#Apoorva Mandavilli

[ruthfeiertag]

The White House just announced that President Biden has contacted COVID. I wish him a speedy and complete recovery. Because the President has been fully vaccinated (and because he has access to levels of health care few of the rest of us enjoy), he is likely to be well again soon. But even a mild or asymptomatic case can lead to Long-COVID, and we should be protecting ourselves and each other from catching this corona virus and possibly developing a permanent, debilitating condition.

Apoorva Mandavilli, writing for the _New YorkTimes_, reminds us that “for some people with certain risk factors — age, pregnancy, chronic conditions or a compromised immune system — an infection may bring serious illness.”1

If you want to know what it’s like to live with a post-viral chronic illness, read the Tumblrs of people enduring them (see the tags below), particularly those of us living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (me/cfs), the condition closely aligned with Long-COVID. (“The illness [Long COVID] is similar to myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome [ME/CFS] as well as to persisting illnesses that can follow a wide variety of other infectious agents and following major traumatic injury.”2) And while some of us are more susceptible than others, ANYONE, no matter how young and healthy, can develop Long-haul COVID:

“Long COVID occurs more often in people who had severe COVID-19 illness, but anyone who gets COVID-19 can experience it, including children.”3

The CDC article also highlights the way that “Living with Long COVID can be difficult and isolating, especially when there are no immediate answers or solutions.” It does not describe the devastating possible “side effects” of losing the ability to work, to enjoy activities, to be independent, nor of the experiences of having doctors refuse to believe one’s condition is real, of the near-impossibility of getting to a doctor who specializes in post-viral diseases (and who won’t accept insurance)4, nor of the feeling of being an inconvenience or burden to those who care for us.

“In every age group, even a mild illness may trigger a lasting set of problems. Nearly 14 million Americans, or about 5.3 percent of adults, may now be living with long Covid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”1

Wearing an N95 might not be the most comfortable fashion accessory, but putting one on when we will be among others can save lives and the meaningful existence of the people with whom we come in contact. The inconvenience is far less than the loss of income, health, and happiness Long-COVID can bring.

************************

1. Apoorva Mandavilli. “Long Covid and Vaccination: What You Need to Know,” _New York Times_, July 17, 2024, 6:03 p.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/article/long-covid-vaccine.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

2. Anthony L. Komaroff and W. Ian Lipkin. “ME/CFS and Long COVID share similar symptoms and biological abnormalities: road map to the literature,” Front Med (Lausanne). 2023; 10: 1187163. Published online 2023 Jun 2. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2023.1187163

PMCID: PMC10278546PMID: 37342500

3. https://www.cdc.gov/covid/long-term-effects/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects/index.html

4. “There are only a handful of specialists and clinical centers that specialize in ME/CFS around the country. Many of them do not take insurance and most have waiting lists that can be years long.” https://solvecfs.org/me-cfs-long-covid/patient-and-caregiver-resources/

[beardedmrbean]

Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award.

The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya has spent years being vilified by the media over his dissenting views on the pandemic. As one of the signatories of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, he was canceled, censored, and even received death threats.

That open letter called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in light of past pandemics.

All the signatories became targets of an orthodoxy enforced by an alliance of political, corporate, media, and academic groups. Most were blocked on social media despite being accomplished scientists with expertise in this area.

It did not matter that positions once denounced as “conspiracy theories” have been recognized or embraced by many.

Some argued that there was no need to shut down schools, which has led to a crisis in mental illness among the young and the loss of critical years of education. Other nations heeded such advice with more limited shutdowns (including keeping schools open) and did not experience our losses.

Others argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.”

Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence.

The Biden administration tried to censor this Stanford doctor, but he won in court

Likewise, many questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — both positions were later recognized by the government.

Others questioned the six-foot rule used to shut down many businesses as unsupported by science. In congressional testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently admitted that the 6-foot rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.” Yet not only did the rule result in heavily enforced rules (and meltdowns) in public areas, the media further ostracized dissenting critics.

Again, Fauci and other scientists did little to stand up for these scientists or call for free speech to be protected. As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right,” the result is that we never really had a national debate on many of these issues and the result of massive social and economic costs.

I spoke at the University of Chicago with Bhattacharya and other dissenting scientists in the front row a couple of years ago. After the event, I asked them how many had been welcomed back to their faculties or associations since the recognition of some of their positions.

They all said that they were still treated as pariahs for challenging the groupthink culture.

Now the scientific community is recognizing the courage shown by Bhattacharya and others with its annual Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom.

So what about all of those in government, academia, and the media who spent years hounding these scientists?

Universities shred their ethics to aid Biden’s social-media censorship

Biden Administration officials and Democratic members targeted Bhattacharya and demanded his censorship. For example, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) attacked  Bhattacharya and others who challenged the official narrative during the pandemic. Krishnamoorthi expressed outrage that the scientists were even allowed to testify as “a purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation.”

Journalists and columnists also supported the censorship and blacklisting of these scientists. In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik decried how “we’re living in an upside-down world” because Stanford allowed these scientists to speak at a scientific forum. He was outraged that, while “Bhattacharya’s name doesn’t appear in the event announcement,” he was an event organizer. Hiltzik also wrote a column titled “The COVID lab leak claim isn’t just an attack on science, but a threat to public health.” 

Then there are those lionized censors at Twitter who shadow-banned Bhattacharya. As former CEO Parag Agrawal generally explained, the “focus [was] less on thinking about free speech … [but[ who can be heard.”

None of this means that Bhattacharya or others were right in all of their views. Instead, many of the most influential voices in the media, government, and academia worked to prevent this discussion from occurring when it was most needed.

There is still a debate over Bhattacharya’s “herd immunity” theories, but there is little debate over the herd mentality used to cancel him.

The Academy was right to honor Bhattacharya. It is equally right to condemn all those who sought to silence a scientist who is now being praised for resisting their campaign to silence him and others.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jesse Duquette, The Daily Don

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 27, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 28, 2025

Yesterday an unvaccinated child in Texas died of measles as nearly 140 people in Texas and New Mexico have been reported ill with the disease. This is the country’s first measles death since 2015.

Measles cases appear almost every year, but usually the government works to suppress measles, as well as other contagious diseases. It’s not clear the Trump administration intends to do that. Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) abruptly canceled a scheduled meeting to select the strains of flu to be included in next season’s vaccines. This year’s flu season has been severe: according to NBC News health and medical reporter Berkeley Lovelace Jr., 86 children and 19,000 adults so far have died from the flu this year and 430,000 adults have been hospitalized. On February 20, Lovelace reported that a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, scheduled for February 26–28, was cancelled.

Speaking earlier this month in favor of confirming anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and who is a doctor himself, assured his colleagues that Kennedy had promised to notify the Senate before making changes to vaccine programs and that “[i]f confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without change.”

Cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have made it hard for the country to confront the bird flu that is sweeping the poultry industry and now infecting dairy herds, as well. Marcia Brown of Politico reported today that the Trump administration is trying to rehire government employees who were working on combating the disease after widespread cuts to employees in the Agriculture Department during the first purge of government workers gutted research on it. Now some of the employees in the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the National Animal Health Laboratory Network program, and so on, have been offered their jobs back, but those offers are haphazard, and not all employees are keen to take jobs that are clearly not secure.

Indeed, health does not seem to be a top priority of the administration. Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times noted today that during his remarks at the Cabinet meeting yesterday, billionaire Elon Musk, who the administration has claimed in court is only an advisor to the president and neither leads nor is employed by DOGE, admitted that DOGE had made some initial mistakes, such as when it “accidentally canceled very briefly” efforts to contain an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda. But Musk reassured his audience that mistaken decisions were quickly reversed. DOGE “restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.” Except they didn’t: in theory, USAID workers could get a waiver to continue work, but in reality, money did not resume and much of the work was forced to stop.

The administration continues to insist it is cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but the reality that it is cutting programs on which Americans depend is becoming clearer. During yesterday’s Cabinet meeting, Trump indicated that the next major round of workforce cuts will be at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by Congress in 1970 at the urging of Republican president Richard M. Nixon to protect clean air, land, and water. Trump said that 65% of the 15,000 people who work there will be fired; an official later clarified that the president meant that the budget would be cut by 65%.

Today, three former heads of the EPA warned in a New York Times op-ed that Americans would miss the agency “when it’s gone.” William K. Reilly and Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the EPA under Republican presidents, and Gina McCarthy, who headed it under a Democratic president, recalled how between 1970 and 2019 the EPA “cut emissions of common air pollutants by 77 percent, while private sector jobs grew 223 percent and our gross domestic product grew almost 300 percent.” The EPA minimizes exposure to dangerous air during wildfires, cleans up contaminated lands, and tests for asbestos, lead, and copper in water,, delivering health benefits that outweigh its costs, the authors say, by more than 30 to 1.

Trump administration officials claim they are enacting the policies their voters demand, but Melanie Zanona, Jonathan Allen, and Matt Dixon of NBC News reported Tuesday that the blowback on Republican representatives willing to hold town halls during the House recess was so intense that House leaders are urging them simply to stop holding constituent events. If they want to continue to do so, leaders suggest making sure they vet attendees to make sure there won’t be altercations that go viral on social media, as several have done recently. Leadership wants to stop what they say is a developing narrative that paints Republicans in a bad light.

Republican National Committee senior advisor Danielle Alvarez told the NBC News reporters: “The president's policies are incredibly popular, and the American people applaud his success in cutting the waste, fraud and abuse of their hard-earned taxpayer dollars…. Pathetic astroturf campaigns organized by out-of-touch, far-left groups are exactly why Democrats will keep losing.”

But today’s news is unlikely to quiet the blowback. The administration announced cuts of 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors ocean currents, atmospheric changes, and climate change and provides weather and ocean reports. It suggested further cuts tomorrow could bring the total to 1,000. NOAA’s weather reports and marine forecasts are vital to Americans. As climate scientist David Ho pointed out, for example, NOAA operates both of the U.S. tsunami warning centers. Employees from them were fired today.

Also in DOGE’s crosshairs is Social Security. Today the administration announced a major “organizational restructuring” of the Social Security Administration. This restructuring appears to mean large cuts to the agency, even though staffing is already at a 50-year low. It is not clear exactly how many positions will be cut; multiple outlets say half of the agency’s 57,000 employees will be let go, while an executive at the agency told Erich Wagner and Natalie Alms of Government Executive that the initial number of firings will be 7,000. At least five of the eight regional commissioners whose offices oversee and support the agency’s frontline offices across the country are leaving, and former Social Security administrator Martin O’Malley warned: “Social Security is being driven to a total system collapse.”

There are also rumblings of concern among business people about the Trump administration’s approach to the economy. Trump said today that the 25% tariffs on products from Mexico and Canada he paused for a month in early February will take effect on March 4. An additional 10% tariff on goods from China will also go into effect that day. Tariffs are expected to drive up prices, and Bloomberg reported that in this quarter’s earnings calls for 500 of the country’s most valuable businesses, when company managers, investors, and analysts discuss the company’s financial performance, mentions of tariffs reached an all-time high.

Selina Wang of ABC News reported the warning of economists that the mass firings and the Trump tariff threats are having a “chilling” effect on the economy. The tariffs make it hard to plan for future costs, so companies are holding back on investments, while people who lose their jobs or are afraid they’re going to lose their jobs stop spending money. A survey by the Conference Board, a nonpartisan nonprofit that provides insight for business, shows that consumer confidence is dropping dramatically.

When Stanford University announced today that “[g]iven the uncertainty, we need to take prudent steps to limit spending,” adding that “we are implementing a freeze on staff hiring in the university,” Carl Quintanilla of CNBC posted: “‘Here come the multiplier effects.’”

Voters and business people are not the only ones pushing back against Trump’s policies. Rachel Bluth and Melanie Mason of Politico reported today that the country’s 23 Democratic state attorneys general have been working together to stop Trump’s unconstitutional actions. Under the urging of then–attorney general Bob Ferguson of Washington state in February 2024, they began to prepare for cases based on Trump’s campaign statements, taking them seriously as potential policies, and on Project 2025, which they recognized would play a big part in a second Trump administration.

They worked together to figure out the most effective strategies for challenging the administration in court. As Trump issued executive orders at breakneck speed in his first few days in office, they were ready to respond.

Today, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered the administration, specifically the Office of Personnel Management, to rescind the mass firing of government workers with probationary status, ruling that the firings were probably illegal. Alsup pointed out that Congress had given personnel decisions to the agencies themselves. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees at another agency. They can hire and fire their own employees.”

“Probationary employees are the lifeblood of these agencies,” the judge added. “They come in at the low level and work their way up, and that’s how we renew ourselves and reinvent ourselves.”

Meanwhile, Trump and his team appear to be trying to undermine the rule of law in the United States. Today, Rebecca Crosby and Judd Legum of Popular Information reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission has stopped its prosecution of Justin Sun, a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur who had been charged in March 2023 with securities fraud. After Trump was elected in 2024, Sun bought $30 million worth of Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto tokens, putting $18 million directly into Trump’s pockets. Since then, he has invested another $45 million in WLF. Altogether, Sun’s investments have netted Trump more than $50 million.

Crosby and Legum note that the SEC also appears to have dropped its case against the crypto trading platform Coinbase after the platform donated $75 million to a political action committee associated with Trump and donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.

