVID-19 Vaccines. Viewers Have Taken Notice." The article declares that "some conservative media personalities have gone all in on vaccines," falsely citing Hannity as an example. It credits this supposed shift in messaging for the fact that vaccine "reluctance fell to an all-time low this week among adults who watch Fox News: 27 percent of viewers now say they probably or definitely won't get vaccinated, down from 30 percent the week before and a high of 37 percent in mid-March." That's certainly an improvement, but hard to say if Fox News is really the cause, since their much-ballyhooed "shift" is an illusion propped up to bamboozle the mainstream media and not actually representative of the vaccine-negative messaging their audience actually gets. The comments from his fans on Facebook make quite clear what message they're getting, and it's definitely not that vaccination is good and that unvaccinated people are the cause of the current surge. Instead, it's fear-mongering about the shots, blaming immigrants and not the unvaccinated, and comparing vaccine passports and mandates to Nazi Germany.

As the New York Times reports, fears of the delta variant are also driving a lot of red state Americans to get the shot, clearly deciding that sticking it to the liberals isn't worth getting sick over. The article also points out that "employers and universities have started requiring the shots to return to work and class." Even the phrase "pandemic of the unvaccinated," which is being heavily (and accurately) promoted by the White House and the Centers for Disease Control, likely deserves credit for underscoring to the unvaccinated that it's they, not hated liberals, who are paying the price for listening to Fox News.

So this is probably not a matter of one pro-vaccine Hannity clip in a sea of anti-vaccine messaging changing minds. It's just that even the most devout death cults eventually have some members who start to question the wisdom of sacrificing themselves for some dumb ideology. Let's hope that the number of Fox News fans deciding they have their limits only continues to rise.

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someone says freeDUMB just assertion of white male xian priviledge

Rand Paul tells vaccinated Americans to 'mind your own business'

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

August 05, 2021

U.S. Senator Rand Paul blasted millions of Americans who are fully vaccinated, telling them to "mind your own business" after complaining about those who say they don't want to eat in restaurants where everyone...

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robt reich? pts out that gop used to be anti- reg, let decisions be made local, free mkt but then pass laws against local mask and cruise ships petri dish req vax

internet slams 'homicidal sociopath' Desantis as Florida Gov. lashes out over questions about kids in COVID ICU

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

 August 05, 2021

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is waging the opposite of a charm offensive, lashing out at reporters and even President Joe Biden any time questions are asked about the coronavirus pandemic...

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/gop-2653811907/

"Death Wish" was a hit movie in 1974, starring Charles Bronson as a violent vigilante. Now it's the primary motivation for the Republican Party. As of this week, in 13 states you have a legal right not merely to have a death wish but to inflict it on others by refusing to get vaccinated against COVID. In 21 more states, bills have been introduced that would limit any requirements that individuals produce evidence that they have been vaccinated. In six of those states, the laws specify that schools, including public primary and secondary schools and public colleges, cannot require coronavirus vaccines, even while the same schools continue to require vaccinations against whooping cough, polio, measles and chicken pox.

"It seems to be kind of a mixed bag of all the things going on here — there's the limiting of requiring proof of vaccine, there's the limiting of requiring the vaccination itself, the prohibition of the mandates. So, there's a lot," Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive officer of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, told CNN.

These bills are being called "vaccine freedom laws," as in, you have a right to be free of the vaccines against COVID. What's not a mixed bag is the political leaning of the states. All the states where such laws are in effect are controlled by Republican governors and legislatures: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.

You could call them the death wish states, or the Kevorkian states, after the infamous Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who was jailed for eight years after assisting a man to commit suicide who suffered from ALS, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's disease. So if you want to enjoy your freedom to catch COVID and possibly die, those 13 states are the states for you. In six of them, you are guaranteed the freedom to subject your unvaccinated children to the virus as well.

At the same time the Republican Party is moving to protect your right to refuse the COVID vaccine, rates of infection are on the rise across the country. According to Johns Hopkins University, the new case rate is 10 percent higher in 46 states than it was last week. According to CNN, "In 31 states, _{new cases this past week are at least 50% higher }_than new cases the previous week."

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNN that more than 99 percent of deaths from Covid in June were unvaccinated patients. CNN reports that "the vast majority of new Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths … are among unvaccinated people, doctors say."

The Delta variant of the virus is causing more infections among children and young adults than before. In Missouri, where just 39 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, the situation is so bad that the CDC and FEMA have sent teams of specialists to the state to help stop the spread of the disease."We've been seeing a much younger population," Dr. Harold Jarvis, an emergency physician in Springfield, Missouri, told CNN. "We're seeing a lot of people in their 30s, 40s, early 50s. We're seeing some teenagers and some pediatric patients as well."

Missouri is one of the states that has passed a law forbidding the requirement of a COVID vaccine or evidence of vaccination such as a so-called vaccine passport.

In Mississippi, where the vaccination rate is only 33 percent, seven children are in intensive care with COVID disease and two are on ventilators, according to the state health officer, Thomas Dobbs. On Monday, Dobbs tweeted "Pretty much ALL cases in MS are Delta variant right now. Vast majority of cases/hospitalizations/deaths UNVACCINATED." By Wednesday, Dobbs was tweeting that the state had suffered a "Big jump," and reported 641 new cases and five deaths in one day, along with 36 new outbreaks of the virus in long-term care facilities such as nursing homes and rehabilitation centers.

Mississippi has three bills pending before the state legislature that would prohibit issuing a "vaccine passport" and prohibit businesses and state facilities from requiring proof of vaccination.. One bill has passed both houses of the legislature and is awaiting the governor's signature.

But it's in Tennessee that promotion of the Republican death wish has reached its nadir. On Monday, the state fired its top immunization official for her efforts to get teenagers vaccinated against the COVID virus. "This is about a partisan issue around covid vaccines and around people in power in Tennessee not believing in the importance in vaccinating the people, and so they terminated the person in charge of getting it done," Michelle Fiscus told the Washington Post. She was director of all immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health. "The government is sacrificing public health to be in the good graces of our legislators; it's a horrid dereliction of duty," she said on Monday. The Tennessean, the state's largest daily newspaper, reported on Tuesday that the state would stop promoting vaccinations for all teenagers, and would cease sending out reminders for teenagers who had received one vaccination to get their second dose.

That's more than a death wish. With 99 percent of all deaths from Covid among the unvaccinated, that is more like the organized and state-sanctioned killing of children.

I've been reading these stories all week and trying to figure out what's driving this madness. The evidence is out there for everyone to see. There can't be a state legislator or governor in this country who isn't aware that virtually all people who come down with COVID today, and 98 or 99 percent of those who die from the disease, are unvaccinated. They have to be aware of the fact, and it is a fact, that if you want to avoid being hospitalized with this disease and dying from it, a vaccination will not only help, it will absolutely prevent both outcomes.

They're not just standing up and speaking out against the COVID vaccines, they are passing laws with the express purpose of making it easier for people to refuse vaccinations. In some cases, these laws are specifically aimed at school-age children. It's one thing to put your adult neighbors and employees and fellow workers at risk. It's quite another to put not only your children, but all children at greater risk of getting sick with a virus that, with the spread of the Delta Variant, is showing signs of being deadly to children as well as adults.

The only answer I've been able to come up with is the obvious one. It's about politics, and not just any politics. These Republican death wish laws have one purpose: they are designed to make President Biden's push to get all Americans vaccinated fail. Republicans at the CPAC gathering last week in Dallas were laughing at references to Biden's goal of vaccinating 70 percent of the population by the Fourth of July. One speaker received an ovation when he told the crowd, "The government was hoping they could sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated. And it isn't happening."

"The government," of course, is no longer being run by the man the whole CPAC conference was designed to celebrate, former president Donald Trump. It's run by the man who beat him, Joe Biden, and the Republican Party seems determined to do as much damage to his vaccination program as they can, even if that means enacting laws that will surely cause more people to get sick from the virus and die.

Republicans have become the death wish party. Unsatisfied with passing laws to take away people's right to vote, they have moved on to passing laws that will, without a doubt, take away people's right to life.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/19-is-raging-in-a-missouri-county-with-low-vaccination-rates-report/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/gop-vaccines/

thom h

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN Medical Analyst, said last week, "A surprising amount of death will occur soon..." But why, when the deadly Delta variant is sweeping the world, are Republicans and their media warning people not to get vaccinated?

There's always a reason. People don't do things — particularly things involving a lot of effort and a need for consistency — without a reason. It just doesn't happen. No matter how bizarre, twisted or dysfunctional the reason may be, there's always a reason.

Dr. Anthony Fauci told Jake Tapper on CNN last Sunday, "I don't have a really good reason why this [unwillingness to get vaccinated] is happening."

But even if he can't think of a reason why Republicans would trash talk vaccination and people would believe them, it's definitely there.

Which is why it's important to ask a couple of simple questions that all point to the actual reason why Republicans and their media are discouraging people from getting vaccinated:

1. Why did Trump get vaccinated in secret after Joe Biden won the election and his January 6th coup attempt failed?

2. Why are Fox "News" personalities discouraging people from getting vaccinated while refusing to say if they and the people they work with have been protected by vaccination?

3. Why was one of the biggest applause lines at CPAC: "They were hoping — the government was hoping — that they could sort of sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated and it isn't happening!"

4. Why are Republican legislators in states around the country pushing laws that would "ban" private businesses from asking to see proof of vaccination status (they call it "banning vaccine passports")?

5. Why, when President Biden suggested sending volunteers door-to-door into low-vaccination communities to let people know how and where they could get vaccinated, did rightwing media go nuts about "government thugs" coming to your door to "force" vaccines on you?

6. Why are about half of all the Republicans in Congress refusing to say if they've gotten a vaccine or not? For that matter, why do the CPAC speakers who are trashing vaccines refuse to say if they're vaccinated or not?

7. Why would a Newsmax hosttrash-talk vaccines saying, "I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature"?

8. Why did Republican Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota downplay the dangers of Covid last week by bragging that she never shut her state down(and Ron DeSantis did) when SD has 230 Covid deaths per 100,000 people while similar low-population states like Vermont and Oregon are at 41 and 66 deaths per 100,000 respectively?

I hope I'm proven wrong on this, but the only possible explanation I can see for all this activity that seems so well-coordinated and largely consistent is that they all think there's something in it for them. And what might that be?

Political power. And, of course, the eventual wealth that often comes with political power, particularly corrupt power. Retired Republicans make a lot of money.

Put simply, I believe these Republicans are trying to promote outbreaks of Covid in America to soften or damage Joe Biden's red-hot economy on the assumption that if the economy tanks then people will vote out Democrats and vote in Republicans in 2022 and 2024.

As Pat Buchanan wrote today: "Are the Democrats headed for their Little Bighorn, with President Joe Biden as Col. Custer? The wish, you suggest, is father to the thought."

They're not just willing to let tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans die just to win the next two elections, they're actively encouraging that outcome.

Deathis their electoral strategy.

Is there any other possible explanation?

They're not stupid (although they're banking on their audience being, at least, poorly informed) and most have college degrees (and Lauren Boebert finally got her GED). Even if a few of them fell down the Facebook or YouTube rabbit hole into anti-vaxxer territories, they still have no shortage of actual medical experts and staffers who know how to use Google available to them.

It's remotely possible they just hate and want to damage the US, and a few who are pushing vaccine "hesitancy" like Ron Johnson and John Kennedy recently celebrated the 4th of July in Moscow, but it's unlikely that they'd take the chance of coordinating with a foreign power to kill Americans (even if much of the foreign troll activity on social media is also trashing vaccines to American social media users).

A bizarre faux masculinity could be behind it, the way Trump tried to promote the idea that only wimps wear masks, but, seriously, do you really think these folks are taking fashion/appearance tips from an obese geriatric guy with a huge comb-over who wears absurd amounts of makeup, contacts, men's diapers and false teeth? And what's "masculine" about slowly dying by drowning in your own snot? Or becoming unable to get an erection, as happens to a significant number of men who get Covid?

It's certainly not fear of, or concern about, the vaccine itself; whether they'll admit it or not, virtually all of these Republicans and media stars telling people to be afraid of getting a shot have been secretly vaccinated themselves, just like Trump and his family were in January. As CNN Medical Analyst, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, said, "Over 100 members of Congress, all of them GOP members, refuse to tell their constituents whether they have been vaccinated. They've all been vaccinated, every single one of those characters have been vaccinated."

This also has nothing to do with "conservative" ideology. Vaccination has been a part of the American landscape since George Washington ordered his troops inoculated against smallpox during the Revolutionary war, and Republican President Dwight Eisenhower (and his VP, Richard Nixon) had schoolchildren across the nation get the polio vaccine in the 1950s (I was one of them who lined up in school to get it and remember it well).

As California governor, Ronald Reagan oversaw a public school system that required vaccination for admission and conservatives like Bill Kristol and George W. Bush are proudly vaccinated against Covid. Mitch McConnell, who had polio as a child, said, "As a victim of polio myself, I'm a big fan of vaccinations, and if I were a parent who had a child … being subject to getting any particular disease, I would come down on the side of vaccinations." This is not about fearing or not understanding vaccines.

They're certainly not being paid by "big Pharma" to trash vaccines, and you can bet your last dollar that the billionaires who pay for big Republican events are not only themselves vaccinated but have made sure the entire staff of their multiple mansions, from the cooks to the pool boys to the masseuses and the live-in chefs are all vaccinated.

So, what's left?

Politics, and the power and money that derive from it.

The reason why Donald Trump spent much of 2020 desperately encouraging people to keep shopping and working was because he knew that when an economy collapses in the 18 months before an election, the party in power always loses.

In his desperation to get the economy back in shape, Trump even issued an executive order**forcing** mostly Black and Hispanic meat-packing and slaughterhouse employees back to work under threat of imprisonment.

But, sure enough, the economy tanked anyway and Democrats now control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives.

Thus, it appears that today's entire GOP strategy of encouraging "vaccine hesitancy" is to try to replicate that dynamic, to tank the economy, only this time in a way that works in favor of Republicans.

Encouraging Americans to die so they can win elections. That's how low today's GOP has sunk.

---

721 noem  brag on covid fail

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/19-republicans/

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an 721

no lnx twt vid

Newsmax host dangerously declares vaccines go ‘against nature’: Diseases are ‘supposed to’ wipe out people

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement July 12, 2021

Newsmax host Rob Schmitt on Monday dangerously declared he believes vaccines go "against nature" and diseases are "supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that's just kind of the way evolution goes."

Admitting he's "not a doctor," as Media Matters reports, Schmitt mused on-air, "I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm not a pro-vaxxer. I'm somebody that's looking at this thing and trying to figure it out."

"I've always thought about vaccines, and I always think about just nature, and the way everything works. And I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature," he claimed, ignoring the fact that all medicine in theory does too – if you define evolution in the most basic "survival of the fittest" terms.

"Like, I mean, if there is some disease out there -- maybe there's just an ebb and flow to life where something's supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that's just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that. Do you follow what I'm saying? Does that make sense to somebody in medicine?"

Schmitt was speaking to Dr. Peter McCullough, a professor at Texas A&M College of Medicine, who wrongly claimed the Delta variant of the coronavirus is only 30% of COVID-19 cases (it is 51.7%) and wrongly claimed that as time goes on the variants get "weaker." The Delta variant "is more contagious than the other virus strains," Yale Medicine reports.

00:00

The World Health Organization calls it “the fastest and fittest."

"Delta is spreading 50% faster than Alpha, which was 50% more contagious than the original strain of SARS-CoV-2," Yale Medicine epidemiologist Dr. Perry Wilson says.

Schmitt went on to tell viewers that "if you don't have a risk, I just, I can't comprehend why you would take something -- they start learning about the heart inflammation and stuff like that. I just don't understand why it's being pushed so hard on people that are very young. And now they're trying to give it to kids."

Three weeks ago the Associated Press reported, "Nearly all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. now are in people who weren't vaccinated, a staggering demonstration of how effective the shots have been and an indication that deaths per day — now down to under 300 — could be practically zero if everyone eligible got the vaccine."

Watch:

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biden goal 70 by july 4 close; huge split red blue, delta grows fast #1 in weeks:

ith around 65% of the U.S. population having been at least partially vaccinated for COVID-19, millions of Americans are celebrating the fact that they are less likely to die from the novel coronavirus — which, according to Johns Hopkins researchers in Baltimore, has killed more than 3.9 million people worldwide. Yet anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories on the far right are discouraging some Americans from getting vaccinated. And journalist Pilar Melendez, in an article published by the Daily Beast on June 25, points to non-vaccination as one of the reasons why COVID-19 is especially bad in a Colorado county.

"For the last seven weeks," Melendez reports, "health officials in Mesa County, Colorado, have been scrambling to contain the highly transmissible Delta variant of the novel coronavirus. But now, as a huge music festival kicks off, time may be up. As the first location in Colorado to positively identify the presence of the variant deemed potentially more deadly and at least 50% more contagious on May 5, the county, nestled at the state's border with Utah, only had five cases. Within a month, with the vaccination rate in the area low, the variant positivity rate soared 2500%."

Melendez adds, "And health-care officials believe that number will only go higher — especially with the start ofCountry Jam, the state's largest three-day music festival that has already sold 50,000 tickets. The potential disaster site pitted vaccine holdouts against an extra-contagious variant of COVID-19 — one that may make people sicker, faster — in a local encapsulation of a phenomenon experts fear will play out in anti-vaxxer bastions nationwide."...

===

621 biden 80 mill then 500 mill doses to who; kpfa 40% med ppl reluctant, tho not so much dr and nurses; rw lawyer --> scotus

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/antivax-testimony/

new civ rtd

Ohio lawmakers debating a bill Tuesday that would allow anyone to refuse any vaccine for any reason and would give them the "right" to not be "discriminated" against or even asked about their vaccination status, heard from Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, recognized as**one of the world's top spreaders of vaccine disinformatio**n.

After falsely claiming that 5000 Americans have died from the coronavirus vaccine, Dr. Tenpenny told lawmakers that the injections, which have saved countless lives around the world, make people magnetic.

"Right now we're all kind of hypothesizing," a fast-talking Tenpenny said, after being asked about the "EMF frequencies," also known as electromagnetic frequencies,she "hypothesizes" are associated with the COVID-19 vaccine.

"I mean what is it that's actually being transmitted that's causing all of these things? Is it a combination of the protein which now we're finding has a metal attached to it?" Tenpenny posited to lawmakers.

"I'm sure you've seen the pictures all over the internet of people who've had these shots and now they're magnetized, and put a key on their forehead, it sticks, they can put spoons and forks all over them and they can stick because now we think that there's a metal piece to that," she claimed, not saying who "we" refers to. There is exactly zero proof this is legitimate.

She also pushed the false claim that vaccinated people are shedding unknown properties onto unvaccinated people.

"There has been people who've long suspected that there was some sort of an interface," she continued, using air quotes, "yet to be defined in the interface between what's being injected in these shots, and all of the 5G towers. Not proven yet, but we're trying to figure out what is it that's being transmitted to these unvaccinated people."

The name of the Ohio bill, HB 248, is the "Vaccine Choice and Anti-Discrimination Act," to protect science-denying unvaccinated Ohioans from discrimination.

As far as Dr. Tenpenny goes, the Center for Public Integrity reports "Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, who offers a $595, eight-week course in anti-vaccine talking points despite a federal judge having found her 'unqualified' to weigh in as an expert witness on a vaccine-related lawsuit ('Television interviews do not an expert make,' he wrote)."

Ohio Capital Journal reporterTyler Buchanan posted the video, below. His colleague at the Journal, Jake Zuckerman, who he says has "followed the anti-vax movement in Ohio closer than anyone over the past year," posted this today:

Handed to me outside the statehouse today https://t.co/XqTyVJvunz

— Jake Zuckerman (@Jake Zuckerman) 1623173646.0

Watch the video:

Testimony going off the rails now. Tenpenny is claiming there is metal in the vaccine that causes forks to stick… https://t.co/TRBqBwZXXx

— Tyler Buchanan (@Tyler Buchanan) 1623166665.0

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/scientists-lab-leak/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/india-modi/

// trump fail covid

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lotta lunacy out of midwest 521? illinois?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/dewine-2653101245/

~ vax lotto

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no twt pix dress all blk looks like skater chick

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)is leading the charge among House Republicans to refuse to follow Speaker Nancy Pelosi's rule continuing the mask mandate, with at least a dozen far right lawmakers flouting their obligation.

"Masks are oppressive and nothing but a political tool. End the oppression!" Greene tweeted Tuesday.

As with many issues from the far right House members, they are literally the cause of their own issues. The House mask mandate has remained in place because, according to CNN, less than half of the House members say they are vaccinated. One hundred percent of House Democrats are, the unvaccinated are all Republicans.

