from the NY Times ...
States Are in Crisis. Why Won’t Trump Help?
Federal support for cities and states was a core part of the New Deal. The president is tearing it apart.
By Lizabeth Cohen
Dr. Cohen is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of “Making a New Deal.”
April 29, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
When most people think of the New Deal, they think of the enduring institutions it created — above all, the web of agencies and programs that has provided the social safety net, such as it is, for life in the United States since the 1950s. A national retirement system, public housing, collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage — all had their origins during the Great Depression.
More important than any specific benefits, however, was the way that the New Deal recast the structure of American federalism. Washington stepped in to address a crisis that states and local governments were failing miserably to meet on their own, overwhelmed by tremendous need and limited by the resources and powers at their disposal.
New Deal federalism has shaped American governance for almost a century, and it has played a vital role in our country’s success. Now, with the Covid-19 crisis wreaking havoc across every state in America and the president unwilling to hold up Washington’s end of the bargain, that system may be falling apart.
For all the New Deal’s achievements, the American welfare state would never live up to the fuller protections provided by some European nations and our neighbor Canada. And there were glaring flaws in the programs that were created, such as excluding agricultural and domestic workers from the minimum wage guarantees of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and refusing to pass anti-lynching legislation. Both of these failures were partly attributable to the fragile coalition of Southern Democrats and Northern liberals that made the New Deal possible.
Still, the New Deal’s programs, enhanced by the Great Society’s addition of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s and President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010, made the United States on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic a far more benevolent place than it had been when the Great Depression hit in 1929.
New Deal federalism likewise made it easier for the states to respond to challenges and emergencies. But in exchange for federal resources, states accepted the federal government’s expectations and regulations. That relationship has substantially contributed to historic levels of economic prosperity and notable progress toward greater class and racial equality across regions.
Many of the landmark programs originating in the New Deal and the postwar era were built on this system of governance, with great success. Social Security has reduced poverty among older Americans. Intervention by the U.S. Justice Department helped the struggle to register African-American voters in the South and to integrate public accommodations nationwide. And the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided a legal basis for accountability, even if challenging to enforce.
The expansion of federal authority took place under Republican and Democratic presidents alike. When the variation in workplace protections state by state left some workers more endangered than others, the federal government under President Richard Nixon created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to set national standards for safety.
And faced with wildly unequal welfare benefits across the states, the government instituted the uniform, federally funded Supplemental Security Income program in the early 1970s. Federal consumer protection and clean air and water legislation in the 1960s and 1970s protected citizens in all states, however friendly their local leaders were to mass marketers or polluters.
Continued on next page
Yes today is Earth Day, a reminder that there are limits and results, that climate change and pollution are real.
The Right Sends In the Quacks - Covid-19 highlights the conservative reliance on fake experts.
By Paul Krugman Opinion Columnist April 20, 2020
Over the past few days there have been noisy, threatening demonstrations at various statehouses demanding an end to Covid-19 lockdowns.
The demonstrations haven’t been very big, with at most a few thousand people, and involve a strong element of astroturfing — that is, while they supposedly represent a surge of grass-roots anger, some of them have been organized by institutions with links to Republican politicians, including the family of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education.
And polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans — including half of Republicans — are more worried that restrictions will be lifted too soon than that they will be kept in place too long.
But the demonstrators have received huge favorable coverage from right-wing media; Donald Trump called them “very responsible people”; and they were praised by White House economic adviser Stephen Moore, who compared them to Rosa Parks.
That last bit caught my eye, and not just because some of the demonstrators were waving Confederate flags. The grotesqueness of the comparison aside, why are we still hearing from Stephen Moore?After all, Moore — whom Trump tried but failed to install as a member of the Federal Reserve Board — isn’t just a bad economist with a history of misogynistic outbursts. More to the point, he’s a quack, with a long history of misrepresenting or inventing facts to support his ideological agenda.
Among his greatest hits was a number-filled screed about the relationship between tax cuts and jobs — framed, as it happens, as an attack on yours truly — in which not a single number was remotely close to the truth.
On second thought, however, Moore fits right in. One thing the coronavirus has thrown into sharp relief is the centrality of quackery — confident pronouncements on technical subjects by people who have no idea what they’re talking about — to the whole enterprise of modern conservatism.
We know, for example, that Trump’s call for an early end to the economic lockdown was inspired in part by the writings of Richard Epstein, a conservative legal scholar who decided that he understands epidemiology better than the epidemiologists and confidently predicted that Covid-19 would kill no more than 500 people. (It’s currently killing four times that many every day.)
