#Trump Undercuts Health Experts

[sentinelleblr]

A Lancet study found that under the Trump administration the US could have averted about 40 percent of its Covid-19 deaths compared to other high-income, G7 countries, and that’s partly due to the Trump administration’s manner of handling the crisis by politicizing masks and publicly dismissing its threat. 

Trump's next pandemic: bird flu.

"There is still trepidation from public health experts about an unlikely but possible path: that the seasonal flu and bird flu could cohabitate in a person infected with both, and mutate into something more capable of infecting humans. It’s why the CDC has encouraged seasonal flu shots in hopes of reducing the chance of co-infection."

[scottbcrowley2]

Trump undercuts health experts -- again -- in schools debate - Fri, 10 Jul 2020 PST

The White House seating chart spoke volumes. When the president convened a roundtable this week on how to safely reopen schools with coronavirus cases rising, the seats surrounding him were ... Trump undercuts health experts -- again -- in schools debate - Fri, 10 Jul 2020 PST

[casorasi]

Experts: Trump's threats to WHO could undercut global health

LONDON (AP) — Health experts say U.S. President Donald Trump's increasing attacks on the World Health Organization for its handling of the coronavirus demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the U.N. agency's role and could ultimately serve to weaken global health. Experts: Trump's threats to WHO could undercut global health

[wilwheaton]

Yet again this morning, President Trump attacked the CDC and the public health experts who should be guiding our response to Covid-19, saying that they “don’t know” what they’re talking about. The past six months have proven again and again that it’s Donald Trump who doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to Covid-19. He said the virus would disappear. He said anyone who wants a test could get a test. He said the virus was under control. When it comes to the coronavirus, you can’t believe a word he says. It’s astonishing that even after 140,000 Americans have died in the worst Covid-19 outbreak in the developed world, President Trump continues his offensive against the CDC and scientists like Dr Fauci, instead of heeding their clear advice about the steps we must take to stop this virus – from ramping up testing to getting protective equipment to the heroes on the front lines. But what’s truly disturbing is that President Trump isn’t just attacking our leading health experts – he’s waving the white flag and actively undercutting our ability to save lives and stop Covid-19 by shamefully trying to block critical additional new funding for the CDC, as well as for testing and tracing. Think about that again: In the middle of a pandemic that continues to worsen on his watch, President Trump is trying to keep money away from the public health measures that we know will keep us and our families safe. He even went on to attack the value of testing again in the same interview, perpetuating a terrible months-long streak. Mr President, your ignorance isn’t a virtue or a sign of your strength – it’s undercutting our response to this unprecedented crisis at every turn and it’s costing Americans their jobs and their lives. It’s long past due for President Trump to listen to somebody other than himself in how to fight this virus, because after six straight months of deadly mismanagement it is spiraling even more out of control. He can start immediately by adopting the proposals I have laid out for months now that experts tell us will help us stop this virus, save lives, and safely re-open our economy.

Future President Joe Biden

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 21, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

As the Biden administration sets out to restore a government that can regulate business to level the playing field in the United States between workers and employers, address inequality, and combat climate change, Republicans are turning to the courts to stop him.

Republican attorneys general have already launched a number of lawsuits challenging various of the new administration’s policies. Twenty-one states are suing Biden for revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline to cross the border from Canada. They claim such authority belongs to Congress because it has the authority to regulate interstate and foreign commerce. Biden cancelled the permit because he said it was not in the national interest, and legal experts say he is on solid ground.

Twelve states are suing the president over his executive order to address climate change because they say that Biden has no authority to regulate “’social costs’ of greenhouse gases.” Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who is considering running for the Senate and who is leading the lawsuits, says such regulations will be expensive and ordinary Americans will bear the higher costs on everyday products. Missouri legislators are talking about blocking any of Biden’s executive orders with which they disagree.

Eleven states are challenging Biden’s immigration policy: they want to reinstate the rule that requires applicants for citizenship to prove they are financially secure before they are allowed to become citizens.

And twenty-two Republican states are suing to challenge the provision of the American Rescue Plan that says states cannot use the federal money, which is intended to stimulate the economy, to cut taxes. Democrats added this provision deliberately to prevent Republican legislatures from using the money to cut taxes rather than as it was intended. States have the option to turn down the funds, but if they take the money, they must use it as Congress intended: to fund public programs.

Former President Trump and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)—who was known for saying “Leave no vacancy behind”-- made it their top priority to reshape the federal judiciary. McConnell stalled confirmations for Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, leaving a number of vacancies for Trump to fill. McConnell approved the new judges with vigor, keeping the Senate confirming them during the pandemic, for example, even when all other business stopped.

Most notably, of course, Trump appointed three justices to the Supreme Court. McConnell refused to hold hearings for Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland, now Biden’s attorney general, saying that his nomination in March 2016 was too close to the November presidential election to permit an appointment. This obstruction created an opening for Trump’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch. When Justice Anthony Kennedy retired in 2018, Trump replaced him with Brett Kavanaugh. Then, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed, Trump replaced her with Amy Coney Barrett less than two weeks before the November 2020 election.

The importance of those appointments is about to start playing out.

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, a somewhat confusing case about the rights of workers. The case is about whether union organizers can talk to farm workers in their workplaces (when they are not working). The 1975 law that permits such conversations has enabled agricultural workers, who are mostly people of color and immigrants, to bargain for better conditions. But in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, companies argue that the regulation permitting organizers into work spaces deprives the property owner of economic benefit and thus is unconstitutional.

If the Supreme Court agrees, the precedent will go a long way toward striking down regulations that involve intruding on private property—like workplace safety inspections—and which are currently allowed. That the Supreme Court agreed to hear this case suggests it is open to the argument.

For years now, the court has hemmed in Congress’s ability to use the Constitution’s Commerce Clause to regulate different aspects of American life. Since the 1930s, Congress has expanded the use of that clause to regulate anything that has a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Recently, the Supreme Court has challenged that sweeping argument, saying it cannot be used to regulate guns in schools, for example, or require individuals to buy health insurance.

Most dramatic, though, is the court’s apparent willingness to revisit something called the “nondelegation doctrine.” According to Julian Davis Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley, authors of a new piece in the Columbia Law Review, nondelegation was invented in 1935 to undercut the business regulation of the New Deal. In the first 100 days of his term, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt set out to regulate the economy to combat the Great Depression. Under his leadership, Congress established a number of new agencies to regulate everything from banking to agricultural production.

While the new rules were hugely popular among ordinary Americans, they infuriated business leaders. The Supreme Court stepped in and, in two decisions, said that that Congress could not delegate its authority to administrative agencies. But FDR’s threat of increasing the size of the court and the justices’ recognition that they were on the wrong side of public opinion undercut their opposition to the New Deal. The nondelegation theory was ignored until the 1980s, when conservative lawyers began to look for ways to rein in the federal government.

In 2001, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the argument in a decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who said the court must trust Congress to take care of its own power. But after Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that he might be open to the argument, conservative scholars began to say that the framers of the Constitution did not want Congress to delegate authority. Mortenson and Bagley say that argument “can’t stand…. It’s just making stuff up and calling it constitutional law.” Nonetheless, Republican appointees on the court have come to embrace the doctrine.