And, after Trump issued blanket pardons to those convicted of crimes associated with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, including those who attacked police officers, his administration now appears to have put pressure on Romania to lift a travel ban on social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate. The brothers were under investigation in Romania for rape, human trafficking, and money laundering and are under similar allegations in the U.K.

MAGA Republicans attracted followers by claiming they would stand up for law and order. So the arrival in the U.S. of the Tates was not universally popular among them. A number of MAGA Republicans rushed to distance themselves from the Tates. When news broke that they were headed for Florida, Florida’s attorney general said that Florida has “zero tolerance for human trafficking and violence against women,” and Florida governor Ron DeSantis appeared angry as he said he learned of the Tate brothers’ arrival through the media.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ocean-sailor]

C.D.C. Posts, Then Deletes, Data on Bird Flu Spread Between Cats and People

From The New York Times: Feb 6, 2025 by Apoorva Mandavilli and Emily Anthes

Cats that became infected with bird flu might have spread the virus to humans in the same household and vice versa, according to data that briefly appeared online in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but then abruptly vanished. The data appear to have been mistakenly posted but includes crucial information about the risks of bird flu to people and pets.

In one household, an infected cat might have spread the virus to another cat and to a human adolescent, according to a copy of the data table obtained by The New York Times. The cat died four days after symptoms began. In a second household, an infected dairy farmworker appears to have been the first to show symptoms, and a cat then became ill two days later and died on the third day.

The table was the lone mention of bird flu in a scientific report published on Wednesday that was otherwise devoted to air quality and the Los Angeles County wildfires. The table was not present in an embargoed copy of the paper shared with news media on Tuesday, and is not included in the versions currently available online. The table appeared briefly at around 1 p.m., when the paper was first posted, but it is unclear how or why the error might have occurred.

The virus, called H5N1, is primarily adapted to birds, but it has been circulating in dairy cattle since early last year. H5N1 has also infected at least 67 Americans but does not yet have the ability to spread readily among people. Only one American, in Louisiana, has died of an H5N1 infection so far.

The report was part of the C.D.C.’s prestigious Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which, until two weeks ago, had regularly published every week since the first installment decades ago. But a communications ban on the agency had held the reports back, until the wildfire report was published on Wednesday.

Experts said that the finding that cats might have passed the virus to people was not entirely unexpected. But they were alarmed that the finding had not yet been released to the public.

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

The NY Times

By Apoorva Mandavilli

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, has an unorthodox idea for tackling the bird flu bedeviling U.S. poultry farms. Let the virus rip.

Instead of culling birds when the infection is discovered, farmers “should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it,” Mr. Kennedy said recently on Fox News.

He has repeated the idea in other interviews on the channel.

Mr. Kennedy does not have jurisdiction over farms. But Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, also has voiced support for the notion.

“There are some farmers that are out there that are willing to really try this on a pilot as we build the safe perimeter around them to see if there is a way forward with immunity,” Ms. Rollins told Fox News last month.

Yet veterinary scientists said letting the virus sweep through poultry flocks unchecked would be inhumane and dangerous, and have enormous economic consequences.

“That’s a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” said Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas.

Since January 2022, there have been more than 1,600 outbreaks reported on farms and backyard flocks, occurring in every state. More than 166 million birds have been affected.

Every infection is another opportunity for the virus, called H5N1, to evolve into a more virulent form. Geneticists have been tracking its mutations closely; so far, the virus has not developed the ability to spread among people.

But if H5N1 were to be allowed to run through a flock of five million birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Dr. Hansen said.

Large numbers of infected birds are likely to transmit massive amounts of the virus, putting farm workers and other animals at great risk.

“So now you’re setting yourself up for bad things to happen,” Dr. Hansen said. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

Emily Hilliard, the deputy press secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, said Mr. Kennedy’s comments were aimed at protecting people “from the most dangerous version of the current bird flu, which is found in chickens.”

“Culling puts people at the highest risk of exposure, which is why Secretary Kennedy and N.I.H. want to limit culling activities,” she said, referring to the National Institutes of Health. “Culling is not the solution. Strong biosecurity is.”

In her plan to combat bird flu, Ms. Rollins recommended strengthening biosecurity on farms — preventing the virus from entering their premises, or halting its spread with stringent cleaning and use of protective gear.

But that is a longer-term solution. The U.S.D.A. is beginning those efforts in just ten states.

The virus first took root among wild birds, which transmitted it to domestic poultry and various mammal species. Now a single infected duck flying overhead may drop excrement onto a farm, where a chicken or turkey may ingest it.

Farmed poultry have weak immune systems and are under enormous environmental stress, often packed together in wire cages or poorly ventilated barns. Within a day, H5N1 can sicken as much as a third of a flock.

Infected birds can develop severe respiratory symptoms, diarrhea, tremors and twisting of their necks, and produce misshapen or fragile eggs. Many die gasping for breath. (Some birds die suddenly without showing any symptoms at all.)

The speed with which infected birds collapse has been cited as one reason that officials believe eggs to be safe for consumption. Most sick birds die before they can lay an egg, or are so visibly diseased that it is easy to filter them out.

Poultry farmers call the authorities as soon as they spot the signs of illness or death. If the tests turn up positive for bird flu, they are reimbursed for killing the rest of the flock before the virus spreads any farther.

If farmers were instead to let the virus make its way across the farm, “these infections would cause very painful deaths in nearly 100 percent of the chickens and turkeys,” said Dr. David Swayne, a poultry veterinarian who worked at the U.S.D.A. for nearly 30 years.

The result would be “inhumane, resulting in an unacceptable animal welfare crisis,” he added. (Methods to cull birds can also be cruel but at least are generally faster.)

Farmers who cull infected flocks must also clean the premises and pass audits before restocking. They are often eager to resolve the crisis quickly. Simply stepping back would have serious financial consequences.

The strategy “means longer quarantine, more downtime, more lost revenue and increased expenses,” said a U.S.D.A. scientist who was not authorized to speak to the media.

Mr. Kennedy has suggested that a subset of poultry might be naturally immune to bird flu. But chickens and turkeys lack the genes needed to resist the virus, experts said.

“The way we raise birds now, there’s not a lot of genetic variability,” Dr. Hansen said. “They’re all the same bird, basically.”

Public health regulations would forbid the very few birds that might survive an infection from being sold. In any event, those birds might only be protected against the current version of H5N1, not others that emerge as the virus continues to evolve.

“The biology and the immunology doesn’t work that way,” said Dr. Keith Poulsen, the director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.

Letting the virus spread unchecked would also likely lead to trade embargoes against poultry from the United States, he added: “There’s a huge economic loss immediately.”