Forbes' Andrew Solender reports among those refusing to wear masks on the House floor are "some of the House's most vocal right-wingers: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Laure Boebert (R-Colo.), Mary Miller (R-Ill.), Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), Chip Roy (R-Texas), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas)."

The hypocrisy isn't limited to refusing to be vaccinated.

Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, according to Solender, "says he 'got into it' with the GOP lawmakers and joked that they are pro-choice when they told him the mandate is a 'violation of their right to decide for themselves.'"

They replied 'absolutely not, it's a totally different thing,' he says."

The U.S. is approaching 34 million cases of COVID-19, and just passed 600,000 coronavirus deaths.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/lab-origin-theory/

ah

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump went from bragging about his ability to make deals with Chinese government officials to pushing the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 coronavirus was invented in a lab in Wuhan, China and leaked out. Never Trump conservative David Frum, in an Atlantic article published by The Atlantic on May 18, lays out some ways in which Trump and his sycophants are still trying to use that conspiracy theory as a political weapon in the United States.

Although Frum's article is critical of Trump, it is also critical of the Chinese government's initial response to COVID-19. The novel coronavirus was first reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and spread rapidly in January 2020, when Chinese officials downplayed its severity — which is the same thing Trump subsequently did when COVID-19 spread rapidly in the United States. But Frum rejects the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan.

"Early on, it became clear that Chinese authorities were lying about the disease's human toll," Frum explains. "Nick Paton of CNN, in December 2020, reported on 117 pages of internal Chinese government documents suggesting that the local authorities in Wuhan had massively underreported COVID-19 infections in the early weeks of the outbreak. In January 2021, HBO aired a documentary by the director Nanfu Wang minutely detailing the Chinese undercount. From the beginning, though, many have suspected the Chinese authorities of concealing an even darker secret about the outbreak than China's count of the sick and the dead. Those doubters suspected that the Chinese were also lying about how the outbreak started. They suspected that the official story of a spread from bats to humans was an excuse to conceal the fact that the virus had originated in a Chinese lab."

Frum adds that on January 29, 2020, the Washington Post published an article headlined "Experts Debunk Fringe Theory Linking China's Coronavirus to Weapons Research." And on February 17, 2020, the New York Times published an article headlined "Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins." Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, has been a devoted Trump supporter.

"Over time, the suspicious modulated their accusation a little," Frum notes. "In the spring of 2020, Trumpworld was also arguing that the virus was no big deal, no reason to shut down the U.S. economy. The president and his supporters wanted to argue that masking was stupid and that public-health officials were hysterical. You couldn't argue both that the virus was absurdly exaggerated and that it had begun its existence as a Chinese superweapon. By the time Secretary of State Mike Pompeo endorsed a lab-origin theory of the virus in May 2020, the suspicion about the virus' origin had been downgraded from 'superweapon' to 'medical experiment gone wrong.' Despite this softening, the scientific community, for the most part, continued to emphatically reject the lab-origin theory."

Scientists, Frum points out, are unsure exactly how COVID-19 started — adding that Trump supporters are happy to toss science aside if it is politically advantageous.

"If there is any group of people more disliked by Trump supporters than Chinese Communists," Frum observes, "it is the U.S. scientific community. For months, scientists had irritated Trump supporters by not falling in line with the pro-Trump argument that the coronavirus was much exaggerated and no big deal."

Frum adds, "Anthony Fauci in particular has become a hate figure to the pro-Trump world and the Fox News network. It's weird, it's hard to explain, but it is an organizing fact of American politics: More than Biden, more than Vice President Kamala Harris, more than any Democrat in Congress other than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Fauci has become the emblem and totem of everything that Trumpists resent."

The Never Trump conservative stresses that although COVID-19-releated "misconduct" on the part of Chinese officials needs to be called out, that shouldn't include pushing bogus conspiracy theories.

"Pro-Trumpers want to use Chinese misconduct — real and imagined — as a weapon in a culture war here at home," Frum warns. "They are not interested in weighing the evidence. They want payback for the political and cultural injuries inflicted on them by the scientists. They want Fauci to have time in the barrel. What the rest of us should want is the truth…. By actively seeking the truth, the Biden Administration will deny the Trump dead-enders the culture-war weapon they want."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/gop-governors

kos

note criminalization

The flood of Republican-controlled states cutting off the federal unemployment benefits supplement will lead to nearly 2 million people losing payments before the September cutoff passed by Congress. The nearly 1.4 million people in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Assistance programs will lose everything they're currently getting, while people on traditional unemployment insurance will lose the $300 a week above their state's regular benefits.

"These changes have the potential to drastically scale back assistance to jobless workers far too early in the recovery," Andrew Stettner, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, told CNN. "Nationally, there are still 16.8 million workers on one of the unemployment programs, and the nation is still short 8 million-plus jobs from the start of the pandemic."

According to Stettner's calculations, the early cutoffs will strip billions of dollars from jobless workers. If every state that has announced it's refusing the federal supplement did so starting on June 12, it would be $10.8 billion, but several states have announced later cutoff dates.

The Republican message is that this is what's needed because too many people are sitting home living large on unemployment aid and are too lazy to work. In reality, writes Adam Chandler at The Washington Post, "In the past year alone, study after study has debunked the myth that the emergency benefits and occasional payments provided by the government are disincentivizing people from returning to the labor force en masse."

Back when the federal government was adding $600 a week to unemployment benefits—a measure passed by a Republican Senate and signed by Donald Trump—a study by Yale economists found "no evidence that high UI [unemployment insurance] replacement rates drove job losses or slowed rehiring." Also last summer, University of Massachusetts economist Arindrajit Dube looked at unemployed workers without a college degree. "Overall," he concluded, "these findings do not provide evidence supporting the claim that the [Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation] has held back the labor market recovery."

And, Chandler notes, even these supposedly lavish unemployment benefits are not eradicating hunger: "According to a Census Bureau survey last month, nearly 1 in 3 Americans on unemployment said they were still failing to cover routine expenses such as food, housing and medical treatments."

So studies show that the emergency benefits aren't keeping lazy people from looking for work. Surveys show that people are not living large, or even necessarily making ends meet. But history gives us a context for the persistent claims that that's what's going on, as AFL-CIO economist William Spriggs pointed out: [twt]

republicans can't reproduce those conditions, but they can use low or no unemployment benefits to force people back into minimum-wage and unsafe jobs—and the present-day effort also echoes the past in the disproportionately Black and Latino workers it targets, after 14 months in which Black and Latino people have disproportionately suffered and died as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

So far, Montana, South Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota, Missouri, Iowa, Idaho, Tennessee, Wyoming, South Dakota, Utah, Georgia, Arizona, and Ohio have announced cutoff dates ranging from June 12 to July 10. More states could follow, raising the number of people in economic pain as a direct result of Republican lies about the unemployment situation.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/vaccine/

comm dr

While global health advocates applauded the Biden administration's recent decision to support waiving intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines as "critical," "transformative," and "unquestionably the right thing to do," Big Pharma took a decidedly less optimistic view of the move and has been hard at work behind the scenes in a bid to thwart the policy, a report published Friday by The Intercept revealed.

In a bid to stymie U.S. support for a proposal by India and South Africa to enact a Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver at the World Trade Organization (WTO), the pharmaceutical industry is "distributing talking points, organizing opposition, and even collecting congressional signatures in an attempt to reverse President Joe Biden's support for worldwide access to generic Covid-19 vaccines," according to The Intercept's Lee Fang.

Fang obtained an email from Jared Michaud, a lobbyist with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA)—a trade group whose clients include vaccine developers AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer—describing how Big Pharma and sympathetic U.S. legislators are pushing lawmakers to oppose a TRIPS waiver.

The email explains that Reps. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) and Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) are leading an unreleased letter to Biden—which currently has 29 co-signers—"expressing concerns with the administration's support for waiving IP protections related to Covid-19 vaccines under the WTO TRIPS waiver."

"We urge you to contact offices and ask them to sign onto this letter," said Michaud's email.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/bill-gates-vaccine-india/

globetrotter

While the incompetence of the Indian government is starkly visible in its handling of the second wave of the COVID-19 crisis, its performance has been far worse on the vaccine front. The BJP-led government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which seems to believe in the ideology of free-market capitalism, thinks that the market will magically produce the number of vaccines the country needs. This would explain why it has starved seven public sector vaccine manufacturing units—according to an April 17 article in Down to Earth—of any support instead of ramping up much-needed vaccine production.

The rights to produce the public sector vaccine, Covaxin, which has been developed bythe Indian Council of Medical Research(ICMR) and National Institute of Virology (NIV), in collaboration with Bharat Biotech, have been given to the private company partner on an exclusive basis. The Indian government also believed that Serum Institute of India, another private sector company and the world's largest vaccine manufacturer, which has tied up with AstraZeneca for producing Covishield, would make vaccines according to the country's requirements without any prior orders or capital support. The government did not even see the necessity to intervene and prevent India's new Quad ally, the U.S., from stopping sending India supplies of the required raw materials needed by India for manufacturing vaccines.

The sheer negligence by the government is further highlighted by the fact that even though India has about 20 licensed manufacturing facilities for vaccines and 30 biologic manufacturers, all of which could have been harnessed for vaccine manufacturing, only two companies are presently producing vaccines. That too is at a pace completely inadequate for India's needs.

India has a long history of vaccine development, which can be traced back to the Haffkine Institute for Training, Research and Testing, in Mumbai, in the 1920s. With the Patents Act, 1970 and the reverse engineering of drugs by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) laboratories, the country also broke the monopoly of global multinationals. It is this change, fought for by the Left, that led to India emerging as the largest generic supplier of drugs and vaccines in the world and becoming the global pharmacy of the poor.

Bill Gates recently spoke to **Sky News**in the UK regarding India and South Africa's proposal to the World Trade Organization on the need to lift intellectual property (IP) protection for COVID-19 vaccines and medicines during the pandemic. Gates claimed that IP is not the issue and that "moving a vaccine… into a factory in India… It's only because of our grants and our expertise that can happen at all." In other words, without the white man coming in to tell India and other middle-income countries how to make vaccines and provide them with his money, these countries would not be able to make vaccines on their own.

This is a rehash of the AIDS debate, where the Western governments and Big Pharma argued that developing generic AIDS drugs would lead to the manufacturing of poor-quality drugs and theft of Western intellectual property. Bill Gates, who built his fortune on Microsoft's IP, is the leading defender of IP in the world. With his newfound halo as a great philanthropist, he is leading Big Pharma's charge against the weakening of patents on the global stage. The role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of the World Health Organization, is also to dilute any move by the WHO to share patents and knowledge during the pandemic.

Indian companies are the largest manufacturers of existing vaccines by volume in the world, according to the WHO's Global Vaccine Market Report 2020. When it comes to measuring vaccine manufacturing by value, however, the global share held by multinational corporations or Big Pharma is much bigger than that of India. For example, as per the WHO report, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), with 11 percent of the global market by volume, generates 40 percent of the market by value, while Serum Institute with 28 percent of the market by volume has only 3 percent of the market by value. This shows that the patent-protected vaccines with monopoly pricing get much higher prices. This is the model that Bill Gates and his ilk are selling. Let Big Pharma make the big bucks even if it bankrupts the poorer countries. The Western philanthropic money of Gates and Warren Buffett will 'help' the poor Third World to get some vaccines, albeit slowly. As long as they get to call the shots.

The Modi government's approach to vaccines is based on the central pillar of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ideology—which serves as the ideological parent of the ruling BJP—that the task of the state is only to help big capital. Anything else including planning is seen by the right wing as socialism. In the case of vaccines, it means not to make any attempt to get the companies, both in the public and private sectors, to make necessary preparations for a quick vaccination program: to put in the money and provide the necessary supply chain. Instead, the government believed that India's private pharmaceutical industry would do all of this on its own.

It forgot that the Indian pharmaceutical industry was the product of public domain science—the CSIR institutions—the public sector and nationalist companies like Cipla. They all came out of the national movement and built India's pharmaceutical industry. It is institutions like the Haffkine Institute under Sahib Sokhey's leadership and the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) built under the leadership of Dr. Pushpa Bhargava that led to India's vaccine and biologics capacity. It is on this base that India's vaccine manufacturing capacity rests.

It is not niji (private) companies that built the vaccine capacity in India, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi claims. The private sector companies rode on the back of public sector science and technology that was built in the country between the 1950s and the 1990s.

The Indian government recently opened up vaccinations for all adults in the country on May 1. To vaccinate all the eligible population—above 18 years of age—India would require about 2 billion doses of the vaccine in order to give the required two shots per person. To plan for the production of an order of this size, apart from technology and capital support, India also needs to plan for the complex supply chain that is required for production. This includes raw materials and intermediate supplies such as filters and special bags. There are at least 37 "critical items" that are currently embargoed by the U.S. from exports under the Defense Production Act, 1950, a relic of the U.S.'s Korean War....

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/state/GOP fail, 2 am

i don't think they give death # eg bot line, but graphs

...All of these findings, in conjunction with those of our own research, suggest that amid the current deep divide in U.S. politics, it's possible to forecast public health outcomes based on whether a state is led by a Republican or a Democrat. For large chunks of time in 2020, states led by Republicans overall had higher average case and death rates from COVID-19, in part due to their state governments adopting less stringent policies to quell the virus. It is important to note, however, that not all states fit perfectly into this pattern. For example, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, adopted relatively stricter measures and this likely led to better health outcomes.

America's polarized health care politics

The differences we discovered between red and blue states in our analysis did not surprise our team. After all, a partisan divide over health care in the U.S. existed before COVID-19. During President Bill Clinton's administration in the 1990s, there was a clear and growing partisan divide over health care reform. During President Barack Obama's administration, Democrats supported the Affordable Care Act and the federal government's response to the H1N1 virus, while nearly all Republicans opposed both measures.

We already know that partisan divisions over health care in the U.S. can worsen public health. For example, despite the evidence that the ACA has had a positive effect on individual health care outcomes, Republicans have consistently fought against it. Republican-led states that chose not to adopt Medicaid expansion have not experienced all the positive benefits of the Affordable Care Act.

For example, states such as Texas, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi that have not expanded Medicaid have the largest relative percentage of uninsured residents in the country. In some Republican-led states that did opt for Medicaid expansion, it was adopted with new restrictions. This has ultimately led to worse outcomes.

These long-established partisan divisions have also influenced Americans' polarized views of the government's proper role in addressing the pandemic. This divide grew so wide during 2020 that at some points it was as if people were living in alternate realities based on their partisan leanings. At times an American's political affiliation indicated whether or not they would acknowledge even that a pandemic was really happening....

===

===

former GOP congressional candidate says vaccinating people is the 'modern day Holocaust'

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

DeAnna Lorraine, a QAnon conspiracy theorist, right wing religious extremist, and former Republican candidate who tried to win Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's congressional seat last year, says working to get people vaccinated and to trust science is the work of "Satan."

Lorraine, who used her run for Congress to further her brand ...

===

==

mma

facebook masks

Facebook is allowing users to promote and organize maskless marches and mask-burning events

04/09/21 10:54 AM EDT

Daystar broadcasts vaccine misinformation on Facebook

Right-wing ministry continues to use Facebook to dispense deadly COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation to millions of followers

03/29/21 11:03 AM EDT

coronavirus social media

A falsified audio clip spreading COVID-19 misinformation is still circulating on Facebook and other platforms

03/19/21 10:51 AM EDT

===

almost random grab an 321

Kristi Noem promised transparency — but is among 5 governors defying records requests: report

Alex Henderson  March 15, 2021

When Kristi Noem was campaigning for governor of South Dakota in 2018, the far-right Republican promised transparency — vowing to "throw open the doors" of government if she won. But Noem's office, according to Associated Press reporter Stephen Groves, has denied records requests when it comes to how much her security detail is costing taxpayers.

Groves explains, "Her state is among half a dozen where governors' offices routinely block access to executive records, keeping the public in the dark about decision making and possible influence peddling by special interests."

The 49-year-old Noem, a strong supporter of former President Donald Trump, is popular with the MAGA crowd and was a hit when she recently spoke at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida. But as Groves points out, it is unknown exactly how much her travels and the security involved are costing taxpayers.

Jack Marsh, co-founder of the nonprofit South Dakota News Watch, told AP that South Dakota's open records laws are "some of the weakest in the country" and warned, "Things that are in the public's interests are still being hidden from the public."

Groves notes that open-records laws, also known as "sunshine laws," exist in most states in the U.S. and "give the public insight into (a) governor's decisions." But according to Groves, Noem is among the governors who has "thwarted records requests by citing exemptions."

"Her administration has refused to disclose how much it costs to send state troopers with her as she travels the country campaigning for former President Donald Trump and raising her own campaign cash," Groves observes. "The governor's office has cited state law exempting security details from records requests and argued that providing the information would 'put lives in danger.' Several GOP lawmakers pushed the governor's office to disclose its annual security costs to the (South Dakota) Legislature, but Noem, a fellow Republican, pressured them to drop the matter."

Per the AP: "Noem and governors in five other states — Arkansas, California, Massachusetts, Michigan and New Jersey — have thwarted records requests by citing exemptions."

Republican lawmakers are refusing to get vaccinated — which is holding up Congress

Brad Reed Raw Story  March 15, 2021

Many members of the Republican Party are refusing to take the novel coronavirus vaccine -- and it's delaying Congress's return to a full legislative schedule.

Axios reports that 25 percent of lawmakers serving in the House of Representatives still have not been vaccinated, even though Congress has its own supply of the vaccine.

"While it's not certain which party is most to blame for any vaccine hesitancy, the phenomenon is higher among white Republicans than any other demographic group," the publication writes.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) told the publication that he will not be getting the vaccine because he's only 25 years old and "the survival rate is too high for me to want it."

Additionally, GOP lawmakers such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have regularly spread anti-vaccination propaganda, making them likely culprits in thwarting the House's efforts to return back to normal.

"Multiple waves of voting, meant to ensure social distancing inside the House chamber, are slowing a full legislative schedule," notes Axios. "It's also giving power to disrupters like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who's used a procedural move to further drag out the process. Votes can take more than three times longer than pre-pandemic times."

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WSJ columnist encourages college students to come to Florida for Spring Break despite COVID

Matthew Chapman Raw Story  March 15, 2021

On Monday, writing for The Wall Street Journal opinion page, Dave Seminara urged college students to "come back to Florida" and flout COVID-19 safety recommendations.

"Much of the spring-break travel scare revolves around the effort to discredit Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose less restrictive approach to the pandemic has worked, infuriating Democrats," wrote Seminara. "Perhaps some of his critics perversely hope that a calamitous outbreak here will give them a chance to blame Florida, the state progressives love to loathe."

Cases in Florida are falling as vaccination rates climb, although DeSantis has come under fire as vaccines have been distributed to communities with his donors.

"Shutting down tourism, as [CDC Director Rochelle] Walensky would prefer, would be disastrous for many states, especially Florida," wrote Seminara. "Tourism generated $13.3 billion in federal tax revenue and $11.4 billion in state and local tax revenue in 2017, according to Rockport Analytics, and the industry supports more than 1.5 million jobs in the state ... Some students will behave irresponsibly on spring break. But the answer isn't to punish everyone. Heavy-handed efforts to limit personal freedom based on the assumption that too many people are ignorant is elitist."

Seminara's plea comes after 120 unruly spring breakers were arrested in Miami Beach, after partiers turned on police in a clash that uncovered guns and drugs. It also comes as the UK COVID-19 variant spreads across Florida — something experts aren't entirely sure our current vaccines will be able to contain, although so far they appear to be effective.

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GOP chair tweets proof that Biden was right about Trump's COVID lies 8 months ago

News Corpse Daily Kos  March 14, 2021

The Republican Party has devolved into nothing more than a culture war slogan dispenser, spending all of its time and energy contriving faux outrage and divisiveness. They have no discernible policies to

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321 gop kia covid

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/republican-governors/

===

brownback just keeps on giving // texas cold disaster

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/kansas-gop/

gutted soc safe net, now covid fail

===

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/ayn-rand/

cdv

Behold! Death rides upon a pale horse — and Death is a Republican.

The coronavirus pandemic has now killed more than 500,000 people in the United States. This is roughly equivalent to the cumulative number of Americans lost in World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. These deaths from the coronavirus were largely preventable.

Instead, at almost every opportunity Donald Trump and his regime, through willful negligence if not outright sabotage and negligent homicide, made decisions which caused more deaths, not fewer, from the pandemic.

The country's season of mass death, now nearing its one-year anniversary, will negatively impact American society for generations to come.

A new report by The Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals, shows in great detail how the Trump regime's response to the coronavirus (and the country's well-being more generally) actually shortened Americans' lifespans through incompetence and malevolence.