In November 2019, the same day that then-Senate Majority Leader McConnell boasted on Twitter that the Senate had confirmed more than 160 new federal judges since Trump took office (one out of every four) and would continue to confirm them as fast as possible, Justice Kavanaugh sided with Justice Gorsuch-- Trump appointees both-- to say the Court should reexamine whether or not Congress can delegate authority to administrative agencies. Along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Thomas, they believe that the Constitution forbids such delegation. If Justice Barrett sides with them, the resurrection of that doctrine will curtail the modern administrative state that since the 1930s has regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure.

As Justice Elena Kagan points out, the nondelegation doctrine would mean that “most of Government is unconstitutional.” But that, of course, is the point. We are caught up in a struggle between two ideologies: one saying that the government has a significant role to play in keeping the playing field level in the American economy and society, and the other saying it does not.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[newstfionline]

Sunday, May 2, 2021

US to restrict travel from India over COVID starting Tuesday (AP) The U.S. will restrict travel from India starting May 4, the White House said Friday, citing a devastating rise in COVID-19 cases in the country and the emergence of potentially dangerous variants of the coronavirus. With 386,452 new cases, India now has reported more than 18.7 million since the pandemic began, second only to the United States. The Health Ministry on Friday also reported 3,498 deaths in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 208,330. Experts believe both figures are an undercount, but it’s unclear by how much. The White House waited on the CDC recommendation before moving to restrict travel, noting that the U.S. already requires negative tests and quarantines for all international travelers. Other restrictions are in place on travel from China, Iran, the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Brazil and South Africa, which are or have been hotspots for the coronavirus.

Biden administration forges new path on North Korea crisis (Washington Post) The Biden administration is charting a new course in an attempt to end North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile program, striking a balance between President Donald Trump’s grand-bargain, leader-to-leader diplomacy and President Barack Obama’s arm’s-length approach to the crisis, said U.S. officials familiar with the plan. The decision to pursue a phased agreement that leads to full denuclearization follows a months-long review that was briefed to President Biden last week. “We are not seeking a grand bargain or an all-or-nothing approach,” a senior administration official said in an interview Thursday. “What we’ve settled on is what we think is a calibrated, practical approach to diplomacy with the North with the goal of eliminating the threat to the United States.” The specifics of the proposal Washington will put forward remain unclear, and U.S. officials are not using familiar terms that previous U.S. administrations have used, such as a “step by step” agreement. U.S. officials said they planned to convey the new strategy to North Korean officials but acknowledged that it was not likely to change the regime’s near-term calculus regarding nuclear provocations. “We do not think what we are contemplating is likely to forestall provocation from the North,” said the senior official. “We fully intend to maintain sanctions pressure while this plays out.”

Biden cancels border wall projects Trump paid for with diverted military funds (Washington Post) The Biden administration said Friday it has canceled border wall projects paid for with funds diverted from Defense Department accounts, a widely expected move that follows Biden’s decision to suspend construction activity on President Donald Trump’s signature project. Trump diverted about $10 billion from military construction accounts and counternarcotic programs to pay for hundreds of miles of steel barriers along the Mexico border, an effort that Biden has denounced as wasteful and ineffective. Trump built 450 miles of new barriers during his term, much of it across the deserts and mountains of southern Arizona where his administration built along national forest land, wildlife preserves and other federal property already under government control. It built far less in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, the busiest area for border crossings and the epicenter to a major migration influx.

Bolsonaro has insulted much of the world. Now Brazil needs its help. (Washington Post) Two developing countries, enormous in population and geography, in the grip of devastating coronavirus outbreaks. Hospitals running out of supplies. Patients turned away. A new variant everywhere. Outside help desperately needed. For India, upended by record infection rates, the world has responded. The White House this week touted the delivery of more than $100 million in supplies. Singapore and Thailand sent oxygen. Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the United Kingdom would do “all it can.” But for Brazil, which has buried some 140,000 coronavirus victims in the past two months, the international response has been more muted. President Jair Bolsonaro in March called on international organizations to help. A group of state governors asked the United Nations for “humanitarian aid.” The Brazilian ambassador to the European Union begged two weeks ago for help: “It’s a race against time to save many lives in Brazil.” But the response has largely been a shrug, criticism of Brazil’s missteps—and limited action, so far. The contrast between how the international community has addressed the crises in India and Brazil shows how Brasilia’s mounting diplomatic struggles have complicated the country’s coronavirus response. The international image it has spent decades cultivating—environmentally focused, amiable, multilateral—has been undercut by a president whose administration has insulted much of the world at the very time Brazil was in most need of its help. “The whole world is trying to help India,” said Mauricio Santoro, a political scientist at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “But Bolsonaro has become such an international problem that no one ... is talking about giving Brazil much help.”

EU aims to cut foreign reliance on chips, pharma materials (Reuters) The European Union aims to cut its dependency on Chinese and other foreign suppliers in six strategic areas including raw materials, pharmaceutical ingredients and semiconductors, under an industrial action plan to be announced next week. A draft seen by Reuters outlined the urgency of the task ahead, citing Europe’s reliance on China for about half of 137 products used in sensitive ecosystems, mainly raw materials and pharmaceuticals and other products key to the bloc’s green and digital goals.

Suicide truck bomber hits Afghan guest house, killing 21 (AP) The death toll in a powerful suicide truck bombing that struck a guest house in eastern Afghanistan rose to 21 with as many as 90 others wounded, officials said Saturday. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the late Friday night bombing in Pul-e-Alam, the capital of Logar province. There was no indication why the guest house was targeted. In Afghanistan, guest houses are lodgings often provided for free by the government, usually for the poor, travelers and students.

Extreme weather kills 11, injures 102 in eastern China (AP) An extreme thunderstorm hit an eastern Chinese city, leaving 11 dead and 102 injured, with strong winds causing buildings and trees to collapse. Nantong city, located in the eastern province of Jiangsu, was among the hardest-hit when the extreme weather swept the Yangtze Delta on Friday night, according to state-affiliated newspaper Global Times. Wind speeds of 162 kilometers (100 miles) per hour overturned a fishing ship. Two sailors were rescued and search operations were underway for the nine remaining crew, the notice said.

Myanmar risks coming to standstill as violence worsens—U.N. envoy (Reuters) The U.N. special envoy on Myanmar told the Security Council on Friday that in the absence of a collective international response to the country’s coup, violence is worsening and the running of the state risks coming to a standstill, according to diplomats who attended the private meeting. “The general administration of the state could risk coming to a standstill as the pro-democracy movement continues in spite of the ongoing use of lethal force, arbitrary arrests and torture as part of the military’s repression,” Schraner Burgener said, according to diplomats. The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners advocacy group says more than 3,400 people have been detained for opposing the coup and security forces have killed at least 759 protesters. Schraner Burgener said there were concerning reports that civilians, mostly students from the urban areas, were being trained how to use weapons by ethnic armed organizations. “In the absence of a collective international response, there has been a rise in violence and reported use of improvised explosive devices. Calls for maximum restraint by all sides have been met with responses from some protesters asking who can blame them for their self-defense,” she said, according to diplomats.