In one interview with Fox News, Mr. Kennedy also suggested that the virus “doesn’t appear to hurt wild birds — they have some kind of immunity.”

In fact, while ducks and shorebirds may not show symptoms, H5N1 has killed raptors, waterfowl, sand hill cranes and snow geese, among many other species.

[reynard61]

Yesterday an unvaccinated child in Texas died of measles as nearly 140 people in Texas and New Mexico have been reported ill with the disease. This is the country’s first measles death since 2015. Measles cases appear almost every year, but usually the government works to suppress measles, as well as other contagious diseases. It’s not clear the Trump administration intends to do that. Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) abruptly canceled a scheduled meeting to select the strains of flu to be included in next season’s vaccines. This year’s flu season has been severe: according to NBC News health and medical reporter Berkeley Lovelace Jr., 86 children and 19,000 adults so far have died from the flu this year and 430,000 adults have been hospitalized. On February 20, Lovelace reported that a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, scheduled for February 26–28, was cancelled. Speaking earlier this month in favor of confirming anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and who is a doctor himself, assured his colleagues that Kennedy had promised to notify the Senate before making changes to vaccine programs and that “[i]f confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without change.” Cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have made it hard for the country to confront the bird flu that is sweeping the poultry industry and now infecting dairy herds, as well. Marcia Brown of Politico reported today that the Trump administration is trying to rehire government employees who were working on combating the disease after widespread cuts to employees in the Agriculture Department during the first purge of government workers gutted research on it. Now some of the employees in the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the National Animal Health Laboratory Network program, and so on, have been offered their jobs back, but those offers are haphazard, and not all employees are keen to take jobs that are clearly not secure. Indeed, health does not seem to be a top priority of the administration. Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times noted today that during his remarks at the Cabinet meeting yesterday, billionaire Elon Musk, who the administration has claimed in court is only an advisor to the president and neither leads nor is employed by DOGE, admitted that DOGE had made some initial mistakes, such as when it “accidentally canceled very briefly” efforts to contain an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda. But Musk reassured his audience that mistaken decisions were quickly reversed. DOGE “restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.” Except they didn’t: in theory, USAID workers could get a waiver to continue work, but in reality, money did not resume and much of the work was forced to stop.

[sataniccapitalist]

Experts warn bird flu poses ‘an existential threat’ to biodiversity, and a possible threat...

The current clade of H5N1 or bird flu is an "existential threat" to the world’s biodiversity, experts say. While it has infected more than 500 bird and mammal species on every continent except Australia, the number of human infections from the current clade (grouping) 2.3.4.4b is still comparatively small. U.S. dairy workers have recently become infected, and the virus could easily mutate to become more virulent, our guest says.

Joining the Mongabay Newscast to talk about it is Apoorva Mandavilli, a global health reporter for The New York Times. Mandavilli details what virologists and experts know about the human health risks associated with this latest clade, what nations are doing (or not doing) to help contain its spread, and why. She also details how environmental degradation and industrial agriculture help create the conditions for outbreaks like this to occur.

[kkm-daily-dispatch]

What We Know About mRNA Vaccines

On the five-year anniversary of the Covid pandemic, a Times reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, looks back at the success of, and the backlash to, the mRNA vaccine. There’s no question that this vaccine technology saved millions of lives. But the vaccine couldn’t provide total protection against transmission or infection, and there were rare cases of side effects, leading to confusion among the…

[youthchronical]

Video: What we know about mRNA vaccines

On the five-year anniversary of the Covid pandemic, a Times reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, looks back at the success of, and the backlash to, the mRNA vaccine. There’s no question that this vaccine technology saved millions of lives. But the vaccine couldn’t provide total protection against transmission or infection, and there were rare cases of side effects, leading to confusion among the…

[yourreddancer]

February 27, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 28

Yesterday an unvaccinated child in Texas died of measles as nearly 140 people in Texas and New Mexico have been reported ill with the disease. This is the country’s first measles death since 2015.

Measles cases appear almost every year, but usually the government works to suppress measles, as well as other contagious diseases. It’s not clear the Trump administration intends to do that. 

Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) abruptly canceled a scheduled meeting to select the strains of flu to be included in next season’s vaccines. This year’s flu season has been severe: according to NBC News health and medical reporter Berkeley Lovelace Jr., 86 children and 19,000 adults so far have died from the flu this year and 430,000 adults have been hospitalized. On February 20, Lovelace reported that a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, scheduled for February 26–28, was cancelled.

Speaking earlier this month in favor of confirming anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and who is a doctor himself, assured his colleagues that Kennedy had promised to notify the Senate before making changes to vaccine programs and that “[i]f confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without change.”

Cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have made it hard for the country to confront the bird flu that is sweeping the poultry industry and now infecting dairy herds, as well. Marcia Brown of Politico reported today that the Trump administration is trying to rehire government employees who were working on combating the disease after widespread cuts to employees in the Agriculture Department during the first purge of government workers gutted research on it. Now some of the employees in the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the National Animal Health Laboratory Network program, and so on, have been offered their jobs back, but those offers are haphazard, and not all employees are keen to take jobs that are clearly not secure.

Indeed, health does not seem to be a top priority of the administration. Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times noted today that during his remarks at the Cabinet meeting yesterday, billionaire Elon Musk, who the administration has claimed in court is only an advisor to the president and neither leads nor is employed by DOGE, admitted that DOGE had made some initial mistakes, such as when it “accidentally canceled very briefly” efforts to contain an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda. But Musk reassured his audience that mistaken decisions were quickly reversed. DOGE “restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.” Except they didn’t: in theory, USAID workers could get a waiver to continue work, but in reality, money did not resume and much of the work was forced to stop.

The administration continues to insist it is cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but the reality that it is cutting programs on which Americans depend is becoming clearer.

During yesterday’s Cabinet meeting, Trump indicated that the next major round of workforce cuts will be at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by Congress in 1970 at the urging of Republican president Richard M. Nixon to protect clean air, land, and water. Trump said that 65% of the 15,000 people who work there will be fired; an official later clarified that the president meant that the budget would be cut by 65%.

Today, three former heads of the EPA warned in a New York Times op-ed that Americans would miss the agency “when it’s gone.” William K. Reilly and Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the EPA under Republican presidents, and Gina McCarthy, who headed it under a Democratic president, recalled how between 1970 and 2019 the EPA “cut emissions of common air pollutants by 77 percent, while private sector jobs grew 223 percent and our gross domestic product grew almost 300 percent.” The EPA minimizes exposure to dangerous air during wildfires, cleans up contaminated lands, and tests for asbestos, lead, and copper in water,, delivering health benefits that outweigh its costs, the authors say, by more than 30 to 1.