The report, titled "Public policy and health in the Trump era" features this summary:

*The global COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate effect on the USA, with more than 26 million diagnosed cases and over 450 000 deaths as of early February, 2021, about 40% of which could have been averted had the US death rate mirrored the weighted average of the other G7 nations.

Many of the cases and deaths were avoidable. Instead of galvanising the US populace to fight the pandemic, President Trump publicly dismissed its threat (despite privately acknowledging it), discouraged action as infection spread, and eschewed international cooperation. His refusal to develop a national strategy worsened shortages of personal protective equipment and diagnostic tests. President Trump politicised mask-wearing and school reopenings and convened indoor events attended by thousands, where masks were discouraged and physical distancing was impossible.*

The racial disparities are extreme: the life spans of Black and brown Americans have been shortened, compared to whites. Given the Trump regime's racial authoritarian policies, as well as its overall hostility to nonwhite people, such an outcome is a feature and not a bug. The Lancet report continues: "COVID-19 has increased the longevity gap between Black and white people by more than 50%, ... Overall, in the USA, Black and Latinx people have incurred more total years of potential life lost than white people because of COVID-19, although the white population is three to four times larger."

In addition, since 1980 public policies have reduced Americans' lifespans by 3.4 years as compared to the other "advanced" countries in the G7 (with data included through to 2018). America's public health problems considerably predate Trump's tenure in office — but his regime made them much worse.

On this, The Lancet report specifically notes Trump's "disdain for science and manipulation of hatred," adding that his "Make America Great Again" promise "camouflaged policies that enriched people who were already very wealthy andgave corporations license to degrade the environment for financial gain."

The mass death from the coronavirus pandemic reflects a broader pattern of negative outcomes, largely caused by the Republican Party and broader right-wing "conservative" movement.

As exhaustively documented by public health experts and other social scientists, across a range of policies such as gun violence, tax policy, the environment, access to health care, education, voting rights and the size and strength of the social safety net more generally, Republican policies over the last several decades have resulted in the deaths of many more Americans, compared to the policies advocated by Democrats.

While Republicans and the right market themselves as being "pro-life," in reality their policies could more fairly be described as pro-death. These dire outcomes rest on the following foundation.

Neoliberalism or "gangster capitalism."Every part of society is to be financialized and subjected to the forces of the market. There is no innate value to human life and human dignity. "Democracy" is but a tool for the market and the moneyed classes to gain more control over society through a process that superficially legitimizes their authority and rule. In this sociopathic worldview, there are "makers and takers," "productive" people as compared to those deemed to be "parasites" and "surplus" human beings. Social democracy is to be destroyed and ultimately replaced by "market forces" and some version of "managed democracy" or "competitive authoritarianism".

**Social Darwinism**. This is a belief in the "survival of the fittest," where government is seen as having no obligation to the collective good. Moreover, instead of an understanding that government exists to solve problems that are greater than the ability of any one person to resolve, the state instead becomes a tool for plutocrats and other elites to secure more power and resources, at the public's literal expense.

Right-wing libertarian fantasies of "self-reliance," "freedom" and the evils of government. Modern conservatism and the right-wing movement have constructed their own alternate reality, one that rejects empirical reality and expert knowledge, and confuses dogma with truth. In total, it is a closed epistemology, a hallucinatory ideology where self-serving fantasies about the "economy" and "human nature" are taken as inviolate truths. This is a form of religious politics in which faith supersedes reason, substantive evidence and truth.

One of the central figures in this right-wing fantasy world is novelist and self-styled philosopher Ayn Rand, whose semi-coherent theories have helped to create an America where cruelty and selfishness have been elevated into virtue.

Lisa Duggan, author of the recent book "Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed," locates Rand relative to the current age of capitalist barbarism by observing that Donald Trump is not the only person in contemporary America "who mistakenly envisages himself as a Rand hero":

*... the government and business world is full of Rand fans who read Atlas Shrugged in high school. The blend of right-wing white nationalism, combined with hard, zombie neoliberalism that rules the Republican Party right now does not align with Rand's purest economic and political vision.But the unifying social cruelty, the full deference to the wealthiest as the most deserving of tax breaks, the representation of the poor and of immigrants as unworthy and undeserving of any kind of assistance, the opposition to unions, to universal health care, to minimum wages — that is pure Rand.

Many advocates of these policies learned to legitimize them, learned to moralize them, as in "greed is good," from reading Rand or just from existing in a Randian milieu (we can be pretty sure Trump has not actually read Rand!). She is the dour visage presiding over the cruelties of our contemporary moment.*

Coronavirus fascism. The Trump regime, the Republican Party and the right-wing movement do not believe in multiracial democracy. Fascism uses violence and destruction as a means of creating a "new" world, one based on a return to some mythical past. To that end, the death and misery caused by the coronavirus pandemic creates an opportunity to undermine democratic institutions (and the very idea of government itself) as well as to target those who are deemed to be "the enemy" for elimination.

Because coronavirus fascism wields power over its followers in part by arousing their fears, it is not entirely surprising that in the 2020 election Trump actually did better in regions of the country hit especially hard by the pandemic.

In a near-perfect crystallization of the cruel values the sustain today's Republican Party and right-wing movement, Tim Boyd, the Republican mayor of Colorado City, Texas, wrote on Facebook that those suffering through that state's ice and snow disaster and electrical outages should: "Sink or swim it's your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! ... If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your (sic) lazy [it] is [a] direct result of your raising." (Boyd was at least forced to resign in disgrace.)

Why do rank-and-file Republicans, Trumpists and other right-wing voters support leaders and policies that literally cause them illness, suffering and death?

There are many reasons, including a vast propaganda and disinformation machine comprised of the right-wing media, Christian nationalist churches and related organizations, schools and other socializing agents that create and sustain an alternate reality.

Political parties have become a marker of personal identity. This is especially true of Republicans and right-leaning independents. Because today's Republican Party is a full-on white supremacist organization, loyalty to the party (and to its neofascist leader) is an embrace of white identity as central to one's personhood. As a function of that relationship, any criticism of the Republican Party and right-wing movement is seen as an attack on the believers' sense of being and their emotional, psychological, cognitive and material investment(s) in white privilege and white supremacy.

Perhaps most importantly, rank-and-file Republicans, Trumpists, and other members of the white right believe themselves to be in an existential struggle against various enemies: liberals and progressives, Democrats in general, nonwhite people, Muslims, immigrants and other "enemies" who want to "end their way of life". Therefore, to embrace death is understood to be a patriotic act in service to a better future.

Ultimately, today's Republican Party and broader right-wing movement are a death cult, whose millions of ardent followers are willing to sacrifice themselves and their families to sustain it. Much to the dismay of the Democrats and others who believe in "normal politics," this is the reality we must all face. No "bipartisanship" or "unity" or "common ground" is possible with a fanatical death cult. Joe Biden's great task and responsibility is to make decisions with that fact in mind and then find a way forward to political victory and a better American society.

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-

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who said small price to pay to keep gubmint out of our business?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/green-new-deal/

Author and environmentalist Naomi Klein argued in a New York Times column Sunday that Republicans rushed to attack the Green New Deal as disaster struck in Texas because the popular push for a sweeping transformation of the U.S. energy system poses a genuine threat to the deregulated, fossil-fuel dependent status quo that left the Lone Star State vulnerable to extreme weather driven by the climate crisis.

"Texans are living through the collapse of a 40-year experiment in free-market fundamentalism, one that has also stood in the way of effective climate action," Klein wrote. "Fortunately, there's a way out—and that's precisely what Republican politicians in the state most fear."

Klein characterized the ongoing power, water, and food crises in Texas as the consequence of "an energy-market free-for-all" stemming from "a fateful series of decisions [that] were made in the late-'90s, when the now-defunct, scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful push to radically deregulate Texas' electricity sector."

"As a result, decisions about the generation and distribution of power were stripped from regulators and, in effect, handed over to private energy companies," Klein wrote. "Unsurprisingly, these companies prioritized short-term profit over costly investments to maintain the grid and build in redundancies for extreme weather. Today, Texans are at the mercy of regulation-allergic politicians who failed to require that energy companies plan for shocks or weatherize their infrastructure (renewables and fossil fuel alike)."

In the aftermath of Winter Storm Uri, ordinary Texans are beginning to see the direct impact of the deregulatory push on their material wellbeing as electric companies hit them with bills topping $17,000—"a consequence," Klein argued, "of leaving pricing to the whims of the market."

Alluding to her previous work on "the shock doctrine"—a term she coined to describe how the right has exploited past disasters to force through unpopular privatization and austerity agendas—Klein noted that "large-scale shocks... become ideal moments to smuggle in unpopular free-market policies that tend to enrich elites at everyone else's expense."

"I often quote a guru of the free market revolution, the late economist Milton Friedman," Klein wrote. "In 1982, he wrote about what he saw as the mission of right-wing economists like him: 'Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."[gop sez BO cos chic guy]

The difference between past shocks such as the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial crisis and the current emergency in Texas, Klein argued, is that "Republican ideas are no longer lying around—they are lying in ruin."

Texas' Republican Gov. Greg Abbott attacked the Green New Deal—a proposal that has not even been implemented—in an appearance on Fox News last week because he knows its promise to "create millions of union jobs building out shock-resilient green energy infrastructure, transit, and affordable housing" is "extremely appealing" to Texans as they "suffer under the overlapping crises of unemployment, houselessness, racial injustice, crumbling public services, and extreme weather," Klein wrote.

"All that Texas' Republicans have to offer, in contrast," Klein added, "is continued oil and gas dependence—driving more climate disruption—alongside more privatizations and cuts to public services to pay for their state's mess, which we can expect them to push in the weeks and months ahead." [death spiral]

As The Houston Chronicle reported last week, Republican members of the Texas state legislature are already signaling that "one of the most immediate reforms they will push for is recalibrating the state's electricity grid to ensure more fossil fuels are in that mix and fewer renewables."

But Klein contended that "unlike when the Republican Party began deploying the shock doctrine, its free-market playbook is no longer novel."

"The horrors currently unfolding in Texas expose both the reality of the climate crisis and the extreme vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure in the face of that crisis," Klein wrote. "So of course the Green New Deal finds itself under fierce attack. Because for the first time in a long time, Republicans face the very thing that they claim to revere but never actually wanted: competition—in the battle of ideas." twt

in recent days, as Common Dreams has reported, progressive advocacy groups such as the youth-led Sunrise Movement and Greenpeace USA have made the case that—contrary to the GOP's bad-faith attacks—a Green New Deal is precisely what's needed to help Texas equitably recover from the present emergency and build the resilience necessary to withstand future climate-driven disasters.

"Many people across the country are realizing for the first time that fossil fuels are not only polluting, they are unstable. Millions of Texans are being let down by coal, oil, and gas right now," Greenpeace climate campaigner Ashley Thomson said last Thursday.

On Monday, activists with the Sunrise Movement of Texas are expected to rally at the state capitol in Austin to demand immediate relief for struggling Texans, the resignations of Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas.), and passage of a Green New Deal that would "make our state and country more resilient to future disasters, and create millions of good union jobs in the process of transforming these necessary structures."

"Texas is the perfect example of what happens when our politicians cater to fossil fuel executives instead of the young people who have been shouting from the rooftops for years, warning of an impending climate emergency like this," said Chante Davis, a 17-year-old Sunrise Movement leader and Houston resident.

"I've survived three once in a lifetime storms in my 17 years of life," added Davis, whose family moved to Texas in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. "We need change, and the Green New Deal is the obvious, urgent solution. As our communities come together to fill the void of our government, our leaders must invest in us to provide jobs that directly address the crises we face."

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abbott resign he lies ppl die

polar vortex AGW

wind blamed (by abbott?]  ~ AOC GND

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/texas-green-energy/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/gov-abbott/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/texas-power-grid

by Kate Galbraith, The Texas Tribune Feb. 8, 2011

"Texplainer: Why does Texas have its own power grid?" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Why does Texas have its own electric grid?

Texas' secessionist inclinations have at least one modern outlet: the electric grid. There are three grids in the Lower 48 states: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection — and Texas.

The Texas grid is called ERCOT, and it is run by an agency of the same name — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. ERCOT does not actually cover all of Texas. El Paso is on another grid, as is the upper Panhandle and a chunk of East Texas. This presumably has to do with the history of various utilities' service territories and the remoteness of the non-ERCOT locations (for example the Panhandle is closer to Kansas than to Dallas, notes Kenneth Starcher of the Alternative Energy Institute in Canyon), but Texplainer is still figuring out the particulars on this.

The separation of the Texas grid from the rest of the country has its origins in the evolution of electric utilities early last century. In the decades after Thomas Edison turned on the country's first power plant in Manhattan in 1882, small generating plants sprouted across Texas, bringing electric light to cities.

Later, particularly during the first world war, utilities began to link themselves together. These ties, and the accompanying transmission network, grew further during the second world war, when several Texas utilities joined together to form the Texas Interconnected System, which allowed them to link to the big dams along Texas rivers and also send extra electricity to support the ramped-up factories aiding the war effort.

The Texas Interconnected System — which for a long time was actually operated by two discrete entities, one for northern Texas and one for southern Texas — had another priority: staying out of the reach of federal regulators. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Power Act, which charged the Federal Power Commission with overseeing interstate electricity sales. By not crossing state lines, Texas utilities avoided being subjected to federal rules. "Freedom from federal regulation was a cherished goal — more so because Texas had no regulation until the 1970s," writes Richard D. Cudahy in a 1995 article, "The Second Battle of the Alamo: The Midnight Connection." (Self-reliance was also made easier in Texas, especially in the early days, because the state has substantial coal, natural gas and oil resources of its own to fuel power plants.)

ERCOT was formed in 1970, in the wake of a major blackout in the Northeast in November 1965, and it was tasked with managing grid reliability in accordance with national standards. The agency assumed additional responsibilities following electric deregulation in Texas a decade ago. The ERCOT grid remains beyond the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which succeeded the Federal Power Commission and regulates interstate electric transmission....

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seriously/ still?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/ron-desantis/

variants  in blue states

===

Rand Paul laughs out loud about not wearing a mask on the Senate floor

David Edwards Raw Story

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) defended his refusal to weak a face mask on the Senate floor by calling other senators "science deniers."

Paul made the remark...

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alexander et al suppress covid #, kids

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/trump-administration

veema s on task force? pix]

Former President Donald Trump's administration is under fire for hindering the government's pandemic response and rolling back Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) coronavirus mitigation guidelines in an effort to protect his interests.

According to CNBC News, the latest reports stem from documentation compiled during the House Oversight investigation launched back in September 2020. Based on the documents, the Trump administration is said to have intentionally suppressed COVID-19 testing by rolling back the CDC guidelines.

To justify the scaling back of COVID testing, former Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) scientific advisor Paul Alexander argued there was little significance in testing asymptomatic individuals, according to emails obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

"Testing asymptomatic people to seek asymptomatic cases is not the point of testing, for in the end, all this accomplishes is we end up quarantining asymptomatic, low-risk people and preventing the workforce from working," Alexander wrote shortly after HHS officials received an update about the CDC's guidelines. "In this light, it would be unreasonable based on the prevailing data to have widespread testing of schools and colleges/universities. This will not allow them to optimally re-open."

According to the Daily Beast, another report — which would have highlighted elevated death totals in young people — was an area of concern for Alexander. Although the report was true, Alexander emailed White House COVID Task Force Senior Adviser Scott Atlas warning that it was "very duplicitous to damage the administration."

Alexander said, "The timing of this is meant to interfere with school re-opening and we need to get something out fast to preempt this in the next day or so and I can work with you on it."

According to the documentation, Alexander also attempted to convince Atlas to "craft an op-ed .. disputing the reporting for on face value, it is meant to mislead."

After deep scrutiny about the rollback of guidelines, the CDC quietly backpedaled on the changes, replacing the previous guidance with recommendations suggesting that anyone who "has been in close contact with an infected person needs a Covid-19 test."

In December, email correspondence to HHS public-affairs adviser Michael Caputo also highlighted Alexander's attemptto advocate for the former president to consider a "herd immunity" strategy" for the United States in handling the coronavirus.

"There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high-risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD," Alexander's letter read. "Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle-aged with no conditions, etc. have zero to little risk…. so we use them to develop herd… we want them infected…."

The latest report comes less than one week after veteran election consultant Tony Fabrizio and Republican pollster John McLaughlin both released assessments of the 2020 election and what led to Trump's loss. Despite the former president's claims of voter fraud, both analyses suggest Trump's failed leadership amid the pandemic contributed significantly to his electoral defeat.

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hmmn/ but fusion ctrs got $ and rewarded for tracking EF! dapl, green occupy?

aha: invis hand free mkt is impoverished systemic "thinking"  bottom line (a little knowledge is dangerous) b/c it is too radical an exclusion of factors, often the ones that can't be quantified,eg of fail

raw story

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/capitol-riot-2650416088/

On Tuesday, writing for The Daily Beast, former CIA officer Jeff Stein highlighted some of the root causes of the "massive" intelligence failure that prevented a meaningful effort to stop the Capitol riot from happening.

Reports suggested that the FBI had alerts of "war" at the Capitol just a day before it all unfolded — and yet many federal and local officials who should have been prepared were caught off guard.

"Nobody here needs to be reminded that far-right fringe groups and untold tens of thousands of delusional pro-Trump fans had been lighting up their social-media redoubts and chat-room hideouts for weeks with excited talk of marching on Washington to reverse the election results," wrote Stein. "The red lights were screaming, as the all too common saying goes.Just days before the Jan. 6 insurrection calamity, I talked to a regional D.C. intelligence official who claimed with quiet confidence to be on top of it all. In retrospect, it reminds me of the walk I took with a CIA friend in August 2001, when he told me the agency was expecting Osama bin Laden to hit us big time any day."

One of the big causes of the problem, wrote Stein, is that the culture at the intelligence and law enforcement agencies prioritizes "statistical accomplishments" that can be quantified — and preventing an insurrection is not easily quantifiable, so there aren't enough resources put into it.

"As former FBI agent Harry Gossett told me a few weeks ago,investigative resources are 'doled out based on statistical accomplishments,' such as the number of 'subjects identified, indictments, arrests, convictions, fines, savings, recoveries, etc,'" wrote Stein. "If the squad investigating bank embezzlements, for example, can show hard numbers on money saved, it's going to get a bigger budget. In contrast, Gossett said, 'counterintelligence squads were measured by defections, recruitments, and intelligence take. Their cases rarely went to court.' Can't show money saved there."

You can read more here.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/grant-stinchfield/newsmax-host-warns-democrats-will-round-all-republicans-covid-internment-camps

==

socialist iceberg

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/fox-news-begins-new-scare-campaign-against-biden-pandemic-relief-plan

121

https://theintercept.com/2021/01/09/montana-tribes-covid-republicans/

nat am 11x kia

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===

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-turning-point-usa-montgomery-coronavirus-20200730-ctsxgggwxzcb3o5jh7bevjq5ji-story.html

tabloid?

Bill Montgomery, the co-founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative student organization, died Tuesday from coronavirus.

He was 80.

“He believed in me. He poured his heart & soul & time into me. He took a risk on me and without Bill Montgomery, there is no TPUSA,” Charlie Kirk, who co-founded the group with Montgomery in 2012, tweeted. “He touched the lives of thousands of young Americans and I will miss him greatly.”

Turning Point credited Montgomery with the “generosity and willingness invest in an 18-year-old with no experience and no connections that gave birth to the dream.”

“Bill’s steadfast devotion to his family, his country, and the organization he helped create have left a permanent mark on the entire Turing Point USA community, and by extension an entire generation of students,” the group said.

Turning Point USA, which lists its priorities as “fiscal responsibility, free markets andlimited government,” has been popular among younger conservatives.

Kirk has been outspoken about his disregard for coronavirus protocols, including mask usage.

“The science around masks is very questionable, very questionable,” he said on his podcast Sunday, days before Montgomery died. “In fact some people, some doctors think that masks actually make you sicker and have you less likely to be able to get oxygen and more likely to infect yourself, and less likely to be able to fight the virus, and actually more likely to be able to die sooner.”

Montgomery is survived by his wife, Edie, and two children.

----

https://msmagazine.com/2020/10/06/turning-point-usa-action-trump-social-media-troll-farm-fake-news/

• JUSTICE & LAW
• NATIONAL
• NEWS & OPINION
• VIOLENCE & HARASSMENT

Conservative Youth Group Hires Teens to Covertly Spam a Pro-Trump Social Media Agenda

10/6/2020 by AUDREY GIBBS

“In this election, the troll farm is in Phoenix.”

Over the past few months, tweets and Facebook messages echoing Trump campaign talking points have been pouring in across social media platforms.

But these aren’t your usual random bots mass-releasing messages like “Don’t trust Dr. Fauci,” or falsely claiming mail-in ballots are bound to lead to election fraud.