Or consider how Fox News responded to the unwillingness of Dr. Anthony Fauci to do what it wanted, and support an early reopening of the economy. To provide an alternative view, the network turned to … Dr. Phil, whose expertise, if he has one, is in pop psychology.
Now, much of this is familiar to anyone who has followed the debate, such as it is, over climate change. Faced with the overwhelming scientific consensus that man-made climate change is real and frightening, the right has long promoted the contrarian views of a handful of quacks — some with actual scientific credentials, but generally in fields other than climate science, and with a shared unwillingness to accept evidence that challenges their preconceptions. And there’s a strong overlap between organizations that promote climate denial and those that promoted virus denial.
But why is there such a close alliance between modern conservatism and quackery? One answer is that a political movement that demands absolute loyalty considers quacks more reliable than genuine experts, even if those experts currently support the movement’s policies.
As I’ve noted in the past, there are quite a few serious economists who also happen to be conservative, but they have been largely frozen out by the G.O.P. in favor of people like Moore. Why? Because serious economists might turn out to have principles, rejecting outlandish policy claims or changing their views in the face of evidence. And we can’t have that.
continued on next page
from the NY Times ...
Protesting for the Right to Catch the Coronavirus
The reopen America protests are the logical conclusion of a twisted liberty movement.
By Charlie Warzel
Mr. Warzel is an Opinion writer at large.
April 19, 2020
At a string of small “reopen America” protests across the country this week, mask-less citizens proudly flouted social distancing guidance while openly carrying semiautomatic rifles and waving American flags and signs with “ironic” swastikas. They organized chants to lock up female Democrat governors and to fire the country’s top infectious disease experts. At one point during protests at the Michigan Capitol, the group’s orchestrated gridlock blocked an ambulance en route to a nearby hospital.
For those who’ve chosen to put their trust in science during the pandemic it’s hard to fathom the decision to gather to protest while a deadly viral pathogen — transmitted easily by close contact and spread by symptomatic and asymptomatic people alike — ravages the country. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise. This week’s public displays of defiance — a march for the freedom to be infected — are the logical conclusion of the modern far-right’s donor-funded, shock jock-led liberty movement. It was always headed here.
Few demonstrate this movement better than Alex Jones of Infowars — one of the key figures of Saturday’s “You Can’t Close America” rally on the steps of the Capitol building in Austin, Tex. For decades, Mr. Jones has built a thriving media empire harnessing (real and understandable) fear, paranoia and rage, which in turn drive sales of vitamin supplements and prepper gear in his personal store. The Infowars strategy is simple: Instill a deep distrust in all authority, while promoting a seductive, conspiratorial alternate reality in which Mr. Jones, via his outlandish conspiracies, has all the answers. He’s earned the trust of a non-trivial number of Americans, and used it to stoke his ego and his bank account. And he never lets reality get in the way (case in point, holding a stay-at-home order protest in Texas the day after the state announced it would begin efforts to carefully reopen in coming weeks).
Former employees have described Mr. Jones to me as master of manipulating the truth into a convenient worldview in which Infowars and its listeners are constantly victimized by powerful institutional forces. “We kept saying ‘We’re the underdogs’ — that was our mantra,” one former employee told me in 2017. To make this work, Mr. Jones molds the day’s news into conspiratorial fables.
A novel virus — about which so much is unknown and where expert opinion is constantly shifting — is a near perfect subject for Infowars to fit the news to its paranoid narrative. Uncertainty over the virus’s origins in China is a springboard to float unproven theories about bioweapons. Discussions about a vaccine to end the epidemic become conspiracies about billionaire tech leaders pushing population control. Changing epidemiological models that show fewer projected Covid-19 deaths (because social distancing has worked to slow infections) provide an opening for Mr. Jones to rant about stay-at-home lockdowns. Genuine fears about deeply unfair job losses and economic recession become reckless theories about Democrat-led plans to punish American citizens by driving them into poverty.
continued on next page
Trump Is Asking Us to Play Russian Roulette With Our Lives - Are we really going to bet that we can go back to life as normal without proper coronavirus tracking in place?
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist April 18, 2020
“LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.”
With these three short tweets last week, President Trump attempted to kick off the post-lockdown phase of America’s coronavirus crisis. It should be called: “American Russian roulette: The Covid-19 version.’’
What Trump was saying with those tweets was: Everybody just go back to work. From now on, each of us individually, and our society collectively, is going to play Russian roulette. We’re going to bet that we can spin through our daily lives — work, shopping, school, travel — without the coronavirus landing on us. And if it does, we’ll also bet that it won’t kill us.