The Bureaucrat From Buffalo Who Pushed Somalia to the Brink (NYT) During his years as an administrator at the Department of Transportation in upstate New York, the Somali refugee turned U.S. citizen earned a master’s degree in American Studies, imbibing democratic values he hoped to one day export back to his homeland. That dream came true for Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed in 2017, when he returned to Somalia and was elected president in a surprise victory that evinced high hopes he might reform—even transform—his dysfunctional, war-weary country. But those aspirations have crumbled since Mr. Mohamed failed to hold elections when his four-year term ended in February, then moved to extend his rule by two years—a step many Somalis viewed as a naked power grab. A furious political dispute turned violent on Sunday when a series of gunfights broke out between rival military factions in the capital, Mogadishu, evoking fears that Somalia, after years of modest yet gradual progress, could descend into the kind of clan-based bloodshed that ripped it apart in the 1990s. Now Mr. Mohamed’s democratic credentials lie in tatters and he is in an open confrontation with his former ally, the United States, where he still has a family home. This week American officials reiterated calls for Somalia to hold elections immediately.

Factory owners around the world stand ready to manufacture covid-19 vaccines (The Intercept) The drug industry has strenuously argued that any legal proposal to allow the sharing of intellectual property and creation of generic coronavirus vaccines is pointless because there are no facilities around the world that can be tapped. Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist whose foundations help manage the United States and Europe’s primary Covid-19 outreach efforts to the developing world, known as Covax, was blunt. “It’s not like there’s some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines,” Gates said last weekend by way of explaining to Sky News why he thought the recipe for making coronavirus vaccine should not be shared. Except it is exactly like that. Factory owners around the globe, from Bangladesh to Canada, have said they stand ready to retrofit facilities and move forward with vaccine production if given the chance.      “We have this production capacity and it’s not being used,” said John Fulton, a spokesperson for Biolyse Pharma, a company based in St. Catharines, Ontario, that produces injectable cancer treatments. Fulton noted that Biolyse has spent years buying equipment to produce biologics and is uniquely prepared to start getting ready to produce vaccines. The company, which Fulton said is best suited for replicating the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, could produce as many as 20 million vaccines per year, he estimated. Abdul Muktadir, chair and managing director of Incepta, a pharmaceutical firm based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, has told reporters that his firm has the capacity to fill vials for 600 million to 800 million doses of vaccine per year. He has reportedly reached out to Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax. Other firms in South Korea and Pakistan have also reportedly expressed an interest in producing vaccines or vaccine components. In the past few months, the danger of not transferring the knowledge more quickly has become painfully clear, with deaths climbing in India, Brazil, and other parts of the world that have been unable to procure adequate supplies of vaccines while richer countries stockpile them.

[feelingbluepolitics]

"In the coming days, the number of U.S. deaths is set to clear the outer band of [trump's] projections: 200,000, according to the official tally, though the real number is certainly higher. The virus continues to spread and there is currently no approved vaccine. Some public health experts fear infections could spike this fall and winter, perhaps even doubling the death count by the end of the year.

"Yet the grim milestone and the prospect of more American deaths to come have prompted no rethinking from [trump] about his handling of the pandemic and no outward expressions of regrets. Instead, [t]rump has sought to reshape the significance of the death tally, trying to turn the loss of 200,000 Americans into a success story by contending the numbers could have been even higher without the actions of his administration.

...Just 39% of Americans approve of [trump’s] handling of the pandemic, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Roughly one-quarter of Republicans say they don’t approve of [t]rump’s stewardship of the public health crisis, though his overall backing among GOP voters sits at a comfortable 84%.

"There’s also little doubt that the death toll in the U.S. has soared past where [t]rump repeatedly assured the public it would be. In February, when the first coronavirus cases were detected in the U.S., [trump] said the numbers would be 'down to close to zero' within days. In early April, when U.S. officials estimated at least 100,000 people would die from the pandemic even if all conceivable steps were taken against it, [t]rump suggested the numbers would be lower, saying: 'I think we’re doing better than that.'

"He’s shifted again in recent days, saying that the U.S. remains a success story because some models showed the nation could have 240,000 deaths — a threshold that appears likely to be eclipsed by the end of the year.

..."[t]rump has insisted he wasn’t downplaying the severity of virus when he compared it with the seasonal flu and undercut public health officials who pushed for more stringent mitigation efforts. Yet he’s repeatedly flouted his own administration’s safety guidelines, rarely wearing a mask himself and holding large campaign events with little evidence of social distancing among his crowds.

"With the death toll continuing to climb, [t]rump has also repeatedly passed up opportunities to serve as a unifying force for communities and families grieving the loss of loved ones. Instead, he’s effectively discounted the deaths of Americans who live in Democratic-leaning states, suggesting he has little responsibility for the well-being of those who don’t support him politically."

He is abhorrent. Conclusively vote him out.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Two Huge Covid-19 Studies Are Retracted After Scientists Sound Alarms

The reports, published in two leading journals, were retracted after authors could not verify an enormous database of medical records.

The studies, published in renowned scientific journals, produced astounding results and altered the course of research into the coronavirus pandemic.

One undercut President Trump’s claim that certain antimalarial drugs cure Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, concluding that the medications in fact were dangerous to patients. The other found that some blood pressure drugs did not increase the risk of Covid-19 and might even be protective.

Both studies were led by a professor at Harvard, and both depended on a huge international database of patient medical records that few experts had ever heard of.

But on Thursday, the studies were retracted by the scientific journals in which they had appeared, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, because the authors could not verify the data on which the results depended.

The retractions may breathe new life into the antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, relentlessly promoted by Mr. Trump as a remedy for Covid-19 despite a lack of evidence. On Wednesday, after the journals noted concerns about the studies, the World Health Organization announced that it would resume trials of the medications.

But the retractions also raise troubling questions about the state of scientific research as the pandemic spreads. Thousands of papers are being rushed to online sites and journals with little or no peer review, and critics fear long-held standards of even the most discerning journals are eroding as they face pressure to rapidly vet and disseminate new scientific reports.

Continue reading.

[phroyd]

Trump knew about the virus the entire time from day 1. - Phroyd

More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials.

A number of CDC staffers are regularly detailed to work at WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years. Senior Trump-appointed health officials also consulted regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said.

The presence of so many U.S. officials undercuts President Trump’s charge that the WHO’s failure to communicate the extent of the threat, born of a desire to protect China, is largely responsible for the rapid spread of the virus in the United States.

The administration has also sharply criticized the Chinese government for withholding information.

But the president, who often touts a personal relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping and is reluctant to inflict damage on a trade deal with Beijing, appears to see the WHO as a more defenseless target.

Asked early Sunday about the presence of CDC and other officials at the WHO, and whether it was “fair to blame the WHO for covering up the spread of this virus,” Deborah Birx, the State Department expert who is part of the White House pandemic team, gently shifted the onus to China, and the need to “over-communicate.”

“It’s always the first country that get exposed to the pandemic that has a — really a higher moral obligation on communicating, on transparency, because all the other countries around the world are making decisions on that,” Birx told ABC’s This Week. “And when we get through this as a global community, we can figure out really what has to happen for first alerts and transparency and understanding very early on about … how incredibly contagious this virus is.”

Following a Trump-hosted video conference of the leaders of the Group of Seven industrialized nations on Thursday, a White House statement said “much of the conversation centered on the lack of transparency and chronic mismanagement of the pandemic by the WHO.”