A thorough investigation carried out by the Washington Post has uncovered these tweets and posts are being plastered by teens and young adults—some of whom are under the age of 18—hired by Turning Point Action (TPA), closely working with Turning Point USA, to spam their social media feeds with these types of messages.

Based in Phoenix, Turning Point USA is a conservative and outwardly pro-Trump youth organization, known for its outspoken young leader Charlie Kirk.

pix Jared Kushner with Charlie Kirk—founder and president of Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action—at the 2019 Teen Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Washington, D.C. ([Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

The posts in question include blatantly false information—such as claiming 28 million ballots have gone missing in the past four elections, or that the CDC is inflating the number of COVID deaths (In reality, the CDC count, if anything, is likely an underestimation).

Many parties have confirmed the legitimacy of the operation—from participating teens and their parents, to the friends of these teens who used Turning Point’s gig as a summer job.

Turning Point Action Pays Teens to Spread Lies on Social Media

So why pay young people to spread campaign propaganda? And how?

Most social media companies have guardrails in place to curtail the spread of misinformation on their platforms (like the kind Russia used during the 2016 campaign). For instance, Facebook prevents users from operating multiple accounts.

Prior to a rebuke from Twitter and Facebook, TPA’s underground social media campaign had found a secretive way to carefully navigate around these platforms’ rules by employing humans (not bots) using their own personal accounts.

The campaign’s structure was simple: Participants pulled the post’s basic language from a shared online document. Before posting, TPA instructed the teens to tweak the language to make them seem more authentic and “posted the same lines a limited number of times to avoid automated detection by the technology companies.”

In response to the Post investigation, Twitter suspended at least 20 accounts involved with the campaign, citing “platform manipulation and spam.”

Twitter commented on the ordeal:

You may not use Twitter’s services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience on Twitter.

Facebook too removed a number of accounts; the company says an investigation is ongoing.

Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, classified this type of behavior as a troll farming initiative.

“The scale and scope of domestic disinformation is far greater than anything a foreign adversary could do to us,” said Brookie. “In this election, the troll farm is in Phoenix.”

Despite the acknowledgement from those directly involved in the spread of disinformation, as well as experts and the social media platforms themselves, TPA maintains the efforts are simply a result of youth activism. Charlie Kirk has defended the group’s behavior, stating any comparison to a troll farm is a serious “mischaracterization.”

pix Charlie Kirk at the Culture War tour at Ohio State University in Columbus in October 2019. ([Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

---

What Can Be Done to Counteract this Misinformation Effort?

Ms. spoke with Pik-Mai Hui, an Indiana University PhD student working with the Observatory on Social Media, aimed at curbing the spread of misinformation online and the manipulation of social media. His research played a large role in identifying TPA’s coordinated, inauthentic network behavior.

We asked him the best ways to combat trolling and misinformation on social media.

“For general users on social media, develop news literacy and critical thinking skills for evaluating the reliability of any information on social media, so that they do not participate (by resharing) in any part of these malicious activities unconsciously,” Hui told Ms. “If they see any such malicious activities, they should report them to the platforms, rather than just skipping over them.”

Hui also said parents can play a large role by teaching their children responsible social media behavior.

“Parents need to educate their children to use social media properly and morally,” he said. “Paid trolling is among the things that one should not do on social media; it can have a huge implication on democracy. There are other problematic behaviors from the young social media users as well, such as cyber-bullying.”

And while social media platforms say they’re hard at work to combat trolling in the run-up to the November elections, “it’s always been a cat-and-mouse game between researchers—both at the social media companies and in academia—and the malicious actors,” Hui said.

“We find patterns and build detectors, and then they develop new patterns to escape our detection. Despite the long history of this game, I am optimistic that the recent rise of awareness of society will eventually bring us closer to its end.”

But in the meantime, one thing is for sure: The truth speaks for itself. And regardless of the intention behind the posts, this social media blitz has given us all a timely reminder for this election cycle: Don’t believe everything you see on the internet—and remember to check the facts.

You may also like: how to guide...

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/texas-supreme-court/

truscott salon

they didn't bother with writing articles of secession this time. No, Ken Paxton, the disgraced attorney general of the state of Texas, did that for them when he filed a lawsuit directly with the Supreme Court seeking to overturn the presidential election. On Wednesday, Missouri and 16 other states filed a brief with the court seeking to join the Texas lawsuit, which alleges that the four decisive swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia violated the Constitution by allowing mail-in voting in the November election. On Thursday, a majority of the Republican caucus in the House, 126 members of Congress, signed on to the lawsuit along with the instigator in chief, Donald Trump. Twenty-five states and territories signed a brief opposing the Texas lawsuit. Friday evening, the Supreme Court rejected the suit out of hand.

The 18 states and 126 members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise, are seceding from democracy.It amounts to nothing less than an act of sedition by the entire Republican Party, 70 percent of whom believe that Joe Biden's election was illegitimate, according to a Quinnipiac poll released on Thursday. In contrast, 98 percent of Democrats think Biden's victory was legitimate, along with 62 percent of independents.

The last time anything like this happened was in 1860, when the election of Abraham Lincoln led almost immediately to declarations of secession by seven states between Dec. 20, 1860 and Feb. 1, 1861. Two months later, on April 12, the bombardment of Fort Sumter began, and the Civil War was underway.

It's not a shooting war — yet — but Texas didn't just file a lawsuit this week, it set a match to the Constitution of the United States. It isn't just that these Republicans don't recognize Joe Biden as our next president. They don't want to be part of the democracy that this country was founded on. They don't respect the votes of their fellow citizens. They don't want what more than 80 million people wanted when they cast their votes in this election. They want what Donald Trump wants.

Thankfully, it's not the whole country. The Quinnipiac poll found that 60 percent of registered voters think that Biden's victory was legitimate. But it wasn't the whole country in 1860, either. It was only after the election of Lincoln that the Southern states seceded from the Union over the issue of slavery.

This time there isn't a single issue, there's a single man: Donald Trump. In this way, what's happening right now in this country is eerily similar to what happened in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s with Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Trump has identified and used the same sort of mass hysteria Hitler did — a sense of resentment among his supporters that somehow they have been left behind and misunderstood and humiliated, and that only he, Trump, understands them and is willing to stand up for them and will bring back their rightful way of life.

So far, Trump has only played around with the kind of violence that Hitler made use of to achieve power and then consolidate it. Trump used implied violence in the chants of "Lock her up" that energized supporters at his rallies in 2016 and throughout the campaign of 2020. By staying silent this year when armed protesters occupied the State Capitol in Michigan, Trump implied his support, and his exhortations to "liberate" states that were mandating lockdowns to fight COVID were taken by many as invitations to violence.

Now armed protesters have gathered outside the home of the Michigan secretary of state, and Georgia election officials report that they are receiving death threats and racist voice mails. The Republican Party of Arizona has retweeted exhortations from those who say, "I'm willing to give up my life for this fight," suggesting it's time to "die for something." The New York Times _{reported this week}_ that the chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission has said that "people on Twitter have posted photographs of my house." Another tweet mentioned her children and threatened "I've heard you'll have quite a crowd of patriots showing up at your door."

The conservative website The Bulwark _{reported this week}_ that far-right websites have been posting addresses and other personal information about Republican elected officials in Georgia, superimposing target crosshairs over images of their faces. Right-wing Republicans are in full cheerleader mode trying to turn Kyle Rittenhouse, who is accused of murdering two people and wounding another at a Kenosha, Wisconsin, protest, into a hero of the Trump cause. A Democratic state representative in Pennsylvania told the New York Times that "we've been getting emails all the time, all hours of the day and night," and that "they're getting more angry, and a lot of calls are saying we won't be forgetting."

This kind of stuff is not a joke. The fantastic lie that has gripped the Republican Party started out with everyone going along with Trump's fantasy and kind of humoring him. But now it's taken a deadly turn. Trump has been calling Republican state representatives on the phone and pressuring them to go along with his demands that they ignore the votes that have taken place in swing states and appoint electors that will vote for him. If they step out of line, they're branded as traitors, cowards, RINOs. He's doing this kind of stuff to his own people, to loyal Republicans who have voted the party line since they were in short pants.

When you add in what's been happening in red states with COVID, it's jaw-dropping. Governors and Republican-controlled state legislatures are so intimidated that they won't pass mask mandates and bar closures, not to mention rules against mass gatherings. COVID cases and hospitalizations in red states are off the charts. They are lining up refrigerated trucks outside hospitals in states like North and South Dakota. Republicans are killing their own people in craven attempts to keep Donald Trump from attacking them on Twitter. God only knows what's going to happen in those states when the COVID vaccines become widely available, although we're getting some idea with reports of people standing up at meetings of county commissioners pledging not only that they won't wear masks, they'll also refuse to be vaccinated.

The Mason-Dixon line is psychological this time. These people have lost their minds. They have seceded from sanity and reason. This Civil War isn't being fought with rifles and pistols. It's a war fought with lies and delusions. This week it passed the number of Americans killed in World War II, and its victims are just as dead as the bodies buried at Anzio and Normandy. Americans are dying every time Mitch McConnell stands up and blocks a COVID relief bill. They are dying every time a Republican senator like Ron Johnson presents testimony from an anti-vaxxer as if it were a sane person instead of an outright idiot. They're dying by the thousands with their mask-less hubris. They're dying for Donald Trump, but at least for now, our democracy has not died with them.

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===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/ex-trump-officials-reveal-how-ivanka-trump-and-kellyanne-conway-meddled-with-cdc-guidelines/

i**vanka Trump** and **Kellyanne Conway** sent "dictates" to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordering the public health agency to downplay the severity of its coronavirus messaging, two former members Trump appointees tell The New York Times.

"Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won," former chief of staff at CDC Kyle McGowan says. McGowan had worked with **Tom Price**, first in the Georgia Republican Congressman's office, and then at Health and Human Services after Trump appointed him Secretary of the agency. Price left HHS in disgrace.

Conway and Trump, both top advisors to the president, were focused on churches and schools. During the course of the pandemic the CDC first held back guidance it had prepared to help churches re-open safely. The Trump administration rewrote that guidance to allow houses of worship greater freedom, but at a huge cost in American lives. President Trump spent months demanding schools reopen, ignoring CDC guidance, and providing state and local governments few if any tools or financial support to protect students and staff.

McGowan and his deputy, Amanda Campbell, say the White House slowly but surely crushed the CDC, interfering with public announcements or pronouncements, all in the interest of protecting the health of the economy instead of the health of the American people.

In one instance McGowan says he and CDC Director Robert Redfield were forced to alter language on social distancing guidance, after White House budget director Russell Vought told them specifics on spacing requirements would be too onerous for businesses. In the end, no specifics on social distancing requirements were provided.

McGowan and Campbell say they "mediated between Dr. Redfield and agency scientists when the White House's requests and dictates would arrive: edits from Mr. Vought and Kellyanne Conway, the former White House adviser, on choirs and communion in faith communities, or suggestions from Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter and aide, on schools."

wtf? 3k/day BEFORE thxgiving surge?!

mma

hosting Scott Atlas, Laura Ingraham mocks the COVID-19 fatality rate even as thousands die a day

12/11/20 11:16 PM EST

As the pandemic death toll soars, Laura Ingraham declares the virus “a lot less lethal than previously thought”

===

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mma 1220

fo

:{:{x has undermined public health measures in over 1,000 coronavirus segments since September 1:(style="font-weight:normal"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{:(style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;outline-color:initial;outline-style:initial"):}::{}:12/03/20 12:04 PM EST

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/climate-change

JC cmn dreams

More than 250 scientists and scholars from 30 countries have issued an open letter calling on policymakers to "engage more with the growing risk of societal disruption and collapse due to damage to the climate and environment," arguing that only then "might communities and nations begin to prepare and so reduce its likelihood, speed, severity, harm to the most vulnerable, and to nature."

The letter, a version of which appeared GUK in The Guardian Sunday, comes on the heels of a pair of United Nations reports warning of the dire direction in which the planet is headed. As U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres put it: "The state of the planet is broken. Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal."

This weekend, world leaders will hold the Climate Ambition Summit 2020to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris climate agreement. After failing in the years since then to cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with that accord, the letter says, "we must now face the consequences."

While "some armed services already see collapse as an important scenario, requiring planning," the letter notes that "the topic is not well reported in the media, and mostly absent from civil society and politics," even though such collapse "is already the experience or memory of many communities in the Global South."

The U.K. arm of Extinction Rebellion shared pieces of the letter on Twitter with photos of climate activists around the world demanding urgent action:

Denouncing media coverage that "typically cites people who condemn discussion of the topic," the letter says that "ill-informed speculations, such as on foreign misinformation campaigns, or impacts on mental health and motivation, will not support serious discussion. Rather, such claims risk betraying the thousands of activists and community leaders whose anticipation of collapse is part of their motivation to push for change on climate, ecology, and social justice."

The letter continues:

*People who care about environmental and humanitarian issues should not be discouraged from discussing the risks of societal disruption or collapse. That could risk agendas being driven by people with less commitment to such values.

Some of us believe that a transition to a new form of society may be possible. That will involve bold action to reduce damage to the climate, nature and other people, including preparations for major disruptions to everyday life. We are united in regarding efforts to suppress discussion of collapse as hindering the possibility of that transition.*

"We have experienced how emotionally challenging it is to recognize the damage being done, along with the growing threat to our own way of life," the letter concludes. "We also know the great sense of fellowship that can arise. It is time to invite each other into difficult conversations, so we can reduce our complicity in the harm, and be creative to make the best of a turbulent future."

Signatories and supporters of the letter shared it on social media with the hashtag #scholarswarning, offering their summaries of what the letter calls for and detailing why they signed on to it.

"We're saying we must confront the real possibility of climate collapse so that we can do our utmost to avoid it," American climate scientist Peter Kalmus, a signatory to the letter, saidin a tweet Sunday. "This is as far from 'doomerism' as you can get."

In a statement, University of Cumbria professor Jem Bendell, another signatory, explained that "we come from dozens of countries and subject disciplines and perceive a resistance by the establishment to serious engagement in adapting to the increasing disruptions to food, water, health, and the economy."

"It is time to listen to the scholarship," Bendell added, "and try to reduce harm from societal disruption and even collapse."

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https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063720073

wheeler on way out the door 12/20 ignores sci

with six weeks left in President Trump's term, EPA has cemented plans to bypass tighter soot standards, despite agency career staff conclusions and concerns about tens of thousands of additional deaths every year.

EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler has signed a final rule to keep the existing ambient air quality standards for soot in place at least another five years,according to people familiar with the matter both inside and outside the agency, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified. A formal public announcement is scheduled for later this afternoon.

An EPA spokesman declined to comment in advance of that announcement.

The decision, which marks a victory for the fossil fuel industry but is certain to be challenged in court, comes as no surprise. In signing the draft rule this spring, Wheeler said he believed the existing limits sufficed to protect public health (Greenwire, April 14).

But his determination bypassed the findings of EPA air office employees who concluded in a report this year that the existing annual limit on soot exposure could be too weak to prevent "a substantial number" of premature deaths each year. An overview of 30 urban areas, for example, tied exposure to as many as 45,000 annual deaths from heart disease and other causes, with minority communities at greater risk. Those findings didn't take into account more recent research suggesting that long-term exposure to soot may also heighten vulnerability to COVID-19 (Greenwire, April 30).

As E&E News has previously reported, critics are already angling to reverse the decision under the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden (Greenwire, Nov. 23). In a letter late last month, for example, Democratic attorneys general from 16 states urged EPA to reopen the review on the grounds that fresh evidence of soot's perils had surfaced.

Equally contentious was the process by which the Trump administration pursued the legally required review of standards for what is formally known as fine particulate matter or PM2.5.

Under a fast-track timetable put in motion in mid-2018, the review is ending roughly two years ahead of its previous schedule.

While Wheeler cited the recommendation of an agency advisory committee in opting to stick with the status quo, that committee is chaired by a consultant [TONY COX] who had previously done work for the American Petroleum Institute and was nominated for the position by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In late 2018, in what he later described as a streamlining move, Wheeler fired an auxiliary panel of researchers who were providing additional expertise to the review.

In statements today, environmental and scientific advocacy groups denounced his decision to stick with the status quo.

"The Trump administration rigged the rule-making process to achieve exactly this result by cutting science and scientists out of the picture at every turn," said Gretchen Goldman, research director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Center for Science and Democracy, which last year reconvened the fired panel to conduct a competing unofficial review, which found the evidence warranted tighter standards.

"The worst part of all of this is that low income communities and communities of color will bear the brunt of Wheeler's heartless decision," said Al Armendariz, an Obama-era EPA official who is now a senior director at the Sierra Club. "We look forward to the new administration following the scientific evidence and setting the air quality standard that meets legal requirements to protect public health."

Soot is known as PM2.5 because it is no bigger than 2.5 microns in diameter, or one-thirtieth the width of a human hair; its formation is closely associated with the burning of coal and oil products. With an ability to penetrate deep into the lungs and even get into the bloodstream, the tiny particles are associated with an array of respiratory and cardiovascular problems, including a greater risk of premature death under some circumstances.

EPA's current annual exposure threshold for PM2.5, set in 2012, is 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air; the daily limit, dating back to 2006, is 35 micrograms. In this year's report, EPA career staff concluded that the evidence justified an annual standard as low as 8 micrograms per cubic meter of air.

Under the Clean Air Act, particulate matter is among a half-dozen common pollutants for which EPA must set and periodically review ambient air quality standards at least every five years. While the agency rarely meets that timetable, the newly signed final rule is intended to keep the existing standards in place through 2025 at a minimum.

On Friday, the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs completed a routine review of the final draft rule, according to a government tracking website. In sending the rule back to EPA, OIRA officials canceled several meetings that had previously been scheduled with the California Air Resources Board, Environment America and the Natural Resources Defense Council, representatives for the three organizations confirmed in email messages and via Twitter.

===

===

random wk in dumb mma 12/6/20 headed for 300K KIA?!

• Sean Hannity: “I don't vet the information on this program that I give out.” Hannity also said that Donald Trump should pardon himself and his entire family.
• Newsmax has been grifting its audience by falsely claiming that there’s a “natural cure for Alzheimer’s.”
• Rush Limbaugh bemoaned that people supporting Trump's subversion of the election are coming across as "kooks."
• Fox's Ainsley Earhardt was amazed as Steve Doocy explains how a mask mandate slowed the spread of coronavirus
• Fox guestSucharit Bhakdi said COVID-19 vaccine is “downright dangerous” and will send you “to your doom.”
• Tucker Carlson: Calls for anti-racist police reform are a “sick religion” “all over the Anglo world.”
• Fox contributor Kimberley Strassel: “Economic lockdowns, we know, they are causing as much if not more damage than the virus itself.”
• Tucker Carlson dismissed loss of life from COVID: “Death is inevitable.”
• Days after calling for a military coup, Michael Flynn told **Jeanine Pirro** that governors should “not certify these elections”
• Rudy Giuliani pushed for state legislators to overturn vote: “The simple fact is, we don't need courts.”

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/pompeo/

900 ppl party  also a bunch of WH events/holiday parties

===

ted cruz

// trump claimed covid a hoax that wd disappear day after election

war on thxgiving BS

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/ted-cruz-2649019031/

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250k KIA azar praise

Trump plan for mass death is unfolding before our eyes

Cody Fenwick

On Friday, the COVID Tracking Project reported that the number of positive coronavirus infections in the last day had reached 170,000, the highest record ever and a number tha...

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has earlier demonization og brown  led to /made possible this war on thxgiving BS?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-becoming-foxs-news-side-assignment-editor

Tucker Carlson, Fox News’ most influential prime-time star, announced on Monday that he would be taking on a bigger role at the network. Carlson claimed that he was discussing with Fox executives what he described as plans to “expand the amount of reporting and analysis we do in this hour across other parts of the company.” He told his viewers that “the people who run Fox News want more of it, not less.”

They are already getting it -- at the expense of the network’s putative “straight news” programs. In the two days following Carlson’s announcement, those shows aired clips from his nightly “opinion” show at least 14 times. Fox “news” anchors and correspondents have incorporated clips from Carlson or his guests into packaged reports; used them as the jumping off point for panel discussions; and featured them in news briefs.

This drastic change in Fox’s typical programming habits suggests that the wall between the “news” and “opinion” side -- often touted by the network’s executives and defenders -- has become increasingly permeable. Carlson effectively served as Fox’s assignment editor over the last two days, with the network’s purportedly independent “news” side adopting his story selection and framing.

Fox executives know that Carlson is not a credible source for “news” content. The network lawyers won a court case by convincing a judge that no “reasonable viewer” should take him seriously.He’s also a notorious demagogue, particularly on issues related to diversity and the coronavirus pandemic, and his “anti-Black rhetoric” has reportedly led to confrontations between the network brass and its Black employees.