More specifically: As a society, we will be betting that as large numbers of people stop sheltering in place, the number of people who will still get infected with Covid-19 and require hospitalization will be less than the number of hospital beds, intensive care units, respirators, doctors, nurses and protective gear needed to take care of them.
Because it is clear that millions of Americans are going to stop sheltering in place — their own President is now urging them to liberate themselves — before we have a proper testing, tracking and tracing system set up. Until we have a vaccine, that kind of system is the only path to dramatically lowering the risk of infection while partially opening society — while also protecting the elderly and infirm — as Germany has demonstrated.
And as individuals, every person will be playing Russian roulette every minute of every day: Do I get on this crowded bus to go to work or not? What if I get on the subway and the person next to me is not wearing gloves and a mask? What if they sneeze? Do I get in the elevator at the office if there is another person on it? Do I go into the office lunchroom or not? Do I stop for a drink at this bar, where the stools are six feet apart, or that crowded one my friends chose? Do I use this toilet or that drinking fountain? Do I send my kid back to school or not? Do I stay in a hotel? Ride an airplane? Let the plumber in? Do I go to the doctor to check that strange lump or not?
What will be so cruel about this American version of Russian roulette is how unfair it will be. Some people will have no choice but to take the subway or the bus to work. Some people will have to send their kids back to school because they can’t afford to stay home from work. Some bosses will demand that their employees show up to reopen their workplace, but some of those employees may be afraid to come back. Do you fire them? Do they bring a lawsuit against you if you do, or do they go on Twitter and post a picture of how closely together you forced them to work — six inches apart, not six feet?
This is the state of play when you have a president who one minute is responsibly issuing sober guidelines for when and how people should go back to work, and the next minute is telling states that they are responsible for getting the testing, tracking and tracing units that we need in place and then, in the third minute, is inciting people on Twitter to “liberate” their workplaces, cities and beaches — even though none of the conditions are in place to do so safely.
“Liberate”? Think about the use of that word. We were not in jail! We were not doing something wrong! We were doing what our president, governor, mayor, and national epidemic experts told us to do: behave responsibly and shelter in place to break the transmission of this virus.
CONTINUED ... next page
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Vaccine Development and Surveillance
Strategy Overview
Our Goal:
Advance public goods for global health through technological innovation. We do this by accelerating the development and commercialization of novel vaccines and the sustainable manufacture of existing vaccines, defining the global disease burden through better primary data and world-class modeling, and reducing the threat of epidemics through the development and use of innovative tools.
The Challenge
At A Glance
Tackling diseases individually won’t solve many global health challenges. Working across disease areas allows us to identify the public goods that can accelerate global health impact and reduce the threat of epidemics.
We believe technical innovation has a critical role to play in the design, development, and deployment of these public goods.
We invest in deep technical expertise and novel platforms in vaccine development and manufacturing to accelerate innovation for better, faster, and cheaper vaccines.
We also invest in building high-quality modeling and forecasting capabilities informed by trustworthy primary data. We make this information public to allow all experts to better prioritize our collective global health resources.
In global health, the focus we’ve put on fighting individual diseases has had enormous impact, yet many of the most stubborn challenges we face are shared across disease areas. Whether it’s accelerating the development of new vaccines, forecasting the global health challenges of tomorrow, or preparing for epidemics, we must work beyond the scope of one disease area and create durable public goods whose benefits permeate global health.
Vaccines are some of our most powerful tools in combating diseases. Yet despite substantial scientific advances and investment, bringing vaccines to market affordably and reliably remains a challenge. Promising candidates can fail late in development, and existing vaccines can face supply shortages, resulting in wasted time, investments, and missed opportunities to improve human health. The diseases of low-resource settings—whether they are entrenched, like malaria and HIV, or they are the next outbreak pathogen—are often some of the hardest to address scientifically. They are also often the least attractive commercially. These challenges mean vaccine development for low-resource settings will only be successful if we use innovation in technologies, platforms, processes, and business models to accelerate timelines and reduce costs.
Because developing new vaccines is a lengthy and expensive undertaking, it is particularly important that we understand how to prioritize our efforts. Some diseases lend themselves to vaccine intervention. Others, like the neglected tropical diseases, are best tackled through better deployment of existing interventions. And others, like noncommunicable diseases, require non-vaccine approaches. Unfortunately, because the quality of our primary data is so poor, it is difficult to answer questions such as how many deaths a malaria vaccine could prevent. Parents who experience the tragedy of losing a child may never know the true cause of death. The mystery behind these individual tragedies are then accumulated into a public health conundrum, making it impossible for product developers, governments, and funders to effectively prioritize the resources of global and public health.