The group’s focus on the global health organization during the call stemmed largely from Trump’s announcement two days earlier that he was freezing all U.S. funding for it, saying donors would be discussing “what do we do with all of that money that goes to WHO.” The United States provides up to $500 million a year in assessed and voluntary contributions, significantly more than any other nation.

In statements following the G-7 call, however, other leaders emphasized the need to build up the WHO, rather than tear it down.

French President Emmanuel Macron “expressed his support for the WHO and underscored the key role it must play,” according to a statement from his office. German Chancellor Angela Merkel “made clear that the pandemic can only be defeated with a strong and coordinated international response,” her spokesman said. “In this context, she expressed full support for the WHO as well as a number of other partners.”

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned that the WHO “cannot be weakened or in any way be called into question politically. … Every inch that the U.S. withdraws from the wider world, especially at this level, is space that will be occupied by others — and that tends to be those that don’t share our values of liberal democracy,” he said.

Canada, Japan and the European Union — all of whom participated in the call — also issued strong statements backing the organization.

A G-7 statement issued after the call supported the need to review WHO performance. “We cannot have business as usual and must ask the hard questions about how [the pandemic] came about,” British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, standing in for virus-stricken Prime Minister Boris Johnson, said. But he stressed a post-crisis review should be “driven by science.”

In announcing the funding cutoff, Trump charged last week that the WHO parroted incorrect Chinese statements and “failed to investigate credible reports … that conflicted directly with the Chinese government’s official accounts.” He criticized “the inability of the WHO to obtain virus samples” that China continues to refuse to supply.

A Senate aide who has tracked the issue said “there was clearly an effort” by China “not to provide transparent date and information” in the early stages of the outbreak.

“We were looking to WHO to provide that information, and they did not. It was unclear as to whether they didn’t get that transparency from the Chinese, or that they chose not to share what they did get under pressure from the Chinese,” said the aide who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

But some noted that the WHO has no power to compel member governments to do its bidding.

The organization “has no intelligence capabilities, and no investigatory power,” said Daniel Spiegel, who served as ambassador to the United Nation’s Geneva-based organizations, including the WHO, for the Clinton administration. “They should have been more skeptical about what the Chinese were telling them, but they’re totally at the mercy of what governments provide.”

Among his complaints, Trump seems most aggrieved by the initial WHO failure to support his Jan. 31 decision to partially ban incoming travel from China. Days later, at a meeting of the WHO executive board, Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said there was no need to “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade” to halt the spread of the disease. That message reiterated what he had said before Trump’s announcement, after meeting with Xi in Beijing.

Trump called Tedros’ statement “one of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO. … They were very much opposed to what we did,” he said last week. “Fortunately, I was not convinced and suspended travel from China, saving untold numbers of lives.”

International public health experts have long debated whether border closures helped stem the spread of infectious diseases, or worsen the situation by blocking cooperation among countries. But many, including Antony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases and a leading member of the administration's coronavirus task force, have said it was probably helpful in this case as the efforts of individual countries to contain and mitigate the virus were outpaced by its rapid global spread.

On Saturday, Trump said without elaboration that “we’re finding more and more problems” with the WHO. Speaking at a White House virus briefing, he said the administration was “doing some research” on “other ways” to spend money originally intended for both the WHO and the National Institutes of Health, which he said was “giving away $32 billion a year.”

The meaning of Trump’s reference to NIH, whose fiscal year 2020 budget totals $41.6 billion, was unclear.

The administration’s 2019 Global Health Security Strategy advocates increased cooperation with the WHO and other international health organizations. But although the United States has a three-year seat on the WHO executive board, expiring in 2021, the post has remained vacant. Last month, Trump nominated Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir for the position.

U.S. participation in the range of Geneva-based U.N. organizations is supervised by the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs, whose assistant secretary left office last November after the department’s inspector general issued a sweeping condemnation of his leadership, including “political harassment” of career officials deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump. It is currently headed in an acting capacity by a deputy.

But below the level of political appointments, communication between the U.S. government’s public health bureaucracy and the WHO has continued throughout the Trump administration.

In addition to working at WHO, on assignments first reported Saturday by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, CDC officials are often members of its many advisory groups. The emergency committee advising the organization on whether to declare “a public health emergency of international concern” during deliberations in mid to late January included Martin Centron, director for CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine.

When China eventually agreed to let a joint WHO mission into the country in mid-February, it included two U.S. scientists among 25 national and international experts from eight countries, although the Americans were not permitted to visit the “core area” in Wuhan.

From the beginning of the outbreak, CDC officials were tracking the disease and consulting with WHO counterparts. A team led by Ray Arthur, director of the Global Disease Detection Operations Center at CDC, compiles a daily summary about infectious disease events and outbreaks, categorized by level of urgency, that is sent to agency officials.

Arthur, according to a CDC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, has participated in the CDC daily “incident management” calls, discussing information he learned from WHO officials.

Information is passed up the chain of command from CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services in daily reports and telephone discussions, this official said.

Any information of a sensitive nature about the growing outbreak was and continues to be shared by CDC officials with other U.S. officials in a secure facility located behind the CDC’s Emergency Operations Center at its Atlanta headquarters.

In the early days of the virus response, those officials included HHS Secretary Alex Azar. Information about what the WHO was planning to do or announce was often shared days in advance, the CDC official said.

Anne Gearan and Yasmeen Abutaleb contributed to this report.

Phroyd

[vbartilucci]

Trump, undercutting his own administration, says he was not kidding about testing comments

President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington early on Sunday, April 21, after returning from a campaign rally in Tusla, Oklahoma. Patrick Semansky/AP

President Trump, undercutting the defense of his own administration, said he was not kidding when he said he asked for a slowdown in coronavirus testing. The President also called testing a “double-edged sword.”

“I don’t kid, let me just tell you, let me make it clear,” Trump said today when asked if he was kidding about the comment he made at his rally on Saturday.

Trump's comments came less than an hour before Dr. Anthony Fauci and other health experts were set to testify before a House committee on the administration’s coronavirus response.

Shortly after Trump said at the rally that he had asked his people to “slow the testing down please,” an administration official told CNN the president was “obviously kidding.”

On Monday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters during a press briefing that Trump was speaking "in jest" and "in passing" at the rally.

The President, speaking to reporters on at the White House ahead of his departure for Arizona, again praised the amount of testing the United States has done, but blamed that same testing for the increase in coronavirus cases.

“We test better than anybody in the world. Our tests are the best in the world and we have the most of them. By having more tests, we find more cases,” Trump said. “If you look at other countries they did 1 million, 2 million, 3 million, big countries. We did 25 million, way more, by double, triple, quadruple, than any other country. Therefore, we test, we’re gonna have more cases.”

The President did also say that testing is helpful for locating where cases are, but because it shows more cases, he views that as “a double edged sword.”

“By having more cases, it sounds bad. But actually what it is, is we’re finding people. Many of those people aren't sick or very little, they may be young people. But what’s happened is because of all of the cases that we find, we have a very low mortality rate. Just about the best in the world. So that’s the advantage to the testing along with other things,” Trump said.