But Carlson’s heightened profile during Fox’s “news” hours comes as the network tries to stave off far-right competitors by promoting its right-wing prime-time hosts. Over the last week, Fox “news” shows have featured on-screen promos, advertisements, and the equivalent of live ad reads for Carlson and his prime-time colleagues, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Fox’s “news” programs aired clips from those three “opinion” shows at least 17 times. Wednesday’s edition of the morning show America’s Newsroom was effectively a show about the previous night’s prime-time lineup, accounting for a whopping 10 of the segments over its three hours. Of those, seven came from Tucker Carlson Tonight, two from The Ingraham Angle, and one from Hannity.

Tucker Carlson Tonight clips were also featured twice on the Tuesday edition of America’s Newsroom, once each that night on the flagship evening broadcast Special Report with Bret Baier and late-night show Fox News @ Night, and three times on Wednesday’s Outnumbered Overtime.

Fox is deploying its “opinion” shows during its “news” hours in two ways, airing both comments from the monologues of their prime-time “opinion” hosts and remarks from their guests.

Clips from the monologues of the prime-time “opinion” hosts accounted for five of the “news” side segments, four of which came on Wednesday’s America’s Newsroom, which separately highlighted all three of the hosts. These segments show Fox treating its employees as de facto newsmakers whose opinions are inherently worth providing the network’s audience during its “news” hours. It’s also a way of giving those viewers more access to their favorite pro-Trump personalities -- lest they change the channel to one of Fox’s competitors.

Chief breaking news correspondent Trace Gallagher, for example, anchored a news brief on Wednesday’s America’s Newsroom that seemed to have little purpose other than to tell viewers what Carlson thinks about coronavirus restrictions.

Gallagher highlighted new limitations on private indoor gatherings that some Democratic governors have rolled out to slow the spread of the coronavirus during the Thanksgiving holiday and commented, “Tucker Carlson blasting the new measures.” He then aired a clip of Carlson saying on Tuesday night’s show, “Politicians have now decided they have total power over you. They can literally decide who comes to Thanksgiving dinner at your house and where they can stand. Well that's lunatic; it’s never happened in American history before." After pointing to some sheriffs who say they won’t enforce the measures, Gallagher concluded the segment.

likewise, the anchors twiceused a clip from Ingraham’s Tuesday monologue attacking “the Thanksgiving police” to frame Wednesday America’s Newsroom segments about the new coronavirus restrictions.

Twelve of the “news” segments, by contrast, featured clips of guests on Carlson’s show.Conservative guests could already expect softball treatment from Carlson when talking about the prime-time host’s particular grievances, like trans youth or the perfidy of social media companies. Now, their talking points are also driving and framing additional coverage on the network's “news” programs.

On Wednesday’s America’s Newsroom, for example, anchor Sandra Smith repeatedly aired comments that Tootie Smith, the incoming Republican chair of the board of commissioners of Clackamas County, Oregon, made on Carlson’s show the previous night attacking Gov. Kate Brown for tightening restrictions due to the coronavirus’s nationwide surge, including by limiting private gatherings. 

“You look at what’s happening in Oregon, with this incoming Republican chair slamming these new COVID rules,” the Fox anchor said during one of the segments. She then aired a video of the Republican telling Carlson that Brown’s actions were “a travesty” and “hypocrisy” because thegovernor was going to “send the police into people's homes and arrest them and fine them for having a Thanksgiving meal with their family.”

that’s an overtly partisan and deeply questionable claim -- while violators of Brown’s order could technically face jail time, the same set of penalties applied to violators of her stay-at-home order in March, and “authorities said at the time that they intended to inform people about the laws rather [than] issue punishments, and it’s not clear those penalties were ever applied.”

Carlson didn’t push back of course, because he’s deeply invested in poisoning the well for any efforts to prevent mass death from coronavirus -- which is the same reason he decided to give airtime to a county official who had a viral social media post in the first place. And Fox’s “news” side decided to prioritize her comments from Carlson’s “opinion” show and air them unchallenged, rather than highlighting an expert voice who could have provided insight into how to stay safe during the holiday.

Despite Fox's best efforts, the United States will soon be transitioning to a Democratic administration -- and the network is sending every signal that it intends to respond by allowing its craziest elements to run the show, influencing the network’s programming well beyond their own timeslots.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/stanford-study-links-18-trump-rallies-to-over-30-000-cases-and-700-deaths/

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https://www.mediamatters.org/cnn/cnns-rick-santorum-claims-trump-rallies-are-not-highly-spreadable-events-studies-and-reports

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mma1120

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yikes

mma 1020  // trump says 85% of ppl who wear masks get covid

:{sinclair stations set to air Eric Bolling monologue claiming masks and lockdown precautions do not help slow the spread of COVID-19:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

10/15/20 4:33 PM EDT

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an 1020 one might think low density pop rural red states do best, but ND worst?

eight of the 10 states with the highest rates have Republican governors. Kansas and Nevada, which come in eighth and ninth, both have Democratic governors.[[1]](https://www.cepr.net/red-state-governors-still-flunk-testing/#_ftn1) While Democrats also control the legislature in Nevada, the legislature in Kansas is overwhelmingly Republican.

The story is more mixed among the states with the lowest positive rates, with five having Democratic governors and five having Republican governors. However, it is worth noting that all five of the states with Republican governors have legislatures that are controlled by Democrats.

In short, by this measure of efforts at getting the pandemic under control, Democrats seem far more serious than Republicans.

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aha yikes herd idiocy is all we have left when freeDUMB rules, plus // w/ darwin libtard reductionist BS

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-and-the-right-share-a-darwinist-herd-mentality-and-preference-for-sacrificing-the-weak-to-capitalism/

carl pope salon

Donald Trump's promise in an ABC News town hall last month that the United States would soon achieve herd immunity for the coronavirus, and conflating that with herd mentality, may be explained because Trump is counting on the latter to rescue his second term. It's otherwise impossible to imagine a campaign whose endgame is to recover the lost loyalty of voters over 65 selecting as its closing argument, "Not enough of you have died yet."

It's a safe bet that none of his 2016 Republican primary challengers would have embraced the idea that the solution to the pandemic was more American casualties than the Civil War and World War II combined. But many of Trump's Republican comrades-in-arms have embraced, often eagerly, a default preference for herd immunity — harkening back to the harsh social Darwinism that underlies much of modern conservatism. _{Early on in the pandemic there were}_ Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Rep. Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana and radio host Glenn Beck, all of whom argued that the loss of more American lives was preferable to scaling back the economy. Then, _{when the issue became wearing masks}_, some opponents argued "if I'm going to get COVID and die from it, so be it …" Of course they really meant, "If you are going to get COVID ..." Wearing masks was a deprivation of freedom — although this argument seems never to have been extended by Republicans to the prohibition on public nudity.

As the pandemic surged again, by October Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was referring to "unjustified hysteria" about covid, _{and asked,}_ after he became infected, ""Why do we think we actually can stop the progression of a contagious disease?" (The obvious answer is that we have been doing so, with increasing success, since the 1854 cholera pump moment. That is rejected by many on the right, because stopping a pandemic may require the government to prevent citizens from endangering others.)

Herd immunity can sometimes reduce mortality from a disease, but over the centuries has failed to end the curse of influenza, tuberculosis, smallpox, polio, rabies or dengue fever. It fits neatly, however, into a social Darwinist framework. Those who die are the "weak" — the poorest, the youngest and the oldest young —or can at any rate be classified as weak and deserving to die, because they died.Survival of the fittest requires discarding the weak.Remember the "let them die" hecklers who populated some of the 2011 Republican debates on health care.

This underlying value distortion — my personal freedom extends to my right to endanger you — spreads out across a range of other issues.Today's Republican reluctance to curb pollution even when it is demonstrably is killing a power plant's neighbors, to keep pesticides that kill farm workers out of the fields or to do anything at all about the climate crisis, which conservatives have privately conceded for years was real and caused by carbon pollution, are all illustrations of how the toxin of social Darwinism still contaminates much of the right's thinking about freedom.

So Trump's response to the COVID crisis — and the willingness of the Republican congressional establishment to enable it — illustrates a deep-rooted flaw in the American right. In a world in which we are, like it or not, all bound together, a tolerable conservatism is one that is willing to protect me from irresponsible neighbors, whether those are COVID-risking teenagers, irresponsible gun owners or multinational chemical companies.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/governance-by-fox-news-the-right-wing-cable-outlet-has-propped-up-dr-scott-atlas-at-the-expense-of-experts-like-fauci

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief medical correspondent for CNN, has stressed that if the United States took a "herd immunity" approach to the coronavirus pandemic, millions would die. But over at Fox News, Dr. Scott Atlas — a major proponent of the "herd immunity" argument — has received a lot of favorable coverage. And Media Matters' Matt Gertz, this week, argues that Fox News has endangered the public's health by encouraging President Donald Trump to make Atlas more prominent on the White House's coronavirus task force.

"Atlas seized control from Dr. Anthony Fauci and other government experts on public health and infectious diseases, and he has derailed their efforts to slow the spread of the virus," Gertz explains. "This is what governance by Fox News looks like. The White House plucked a purveyor of the network's coronavirus happy talk from its green room, and his view has overwhelmed those who have actual expertise on the subject — with potentially disastrous results."

Hosts at Fox News, Gertz notes, have "denounced public health officials like Fauci" but "propped up Atlas" — who, Gertz stresses, now "dominates" the White House coronavirus task force despite his "lack of qualifications in public health or infectious diseases." Atlas, who joined the task force in August, is a neuroradiologist. But unlike Fauci, he isn't an immunologist. Fauci is one of the United States' leading experts on infectious diseases.

Gertz quotes a report from the Washington Post, noting that Atlas "has pushed a baseless theory inside the task force that the U.S. population is close to herd immunity — the point at which enough people become immune to a disease either by becoming infected or getting vaccinated that its spread slows — despite a scientific consensus that the United States is nowhere close."

Atlas, Gertz points out, has argued against social distancing measures, saying, "All restrictions should be lifted, schools should be opened and only the most vulnerable populations, such as nursing home residents, should be sheltered." And when Fox hosts praise Atlas, according to Gertz, Trump is paying close attention.

"Fox hosts dictated the pandemic response through their shows and in meetings with Trump and his top advisers, until they finally managed to place one of their own within his ranks," Gertz explains. "The result has been a calamity: hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead, the economy is in shambles, and the virus is still out of control."

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an 1020

dr. Johnny Bananas': The White House is pushing a fraudulent medical petition to let COVID-19 run rampant

Daniel Villarreal The New Civil Rights Movement

October 18, 2020

Having basically surrendered to the coronavirus, Republican President Donald Trump has increasingly said that he'd like to stop focusing on COVID-19 prevention measures and instead go for "herd immunity." The White House is even backing a p

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/how-toxic-masculinity-became-a-threat-to-public-health/

no lnx

How toxic masculinity became a threat to public health

Nicole Karlis and Salon October 18, 2020

As if the first two waves of COVID-19 hospitalizations in the United States weren't enough to inspire serious political changes to stop the coronavirus, health experts have sounded the alarm that a third wave is underway. Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are rising across the nation, specifically in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Montana, as the seasons change and the election nears.

It's certainly taken a lot of resilience and strength to persevere through this pandemic — particularly given the backdrop of political chaos, uncertainty and immense change in our daily lives. Yet perhaps it is this attitude of "staying strong," and acting stoically — which is rooted in a culture that favors and thrives off toxic masculinity — that has hurt and continues to hurt us the most.

Toxic masculinity, which has become a household phrase over the last few years, is when the archetypal image of masculinity, like displaying strength, becomes harmful to oneself. In 2005, in a study of men in prison, psychiatrist Terry Kupers defined toxic masculinity as "the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence." The phrase is used to describe the issues men face or sometimes, wrongfully, justify them. Certainly, in a patriarchal society, toxic masculinity not only defines people but politics — as its mores trickle into our entertainment, discourse and politics.

Notably, the pandemic response is being led by the most psychologically compromised, toxic men in America. As I wrote last weekend, President Donald Trump's insistence on depicting himself as so strong as to be able to "work through" his COVID-19 illness is deeply harmful, and apt to put Americans' lives at risk who mimic his behavior — either by working while sick or hiding symptoms.

Meanwhile, Trump's re-election campaign has tried to frame Trump as a "warrior" — masculine, strong and void of emotion. The administration's individualistic, pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps rhetoric personifies toxic masculinity, and trickles down to Trump's underlings, too. In June, Vice President Mike Pence wrote an op-ed essay in The Wall Street Journal claiming there was no second wave of COVID-19, despite all the evidence to the contrary. "We are winning the fight against the invisible enemy," Pence wrote then, adding "our greatest strength is the resilience of the American people."

Yet as psychologists will warn, there is a dark side to resilience....[vs NZ]

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animated bar graphs blue states almost gone vs trump says fail but btw reopen

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/19-graph-douses-cold-water-on-trumps-claim-that-blue-states-are-ravished-with

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not covid but recent ish fail

--> IMPEACH

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/democrats-say-the-gops-attempt-to-smear-biden-accidentally-exposed-a-trump-officials-corrupt-scheme/

igor salon

the Republican report aimed at raising questions about the dealings of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in Ukraineappears to have accidentally implicated former Energy SecretaryRick Perry in an energy scheme in the foreign nation, according to the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

Republicans led by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., released their much-hyped report on Hunter Biden’s role at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma on Wednesday. However, it found no evidence of actual wrongdoing and relied largely on debunked claims, old statements and narratives pushed as part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

But the report did find new evidence related to Perry’s actions in Ukraine while he served in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

Amos Hochstein, a member of the supervisory board at the state-owned Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz, told lawmakers that Perry “inappropriately pressured the Ukrainian government” to place Texas oil executive Robert Bensh on the board of the company while officials at the Department of Energy pressured the government to sign a deal with a “private business entity connected to Mr. Bensh,” according to a :{letter Wyden}: sent to Department of Energy Inspector General Teri Donaldson.

perry also pressured the Ukrainian government to place one of his longtime campaign supporters, Michael Bleyzer, on the board during a trip to Ukraine for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration in 2019, Wyden wrote. Bleyzer and his partner were later awarded a drilling contract in the country.

“Mr. Bleyzer’s contract that he was awarded was despite the fact that he was not the highest bidder in the process,” Hochstein told lawmakers. “Other . . . bids were higher, and therefore, Ukraine chose a bid that paid itself less.”

The heads of the state-owned Naftogaz conglomerate have since filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the contract, arguing that the Ukrainian government acted “illegally and with bias” in agreeing to the deal, Wyden noted.

“Witness testimony in this investigation has directly implicated former Secretary Rick Perry in alleged wrongdoing, and the department more broadly, in a scheme to undermine anti-corruption efforts that were implemented by Ukraine in partnership with the international community,” Wyden wrote.

Politico reported last year that Perry — who along with then-Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker were the “three amigos” who pushed a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine — played an active role in the Trump administration’s pressure on Zelensky, which ultimately led to thepresident’s impeachment.

ProPublica reported earlier this month that Perry repeatedly pushed deals that “were potentially worth billions of dollars to Perry’s friends and political donors” and could “stand to benefit” the secretary himself. Two of the deals, including one worth $20 billion, went to the Texas firm Energy Transfer. Perry served on the company’s board before and after his stint at the Energy Department and bought shares now worth about $800,000 three months after leaving his post, according to the report.

Ethics experts told the outlet that Perry’s efforts were violations of federal regulations. His actions also caught the attention of federal prosecutors, though he is reportedly not the target of any investigations.

The interview with Hochstein was part of the Senate Republicans’ investigation into whether Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma affected U.S. foreign policy. The report asserted that his position was “problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine.” However, it did not include any new evidence suggesting his role affected the Obama administration’s policy. It also acknowledged that “the extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear.”

Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the probe pushed “Russian disinformation.” He further described it as “an attempted political hit job facilitated by the State Department.”

A Finance Committee aide told Talking Points Memo that finding new evidence against the Trump administration “was certainly not Republicans’ goal.”

“While Republicans’ Ukraine investigation showed Vice President Biden did nothing wrong,” the aide said, “it succeeded in implicating former Secretary Perry in a corrupt scheme to pressure the Ukrainian government to change the board of Naftogaz.”

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920 an

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/we-were-flabbergasted-new-report-says-jared-kushners-conduct-stunned-attendees-at-a-19-meeting/

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kayleigh McEnany actually thinks people should be impressed that only 200,000 people have died on Trump’s watch

Sweetheart, there are tapes’: Kayleigh McEnany slammed for claiming Trump ‘never downplayed the virus’

Alex Henderson September 9, 2020

On Wednesday, more details emerged about veteran/author Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” which is based in part on a series of interviews with President Donald Trump from December 2019-July 2020…

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ref nyt

no lnx

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/us/politics/trump-cdc-coronavirus.html

Emails Detail Effort to Silence C.D.C. and Question Its Science

Emails from a former top Trump health official and his science adviser show how the two refused to accept Centers for Disease Control and Prevention science and sought to silence the agency.

Michael R. Caputo, the Department of Health and Human Services’s top spokesman, went on medical leave this week, days after he attacked C.D.C. scientists in a bizarre Facebook video.

Noah Weiland

By Noah Weiland

Sept. 18, 2020

WASHINGTON — On June 30, as the coronavirus was cresting toward its summer peak, Dr. Paul Alexander, a new science adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, composed a scathing two-page critique of an interview given by an experienced scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Anne Schuchat, a 32-year veteran of the C.D.C. and its principal deputy director, had appealed to Americans to wear masks and warned, “We have way too much virus across the country.” But Dr. Alexander, a part-time assistant professor of health research methods, appeared sure he understood the coronavirus better.

“Her aim is to embarrass the president,” he wrote, commenting on Dr. Schuchat’s appeal for face masks in an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Association.

“She is duplicitous,” he also wrote in an email to his boss, Michael R. Caputo, the Department of Health and Human Services’s top spokesman who went on medical leave this week. He asked Mr. Caputo to “remind” Dr. Schuchat that during the H1N1 swine flu outbreak in 2009, thousands of Americans had died “under her work.”

ImageFrom a Trump science adviser’s critique of the C.D.C. scientist Dr. Anne Schuchat.

From a Trump science adviser’s critique of the C.D.C. scientist Dr. Anne Schuchat.

Of Dr. Schuchat’s assessment of the dangers of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, he fumed, wrongly, “The risk of death in children 0-19 years of age is basically 0 (zero) … PERIOD … she has lied.”

Dr. Alexander’s point-by-point assessment, broken into seven parts and forwarded by Mr. Caputo to Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director, was one of several emails obtained by The New York Times that illustrate how Mr. Caputo and Dr. Alexander tried to browbeat career officials at the C.D.C. at the height of the pandemic, challenging the science behind their public statements and trying to silence agency staff.

On Friday, two days after Mr. Caputo went on medical leave and Dr. Alexander was dismissed from the Department of Health and Human Services, the C.D.C. reversed a heavily criticized recommendation suggesting that people who have had close contact with a person infected with the coronavirus do not need to get tested if they have no symptoms.The emails shed light on the monthslong fight that led to their departures.

Far from hiding what they knew about the virus’s danger, as Bob Woodward’s new book contends President Trump was doing, the emails seem to indicate that aides in Washington were convinced of their own rosy prognostications, even as coronavirus infections were shooting skyward.

At the same time, Mr. Caputo moved topunish the C.D.C.’s communications team for granting interviews to NPR [// Hansen?] and trying to help a CNN reporter reach him about a public relations campaign. Current and former C.D.C. officials called it a five-month campaign of bullying and intimidation.

Read the Email Between Caputo and Dr. Alexander

In late June, as coronavirus infections were surging to their heights,Dr. Paul Alexander, a science adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, emailed a scathing critique of an interview given by Anne Schuchat, a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The email shows how aides in Washington bullied and tried to silence the C.D.C. at the height of the pandemic.

For instance, after Mr. Caputo forwarded the critique of Dr. Schuchat to Dr. Redfield, C.D.C. officials became concerned whena member of the health department’s White House liaison office — Catherine Granito — called the agency to ask questions about Dr. Schuchat’s biography, leaving the impression that some in Washington could have been searching for ways to fire her.

In another instance, Mr. Caputo wrote to C.D.C. communications officials on July 15 to demand they turn over the name of the press officer who approved a series of interviews between NPR and a longtime C.D.C. epidemiologist, after the department in Washington had moved to take ownership of the agency’s pandemic data collection.

“I need to know who did it,” Mr. Caputo wrote. A day later, still without a reply, Mr. Caputo wrote back. “I have not received a response to my email for 20 hours. This is unacceptable,” he said. “I need this information to properly manage department communications. If you disobey my directions, you will be held accountable.”

On Friday, a department spokeswoman said Mr. Caputo, in his comments about interview approvals, had been trying to make sure that the C.D.C. followed protocols dating to prior administrations that the department clear interview requests for health officials. The C.D.C. did not have an immediate comment, nor did Mr. Caputo.