Trump administration officials claim they are enacting the policies their voters demand, but Melanie Zanona, Jonathan Allen, and Matt Dixon of NBC News reported Tuesday that the blowback on Republican representatives willing to hold town halls during the House recess was so intense that House leaders are urging them simply to stop holding constituent events. If they want to continue to do so, leaders suggest making sure they vet attendees to make sure there won’t be altercations that go viral on social media, as several have done recently. Leadership wants to stop what they say is a developing narrative that paints Republicans in a bad light.

Republican National Committee senior advisor Danielle Alvarez told the NBC News reporters: “The president's policies are incredibly popular, and the American people applaud his success in cutting the waste, fraud and abuse of their hard-earned taxpayer dollars…. Pathetic astroturf campaigns organized by out-of-touch, far-left groups are exactly why Democrats will keep losing.”

But today’s news is unlikely to quiet the blowback. The administration announced cuts of 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors ocean currents, atmospheric changes, and climate change and provides weather and ocean reports. It suggested further cuts tomorrow could bring the total to 1,000. NOAA’s weather reports and marine forecasts are vital to Americans. As climate scientist David Ho pointed out, for example, NOAA operates both of the U.S. tsunami warning centers. Employees from them were fired today.

Also in DOGE’s crosshairs is Social Security. Today the administration announced a major “organizational restructuring” of the Social Security Administration. This restructuring appears to mean large cuts to the agency, even though staffing is already at a 50-year low. It is not clear exactly how many positions will be cut; multiple outlets say half of the agency’s 57,000 employees will be let go, while an executive at the agency told Erich Wagner and Natalie Alms of Government Executive that the initial number of firings will be 7,000. At least five of the eight regional commissioners whose offices oversee and support the agency’s frontline offices across the country are leaving, and former Social Security administrator Martin O’Malley warned: “Social Security is being driven to a total system collapse.”

There are also rumblings of concern among business people about the Trump administration’s approach to the economy. Trump said today that the 25% tariffs on products from Mexico and Canada he paused for a month in early February will take effect on March 4. An additional 10% tariff on goods from China will also go into effect that day. Tariffs are expected to drive up prices, and Bloomberg reported that in this quarter’s earnings calls for 500 of the country’s most valuable businesses, when company managers, investors, and analysts discuss the company’s financial performance, mentions of tariffs reached an all-time high.

Selina Wang of ABC News reported the warning of economists that the mass firings and the Trump tariff threats are having a “chilling” effect on the economy. The tariffs make it hard to plan for future costs, so companies are holding back on investments, while people who lose their jobs or are afraid they’re going to lose their jobs stop spending money. A survey by the Conference Board, a nonpartisan nonprofit that provides insight for business, shows that consumer confidence is dropping dramatically.

When Stanford University announced today that “[g]iven the uncertainty, we need to take prudent steps to limit spending,” adding that “we are implementing a freeze on staff hiring in the university,” Carl Quintanilla of CNBC posted: “‘Here come the multiplier effects.’”

Voters and business people are not the only ones pushing back against Trump’s policies. Rachel Bluth and Melanie Mason of Politico reported today that the country’s 23 Democratic state attorneys general have been working together to stop Trump’s unconstitutional actions. Under the urging of then–attorney general Bob Ferguson of Washington state in February 2024, they began to prepare for cases based on Trump’s campaign statements, taking them seriously as potential policies, and on Project 2025, which they recognized would play a big part in a second Trump administration.

They worked together to figure out the most effective strategies for challenging the administration in court. As Trump issued executive orders at breakneck speed in his first few days in office, they were ready to respond.

Today, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered the administration, specifically the Office of Personnel Management, to rescind the mass firing of government workers with probationary status, ruling that the firings were probably illegal. Alsup pointed out that Congress had given personnel decisions to the agencies themselves. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees at another agency. They can hire and fire their own employees.”

“Probationary employees are the lifeblood of these agencies,” the judge added. “They come in at the low level and work their way up, and that’s how we renew ourselves and reinvent ourselves.”

Meanwhile, Trump and his team appear to be trying to undermine the rule of law in the United States. Today, Rebecca Crosby and Judd Legum of Popular Information reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission has stopped its prosecution of Justin Sun, a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur who had been charged in March 2023 with securities fraud. After Trump was elected in 2024, Sun bought $30 million worth of Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto tokens, putting $18 million directly into Trump’s pockets. Since then, he has invested another $45 million in WLF. Altogether, Sun’s investments have netted Trump more than $50 million.

Crosby and Legum note that the SEC also appears to have dropped its case against the crypto trading platform Coinbase after the platform donated $75 million to a political action committee associated with Trump and donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.

And, after Trump issued blanket pardons to those convicted of crimes associated with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, including those who attacked police officers, his administration now appears to have put pressure on Romania to lift a travel ban on social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate. The brothers were under investigation in Romania for rape, human trafficking, and money laundering and are under similar allegations in the U.K.

MAGA Republicans attracted followers by claiming they would stand up for law and order. So the arrival in the U.S. of the Tates was not universally popular among them. A number of MAGA Republicans rushed to distance themselves from the Tates. When news broke that they were headed for Florida, Florida’s attorney general said that Florida has “zero tolerance for human trafficking and violence against women,” and Florida governor Ron DeSantis appeared angry as he said he learned of the Tate brothers’ arrival through the media.

—

[misfitwashere]

February 27, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

FEB 28

Yesterday an unvaccinated child in Texas died of measles as nearly 140 people in Texas and New Mexico have been reported ill with the disease. This is the country’s first measles death since 2015.

Measles cases appear almost every year, but usually the government works to suppress measles, as well as other contagious diseases. It’s not clear the Trump administration intends to do that. Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) abruptly canceled a scheduled meeting to select the strains of flu to be included in next season’s vaccines. This year’s flu season has been severe: according to NBC News health and medical reporter Berkeley Lovelace Jr., 86 children and 19,000 adults so far have died from the flu this year and 430,000 adults have been hospitalized. On February 20, Lovelace reported that a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, scheduled for February 26–28, was cancelled.

Speaking earlier this month in favor of confirming anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and who is a doctor himself, assured his colleagues that Kennedy had promised to notify the Senate before making changes to vaccine programs and that “[i]f confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without change.”

Cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have made it hard for the country to confront the bird flu that is sweeping the poultry industry and now infecting dairy herds, as well. Marcia Brown of Politicoreported today that the Trump administration is trying to rehire government employees who were working on combating the disease after widespread cuts to employees in the Agriculture Department during the first purge of government workers gutted research on it. Now some of the employees in the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the National Animal Health Laboratory Network program, and so on, have been offered their jobs back, but those offers are haphazard, and not all employees are keen to take jobs that are clearly not secure.