“Testing is a double-edged sword. In one way it tells you you have cases, in another way, you find out where the cases are and you do a good job. We are doing a great job, we have never been credited for it. We are doing the best testing job anywhere in the world,” he added.

----------------------

This man can’t keep his own story straight.  He doesn’t kid...except when he’s “being sarcastic”, I guess.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Heather Cox Richardson

May 6, 2020 (Wednesday)

What a difference a day makes. Yesterday, Trump was talking about disbanding his coronavirus task force because it had outlived its usefulness and the administration was going to go full speed ahead on rebuilding the economy; today, Time magazine issued this week’s cover: an “OPEN” sign with the N ripped off and put in front of the other letters to spell “NOPE.” The administration’s attempt to pivot from a focus on the botched response to the virus toward a triumphant story of the economy has foundered as reality has caught up with Trump’s cheery narrative.

Yesterday we learned that Rick Bright, the scientist who directed the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the federal agency charged with developing a vaccine for this coronavirus, has filed a whistleblower complaint. The complaint alleges he was demoted for refusing to spend his agency's money on developing hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug the administration was promoting for use against Covid-19. But the complaint goes on to charge that the administration pressured him “to ignore expert recommendations and instead to award lucrative contracts based on political connections and cronyism.”

In a very detailed 63-page report, Bright claims that he warned the leadership at Health and Human Services about the coronavirus on January 10, but was first ignored and then ostracized for his insistence that action to prepare for an epidemic was crucial. He says the everyone in the administration except trade advisor Peter Navarro simply refused to take his warnings seriously. Throughout February, Bright peppered administration officials with memos, begging them to secure medical equipment to prepare for the epidemic. Finally, they lost patience with him in March, when he refused to back hydroxychloroquine when the president was touting it as a possible cure for Covid.

Bright told a reporter about the dangers of the drug, and days later was removed from the directorship of BARDA to a post at the National Institutes of Health, because political appointees Alex Azar, the head of HHS, and Dr. Robert Kadlec, Bright’s immediate boss, suspected him of being a source for the article. Bright claims to have been retaliated against for his role as a whistleblower, and is demanding his old job back.

Bright’s whistleblower report was only one of two that offered a window into the administration’s fumbling of the epidemic. We learned that on April 8, a volunteer on Jared Kushner’s coronavirus task force, filed a whistleblower complaint with the House Oversight Committee. Kushner's group took the place of established channels staffed by experts in order to coordinate a private sector effort to find the medical supplies America needed. The complaint, supported by anonymous individuals in the government, says that the people working with Kushner were young volunteers from consulting and private equity firms with no significant experience in health care, procurement, or supply-chain operations, and had no knowledge of relevant laws or regulations. They were ill equipped to do their jobs, and were also ordered to pay particular attention to tips from “VIPs,” including conservative journalists like Brian Kilmeade and Jeanine Pirro, as they searched for medical equipment.

Today, Politico published a story based on audio tapes leaked from three conference calls between HHS and Federal Emergency Management Agency officials and federal officials around the country fielding calls from governors trying to find medical equipment. The calls highlight that as Trump was saying the nation had plenty of equipment, his officials were scrambling to try to provide it. The leaked tapes also show officials privately acknowledging that reopening the states would lead to a higher rate of coronavirus infections.

In an interview with ABC News yesterday, Trump himself admitted the reopening of states for business could cause people to die. At a briefing, when reporter Jim Acosta asked why it was important to end social distancing right now, Trump told reporters "I'm viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent and to a large extent as warriors. They're warriors. We can't keep our country closed. We have to open our country ... Will some people be badly affected? Yes."

But Trump didn’t offer much to provide confidence that the government was on top of the ongoing coronavirus response. In the ABC News interview, when Trump blamed President Barack Obama for leaving the “cupboard” of the Strategic National Stockpile “bare” of medical supplies when he left office, anchor David Muir asked him what he had done to restock it in the three years he’s been in office. The question appeared to catch the president, who is accustomed to a friendly audience on the Fox News Channel, off guard. “Well, I'll be honest,” he said. “I have a lot of things going on. We had a lot of people that refused to allow the country to be successful. They wasted a lot of time on Russia, Russia, Russia. That turned out to be a total hoax. Then they did Ukraine, Ukraine and that was a total hoax, then they impeached the president of the United States for absolutely no reason.”

A Washington Post article by Dr. Zack Cooper, associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale’s Economics Department, says that we do, in fact, have the ability to test at the rate of 20 million tests a day, which is what experts say we need in order to reopen the economy safely. But the rub is that it would cost about $250 billion, and there has not, so far, been sufficient political will to spend that kind of money on testing, especially when those most affected by the reopening of states have been poor Americans and workers who are disproportionately people of color. A Rockefeller Foundation committee on reopening the economy has published a report on how to do so safely; Cooper was a member of the committee.

But for all these events undercutting Trump’s push to reopen the economy, what got under his skin most dramatically was an advertisement released Monday by the Lincoln Group entitled “Mourning in America.” This one-minute spot plays on President Ronald Reagan’s famous “Morning In America” reelection campaign ad, showing Trump’s term as the opposite of the rosy vision people associated with Reagan. “There’s mourning in America,” the voice in the ad intones over shots of Covid-stricken patients and folks in unemployment lines in masks, “and under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker, and sicker, and poorer. And now, Americans are asking, ‘If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?”

It took Trump four tweets to express his fury adequately, calling Lincoln Project founder George Conway a “deranged loser.” Ten hours later, he was still fuming, and ranted about the Lincoln Project to reporters for two minutes on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. This gave Conway the opening to hit him again in an op-ed in the Washington Post today. The article used Trump’s behavior to illustrate Conway’s usual concerns about Trump’s fitness for office, but it began with a new focus on the coronavirus: “Americans died from Covid-19 at the rate of about one every 42 seconds during the past month. That ought to keep any president awake at night.”

[verycleverboy]

The Don ‘n’ Chuck Show

When game show hosts close ranks, this is what you get:

President Donald Trump on Monday launched new attacks on his own administration’s public health officials, while the White House denied that it had perpetrated a smear campaign against Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the most venerated voices combating the coronavirus.

As his standing in public polling sags amid record numbers of daily Covid-19 infections in the United States, Trump has continued to express public dissatisfaction with Fauci for his dire assessments of the outbreak, including on social media.

On Monday morning, he retweeted messages from the politically conservative former game show personality Chuck Woolery — who served stints hosting “Wheel of Fortune” and “Love Connection” — which lamented the “most outrageous lies” being spread about the coronavirus pandemic.

“Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust. I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I’m sick of it,” Woolery wrote in a tweet shared by the president.

In another post Trump retweeted, Woolery claimed there exists “so much evidence, yes scientific evidence, that schools should open this fall. It’s worldwide and it’s overwhelming. BUT NO.”[...]

The most recent public schism between Trump and Fauci, exacerbated by the former’s determination to reopen the national economy and the latter’s dread over the nature of the outbreak, came after an apparent attempt to discredit the doctor Saturday and Sunday.

The White House reportedly told various news outlets that several of its officials were “concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things,” and furnished a lengthy list of statements the widely respected immunologist made in the early days of the outbreak that could appear damaging in retrospect.