[Dr. Paul Alexander, a Department of Health and Human Services science adviser, criticized the C.D.C.’s principal deputy director.

In the months leading up to their exits, the two had routinely worked to revise and delay the C.D.C.’s closely guarded and internationally admired health bulletins, called Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, in an effort to paint the administration’s pandemic response in a more positive light.

Far from apologetic, Dr. Alexander told The Globe and Mail of Toronto this week that the C.D.C. had written “pseudoscientific reports” and that he was better suited to examine data than agency scientists.

“None of those people have my skills,” Dr. Alexander said. “I make the judgment whether this is crap.”

The judgments he rendered — and the punishments that Mr. Caputo appeared intent to mete out — had a demoralizing effect on the agency.

One C.D.C. communications official became so worried about Mr. Caputo’s threat that she wrote to other senior staff asking how to reply, saying that she was “uncomfortable turning over our employee’s name to Mr. Caputo, given the hostility of the message.”

In another email to an agency communications officer who had directed a CNN reporter to contact Mr. Caputo about a vaccine public relations campaign, Mr. Caputo shot back, “In what world did you think it was your job to announce an administration public service announcement campaign to CNN?”

The C.D.C. press official then apologized, which did not satisfy Mr. Caputo. “We will discuss this on a teleconference tomorrow,” he wrote. “I want your H.R. representative in attendance.” He then scolded the official for removing Dr. Redfield from the email thread after Mr. Caputo had added the director in a prior email.

In the emails obtained by The Times, Mr. Caputo repeatedly added Dr. Redfield, who was overseeing an 11,000-person agency, to email chains about news media disputes. People familiar with the emails said it was an attempt to use Dr. Redfield to shame his own staff.

People familiar with Dr. Redfield’s responses to the emails said that he would call senior aides sounding resigned to the orders and asking how to navigate Mr. Caputo’s demands. Often, he tried to delay or ignore Mr. Caputo until the tension subsided.

Perhaps most illuminating in the emails was the way the top officials at the C.D.C. saw the disease in fundamentally different ways than confidants and loyalists of Mr. Trump’s. In the interview that provoked Mr. Caputo and Dr. Alexander, Dr. Schuchat referred to “a lot of wishful thinking around the country that, ‘Hey, summer, everything is going to be fine, we’re over this.’”

“And we are not even beginning to be over this,” she said. “I think we need to continue to learn and continue to apply what we’re learning and be humble about our assumptions.”

At the time of her interview, the United States was setting record levels of new infections and was weeks away from an even more catastrophic peak of almost 70,000 new cases a day. States like Arizona were pausing the reopening of their businesses.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s leading infectious disease expert, testified to a Senate panel that the country could hit 100,000 new cases a day.

That portrait of the virus was at odds with the one the White House had strained to present. The day Dr. Schuchat lamented there was “way too much virus across the country,” Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, told reporters, “We’re aware that there are embers that need to be put out.”

Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network that week that he believed the virus was “at some point” going to “sort of just disappear, I hope.”

Dr. Alexander also had his own ideas of the virus’s staying power. He disputed Dr. Schuchat’s claim that children were vulnerable to it. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that while it is rare, the virus can be lethal to children, who can readily transmit it to more vulnerable family members.

“It also causes no symptoms as it is so mild … you don’t even know you have it,” Dr. Alexander wrote. “Many people never knew they had it. Not one indication. It is very false her statement that it causes death in children.”

At one point in his response to Dr. Schuchat, Dr. Alexander appeared to endorse the largely rejected strategy of “herd immunity,” or allowing the virus to freely spread until enough people develop antibodies that it dies for lack of human hosts.

“Importantly, having the virus spread among the young and healthy is one of the methods to drive herd immunity,” he wrote. “This was not the intended strategy but all must be on deck now and it is contributing positively at some level.”

The clashes between the White House and C.D.C. intensified this week, when Mr. Trump publicly slapped down congressional testimony Dr. Redfield gave, in which he praised masks and estimated that a vaccine might not be widely available to the public until the middle of 2021.

“I think he made a mistake when he said that,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

On Friday, the president told reporters the broad American public would have access to a coronavirus vaccine by April, again snubbing his C.D.C. chief.

Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/team-trumps-response-is-now-a-worldwide-embarrassment

hunter kos

stats --> They’re laughing at us, Donald. Well, they’re laughing at you. Well, actually nobody’s laughing, there’s 200,000 Americans dead and in the ground right now and, still, the only pandemic “plans” coming out all members of Republican leadership combined ended up abandoned because they left it to Jared Kushner, and Jared Kushner got bored.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/usps-had-plan-to-send-5-face-masks-to-every-home-as-exploded-the-white-house-ed-it/

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bill

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/mcconnell-quietly-rams-through-more-lifetime-trump-judges-while-blocking-19-relief-everyone-in-america-should-be-outraged/

no lnx twt ari berman jake j

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as Covid-19 relief for jobless and hungry Americans, collapsing small businesses, and state and local governments languishes in the Senate GOP’s legislative graveyard, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday further advanced his years-long project of dragging U.S. federal courts to the right by ramming through three more of President Donald Trump’s lifetime judicial nominees and teed up votes on several others.

Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, noted on Twitter that the latest confirmations came four months to the day after the Democrat-controlled House passed the Heroes Act, a $3 trillion coronavirus relief package that McConnell dismissed as an “unserious liberal wish list” and blocked from receiving a vote in the Senate.

“Everyone in America should be outraged that this is how Mitch McConnell is spending the Senate’s time amid a pandemic,” tweeted Gupta.

In a separate tweet Wednesday morning, Gupta urged the U.S. public to “pay attention” as McConnell and Trump’s court takeover proceeds apace amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis and resulting economic collapse—to which Senate Republicans have responded by putting forth legislation decried as piecemeal and wholly inadequate.

"As McConnell blocks the Heroes Act, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, election funding, and dozens of civil rights bills, his priority today (amid the pandemic) will be confirming three more Trump judges after confirming three yesterday,” said Gupta. “It’s an outrage.”

While Senate Democrats don’t have the numbers to block Trump’s judicial nominees, few even bothered to object Wednesday to the confirmations of John Holcomb, Stanley Blumenfeld, and Mark Scarsi to lifetime positions on the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Just 12 Democratic senators voted against Holcomb and Scarsi, and only four voted against Blumenfeld.

The confirmations came days after major court decisions laid bare the real-world consequences of Trump and McConnell’s takeover of the U.S. judiciary, which will impact key areas of American society—from climate policy to voting rights—for decades to come.

Last Friday, as Common Dreams reported, the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a Florida requirement that state residents with past felony convictions pay off all court fines and fees before they are allowed to register to vote—a ruling made possible by Trump’s appointees.

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“The only reason it was upheld was because Donald Trump flipped the 11th Circuit with five Trump judges,” Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman told Democracy Now! on Tuesday. “And this is why Mitch McConnell in the Republican Senate is so intent on confirming judges and doing nothing else. This week, McConnell is going to confirmeight more judges to the federal bench, but they’re not doing anything else to help the American people.”

Late Sunday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit—which Trump also flipped with right-wing judges—upheld the White House’s push to end “temporary protected status” (TPS)for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan.

“Without Congressional action, this will lead to devastating moral and economic consequences not just for TPS holders but for their families, communities, and for the entire country,” Peniel Ibe, policy engagement coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee, warned in response to the ruling.

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hunter kos

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/fill-the-swamp-team-trump-taps-an-infamous-oil-funded-climate-denier-for-noaa-role

although the election is almost upon us, Team Trump continues to fill the swamp to whatever new high-water mark they can possibly manage, putting the Absolute Least Competent People in charge of every government agency. It continues with the appointment of David Legates to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where he will act as “deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction.”

Have you heard of David Legates? You might have. He’s a notorious climate change denier. And now he’s evidently being given a key role in “observation and prediction.” Or in other words, a perfect perch from which todo to government climate science what Trump’s team is furiously doing to the nation’s pandemic science: deny that the bad things are happening while claiming that scientific evidence to the contrary is a dangerous plot against Dear Leader and Dear Leader’s rich, dumb friends.

There is literally nothing “conservative” rule cannot turn into a national disaster. And there doesn’t seem to be a single thing Trump’s Republican allies are content to not turn into a national disaster.

NPR speculates that Legates’ new position “suggests he reports directly” to acting NOAA head Neil Jacobs, putting him in a powerful position to sabotage whatever reports the agency’s climate scientists produce. NPR also reports that neither NOAA or Legates was willing to so much as comment on why he was hired or what he will be doing, which is always a near-certain sign that crookedness is afoot. If a government agency is going out of its way to hide what a new hire will be doing, and it’s not the CIA doing the hiring, you can bet it’s because nobody involved thinks the details will make them look good.

as for Legates’ qualifications, they are negative in nature. He is explicitly anti-qualified. Legates has been a climate crank for years, casting doubt on scientific findings with his own research funded by the oil industry and Koch Industries or, less ambitiously, simply by sniping from the sidelines. He is a Heartland Institute associate whose latest writing for the group was a scoffing Paul Driessen-cowritten attackon expert predictions that 100,000 Americans could die in the current pandemic—one that unironically parroted the “cure is worse than the disease” condemnation of shutdown orders,which smoothly segued into the claim that if pandemic experts were giving such outrageous predictions, then What If all of climate science was also similarly false and inflated.

Yeah. Whoops. Funny how that worked out.

Look, fuckers.If you got the pandemic numbers wrong by a factor of All Of Them a mere few months back, you don’t get to feign science-knowing on anything else. Sit your fraudulent asses down, Team Heartland. [Author’s note: It shall now be considered every American’s patriotic duty to use swear words when referencing any of the conservative charlatans whose “cure is worse than the disease” bullshit killed 200,000 Americans and counting. If you’re not calling them crooked fake-ass hoax-spewing shit-for-brains oilfuckers, I’m just saying you might not love America as much as you say you do.]

So that is presumably what we can expect from Legates in his new Trump-enabling role: ostentatiously written but bullshit-heavy feints against government scientists while ignoring his own incompetent death-producing wrongness from oh, say, Last Damn April. It is the climate denier schtick. It is the Heartland schtick on absolutely everything, all the time, and never varies in the slightest.

He and his Heartlandians thought predictions of 100,000 deaths were just crazy talk, in a nationwide pandemic, but don’t you worry: They’re even more paycheck-collectingly sure the climate change that we are currently seeing is a similar hoax, and doing similar unnecessary damage to the Great American Business Model of We Have Money, So You All Can Fuck Off. (Hilariously, Legates’ Heartland biography mentions that he was presented with the “Courage in Defense of Science Award,”without mentioning that the award is, and this is not a joke, issued by the Heartland Institute itself. The group is self-parodying.)

Anyhoo, if you’re looking for a more lengthy description of just how brazenly pigheaded Team Trump’s new “observation and prediction” swamp-creature is, when it comes to pooh-poohing the rest of science while claiming he alone has the Correct Answers, you can go elsewhere for the details. Even as some of the most notorious climate deniers have been forced to alter their stances, given the evidence, to recognize climate change as happening and as a product of human-caused atmospheric changes, Legates has through the years continued to claim that no evidence of human-based change exists at all.

This is less scientific courageousness than apparent ideological commitment. Indeed, his claims tip precariously on the conspiracy-mongering side of things, with pronouncements that carbon dioxide has become “that molecule by which [governments] can take control of our lives, of your efforts, and everything that goes on.” (How …Gohmertian?)

And in his Heartland role, he has certainly been willing to praise the “bold” Donald Trump—a place every one of these dishonest fake-conservative talking point-dispensing charlatans naturally ends up, after selling their soul to all comers for a decade or two.

An aside: It’s uncanny how every die-hard conservative hack has fallen into line behind Trump with no apparent effort, in their eagerness to wage war on the government no matter what methods are used or who the commanding general is. It’s uncanny how every conservative “science” guy slips into the same exact talking points as all the others, to the point where their speeches and claims are indistinguishable, from person to person and year to year. While, of course, claiming that they are the true free-thinkers of the world.

Whatever. Whether the Heartland crew in particular were initially drawn in by Trump’s devotion to tax fraud, racism, and rape or merely willing to overlook those flaws to embrace Trump’s “bold” stance of having whatever policy some random check-cashing hack appearing on the Sean Hannity show tells him to have isn’t known, so we are free to guess. Given the massive quantities of Actual Damn Crime among every category of Trump supporter from “government appointee” to “boat owner,” [guo?] though, we’re probably still underestimating just how closely Trump’s heart and motives resonate with conservatism’s most devoted adherents.

What we do know is that the conservatives surrounding Trump are now making an all-out effort to destroy as much of the nation’s government and expertise as they can manage, before they are each pried back out of the buildings again. The damage will last, at this point, literally forever.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-nations-worst-governor-trump-superfan-kristi-noem-is-a-rising-gop-star-but-she-may-have-mismanaged-the-crisis-worst-of-all

sofia t salon

south Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican who is the first woman to lead that rural and sparsely populated state, is taking her turn in the national hot seat as the Mount Rushmore State has become the nation’s latest coronavirus “hot spot.”  In distinctly Trump-like fashion, the Trump-friendly Noem has turned to right-wing outlets like Fox News tolash out at critical media coverage and rail against an “_{elite class of so-called experts}_.” But as was the case _{with Florida’s Ron DeSantis}_, Georgia’s Brian Kemp and _{Arizona’s Doug Ducey}_, _{conservative media has rushed to circle the wagons}_ around Noem just as the fuller picture of her failed handling of the coronavirus crisis becomes clearer.

South Dakota is now considered in the “red zone” for COVID-19 cases after ranking as the second-worst-hit state in the nation for new cases and test positivity per capita over the last two weeks, according to the _{latest document prepared for governors by the White House Coronavirus Task Force}_. But Noem is one of 14 Republican governors who have ignored the task force guidelines to curb the spread of COVID-19, even as the White House says that increasing case counts in South Dakota and “remarkably high” test positivity are “deeply concerning” given insufficient testing levels in the state.

While the World Health Organization’s benchmark for business re-openings is a 5% rate of positive tests, South Dakota has seen a positivity rate above 10% since Aug. 16.Both daily active cases and hospitalizations have more than doubled in South Dakota since the start of August, and _{no other state has seen such a rapid expansion rate}_. Over the past week, there have been an average of 236 confirmed cases per day, an increase of 48% from the average only two weeks earlier. That’s out of a total state population of roughly 885,000, which ranks 46th in the nation.

Despite such troubling trends, Noem is among the few state governors who never imposed a shelter-in-place order. Her_{ administration has refused to impose any restrictions on businesses or public activities}_, contrary to calls from South Dakota’s largest medical association. And Noem has resisted issuing a face-mask mandate — even though guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said for months that everyone should wear a facial covering while in public to help curb the spread of the coronavirus. She’s even encouraged parents to send their kids back to school “without masks.” As of the end of August, more than 550 people had been infected at the state’s universities, with another 200 cases recently reported in K-12 schools.

noem initially attempted to conceal the latest statistics out of her state. When the Argus Leader, the daily newspaper in Sioux Falls, requested_{ a copy of the weekly reports }_sent to the state health department from the White House task force, Noem’s office refused. When Trump repeatedly touted the drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential COVID remedy, Noem was was among the first to launch a trial of the unproven drug, which was later _{quietly dropped}_.

Noem’s public rhetoric also has a distinctively Trumpian flavor. She recently asserted that “about 95% of the population … is not at risk for serious infection” and announced that “South Dakota is open for business” after _{four workers at a Smithfield Foods meatpacking plant in the state died and another 48 were hospitalized}_. She made a big show out of not requiring social distancing or masks at Trump’s pre-Fourth of July event at Mount Rushmore, appearing on Fox News with host Laura Ingraham to _{brag about the lack of safety precautions}_. The state reversed its longstanding fireworks ban and spent $1.5 million on the event. Noem _{reportedly}_ even gifted Trump with “a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included a fifth presidential likeness: his.” In return, the president flew her back to Washington aboard Air Force One.

Noem has been tying herself ever more closely to the president since narrowly winning election in 2018 — after a last-minute campaign push by Trump and Vice President Mike Pence helped her edge out her Democratic challenger in the closest South Dakota governor’s race in decades. Noem won a congressional seat in the Tea Party Republican wave of 2010, and served as her state’s sole House member for eight years, but only won 51% of the vote against Democrat Billie Sutton in what is generally a die-hard red state.

More recently, Noem — who counts onetime Trump campaign manager :{Corey Lewandowski as a top adviser:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: — has embarked on a multi-state campaign tour as an official surrogate for Trump’s re-election campaign. During the pandemic, she has traveled to Republican events in states like Ohio and Iowa, in the latter state finding a kindred spirit in Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who has also _{resisted a statewide mask mandate}_ in the face of official recommendations amid a surge in cases. The 48-year-old Noem clearly aims to become anational right-wing star, and has spent $130,000 in taxpayer funds to build a studio in the basement of the State Capitol for her frequent Fox News appearances — including one this past week to defend her decision to promote the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, one of the largest public events held since the start of this pandemic.

More than 460,000 people from across North America descended on the small city of Sturgis, in western South Dakota, for the 10-day rally that ran Aug. 7-16. That came even after the city council surveyed local residents andfound that more than 62% opposed holding the rally. Sturgis officials went forward anyway, unable to say no to the $800 million in revenue the rally generates.

Most bikers and enthusiasts who attended the event did not wear masks or practice social distancing, as _{the Associated Press reported}_ at the time. South Dakota shot up to No. 2 in the country in per capita cases shortly thereafter. It’s hard to conclude that’s merely a coincidence. As of last week, the AP had identified 290 cases in 12 states tied to the rally. In South Dakota, 118 residents who attended the rally have subsequently tested positive for COVID-19, and _{one has died}_. Noem has since allowed the state fair to continue as planned and announced plans to add a 13,000-person concert to the annual “Governor’s Hunt” that celebrates South Dakota’s pheasant season in October, which she has promised will be ” bigger and better than ever before.”

Noem now stands alongside Florida’s GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, who allowed the Daytona Bike Week to proceed in March with 500,000 people attending, in terms of permitting potential super-spreader events. According to an Aug. 8 article by the New York Times’ Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman, Lewandowski unsuccessfully lobbied Trump to attend the Sturgis rally in an effort to boost Noem’s profile.

Her biggest turn in the spotlight so far came a few weeks later during her address to the Republican National Convention, in which Noem ignored the spread of coronavirus in her state in favor of culture-war platitudes about saving Confederate monuments from left-wing mobs. (South Dakota did not become a state until 1889, and the Dakota Territory played no role in the Civil War.) Noem then ordered the South Dakota Department of Tourism to run a _{30-second spot}_ she narrated on Fox News during the convention, at a price of $819,000. That was part of a $5 million tourism campaign using federal coronavirus relief funds that comes with great potential personal gain for the governor.

Like the president she admires, Noem has a history of using her office to boost family members.She hired her daughter as a policy analyst while the latter was still in college, and hired her son-in-law for a different position in the governor’s office. _{Her daughter got a promotion and hefty pay raise}_ at a time when other state employees did not. Without citing any specific threats, Noem’s team proposed a $400,000 security fence to be erected around her residence, mostly at taxpayer expense.

Meanwhile, Noem has publicly boasted about turning down federal unemployment relief, citing a healthy state economy she attributes to never locking down. _{She rejected}_ an additional $300 in unemployment benefits per week for unemployed South Dakotans, refusing to kick in the required $100 in state-provided benefits and claiming South Dakota had recovered nearly 80% of its job losses since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Noem told Fox News this week that her response has been “a balanced approach” and pointed to the state’s tax revenues, which who 8.7% more money coming in this fiscal year than projected.

Noem was quick, however, to reach out to the Trump administration to stop sovereign Native American nations from erecting coronavirus checkpoints on highways leading into their territory, even as the virus spread through Native communities. _{She told Trump}_ in June that she needed federal assistance “to bring a prompt end to these unlawful tribal checkpoints/blockades on U.S./State highways” as “a final alternative to formal litigation.” It’s unclear what type of federal reinforcement she sought, but the governor later suggested that her opposition to _{coronavirus checkpoints}_ in Indian Country was linked to the Keystone XL pipeline protests.

“‘For every action that we take, and the tribes take, they’re setting precedent,” Noem warned in a letter to the Department of Justice. “If we allow checkpoints to shut down traffic in this situation, then we are setting precedent for that to happen far into the future in many other situations as well.” She has subsequently _{refused to meet with the state legislature’s bipartisan State-Tribal Relations Committee}_.