Indeed, health does not seem to be a top priority of the administration. Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times noted today that during his remarks at the Cabinet meeting yesterday, billionaire Elon Musk, who the administration has claimed in court is only an advisor to the president and neither leads nor is employed by DOGE, admitted that DOGE had made some initial mistakes, such as when it “accidentally canceled very briefly” efforts to contain an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda. But Musk reassured his audience that mistaken decisions were quickly reversed. DOGE “restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.” Except they didn’t: in theory, USAID workers could get a waiver to continue work, but in reality, money did not resume and much of the work was forced to stop.

The administration continues to insist it is cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but the reality that it is cutting programs on which Americans depend is becoming clearer. During yesterday’s Cabinet meeting, Trump indicated that the next major round of workforce cuts will be at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by Congress in 1970 at the urging of Republican president Richard M. Nixon to protect clean air, land, and water. Trump said that 65% of the 15,000 people who work there will be fired; an official later clarified that the president meant that the budget would be cut by 65%.

Today, three former heads of the EPA warned in a New York Times op-ed that Americans would miss the agency “when it’s gone.” William K. Reilly and Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the EPA under Republican presidents, and Gina McCarthy, who headed it under a Democratic president, recalled how between 1970 and 2019 the EPA “cut emissions of common air pollutants by 77 percent, while private sector jobs grew 223 percent and our gross domestic product grew almost 300 percent.” The EPA minimizes exposure to dangerous air during wildfires, cleans up contaminated lands, and tests for asbestos, lead, and copper in water,, delivering health benefits that outweigh its costs, the authors say, by more than 30 to 1.

Trump administration officials claim they are enacting the policies their voters demand, but Melanie Zanona, Jonathan Allen, and Matt Dixon of NBC News reported Tuesday that the blowback on Republican representatives willing to hold town halls during the House recess was so intense that House leaders are urging them simply to stop holding constituent events. If they want to continue to do so, leaders suggest making sure they vet attendees to make sure there won’t be altercations that go viral on social media, as several have done recently. Leadership wants to stop what they say is a developing narrative that paints Republicans in a bad light.

Republican National Committee senior advisor Danielle Alvarez told the NBC News reporters: “The president's policies are incredibly popular, and the American people applaud his success in cutting the waste, fraud and abuse of their hard-earned taxpayer dollars…. Pathetic astroturf campaigns organized by out-of-touch, far-left groups are exactly why Democrats will keep losing.”

But today’s news is unlikely to quiet the blowback. The administration announced cuts of 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors ocean currents, atmospheric changes, and climate change and provides weather and ocean reports. It suggested further cuts tomorrow could bring the total to 1,000. NOAA’s weather reports and marine forecasts are vital to Americans. As climate scientist David Ho pointed out, for example, NOAA operates both of the U.S. tsunami warning centers. Employees from them were fired today.

Also in DOGE’s crosshairs is Social Security. Today the administration announced a major “organizational restructuring” of the Social Security Administration. This restructuring appears to mean large cuts to the agency, even though staffing is already at a 50-year low. It is not clear exactly how many positions will be cut; multiple outlets say half of the agency’s 57,000 employees will be let go, while an executive at the agency told Erich Wagner and Natalie Alms of Government Executive that the initial number of firings will be 7,000. At least five of the eight regional commissioners whose offices oversee and support the agency’s frontline offices across the country are leaving, and former Social Security administrator Martin O’Malley warned: “Social Security is being driven to a total system collapse.”

There are also rumblings of concern among business people about the Trump administration’s approach to the economy. Trump said today that the 25% tariffs on products from Mexico and Canada he paused for a month in early February will take effect on March 4. An additional 10% tariff on goods from China will also go into effect that day. Tariffs are expected to drive up prices, and Bloomberg reported that in this quarter’s earnings calls for 500 of the country’s most valuable businesses, when company managers, investors, and analysts discuss the company’s financial performance, mentions of tariffs reached an all-time high.

Selina Wang of ABC News reported the warning of economists that the mass firings and the Trump tariff threats are having a “chilling” effect on the economy. The tariffs make it hard to plan for future costs, so companies are holding back on investments, while people who lose their jobs or are afraid they’re going to lose their jobs stop spending money. A survey by the Conference Board, a nonpartisan nonprofit that provides insight for business, shows that consumer confidence is dropping dramatically.

When Stanford University announced today that “[g]iven the uncertainty, we need to take prudent steps to limit spending,” adding that “we are implementing a freeze on staff hiring in the university,” Carl Quintanilla of CNBC posted: “‘Here come the multiplier effects.’”

Voters and business people are not the only ones pushing back against Trump’s policies. Rachel Bluth and Melanie Mason of Politico reported today that the country’s 23 Democratic state attorneys general have been working together to stop Trump’s unconstitutional actions. Under the urging of then–attorney general Bob Ferguson of Washington state in February 2024, they began to prepare for cases based on Trump’s campaign statements, taking them seriously as potential policies, and on Project 2025, which they recognized would play a big part in a second Trump administration.

They worked together to figure out the most effective strategies for challenging the administration in court. As Trump issued executive orders at breakneck speed in his first few days in office, they were ready to respond.

Today, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered the administration, specifically the Office of Personnel Management, to rescind the mass firing of government workers with probationary status, ruling that the firings were probably illegal. Alsup pointed out that Congress had given personnel decisions to the agencies themselves. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees at another agency. They can hire and fire their own employees.”

“Probationary employees are the lifeblood of these agencies,” the judge added. “They come in at the low level and work their way up, and that’s how we renew ourselves and reinvent ourselves.”

Meanwhile, Trump and his team appear to be trying to undermine the rule of law in the United States. Today, Rebecca Crosby and Judd Legum of Popular Information reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission has stopped its prosecution of Justin Sun, a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur who had been charged in March 2023 with securities fraud. After Trump was elected in 2024, Sun bought $30 million worth of Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto tokens, putting $18 million directly into Trump’s pockets. Since then, he has invested another $45 million in WLF. Altogether, Sun’s investments have netted Trump more than $50 million.

Crosby and Legum note that the SEC also appears to have dropped its case against the crypto trading platform Coinbase after the platform donated $75 million to a political action committee associated with Trump and donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.

And, after Trump issued blanket pardons to those convicted of crimes associated with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, including those who attacked police officers, his administration now appears to have put pressure on Romania to lift a travel ban on social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate. The brothers were under investigation in Romania for rape, human trafficking, and money laundering and are under similar allegations in the U.K.

MAGA Republicans attracted followers by claiming they would stand up for law and order. So the arrival in the U.S. of the Tates was not universally popular among them. A number of MAGA Republicans rushed to distance themselves from the Tates. When news broke that they were headed for Florida, Florida’s attorney general said that Florida has “zero tolerance for human trafficking and violence against women,” and Florida governor Ron DeSantis appeared angry as he said he learned of the Tate brothers’ arrival through the media.