Such efforts by the Trump administration to tarnish an individual’s reputation are normally reserved for political rivals — not public-facing, trusted government officials — and McEnany maintained Monday that the White House never sought to besmirch Fauci.[...]

At a White House event Monday afternoon, the president also told reporters he had a “very good relationship with Dr. Fauci,” and while he does not “always agree with him,” Trump said, “I get along with him very well. I like him personally.”

But recent congressional testimony and interviews by Fauci suggest communication between the two men is fraying, and that they view the perils posed by the coronavirus in substantially different terms.

[scottbcrowley2]

Experts: Trump’s threats to WHO could undercut global health - Tue, 19 May 2020 PST

U.S. President Donald Trump’s attacks on the World Health Organization are hurting its ability to protect global health, medical experts said Tuesday, as many WHO member states rallied around the ... Experts: Trump’s threats to WHO could undercut global health - Tue, 19 May 2020 PST

[frontstreet1]

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

WASHINGTON — The White House seating chart spoke volumes.

When the president convened a roundtable this week on how to safely reopen schools with coronavirus cases rising, the seats surrounding him were filled with parents, teachers and top White House officials, including the first and second ladies.

But the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, usually the leader of disease-fighting efforts, was relegated to secondary seating in the back with the children of parents who had been invited to speak.

Intentional or not, it was a telling indication of the regard that President Donald Trump has for the government’s top health professionals as he pushes the country to move past the coronavirus. Whatever they say, he’s determined to revive the battered economy and resuscitate his reelection chances, even as U.S. hospitalizations and deaths keep climbing.

Confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. hit the 3 million mark this week, with over 130,000 deaths now recorded. The surge has led to new equipment shortages as well as long lines at testing sites and delayed results.

States are responding.

At midnight Friday, Nevada was to enforce new restrictions on bars and restaurants in several areas including Las Vegas and Reno after a spike in cases. And New Mexico’s Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said her state was halting indoor restaurant service, closing state parks to nonresidents and suspending autumn contact sports at schools in response to surging infections within its boundaries and neighboring Texas and Arizona.

Yet Trump paints a rosy picture of progress and ramps up his attacks on his government’s own public health officials, challenging the CDC’s school-reopening guidelines and publicly undermining the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, Anthony Fauci.

“Dr. Fauci is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes,” Trump told Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity in a call-in interview Thursday, pointing, in part, to changes in guidance on mask-wearing over time.

In his latest beef with the CDC, the president accused the Atlanta-based federal agency of “asking schools to do very impractical things” in order to reopen. The recommended measures include spacing students’ desks 6 feet apart, staggering start and arrival times, and teaching kids effective hygiene measures to try to prevent infections.

After Trump’s scolding comment, Vice President Mike Pence announced Wednesday that the CDC would be “issuing new guidance” that would “give all-new tools to our schools.”

But the agency’s director, Robert Redfield, pushed back amid criticism that he was bowing to pressure from the president.

“I want to clarify, really what we’re providing is different reference documents. … It’s not a revision of the guidelines,” he said the next day. Indeed, draft documents obtained by The Associated Press seem to confirm Redfield’s assertion, though officials stress the drafts are still under review.

Deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere issued a supportive statement Friday: “The White House and CDC have been working together in partnership since the very beginning of this pandemic to carry out the president’s highest priority: the health and safety of the American public.”

But the flap has touched a nerve amid increasing concern over how the administration has sidelined, muzzled and seemed to derail the CDC. Repeatedly now, the administration has shelved or altered CDC draft guidance, or even told the the agency to take down guidance it has already posted. That includes in early March, when administration officials overruled CDC doctors who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the pandemic.

In May, officials removed some recommendations for reopening religious events hours after posting them, deleting guidance that discouraged choir gatherings and shared communion cups.

“Here we have at this time the 21st century’s biggest public health crisis, and the CDC has been shunted aside,” said William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville. They have “been sidelined and their voices — their clear, consistent, transparent voices — have been muffled or even completely silenced.”

While Trump has led the way, he’s not the only one sending messages contrary to those of public health officials. At a briefing this week by the White House coronavirus task force, Pence’s message to those in states like Texas, Florida, California and Arizona where cases are rising, was simple: “We believe the takeaway from this for every American, particularly in those states that are impacted, is: Keep doing what you’re doing.”

Not so, said Dr. Deborah Birx, the task force’s response coordinator. She said those states should instead close bars, end indoor dining and limit gatherings “back down to our phase one recommendation, which was 10 or less.”

Experts warn the U.S. has suffered from a lack of clear, science-based messaging during the pandemic — typically provided by the CDC. But Trump and the White House have kept the agency at arm’s length since the early days, when it botched development of a test kit, delaying tracking efforts.

Trump also grew enraged in late February when Dr. Nancy Messonnier — a CDC official who was then leading the agency’s coronavirus response but has since been sidelined — contradicted statements by other federal officials that the virus was contained.

“It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when,” Messonnier said, sending stocks plunging and infuriating Trump, even though she proved correct.

Many outside the White House also fault Redfield, who was appointed two years ago, for failing to adequately assert himself and his agency. Redfield does not have a close personal relationship with the president and has rubbed some at the White House the wrong way.

This week, before his later, tougher comments, Redfield appeared to old before Trump’s complaints, saying that the CDC guidelines should not “be used as a rationale to keep schools closed.”

“This is the opposite of good public health practice,” said Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington evolutionary biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. “You put guidelines out there about what’s necessary to keep people safe and then you expect people to follow them — not act disappointed if people follow them.”

The school re-opening controversy is just the latest chapter in a depressing tale, said Jason Schwartz, a government health policy expert at the Yale School of Public Health.

“This reflects a failure on the part of the CDC director to defend his agency, his scientists and the science through the pandemic. And this is what has led to this crisis in the CDC’s public standing, and frankly will take years to recover,” Schwartz said.

Some others expressed more sympathy for Redfield.

Vanderbilt’s Schaffner said that Redfield’s commitment to public health is clear, but said he nonetheless lacks the standing and forcefulness needed to influence the president’s thinking.

“His rhetorical style is nothing like what would be necessary for him to push back. And it’s unclear how much he could push back without being removed,” he said.

By JILL COLVIN and MIKE STOBBE – July 10. 2020 – 3:16 PM ET

—-

AP writers Jeff Amy in Atlanta, Susan Montoya Bryan in New Mexico and Michelle Price in Nevada contributed. Stobbe reported from New York.

Trump Undercuts Health Experts — Again — In Schools Debate WASHINGTON — The White House seating chart spoke volumes. When the president convened a roundtable this week on how to safely reopen schools with coronavirus cases rising, the seats surrounding him were filled with parents, teachers and top White House officials, including the first and second ladies.

[newstfionline]

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

House Sets Impeachment Vote to Charge Trump With Incitement (NYT) House Democrats introduced an article of impeachment against President Trump on Monday for his role in inflaming a mob that attacked the Capitol, scheduling a Wednesday vote to charge the president with “inciting violence against the government of the United States” if Vice President Mike Pence refused to strip him of power first. As the impeachment drive proceeded, federal law enforcement authorities accelerated efforts to fortify the Capitol ahead of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration on Jan. 20. The authorities announced plans to deploy up to 15,000 National Guard troops and set up a multilayered buffer zone with checkpoints around the building by Wednesday, just as lawmakers are to debate and vote on impeaching Mr. Trump. Federal authorities also said they were bracing for a wave of armed protests in all 50 state capitals and Washington in the days leading up to the inauguration.