Noem’s Trumpian words and deeds, along with her charismatic media appearances and her determination to strip benefits from the unemployed have made her favorite among virtually all factions of the right. Expect her to be a leading Republican presidential contender within the decade.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/revelation-that-racist-trump-stooge-tried-to-censor-cdc-reports-rocks-experts-and-critics/

no lnx twt

revelation that ‘racist Trump stooge’ tried to censor CDC reports rocks experts and critics

Written by Common Dreams September 12, 2020

Days after President Donald Trump admitted to knowingly downplaying the Covid-19 pandemic in his statements to the public, new reporting late Friday revealed that Trump political aides have been reviewing—and in some cases altering—weekly CDC reports about the deadly virus in an effort to bring them into closer alignment with the president’s false narrative and claims.

Politico reported Friday evening that the Health and Human Services Department’s politically appointed communications aides, led by former Trump campaign official Michael Caputo—a Republican strategist with no medical expertise—”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.”

The primary target of the Trump officials’ interference, according to Politico, has been the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR), a crucial resource for experts, public officials, and members of the public seeking to track the spread of Covid-19.While CDC officials have pushed back on meddling from political appointees, Politico reported that the agency has “increasingly agreed to allow the political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on the wording.”

According to one internal email obtained by Politico, Caputo aide Paul Alexander accused the CDC—an agency directed by Trump appointee Robert Redfield—of “writing hit pieces on the administration” and attempting to use its weekly reports to “hurt the president.”

“CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school re-opening,” wrote Alexander, an assistant professor of health research at McMaster University in Toronto. “Very misleading by CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear.”

Alexander demanded that Redfield allow the HHS aide to personally edit the CDC’s reports, which are authored by career scientists.

“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, who has also attempted to alter the public messaging of Dr. Anthony Fauci, wrote to Redfield. “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.'”

Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves called the emails “explosive” and said Caputo should resign immediately.

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“This is just beyond the pale,” Gonsalves tweeted. “Caputo, with acquiescence of Redfield, has started to twist the science to Donald Trump’s advantage. It’s sick and disgusting.”

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According to Politico, attempts by political appointees to alter the MMWR to their liking “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,” Politico continued. “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.”

In addition to trying to change the language of CDC scientists to make it fit with the president’s rosy depiction of the pandemic, Caputo and his aides have also moved “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,” Politico reported Friday.

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“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,” Politico noted. “It said that “the potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks.”

Politico‘s new reporting represents just the latest evidence of the Trump administration’s ongoing interference in the activities of public health agencies, an effort lawmakers and experts have denounced as a deliberate campaign to undermine trust in Covid-19 data and advance the president’s political agenda.

“A Trump stooge with a history of racist statements and no medical background is doctoring CDC reports warning Americans on Covid because they make Trump look bad,” Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) tweeted late Friday, referring to Caputo.

Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, said the “Trump CDC is dead to me if they muzzle the MMWR.”

“To kill the MMWR,” Feigl-Ding added, “is akin to burning science.”

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Republicans’ ‘disgraceful’ relief bill fails — here’s why it was a sham

Julia Conley / Common Dreams  September 11, 2020

After Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s attempt to pass the so-called “skinny” coronavirus relief plan—prioritizing corporations over the health, safety, and livelihoods of working families—failed on Thursday, advocacy groups…

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Pence busted for ‘lying through his teeth’ about Trump’s COVID-19 response in damning supercut

Travis Gettys / Raw Story September 11, 2020

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough busted Vice President Mike Pence for “lying through his teeth” about President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. The vice president went on Fox News and…

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/leaked-emails-reveal-a-trump-official-sought-to-muzzle-dr-fauci-on-vital-19-facts/

no lnx twt

Andrea Germanos / Common Dreams September 10, 2020

Reporting from Politico Wednesday revealed that a Trump-allied official within the Department of Health and Human Services tried to censor Dr. Anthony Fauci from communicating to the press dangers the coronavirus may pose to school children.

According to Politico, the messaging directives came from Paul Alexander, a Trump administration appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services. Alexander is a senior adviser to Michael Caputo, a Trump ally and assistant HHS secretary for public affairs.

Politico obtained multiple emails from Alexander that reflect his responses to what Fauci—director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—planned on telling outlets including Bloomberg and HuffPost. They included messages that “are couched as scientific arguments” but “often contradict mainstream science,” according to the reporting.

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The outlet cited as one example an Aug. 27 email in which Alexander wrote that he continues “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.”

In another email from Tuesday, Alexander suggested children have “essentially zero” risk if they are exposed to the coronavirus and pushed Fauci’s press team to make sure Fauci told MSNBC that children should not wear masks at school. From Politico:

“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.

Alexander’s repeated efforts at push Fauci to parrot the administration’s anti-science line, however, may have been for naught.

“No one tells me what I can say and cannot say,” Fauci said. “I speak on scientific evidence.”

It did not, however, mark Alexander’s first attempts at controlling the narrative from federal health experts.

The Washington Post reported in July that he made similar efforts with CDC officials. In a June email to CDC officials, Alexander wrote that the agency’s warning about Covid-19 impacts on women “reads in a way to frighten women .?.?. as if the President and his administration can’t fix this and it is getting worse.”

Virologist Dave O’Connor weighed in on the new reporting on Twitter, writing, “This sort of story will be recalled years from now as an example of the government interfering with science, with predictably disastrous results.”

Shannon Watts, founder of gun control advocacy group Moms Demand Action, also shared Politico‘s new reporting, and had harsh words for the Trump administration.

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“They don’t care if our kids die. They don’t care if we die,” wrote Watts. “They just want power.”

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PPE

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-america-is-still-failing-health-care-workers-battling-the/

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omg

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-administration-plans-250-million-ad-buy-telling-voters-not-to-worry-so-much-about-the/

Trump administration has given up on any serious attempts to curb the nation’s ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As U.S. deaths inch towards the 200,000 mark, outside experts are now warning Americans to ignore the “dysfunctional” Centers of Disease Control and Prevention after the agency issued new, Trump-favored guidelines to reduce testing, rather than expand it. There is no federal contract tracing effort. There is no standard, expert-based pandemic policy—each state has been left to its own devices, with federal officials ignoring even the most serious state outbreaks.

Don’t worry, though. It’s not like the Trump-led federal government is entirely asleep at the wheel. The Department of Health and Human Services is seeking bids for a new quarter-*billion* dollar communications contract, reports Politico. No, not to encourage Americans to social distance, wear masks, or get tested—don’t be stupid. The new publicity campaign will instead “defeat despair and inspire hope,” advising businesses how to operate “in the new normal” and instilling “confidence to return to work and restart the economy.”

Yeah, we’re all going to die.

You will note, dear tired reader, that this language sounds very much like Trump’s own anti-pandemic anti-policy. Rather than taking more aggressive steps to curtail the pandemic—as nearly every other nation on the planet has—the new publicity campaign will presume we live in a “new normal.” It will be based, says “a senior HHS official” who for some reason would not go on the record to say these embarrassing things, on “defeating the mental health challenges of the coronavirus,” which sounds explicitly like Trump’s own insistence that it’s depression over social distancing that’s killing people, not the deadly disease marked on the death certificates.

so instead of a new testing program or, say, mailing out masks to every American household, we’re getting an advertising campaign meant to “defeat despair.” Oh, and Politico reports thecontract will be managed by Trump ex-campaign guy Michael Caputo.

Odds that Trump loyalist Michael Caputo is going to sign off on a $250 million ad campaign telling Americans to “defeat despair” through the remarkably effective practice of wearing masks, against Donald Trump’s personal wishes? Zero. Less than zero. Zero minus the square root of Ivanka.

Anyhoo, the idea that the Trump-led federal government is, immediately before the (cough) November elections, going to be combatting the COVID-19 pandemic via an ad campaign telling Americans to maybe just stop being sad about it is … well, let’s be honest. It’s so on-brand it hurts.

It’s the “Be Best” of infectious disease campaigns. Sorry, we still need to limit testing—but here’s some tips on how you can restart the economy, fellow patriots. Nothing inspires “hope” like getting your unmasked face back to work, unless it’s getting legislation passed immunizing your employer from consequences if you die afterword. Now that’s inspiring.

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thehill 920

top Republicans are seeking to downplay the heavy toll of the coronavirus, in part by pointing to a conspiracy theory that the number of deaths is much lower.

President Trump, along with Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Rep. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), who are both in competitive Senate races, have all pointed in recent days to the widely debunked theory that COVID-19 deaths in the United States total just 10,000 instead of the more than 180,000 recorded by health officials.

The speculative remarks come at a time when about 1,000 people a day are dying from the virus, providing a grim backdrop to the final sprint to Election Day. Trump, meanwhile, has been trying to project an optimistic message, frequently pointing to rapid progress toward a vaccine and saying he thinks the virus is “going away.”

The Trump administration has also increasingly emphasized protecting vulnerable populations such as the elderly rather than putting a focus on a broader strategy of trying to suppress the disease overall.

The discredited theory in question points to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) :{webpage}: stating that the coronavirus was listed as the sole cause for only 6 percent of deaths from the virus. However, that does not mean the other 94 percent of people did not die from the coronavirus. Instead, it means that another factor directly caused by the coronavirus, such as respiratory failure, was also listed or that there was an underlying condition, such as obesity or diabetes, that is not necessarily fatal on its own but heightens the risks from the coronavirus.

The 6 percent figure has been seized on, however, to minimize the death toll. Last weekend, Trump retweeted a post from user Mel Q, who is a believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory, saying only about 9,000 people had “actually” died from the coronavirus. Twitter later removed the tweet for violating its rules.

Ernst likewise said Monday that she is “so skeptical” of case and death counts from the coronavirus, later adding, :{according to}: the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, “They’re thinking there may be 10,000 or less deaths that were actually singularly COVID-19. ... I’m just really curious. It would be interesting to know that.”

Marshall, who is a doctor, pointed to the theory based on the 6 percent statistic in a Facebook post Sunday.

“This week the CDC quietly updated its COVID-19 data to reflect the number of deaths from COVID-19 only,” he wrote, adding that it was “only 6%,” according to a screenshot :{posted by KSNT}:.

Facebook removed the post, with a spokesperson saying it violated “our policies against spreading harmful misinformation about COVID-19 since it misstates CDC data about the deadliness of the disease.”

The prominence of the discredited theory and its embrace among high-level Republicans has dismayed experts.

“It’s completely, to me, mind-boggling that people are using this as fodder for some conspiracy theory,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.

He said experts have long said that underlying conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure are risk factors for having a more severe case of the coronavirus, so “that’s not anything surprising” that such conditions were listed as present in many coronavirus deaths.

“I’m not sure why this is even a story other than people are trying to minimize what is a serious infectious disease,” Adalja added.

Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, likewise said on ABC this week, “That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of COVID didn’t die of COVID-19 — they did — so the numbers that you've been hearing, the 180,000-plus deaths, are real deaths from COVID-19.”

Asked about Trump’s retweets at a press conference Monday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump was "highlighting new CDC information that came out that was worth noting."

Ernst took a different tone in a statement released by her office, saying, "Over 180,000 Americans have died because of COVID-19. What matters is that we are getting the resources to Iowa that are needed to fight this virus and continuing to support our health care workers on the front lines, and that’s what I’m focused on."

Marshall’s campaign manager, Eric Pahls, wrote in an email, “Dr. Marshall was simply presenting data from the CDC. He didn't offer some sort of spin or analysis,” adding that the Senate candidate “respects this virus.”

The promotion of the debunked theory has come alongside other efforts to question the effects of the coronavirus. During a rally Thursday, Trump mocked Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for wearing a mask.

“Did you ever see a man that likes a mask as much as him?” Trump said to a largely maskless crowd while also saying he is “all for” people wearing masks. Trump himself rarely wears a mask.

The president has also put an increased emphasis on encouraging lower-risk people to go on with their lives, emphasizing instead protections for the elderly.

“We are aggressively sheltering those at highest risk, especially the elderly, while allowing lower-risk Americans to safely return to work and to school,” Trump said in his prime-time acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last week.

That approach is in line with suggestions from White House adviser Scott Atlas, a doctor who does not have a background in infectious diseases and is affiliated with the conservative Hoover Institution. Atlas has downplayed concerns about the virus spreading among people who are not elderly or in other high-risk groups, even saying it could be a good thing.

“When you isolate everyone, including all the healthy people, you’re prolonging the problem because you’re preventing population immunity,” Atlas :{said in a}: Fox News radio interview in July. “Low-risk groups getting the infection is not a problem. In fact, it’s a positive.”

Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, :{countered that}: viewpoint in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece last weekend. “The best way to protect the vulnerable is to try to protect everyone,” he wrote, emphasizing that the virus needed to be contained.

The White House :{denies it}: is pursuing the population immunity or herd immunity strategy referred to by Atlas.

The criticism comes on the heels of new testing guidance from the CDC late last month that recommended cutting back on testing of asymptomatic people not in high-risk groups. The guidance said asymptomatic people do not need to be tested, even if they have been in close contact with an infected person, “unless you are a vulnerable individual or your health care provider or State or local public health officials recommend you take one.”

Amid a firestorm from experts saying the country needs more testing, not less, CDC Director Robert Redfield :{sought to}: clarify the guidance but did not rescind it....

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hard to know what to call this:

https://www.corporateaccountability.org/2020-corporate-hall-of-shame/

British American Tobacco

Big Tobacco wrote the playbook on modern corporate abuse. Literally. From spreading junk science to dividing and undermining opponents, to getting politicians to do their bidding, the tobacco industry was at the leading edge of it all.

And they’re still up to these dirty tricks. This year, British American Tobacco (BAT) has exploited the global COVID-19 pandemic to market its harmful and addictive new products by co-opting hashtags meant to spread public health information and using influencers to push its brand.BAT also helped fund a junk science study that claims tobacco consumption (which leads among other things to respiratory disease) might reduce the danger of the novel coronavirus (a respiratory disease). And cynically using a global pandemic as a marketing ploy, BATannounced it had begun researching a COVID-19 vaccine.

We nominate British American Tobacco for exploiting the COVID-19 crisis to peddle its harmful and addictive products on social media and make unproven, dangerous health claims that further undermine public health policies.

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an 920

given that Fox News, as well as some conservative radio stations, have downplayed the severity of the novel coronavirus pandemic, it’s not too surprising that people who rely on such sources for their news may not take all advised precautions seriously at this point in the public health crisis. What sort of precautions? Oh, one of the most essential, basic ones: wearing a face mask in public.A new poll from the University of New Hampshire found that where we get our news can have a seriously big impact on our mask-wearing, and from what we know about this public health crisis, that’s far from good.

According to this research, which was conducted in July 2020 and involved 995 New Hampshire residents, 77% of people living in New Hampshire do, indeed, always wear a face mask in public, unless they are outside and properly socially distanced. Only half of the respondents who said they regularly watch Fox News, however, report the same. For conservative radio listeners in the state, that drops to one-third.

80% of surveyed residents who never tuned in to Fox News or similar conservative outlets wanted the government to make prioritizing containing the virus a bigger priority over the economy. Just over 10% of regular Fox News viewers felt the same. Similarly, three-quarters of people who never consumed these conservative media sources believed that the worst of the virus is still yet to come; less than one-quarter of conservative viewers, however, believe that to be the case.

This is certainly not the first poll to show such variation; for example, in the Daily Kos/Civiqs poll from July, only 20% of frequent Fox News viewers believed that wearing a face mask helps prevent the spread of the virus. A majority of Fox News viewers also felt comfortable with schools reopening; as we’ve already covered, campuses are seeing fresh clusters of cases seemingly by the day.

Interestingly, according to the New Hampshire polling, some people who regularly watch Fox News are concerned about the virus. 25% of respondents said they were worried about either their own health or someone else’s. The majority of respondents, coming in at two-thirds, who did not watch conservative media, however, were worried about health amid the global pandemic.

New Hampshire is an interesting place to conduct this poll as it actually doesn’t have a statewide mask mandate, though Republican Gov. Chris Sununu has ordered that masks must be worn in gatherings of more than 100 people. Some cities do have mask mandates, and businesses are allowed to enforce them as well. That 100 people guideline garnered quite a bit of attention when Trump held a rally in New Hampshire last week; masks were supposed to be worn, but many attendees reportedly did not wear them.

Looking at some viral images from Trump arriving in North Carolina this afternoon, we see many people greeting him without masks or social distancing.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-trump-administration-is-backing-out-of-a-647-million-ventilator-deal-after-investigation-revealed-evidence-of-fraud-waste-and-abuse/

the federal government is backing out of a controversial $646.7 million deal to buy ventilators from Royal Philips N.V., acting before the company had delivered a third of the order.

The deal has been the focus of several ProPublica stories since March. That reporting prompted a congressional investigation that last month found “evidence of fraud, waste and abuse” in the acquisition of the Philips ventilators.

This week, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy announced it is expanding its probe to look at other coronavirus-related deals negotiated by Peter Navarro, the president’s trade adviser, who served as the point man on the Philips deal.

In addition, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw the Philips contract, confirmed that the deal is the subject of an internal investigation and legal review.

“It was ProPublica’s reporting that got my subcommittee interested in this contract,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the Illinois Democrat who chairs the subcommittee, said in a statement. “It prompted our investigation where we uncovered unfathomably inept dealmaking by top Administration officials like Peter Navarro.”

Navarro did not respond to a request for comment. But Sarah Matthews, a White House spokeswoman, defended Navarro on Tuesday, saying he has “played a vital role in our response” to the pandemic, helping to oversee the use of a federal act that compelled production of critical supplies and created “thousands of jobs in the process.”

“While the Trump Administration has been focused on saving lives, House Democrats continue to focus on pointless investigations,” she wrote.

Philips, a Dutch company, announced Monday that its U.S. factories had stopped making the ventilators covered by the contract after receiving an early termination notice from HHS. Philips has delivered 12,300 ventilators, less than a third of the 43,000 the federal government had originally sought.

The congressional investigation determined that the deal would have resulted in the U.S. overpaying for the ventilators by as much as $500 million, thanks to “inept contract management and incompetent negotiating by the Trump Administration.”

ProPublica first wrote about the U.S. government’s relationship with Philips in March, detailing how a decade ago government planners had paid Philips millions of dollars to develop a low-cost ventilator that could be stockpiled and deployed if ever there were a pandemic. The U.S. ordered 10,000 once the company received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration.

But when COVID-19 cases overwhelmed hospitals in New York in the spring, Philips hadn’t delivered any. Instead, ProPublica found, Philips was selling a commercial version of that ventilator — manufactured at its Pennsylvania factory — overseas at far higher prices.

Rather than force production of low-cost ventilators, a White House team led by Navarro cut a new deal for more ventilators, agreeing to pay more than four times the price.

ProPublica in April revealed that this new deal boosted the price of what appeared to be similar ventilators from $3,280 each under the Obama administration deal to $15,000 under the Trump administration. Neither Philips nor HHS would explain how the two models were different.

In its investigation of the deal, the House subcommittee asked Philips to turn over a trove of records and discovered that the more expensive ventilators were “functionally identical” to the cheaper ones.

Navarro and his team “appeared gullible” and there was no evidence that they even tried to negotiate a lower price, the House investigators found.

The U.S. government paid the highest price for the ventilators among American buyers, the investigators found. The company’s records show that Philips had sold more than 5,000 of that model at far lower prices before May 27.

Philips CEO Frans van Houten said earlier this summer that his company did not raise prices to cash in on the coronavirus crisis and did not agree with the conclusions of the congressional investigators.

This week a Philips spokesman said that the list price of the ventilator was $21,000 and that the negotiated price of $15,000 reflected the “higher costs for the expedited delivery schedule.”

“While we are disappointed in light of these vast efforts, we will adjust our plans and work with HHS to effectuate the partial termination of this contract,” van Houten said in a written statement Monday.

It’s not clear how much the deal will ultimately cost taxpayers. Philips, HHS and the White House all declined to say whether the company would be paid an early termination fee.

Stephanie Bialek, a spokeswoman for the HHS office in charge of the Strategic National Stockpile, said in a statement that the government has 120,000 ventilators available and didn’t face any shortages. She said her agency had also terminated two other smaller ventilator deals early as it balanced “federal stockpile requirements with commercial market demand for ventilators.”

“As a result, HHS is saving the U.S. taxpayer millions of dollars by halting delivery of additional ventilators that are no longer required,” Bialek wrote.

Separately, the HHS Office of Inspector General announced in July that it was auditing the five largest ventilator contracts to determine whether the awarding and monitoring of the contracts complied with federal requirements and HHS policies.

As for the 10,000 low-cost ventilators the U.S. ordered for the stockpile years ago, they will arrive eventually. Philips spokesman Steve Klink said the company still planned to deliver them by September 2022, when they are due.

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820, shd have been triggered by Kush let blue states die, but actually it was demon spawn WND

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/white-house-concocted-a-positive-feedback-loop-to-mislead-trump-into-thinking-hes-doing-an-excellent-job-on/

...“If the administration’s initial response to the coronavirus was denial, its failure to control the pandemic since then was driven by dysfunction and resulted in a lost summer,” the newspaper explained.