—

[4bttnra]

Heather Cox Richardson

February 27, 2025 (Thursday)

Yesterday an unvaccinated child in Texas died of measles as nearly 140 people in Texas and New Mexico have been reported ill with the disease. This is the country’s first measles death since 2015.

Measles cases appear almost every year, but usually the government works to suppress measles, as well as other contagious diseases. It’s not clear the Trump administration intends to do that. Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) abruptly canceled a scheduled meeting to select the strains of flu to be included in next season’s vaccines. This year’s flu season has been severe: according to NBC News health and medical reporter Berkeley Lovelace Jr., 86 children and 19,000 adults so far have died from the flu this year and 430,000 adults have been hospitalized. On February 20, Lovelace reported that a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, scheduled for February 26–28, was cancelled.

Speaking earlier this month in favor of confirming anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and who is a doctor himself, assured his colleagues that Kennedy had promised to notify the Senate before making changes to vaccine programs and that “[i]f confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without change.”

Cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have made it hard for the country to confront the bird flu that is sweeping the poultry industry and now infecting dairy herds, as well. Marcia Brown of Politico reported today that the Trump administration is trying to rehire government employees who were working on combating the disease after widespread cuts to employees in the Agriculture Department during the first purge of government workers gutted research on it. Now some of the employees in the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the National Animal Health Laboratory Network program, and so on, have been offered their jobs back, but those offers are haphazard, and not all employees are keen to take jobs that are clearly not secure.

Indeed, health does not seem to be a top priority of the administration. Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times noted today that during his remarks at the Cabinet meeting yesterday, billionaire Elon Musk, who the administration has claimed in court is only an advisor to the president and neither leads nor is employed by DOGE, admitted that DOGE had made some initial mistakes, such as when it “accidentally canceled very briefly” efforts to contain an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda. But Musk reassured his audience that mistaken decisions were quickly reversed. DOGE “restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.” Except they didn’t: in theory, USAID workers could get a waiver to continue work, but in reality, money did not resume and much of the work was forced to stop.

The administration continues to insist it is cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but the reality that it is cutting programs on which Americans depend is becoming clearer. During yesterday’s Cabinet meeting, Trump indicated that the next major round of workforce cuts will be at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by Congress in 1970 at the urging of Republican president Richard M. Nixon to protect clean air, land, and water. Trump said that 65% of the 15,000 people who work there will be fired; an official later clarified that the president meant that the budget would be cut by 65%.

Today, three former heads of the EPA warned in a New York Times op-ed that Americans would miss the agency “when it’s gone.” William K. Reilly and Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the EPA under Republican presidents, and Gina McCarthy, who headed it under a Democratic president, recalled how between 1970 and 2019 the EPA “cut emissions of common air pollutants by 77 percent, while private sector jobs grew 223 percent and our gross domestic product grew almost 300 percent.” The EPA minimizes exposure to dangerous air during wildfires, cleans up contaminated lands, and tests for asbestos, lead, and copper in water,, delivering health benefits that outweigh its costs, the authors say, by more than 30 to 1.

Trump administration officials claim they are enacting the policies their voters demand, but Melanie Zanona, Jonathan Allen, and Matt Dixon of NBC News reported Tuesday that the blowback on Republican representatives willing to hold town halls during the House recess was so intense that House leaders are urging them simply to stop holding constituent events. If they want to continue to do so, leaders suggest making sure they vet attendees to make sure there won’t be altercations that go viral on social media, as several have done recently. Leadership wants to stop what they say is a developing narrative that paints Republicans in a bad light.

Republican National Committee senior advisor Danielle Alvarez told the NBC News reporters: “The president's policies are incredibly popular, and the American people applaud his success in cutting the waste, fraud and abuse of their hard-earned taxpayer dollars…. Pathetic astroturf campaigns organized by out-of-touch, far-left groups are exactly why Democrats will keep losing.”

But today’s news is unlikely to quiet the blowback. The administration announced cuts of 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors ocean currents, atmospheric changes, and climate change and provides weather and ocean reports. It suggested further cuts tomorrow could bring the total to 1,000. NOAA’s weather reports and marine forecasts are vital to Americans. As climate scientist David Ho pointed out, for example, NOAA operates both of the U.S. tsunami warning centers. Employees from them were fired today.

Also in DOGE’s crosshairs is Social Security. Today the administration announced a major “organizational restructuring” of the Social Security Administration. This restructuring appears to mean large cuts to the agency, even though staffing is already at a 50-year low. It is not clear exactly how many positions will be cut; multiple outlets say half of the agency’s 57,000 employees will be let go, while an executive at the agency told Erich Wagner and Natalie Alms of Government Executive that the initial number of firings will be 7,000. At least five of the eight regional commissioners whose offices oversee and support the agency’s frontline offices across the country are leaving, and former Social Security administrator Martin O’Malley warned: “Social Security is being driven to a total system collapse.”

There are also rumblings of concern among business people about the Trump administration’s approach to the economy. Trump said today that the 25% tariffs on products from Mexico and Canada he paused for a month in early February will take effect on March 4. An additional 10% tariff on goods from China will also go into effect that day. Tariffs are expected to drive up prices, and Bloomberg reported that in this quarter’s earnings calls for 500 of the country’s most valuable businesses, when company managers, investors, and analysts discuss the company’s financial performance, mentions of tariffs reached an all-time high.

Selina Wang of ABC News reported the warning of economists that the mass firings and the Trump tariff threats are having a “chilling” effect on the economy. The tariffs make it hard to plan for future costs, so companies are holding back on investments, while people who lose their jobs or are afraid they’re going to lose their jobs stop spending money. A survey by the Conference Board, a nonpartisan nonprofit that provides insight for business, shows that consumer confidence is dropping dramatically.

When Stanford University announced today that “[g]iven the uncertainty, we need to take prudent steps to limit spending,” adding that “we are implementing a freeze on staff hiring in the university,” Carl Quintanilla of CNBC posted: “‘Here come the multiplier effects.’”

Voters and business people are not the only ones pushing back against Trump’s policies. Rachel Bluth and Melanie Mason of Politico reported today that the country’s 23 Democratic state attorneys general have been working together to stop Trump’s unconstitutional actions. Under the urging of then–attorney general Bob Ferguson of Washington state in February 2024, they began to prepare for cases based on Trump’s campaign statements, taking them seriously as potential policies, and on Project 2025, which they recognized would play a big part in a second Trump administration.

They worked together to figure out the most effective strategies for challenging the administration in court. As Trump issued executive orders at breakneck speed in his first few days in office, they were ready to respond.