National Guard inauguration deployment (Military Times) The Defense Department has authorized as many as 15,000 troops to be deployed to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. National Guard Bureau chief Gen. Daniel Hokanson said that there will initially be a deployment of 10,000 troops—an increase of about 4,000 from those in D.C. now. That figure is twice the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. The general declined to specify whether the guardsmen will be armed, stating that “we will work very closely with the federal agency, the FBI and law enforcement to determine if there is a need for that.” A D.C. National Guard spokesman told Military Times on Sunday that while some troops came to town with their weapons, carrying them on the streets had not yet been authorized.

Companies cutting off Trump and GOP (Yahoo Finance) Marriott and Blue Cross Blue Shield are just a few of the companies that are halting donations to GOP lawmakers who objected to certifying Joe Biden as president, while other businesses move to cut ties with President Trump directly. The actions come on the heels of Friday’s permanent suspension of Donald Trump’s Twitter account and Amazon’s move to cut off social media platform Parler’s servers. (NYT) The backlash is part of a broader shunning of Mr. Trump and his allies unfolding in the wake of the assault on the Capitol. Schools stripped the president of honorary degrees, some prominent Republicans threatened to leave the party and the New York State Bar Association announced it had begun investigating Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, which could lead to his removal from the group. And the P.G.A. of America announced it would strip Mr. Trump’s New Jersey golf club of a major tournament.

Virus deaths surging in California, now top 30,000 (AP) The coronavirus death toll in California reached 30,000 on Monday, another staggering milestone as the nation’s most populous state endures the worst surge of the nearly yearlong pandemic. Newly confirmed infections are rising at a dizzying rate of more than a quarter-million a week and during the weekend a record 1,163 deaths were reported. Los Angeles County is one of the epicenters and health officials there are telling residents to wear a mask even when at home if they go outside regularly and live with someone elderly or otherwise at high risk. California has deployed 88 refrigerated trailers to use as makeshift morgues mostly in hard-hit Southern California, where traditional storage space is dwindling.

A never-ending scandal (Bloomberg) Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35, the fighter jet already being flown by the U.S. and eight allies, remains marred by 871 software and hardware deficiencies that could undercut readiness, missions or maintenance, according to the Pentagon’s testing office. The Defense Department’s costliest weapons system “continues to carry a large number of deficiencies, many of which were identified prior to” the development and demonstration phase, which ended in April 2018 with 941 flaws, Robert Behler, the director of operational testing, said in a new assessment obtained by Bloomberg News in advance of its publication.

Pompeo Returns Cuba to Terrorism Sponsor List (NYT) The State Department designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism on Monday in a last-minute foreign policy stroke that will complicate the incoming Biden administration’s plans to restore friendlier relations with Havana. In a statement, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited Cuba’s hosting of 10 Colombian rebel leaders, along with a handful of American fugitives wanted for crimes committed in the 1970s, and Cuba’s support for the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. Mr. Pompeo said the action sent the message that “the Castro regime must end its support for international terrorism and subversion of U.S. justice.” The action, announced with just days remaining in the Trump administration, reverses a step taken in 2015 after President Barack Obama restored diplomatic relations with Cuba, calling its decades of political and economic isolation a relic of the Cold War.

Brexit sandwich problems (BBC) A Dutch TV network has filmed border officials confiscating ham sandwiches and other foods from drivers arriving in the Netherlands from the UK, under post-Brexit rules. Under EU rules, travellers from outside the bloc are banned from bringing in meat and dairy products. The rules appeared to bemuse one driver. “Since Brexit, you are no longer allowed to bring certain foods to Europe, like meat, fruit, vegetables, fish, that kind of stuff,” a Dutch border official told the driver in footage broadcast by TV network NPO 1. In one scene, a border official asked the driver whether several of his tin-foil wrapped sandwiches had meat in them. When the driver said they did, the border official said: “Okay, so we take them all.” Surprised, the driver then asked the officials if he could keep the bread, to which one replied: “No, everything will be confiscated—welcome to the Brexit, sir. I’m sorry.”

Merkel sees coronavirus lockdown until early April: Bild (Reuters) Chancellor Angela Merkel has told lawmakers in her conservative party that she expects a lockdown in Germany to curb the spread of the coronavirus to last until the start of April, top-selling Bild daily cited participants as the meeting as saying. “If we don’t manage to stop this British virus, then we will have 10 times the number of cases by Easter. We need eight to 10 more weeks of tough measures,” Bild quoted Merkel as saying.

‘A Stalin with double meat’ (Foreign Policy) A Moscow kebab shop named after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin has closed after just 24 hours of opening after a string of complaints from angry residents. In its brief existence Stalin Doner served items like “Stalin with double meat” and “Beria with tkemali sauce”—a reference to Stalin’s notorious secret police chief. The shop’s owner, Stanislav Voltman, was interviewed by police for three hours following complaints. “They asked me if my head was screwed on straight,” Voltman told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “It’s not like I had Hitler as the face of my brand,” Voltman said. Despite public outcry about the kebabs, support for Stalin is on the rise in Russia. A Levada Center poll in 2019 found that 70 percent of Russians think Stalin played a completely or relatively positive role in the life of the country.

In Kashmir, Hopes Wither (NYT) Kashmir, the craggily beautiful region in the shadow of the Himalayas long caught between India and Pakistan, has fallen into a state of suspended animation. Schools are closed. Lockdowns have been imposed, lifted and then reimposed. Once a hub for both Western and Indian tourists, Kashmir has been reeling for more than a year. First, India brought in security forces to clamp down on the region. Then the coronavirus struck. The streets are full of soldiers. Military bunkers, removed years ago, are back, and at many places cleave the road. On highways, soldiers stop passenger vehicles and drag commuters out to check their identity cards. Conflict in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority region, has festered for decades. And an armed uprising has long sought self-rule. Tens of thousands of rebels, civilians and security forces have died since 1990. India and Pakistan have gone to war twice over the territory, which is split between them but claimed by both in its entirety. Now, as India flexes its power over the region, to even call Kashmir a disputed region is a crime—sedition, according to Indian officials. Many say that the political paralysis is the worst it has ever been in Kashmir’s 30 years of conflict, and that people have been choked into submission.

India’s top court suspends implementation of new farm laws (AP) India’s top court on Tuesday temporarily put on hold the implementation of new agricultural laws and ordered the formation of an independent committee of experts to negotiate with farmers who have been protesting against the legislation. The Supreme Court’s ruling came a day after it heard petitions filed by the farmers challenging the controversial legislation. The court said that the laws were passed without enough consultation, and that it was disappointed with the way talks were proceeding between representatives of the government and farmer leaders. Tens of thousands of farmers protesting against the legislation have been blocking half a dozen major highways on the outskirts of New Delhi for more than 45 days. Farmers say they won’t leave until the government repeals the laws. They say the legislation passed by Parliament in September will lead to the cartelization and commercialization of agriculture, make farmers vulnerable to corporate greed and devastate their earnings. The government insists the laws will benefit farmers and says they will enable farmers to market their produce and boost production through private investment.