“Under mounting pressure to improve the president’s reelection chances as his poll numbers declined, the White House had what was described as a stand-down order on engaging publicly on the virus through the month of June, part of a deliberate strategy to spotlight other issues even as the contagion spread wildly across the country,”The Post reported. “It was only in July, when case counts began soaring in a trio of populous, Republican-leaning states — Arizona, Florida and Texas — and polls showed a majority of Americans disapproving of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, that the president and his top aides renewed their public activity related to the virus.”

The controversial White House coronavirus model has awful news for Trump as the election approaches.

“Yet the virus rages coast to coast, making the United States the world leader, by far, in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths. An internal model by Trump’s Council on Economic Advisers predicts a looming disaster, with the number of infections projected to rise later in August and into September and October in the Midwest and elsewhere, according to people briefed on the data,” the newspaper reported. “The forecast has alarmed the president and his top aides, even as some have chosen not to believe it, arguing that some previous projections did not materialize.”

According to a former administration official, White House chaos is “an unmitigated disaster.”

Amid the dysfunction, aides have found a way to trick Trump into thinking he’s an effective leader.

“What’s more, with polls showing Trump’s popularity on the decline and widespread disapproval of his management of the viral outbreak, staffers have concocted a positive feedback loop for the boss. They present him with fawning media commentary and craft charts with statistics that back up the president’s claim that the administration has done a great — even historically excellent — job fighting the virus,” the newspaper explained.

The newspaper quoted a “senior administration official involved in the pandemic response.”

“Everyone is busy trying to create a Potemkin village for him every day. You’re not supposed to see this behavior in liberal democracies that are founded on principles of rule of law. Everyone bends over backwards to create this Potemkin village for him and for his inner circle,” the official explained.

The newspaper flushed out who makes up that inner circle.

“Although Fauci, Birx and other medical professionals sit on the coronavirus task force, many of the more pressing decisions lately have been made by the smaller group that huddles in the morning and mostly prioritizes politics. The cadre includes Meadows, senior adviser Jared Kushner andstrategic communications director Alyssa Farah,” the newspaper reported....

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aha doh, covid fail is // sci suppression:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-new-adviser-calls-himself-the-anti-dr-fauci-and-is-pushing-a-controversial-herd-immunity-approach-and-medical-experts-are-worried-report/

proponents of the “herd immunity” approach to the coronavirus pandemic have been arguing that if enough Americans are infected with COVID-19 and survive, the disease will be largely neutralized in the United States — an approach that many medical experts vehemently disagree with, including expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci. But according to Washington Post sources, this is an approach that is being aggressively pushed by one of President Donald Trump’s top coronavirus advisers: Dr. Scott Atlas, who joined the president’s team earlier this month.

Atlas, journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey report in the Post,“is urging the White House to embrace a controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions.”

Atlas’ approach, Abutaleb and Dawsey explain, “relies on lifting restrictions so the healthy can build up immunity to the disease rather than limiting social and business interactions to prevent the virus from spreading.”

The “herd immunity” approach to the pandemic has been used in Sweden, but it has been rejected and sharply criticized by medical experts in many other European countries — which, in contrast to Sweden, embraced comprehensive social distancing policies. Abutaleb and Dawsey note that “Sweden’s approach has gained support among some conservatives who argue that social distancing restrictions are crushing the economy and infringing on people’sliberties.”

Paul Romer, a professor at New York University, told the Post that the Trump Administration “faces some pretty serious hurdles in making” a herd immunity argument — noting, “One is a lot of people will die, even if you can protect people in nursing homes. Once it’s out in the community, we’ve seen over and over again, it ends up spreading everywhere.”

One of the Post’s sources, described by Abutaleb and Dawsey as a “senior administration official,” told the Post that Atlas considers himself the “anti-Dr. Fauci” and strongly disagrees with the social distancing recommendations of Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx — both of whom are part of Trump’s coronavirus task force in the White House. Fauci has warned that easing social distancing restrictions prematurely will have deadly results, and the summer surges of COVID-19 in Florida, Texas, Georgia and other Sun Belt states with Republican governors bear that out.

Eric Topol, the cardiologist who heads the Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego, slammed Topol as a source of “misinformation” — telling the Post, “This is really unfortunate to have this fellow Scott Atlas, who was basically recruited to crowd out Tony Fauci and the voice of reason. Not only do we not embrace the science, but we repudiate the science by our president — and that has extended by bringing in another unreliable misinformation vector.”

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trump called FDA deep state on announcement, relative vs absolute

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-and-his-fda-commissioner-grossly-misrepresented-data-on-blood-plasmas-benefits-in-treating-19-patients-scientists/

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kush2

pow, evil pending (done, covid!)

reportedly short-list for cos

parscale pal, gives cover

see failson

declares victory during epic fail? // "mission accomplished"? 5/20

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wow 3 in one day an 8/20, apparently vanity fair

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/jared-kushner-called-on-to-resign-after-damning-report-reveals-his-depravity/

no lnx

common dr

in the wake of devastating new reporting by Vanity Fair, a chorus of voices Friday called for the immediate resignation of Jared Kushner, a top White House advisor and the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, for disastrous—and deadly—failures by the administration that appear to have put the political desires of the president above the public health needs of the American people.

The Vanity Fair article takes an exhaustive look at decisions made and actions taken by a secretive task force led by Kushner that was charged with implementing an “aggressive, coordinated national COVID-19 response”—including a federal testing regime that would help stem the spread of the virus. What the investigation uncovered, according to reporter Katherine Eban, was an ultimately “aborted plan” for a far-reaching national testing strategy and a deliberative process that “began not with public health experts but with bankers and billionaires.”

While the plan itself devised by the team Kushner put together was characterized as “imperfect” but “a starting point,” the most shocking revelations have to do with why the strategy, which members of the unit believed would head straight to Trump’s desk and then be rolled out nationwide with large fanfare in early April, suddenly seemed to disappear—like “poof into thin air,” said one participant in the effort.

As Eban reports:

the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

On April 27, Trump stepped to a podium in the Rose Garden, flanked by members of his coronavirus task force and leaders of America’s big commercial testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, and finally announced a testing plan: It bore almost no resemblance to the one that had been forged in late March, and shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states.

While the veracity of such claims cannot be verified—and Kushner refused to answer a detailed set of questions or be interviewed by Vanity Fair—the implications of such a decision speak for themselves and drew immediate outrage and a demand for accountability.

“Imagine the administration had intel on an imminent terrorist attack that would kill over 100,000 people, and chose to do nothing because it was politically easier,” tweeted Matt Duss, foreign policy advisor for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), on his personal account. “That’s what we have here. We need to be talking about accountability. For all of it.”

“So the White House made the explicit decision that it was a better political call to let people die in the blue states and blame the governors then try to fix the testing situation,” responded Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo.

Wajahat Ali, an op-ed contributor to the New York Times, indicated the seriousness of these accusations against Kushner should not be ignored.

“Jared Kushner has blood on his hands,” Ali stated. “And we should talk about this today.”

According to Duss, simply voting Trump out of office in November would not count as holding administration officials responsible for this kind of behavior.

“No, losing the election doesn’t qualify as accountability,” Duss said. “Over 100,000 Americans are dead because of these people’s incompetence and viciousness. I know the idea of prosecuting the previous administration makes some uncomfortable. Time to start getting over that.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-and-kushner-must-be-prosecuted-for-crimes-against-humanity/

wa mo no lnx

last month I wrote that president Trump had admitted to a crime against humanity. It was true. The president had openly bragged about deliberately slowing down COVID testing for political gain, thereby causing the deaths of untold numbers of Americans to make himself look better. It is a monstrous crime for which he has not yet been held accountable.

But the latest report from Vanity Fair implicates both Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner of an unspeakable horror orders of magnitude greater. Instead of implementing a comprehensive and aggressive national testing plan the pandemic team originally recommended, Kushner scuttled it. The president and his son-in-law were instead content to allow tens of thousands of Americans die as long as they were mostly people of color, and hailing from Democratic states and counties. Not only that, they saw it as a political opportunity to both cull the numbers of opposing voters and lay blame on Democratic governors at the same time:

Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

Should we believe this report?Maggie Haberman of the New York Times casually confirmed the gist of it, which only raises further questions about why the Times did not report with more alarm on the details:

If this is true–and there is very little reason to doubt its veracity, despite the White House press secretary’s denials–it would constitute perhaps the greatest crime against humanity of any president in American history. Andrew Jackson’s Trail of Tears was more deliberately vicious and murderous; George W. Bush’s immoral war of choice in Iraq killed more people overall.

But no American president has ever betrayed his oath of office more profoundly than in deliberately allowing the deaths of over 140,000 of his own fellow citizens and counting for partisan political gain.

We even lack the vocabulary to even describe it. “Gross negligence” doesn’t reach the level of the crime. “Murder” is lurid, but frankly not a comprehensive enough word to describe the death of 140,000. “Treason” comes to mind when considering that the President of the United States knowingly allowed 140,000 Americans to die because they were mostly his political opponents–but despite his Russia entanglements, there is no direct evidence he did so on behalf of a foreign power.

But there’s another option: “genocide.” The known racial bias of the deaths overlaps with the political bias–black and brown Americans tend to be Democrats and live in Democratic areas, and are disproportionately falling victim to the virus–which in turn would make “genocide” the most compelling way to describe what Trump and Kushner have done.

Genocide. Yes, it sounds preposterous. It sounds like the hyperbole of the deeply unserious. But what else can you call it? No word is perfect, but the crime must have a name that fits the monumental scope of its evil. It must describe what actually happened. And what happened is that the president and his son-in-law deliberately allowed 140,000 (and counting) Americans to die of a pandemic, because it would mostly kill off their political opponents. Because it would kill off mostly poor people of color. Because they thought they could gain an upper hand by blaming opposing governors. But they thought it would advantage them politically. It’s like a plot out of a bad action movie with a comic book villain, except it’s real life and those villains are still governing and making decisions.

When the founders named “high crimes and misdemeanors” as the basis for impeaching a president, they chose the phrase because it was deliberately vague: it would be impossible to write a law to cover every possible abuse of power by a deranged executive. They expected the Congress to respect its own authority and the health of the country enough to know when a relevant “high crime” or “misdemeanor” had taken place.

The problem now is that this president has already been impeached, there isn’t time or appetite to impeach him again, and the Senate controlled by the president’s party refuses to act out of political cowardice and self-interest. Moreover, the phrase “high crime” doesn’t really do justice to the scope of the evil of which the president is reportedly guilty.

This is a crime against humanity. A crime so profound we may not have a law to cover it. A crime with international implications, one so vast it may require an international court.

But somehow, some way, it must be prosecuted. The majority of Americans, the ones not enthralled by conservative infotainment and the Trump propaganda machine, are suffering from years of collective trauma and looking forward to the November election as a means of escape. One can hardly blame them. Nor would many be to blame for wanting to put this entire era behind us and never look back.

But assuming democracy remains intact and Trump is driven from office, this enormous crime cannot be forgotten. It cannot be ignored. There must be accountability for this genocide, this greatest crime in American history.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/ivanka-and-jareds-friday-night-news-dump-was-because-they-have-tons-of-conflicts-of-interest-report/

no twt lnx

Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, have extensive conflicts of interests as they serve in the White House for President Donald Trump, according to an analysis of the ethics forms they released Friday.

“Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner earned at least $36.2 million as they served in the White House last year, reporting a boost in income from some companies they own that hold residential and commercial properties, new disclosures released Friday show. President Trump’s daughter and her husband, who both serve as top advisers to him, reported a minimum combined income that was at least $7 million higher than in 2018, when they reported making at least $29 million, according to their personal financial disclosures, which they are required to file annually,” The Washington Post reported Friday....

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-testing-czar-is-running-a-coverup-for-presidents-abysmal-failure-cnns-sanjay-gupta

CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta is accusing President Donald Trump’s testing czar of running a “cover up” of the president’s incompetent **response** to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

During an interview Friday, Gupta reacted to defensive statements made by Brett Giroir, the federal official tapped by Trump to oversee efforts to increase COVID-19 testing capacity,who has been insisting that there is nothing wrong with the United States’ ability to quickly test for the disease.

“I think on this he’s wrong, he is just wrong,” Gupta said. “I’m surprised by this. I think this is trying to cover up what is unquestionably an abysmal failure when it comes to testing in this country.”

Gupta then elaborated on why he thinks America’s testing situation is in such dire shape.

"We have known that since the middle of February that 40 percent of people out there are completely asymptomatic,” he said. “They don’t have symptoms, they will never develop symptoms and yet, they can still spread the virus. That completely changes everything. Admiral Giroir is still focused on let’s just test symptomatic people.”

Until testing can be scaled up, Gupta said, it’s unlikely that the United States will get control of the disease.

“We’re still not doing enough testing, and frankly now we’re coming up with excuses for why we haven’t done enough testing,” he said.

Watch the video below.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-martha-maccallum-having-differences-opinion-science-surrounding-covid-19-something-we

wrongshow?

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/trumps-new-coronavirus-adviser-right-wing-media-talking-head-who-consistently

Donald Trump announced this week that Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, will serve as a new “adviser” to the president on COVID-19. Atlas, whose background is in diagnostic radiology, is not an expert in infectious disease but rather a pundit andfrequent Fox guest who has been repeatedly wrong about the pandemic.

Atlas, who has appeared 20 times on Fox News since the end of April, predicted in March that there would only be 10,000 deaths from COVID in America, said in April that the pandemic “appears to be entering the containment phase,” and claimed in May that “the curves have been flattened.” More recently, he has taken to making unproven claims downplaying the risk of COVID-19 in considering whether to reopen schools for in-person learning.

But Fox News and other right-wing outlets have elevated his politically convenient though dubious commentary; and on August 12 he gave brief remarks during a White House press briefing after Trump asked him to come up to the podium.

Here is a noncomprehensive list of Atlas’ false claims, incorrect predictions, and pro-Trump sycophancy that preceded his new role at the White House.

• Atlas claimed in a March 16 tweet, “Virus infections typically have seasons. This is temporary.”
• In a March 26 op-ed in The Washington Times, Atlas wrote, “This virus could cause about 10,000 deaths in the United States overall.”
• In a March 26 “:{Hoover:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: Virtual Policy Briefing,” Atlas claimed, “All reasonable numbers point to the fact that our number of severe outcomes will be peaking around three weeks or so.”
• In an April 1:{ op-ed in The Hill:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, Atlas wrote that “Americans should not panic. The United States has the most advanced medical care in the world for situations like this.”
• As the national curve of daily deaths continued to rise, Atlas wrote in an April 13 op-ed in The Hill that “we now need to reenter normal life” and that “continuing full-population isolation and waiting for a vaccine would be doubling down and yielding to panic.”
• Atlas opened his April 22 op-ed in The Hill by declaring, “The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase.”
• In an April 26 appearance on Fox News' The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton, Atlas told the host, “Young people under 18 have virtually no risk of serious illness or death, so it's logical to open most schools. It's logical to open most businesses.”
• Atlas claimed on the :{April 27 edition of Fox News’ *Tucker Carlson Tonight*:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, “It’s actually good news that the virus spreads widely and without high risk to the vast majority of people … because that means we have a better chance of developing population immunity.” The Mayo clinic describes “major problems” with the idea that herd immunity can be achieved through natural infection as it is unknown to what extent an individual is immune to further infection after exposure. Also, according to the Mayo clinic, even if it was possible for herd immunity to be achieved this way, it “could also lead to serious complications and millions of deaths, especially among older people and those who have chronic conditions.”
• On the May 11 edition of Fox News' *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, Atlas referenced the social distancing measures and claimed that “the cure is bigger than the disease at this point.” He also told the audience that “the curves have been flattened.”
• On the June 8 edition of *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, Atlas falsely claimed “there is really no risk to young people” when it comes to COVID-19.
• On the June 22 edition of *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, host Martha MacCallum mentioned to Atlas former Food and Drug Adminstration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb’s claim that 25% of hospitalizations in Texas are among people aged 20 to 29. Atlas responded that he didn’t believe the number, saying, “I question if those people who are positive for COVID-19 and being hospitalized for something else are classified as COVID-19 hospitalizations. That's a big difference.”
• On the June 29 edition of Fox News' :{Tucker Carlson Tonight:(style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, Atlas falsely claimed young people “do not have a significant problem, they do not have the serious complications, they do not die” from COVID-19. (The data showed at the time of this appearance and continues to show that young people do in fact die or suffer serious complications from the virus.) He also said it’s “fantastic news that we have a lot of cases,” which common sense and real-time data show to be false.
• On the July 6 edition of *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, Atlas repeated the falsehood that “it doesn’t really matter how many cases, it only matters who gets the cases” because young people die at a lower rate than older people. But increased caseloads lead to an increased strain on the capacity of health systems and may spread the virus to people who are more vulnerable to serious complications from the disease, even if the vast majority of young people who make up the increased number of cases do not.
• Atlas downplayed the potential risks that COVID-19 poses to people under 70 on the July 7 edition of Fox News' *The Ingraham Angle*, claiming, “The risk of this has been grossly overblown.”
• On the July 15 edition of *America's Newsroom*, Atlas falsely claimed, “It doesn’t matter if children get the disease. ... The data shows that they do not significantly transmit to adults.”
• On the July 25 edition of Fox News’ *Watters World*, Atlas uncritically shilled for the Trump’s disastrous COVID-19 response, saying, “I think the president’s briefings that were done this week were excellent, and I think it’s obvious to everyone that there’s a focus on the data, that they’re closely monitoring the situation.” He also falsely claimed that it’s been “established” that “ children are not significant spreaders,” when in fact the science on this issue remains unsettled.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/ice-rejected-19-testing-for-all-detainees-at-facility-because-it-would-be-too-much-trouble/

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ICE rejected COVID-19 testing for all detainees at facility because it would be too much trouble

Gabe Ortiz / Daily Kos

There’s really no bottom when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and private prison profiteers join forces—just consider the latest example. Internal emails obtained through an ongoing lawsuit show the mass detention agency…

ere’s really no bottom when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and private prison profiteers join forces—just consider the latest example. Internal emails obtained through an ongoing lawsuit show the mass detention agency and private prison operator GEO Group rejected a plan to test all detained people at one California facility for COVID-19 “because they would be unable to adequately isolate those who tested positive,” a coalition of groups said in a statement.

So rather than ensure the well-being of people in their custody, they threw up their hands because it would be challenging, or, gasp, they might actually have to acknowledge that people are safer not in detention. “These emails show a staggering disregard for human life on the part of ICE and GEO,” Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area senior staff attorney Bree Bernwanger said. “ICE chose to risk the outbreak that is now gripping Mesa Verde.” Along with the emails’ public release, a federal judge also rebuked the agency.

On Thursday, “a federal judge granted extraordinary relief—weekly rapid testing, no new intakes, and a dorm for COVID-positive detainees—for all immigrants detained at Mesa Verde Detention Facility in the wake of a COVID-19 outbreak that hospitalized two detainees and infected at least 7 others,” San Francisco Public Defenders, American Civil Liberties Unionof Northern California, American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, Lakin & Wille LLP, and Cooley LLP also said.

The judge’s fury was evident:Judge Vince Chhabria wrote in his order that “[t]he documentary evidence shows that the defendants have avoided widespread testing of staff and detainees at the facility, not for lack of tests, but for fear that positive test results would require them to implement safety measures that they apparently felt were not worth the trouble,” groups said in the statement.

"Another e-mail revealed that ICE refused to test contract staff due to fear that positive tests could force them to change the manner in which they detain immigrants,” the groups continued.“GEO’s Mesa Verde Warden Nathan Allen wrote that ICE’s Assistant Field Office Director ‘mentioned he would rather not have staff testing as they may also impact ERO functions, i.e., an asymptomatic person testing positive would require possible dorm cohorts and detainee testing protocols.’”

In other words, ICE said not even this danged pandemic is going to disrupt our detention and deportation agenda, even if it gets the detainees, or us sick, which it has.

“What these last few weeks have revealed without a shadow of a doubt is that a government agency, and those with whom they contract, are deliberately indifferent with respect to the health and safety of the human beings they incarcerate,” Lakin & Wille LLP attorney Judah Lakin said. “It’s infuriating, heart wrenching and, quite frankly, frightening.”

The deaths this week of two peoplewhile in ICE custody—including a man who reportedly had tested positive for COVID-19 after being detained at a hard-hit Virginia facility—marked the agency’s deadliest period in nearly 15 years. BuzzFeed News reported that the deaths of the two immigrants on the same day were the sixteenth and seventeenth in-custody deaths this fiscal year, “making it the highest total since 2006, when 19 immigrants died, according to ICE records"

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