Today, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered the administration, specifically the Office of Personnel Management, to rescind the mass firing of government workers with probationary status, ruling that the firings were probably illegal. Alsup pointed out that Congress had given personnel decisions to the agencies themselves. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees at another agency. They can hire and fire their own employees.”

“Probationary employees are the lifeblood of these agencies,” the judge added. “They come in at the low level and work their way up, and that’s how we renew ourselves and reinvent ourselves.”

Meanwhile, Trump and his team appear to be trying to undermine the rule of law in the United States. Today, Rebecca Crosby and Judd Legum of Popular Information reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission has stopped its prosecution of Justin Sun, a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur who had been charged in March 2023 with securities fraud. After Trump was elected in 2024, Sun bought $30 million worth of Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto tokens, putting $18 million directly into Trump’s pockets. Since then, he has invested another $45 million in WLF. Altogether, Sun’s investments have netted Trump more than $50 million.

Crosby and Legum note that the SEC also appears to have dropped its case against the crypto trading platform Coinbase after the platform donated $75 million to a political action committee associated with Trump and donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.

And, after Trump issued blanket pardons to those convicted of crimes associated with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, including those who attacked police officers, his administration now appears to have put pressure on Romania to lift a travel ban on social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate. The brothers were under investigation in Romania for rape, human trafficking, and money laundering and are under similar allegations in the U.K.

MAGA Republicans attracted followers by claiming they would stand up for law and order. So the arrival in the U.S. of the Tates was not universally popular among them. A number of MAGA Republicans rushed to distance themselves from the Tates. When news broke that they were headed for Florida, Florida’s attorney general said that Florida has “zero tolerance for human trafficking and violence against women,” and Florida governor Ron DeSantis appeared angry as he said he learned of the Tate brothers’ arrival through the media.

[therepublicreport]

What We Know About Bird Flu

In recent months, bird flu has started raising red flags among scientists and public health officials. Apoorva Mandavilli, a New York Times reporter who covers infectious diseases, explains why we need to start taking bird flu seriously.

[p4557]

Trump’s Transition Team Head Says R.F.K. Jr. Converted Him to Vaccine Skeptic - The New York Times

Trump’s Transition Team Head Says R.F.K. Jr. Converted Him to Vaccine Skeptic

Howard Lutnick told CNN that he believed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who could have a position in a possible Trump administration, was right about debunked vaccine claims.

Howard Lutnick, the head of Donald Trump’s potential transition team, echoed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s views on vaccines in a CNN interview.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

By Maggie Astor and Apoorva Mandavilli

Oct. 31, 2024

Howard Lutnick, the head of the team planning former President Donald J. Trump’s potential White House transition, said on Wednesday that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had persuaded him to embrace Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine claims, which have been widely debunked.

Mr. Trump has indicated that he might give Mr. Kennedy a position in his administration if he wins the election, something that could have profound implications for public health policy.

In an interview on CNN, Mr. Lutnick said he had spoken with Mr. Kennedy for two and a half hours this week, and repeated the false claim that childhood vaccines cause autism. That claim, usually proffered in relation to a vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella, stems from a 1998 study that was discredited and retracted.

He described Mr. Kennedy suggesting that vaccines had become unsafe because of a 1986 law shielding manufacturers from civil liability.

That law created a federal program to compensate people for adverse effects — which are very rare — as an alternative to liability for manufacturers. It did not change anything about safety and approval requirements for vaccines, which are extensively tested and must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Mr. Lutnick, seemingly dismissing the testing and approval requirements, asked CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “Why do you think vaccines are safe? There’s no product liability anymore.”

He also repeated a common anti-vaccine talking point that some vaccines might be safe, but children receive too many. The number of vaccines in the recommended schedule has increased as new vaccines have been developed and shown in clinical trials to be safe and effective, and as researchers and public health officials have determined the optimal number of doses. But vaccines have been streamlined over the same period, meaning that even as the number of shots has increased, the amount of antigens they contain has significantly decreased.

On Politics Newsletter. Get the latest news and analysis on the 2024 election sent to your inbox. Sign up here.

Ms. Collins pushed back on Mr. Lutnick, emphasizing that vaccines are tested for safety, but he doubled down.

The Trump campaign denied a recent statement from Mr. Kennedy that he had been promised “control” of government health agencies, and in the CNN interview, Mr. Lutnick dismissed a suggestion that Mr. Kennedy would lead the Department of Health and Human Services. But he made clear that Mr. Kennedy’s views were likely to be influential in a Trump administration.

The criticism of the 1986 liability law was particularly notable because Casey Means, a doctor who is a contender to lead the F.D.A. if Mr. Trump wins, also condemned it in a recent newsletter. The law was intended to protect companies that were abandoning vaccine manufacturing because of frivolous lawsuits, and it compensates people who believe they have been harmed by vaccines without requiring them to prove fault on the part of the manufacturers.

Mr. Lutnick said Mr. Kennedy wanted access to data on vaccine safety — implying baselessly that it was being hidden — so he could prove vaccines were dangerous and compel companies to recall them.

“He wants the data so he can say these things are unsafe,” Mr. Lutnick said. “He says if you give me the data, all I want is the data, and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe. And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off of the markets.”

The day after Mr. Lutnick made his comments, an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast was released in which JD Vance, Mr. Trump’s running mate, also expressed skepticism about vaccines in an interview recorded earlier this week.

“The moment where I really started to get red-pilled on the whole vax thing was, the sickest that I’ve been in the last 15 years by far was when I took the vaccine,” Mr. Vance said, referring to the original Covid vaccines and describing normal immune-response side effects that, though unpleasant, are not dangerous.

“Red-pilled” is a term used by some people on the far right, stemming from the movie “The Matrix,” to refer to accepting what they believe is a reality that shadowy elites don’t want them to know.

Maggie Astor covers politics for The Times, focusing on breaking news, policies, campaigns and how underrepresented or marginalized groups are affected by political systems. More about Maggie Astor

Apoorva Mandavilli is a reporter focused on science and global health. She was a part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the pandemic. More about Apoorva Mandavilli

See more on: 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, Health and Human Services Department, Food and Drug Administration, Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kaitlan Collins

© 2024 The New York Times Company

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/us/politics/trump-rfk-jr-vaccine-skepticism.html#:~:text=SKIP%20TO%20CONTENT,Subscriptions

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: Europe Faces a Measles Outbreak by Apoorva Mandavilli

By Apoorva Mandavilli When vaccinations begin to lag, as they did during the pandemic, measles is often the first disease to resurge. “It’s the canary in the coal mine,” one expert said. Published: January 24, 2024 at 02:10PM from NYT Health https://ift.tt/IUu9v43 via IFTTT

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New York Times Science Reporter Apoorva Mandavilli Makes One Direction E...