First came political crimes. Now, a digital crackdown descends on Hong Kong. (Washington Post) HONG KONG—The police officers who came to take away Owen Chow on national security grounds last week left little to chance. Determined to find his phones, they had prepared a list of mobile numbers registered to his name, even one he used exclusively for banking, said the 23-year-old Hong Kong activist. Officers called each number in succession, the vibrations revealing the locations of three iPhones around his apartment. By the end of their operation, police had amassed more than 200 devices from Chow and 52 others held for alleged political crimes that day, according to those arrested, as well as laptops from spouses who are not politically active and were not detained. The digital sweep showed how Hong Kong authorities are wielding new powers under the national security law, introduced last summer, far more widely than the city’s leader promised. Since the Jan. 6 raids, authorities have blocked at least one website, according to the site’s owner and local media reports, raising concerns that Hong Kong is headed for broader digital surveillance and censorship akin to that in mainland China. Hong Kong police have begun sending devices seized from arrested people to mainland China, where authorities have sophisticated data-extraction technology, and are using the information gleaned from those devices to assist in investigations, according to two people familiar with the arrangement who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their safety.

26 missing, at least 13 dead in Indonesia landslides (AP) Rescuers are searching for 26 people still missing after two landslides hit a village in Indonesia’s West Java province over the weekend, officials said Tuesday. At least 13 people were killed and 29 others injured in the landslides that were triggered by heavy rain on Sunday in Cihanjuang, a village in West Java’s Sumedang district. Some of the victims were rescuers from the first landslide.

Leading human rights group calls Israel an ‘apartheid’ state (AP) A leading Israeli human rights group has begun describing both Israel and its control of the Palestinian territories as a single “apartheid” regime, using an explosive term that the country’s leaders and their supporters vehemently reject. In a report released Tuesday, B’Tselem says that while Palestinians live under different forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, blockaded Gaza, annexed east Jerusalem and within Israel itself, they have fewer rights than Jews in the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. “One of the key points in our analysis is that this is a single geopolitical area ruled by one government,” said B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad. “This is not democracy plus occupation. This is apartheid between the river and the sea.” That a respected Israeli organization is adopting a term long seen as taboo even by many critics of Israel points to a broader shift in the debate as its half-century occupation of war-won lands drags on and hopes for a two-state solution fade.

Uganda bans social media ahead of presidential election (Reuters) Uganda banned social media on Tuesday, two days ahead of a presidential election pitting Yoweri Museveni, one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders, against opposition frontrunner Bobi Wine, a popular singer. Internet monitor NetBlocks said its data showed that Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, Skype, Snapchat, Viber and Google Play Store were among a lengthy list of sites unavailable via Uganda’s main cell network operators. Campaigning ahead of the vote has been marred by brutal crackdowns on opposition rallies, which the authorities say break COVID-19 curbs on large gatherings. Rights groups say the restrictions are a pretext for muzzling the opposition. At 38, Wine is half the age of President Yoweri Museveni and has attracted a large following among young people in a nation where 80% of the population are under 30, rattling the ruling National Resistance Movement party.

Coronavirus-spurred changes to global workforce to be permanent (Reuters) Sweeping changes to the global labour market caused by the coronavirus pandemic will likely be permanent, policy makers said on Tuesday, as some industries collapse, others flourish and workers stay home. The pandemic, which has so far infected at least 90.5 million people and killed around 1.9 worldwide, has up-ended industries and workers in almost every country in the world as tough lockdowns were imposed. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has estimated that the impact of huge job losses worldwide is creating a fiscal gap that threatens to increase inequality between richer and poorer countries. The ILO estimated that global labour income declined by 10.7 per cent, or $3.5 trillion, in the first three quarters of 2020, compared with the same period in 2019, excluding government income support. India’s Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said the pandemic had created an “accidental challenge” under which the government delivered food on a regular basis to 800 million people and provided sustained business funds. Philippines central bank Governor Benjamin Diokno said it was clear some industries will not survive, others will not be as dynamic as before, and yet others will be boosted by the massive changes. The need for a more nimble and innovative approach to education will remain long after the pandemic ends, said Helen Fulson, Chief Product Officer at educational publisher Twinkl. “How many children today will be doing jobs that currently don’t exist?’ she said at Reuters Next on Monday. “We don’t know how to train for these jobs.”

[feelingbluepolitics]

"More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the [t]rump administration, according to U.S. and international officials.

"A number of CDC staffers are regularly detailed to work at WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years. Senior [t]rump-appointed health officials also consulted regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said.

"The presence of so many U.S. officials undercuts [t]rump’s charge that the WHO’s failure to communicate the extent of the threat, born of a desire to protect China, is largely responsible for the rapid spread of the virus in the United States.

..."[O]ther leaders emphasized the need to build up the WHO, rather than tear it down.

"French President Emmanuel Macron 'expressed his support for the WHO and underscored the key role it must play,' according to a statement from his office. German Chancellor Angela Merkel 'made clear that the pandemic can only be defeated with a strong and coordinated international response,' her spokesman said. 'In this context, she expressed full support for the WHO as well as a number of other partners.'

"German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned that the WHO 'cannot be weakened or in any way be called into question politically. … Every inch that the U.S. withdraws from the wider world, especially at this level, is space that will be occupied by others — and that tends to be those that don’t share our values of liberal democracy,' he said.

"Canada, Japan and the European Union — all of whom participated in the call — also issued strong statements backing the organization.

..."A G-7 statement issued after the call supported the need to review WHO performance. 'We cannot have business as usual and must ask the hard questions about how [the pandemic] came about,' British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, standing in for virus-stricken Prime Minister Boris Johnson, said. But he stressed a post-crisis review should be 'driven by science.'

..."U.S. participation in the range of Geneva-based U.N. organizations is supervised by the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs, whose assistant secretary left office last November after the department’s inspector general issued a sweeping condemnation of his leadership, including 'political harassment' of career officials deemed insufficiently loyal to [t]rump. It is currently headed in an acting capacity by a deputy.

"But below the level of political appointments, communication between the U.S. government’s public health bureaucracy and the WHO has continued throughout the [t]rump administration.

"In addition to working at WHO, on assignments first reported Saturday by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, CDC officials are often members of its many advisory groups. The emergency committee advising the organization on whether to declare 'a public health emergency of international concern' during deliberations in mid to late January included Martin Centron, director for CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine.

..."From the beginning of the outbreak, CDC officials were tracking the disease and consulting with WHO counterparts. A team led by Ray Arthur, director of the Global Disease Detection Operations Center at CDC, compiles a daily summary about infectious disease events and outbreaks, categorized by level of urgency, that is sent to agency officials.

"Arthur, according to a CDC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, has participated in the CDC daily 'incident management' calls, discussing information he learned from WHO officials.

"Information is passed up the chain of command from CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services in daily reports and telephone discussions, this official said.

"Any information of a sensitive nature about the growing outbreak was and continues to be shared by CDC officials with other U.S. officials in a secure facility located behind the CDC’s Emergency Operations Center at its Atlanta headquarters.

"In the early days of the virus response, those officials included HHS Secretary Alex Azar. Information about what the WHO was planning to do or announce was often shared days in advance, the CDC official said."