The Opportunity
We believe we can accelerate the impact of vaccines in low-resource contexts by cultivating deep expertise in the vaccine-manufacturing process, quality control, and clinical evaluation. This expertise allows us to advise on more effective vaccine development programs and identify new areas of innovation to benefit multiple disease programs.
continued on the next page
from the NY Times
With Broad, Random Tests for Antibodies, Germany Seeks Path Out of Lockdown
It was the first large Western democracy to contain the spread of the coronavirus and is now the first to methodically go about reopening its economy. Others are watching.
Taking a blood sample as part of random sampling for antibodies to the coronavirus.Credit...
By Katrin Bennhold
BERLIN — Felix Germann was not expecting anyone when his doorbell rang last week. Outside was a doctor who looked like she had just stepped out of an operating theater, green scrubs, face mask and all — and a policeman.
“I didn’t do it!” Mr. Germann said, throwing up his hands, and everybody laughed.
The unusual visitors had come with an unusual proposal: Would he allow them to test his blood for Covid-19 antibodies? Every month? For a year? Starting next week?
He would be helping to further the science that would ultimately allow for a controlled lifting of social and economic restrictions and save lives.
“Of course I said yes,” said Mr. Germann, a 41-year-old project manager at a media company. “I want to help. This is a collective crisis. The government is doing what it can. Everyone needs to do their bit.”
With that, Mr. Germann and his girlfriend joined 3,000 households chosen at random in Munich for an ambitious study whose central aim is to understand how many people — even those with no symptoms — have already had the virus, a key variable to make decisions about public life in a pandemic.
The study is part of an aggressive approach to combat the virus in a comprehensive way that has made Germany a leader among Western nations figuring out how to control the contagion while returning to something resembling normal life.
Other nations, including the United States, are still struggling to test for infections. But Germany is doing that and more. It is aiming to sample the entire population for antibodies in coming months, hoping to gain valuable insight into how deeply the virus has penetrated the society at large, how deadly it really is, and whether immunity might be developing.
The government hopes to use the findings to unravel a riddle that will allow Germany to move securely into the next phase of the pandemic: Which of the far-reaching social and economic restrictions that have slowed the virus are most effective and which can be safely lifted? The same questions are being asked around the world. Other countries like Iceland and South Korea have tested broadly for infections, or combined testing with digital tracking to undercut the spread of the virus.
In hard-hit Italy, antibody tests — and the potential of “immunity licenses” — have lingered over a national debate over how and when to reopen the country. Regional presidents have turned to serological tests as a way to better chart infections but also to get a sense of which workers might have the desired antibodies to possibly provide protection and return to work.
But even the best laid plans can go awry; Singapore attempted to reopen only to have the virus re-emerge.
In the United States, President Trump is in a hurry to restart the economy in an election year, but experts warn that much wider testing is needed to open societies safely.
Both Britain and the United States, where some of the first tests were flawed, virtually forfeited the notion of widespread testing early in their outbreaks and have since had to ration tests in places as they scramble to catch up. In Italy, one of the worst hit countries in the world, the central government and regional leaders sparred over how widely to test.
Germany, which produces most of its own high-quality test kits, is already testing on a greater scale than most — 120,000 a day and growing in a nation of 83 million.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, a trained scientist, said this week that the aim was nothing less than tracing “every infection chain.”
continued on next page
Trump Extends Social Distancing Guidelines Through End of April
The president, facing grim figures from his health advisers, starkly reversed an earlier upbeat assessment that the country could relax the guidelines by Easter.
By Michael D. Shear March 29, 2020
WASHINGTON — President Trump retreated Sunday from his desire to relax coronavirus guidelines by Easter, announcing instead that all Americans must continue to avoid nonessential travel, going to work, eating at bars and restaurants, or gathering in groups of more than 10 for at least another month and perhaps until June.
The grim recommendation, which the president made in the White House Rose Garden, came just a day before the end of a two-week period in which the world’s largest economy has largely shut down with staggering consequences: businesses shuttered, schools and colleges emptied, and social life all but suspended.
Mr. Trump said repeatedly last week that he wanted to reverse such drastic measures soon, perhaps by Easter, on April 12, in the hopes of restarting the economy. But public health experts — including the president’s own advisers — had warned that trying to return to normal life too quickly risked allowing the virus to rage, increasing the likelihood of more infections and raising the number of deaths.
The president finally appeared on Sunday to acknowledge the possibility of deaths on a large scale and back down from weeks of insisting that the threat from the virus might be overblown. In the past month, Mr. Trump has vacillated between accepting the need for aggressive action to limit the pandemic and complaining that such moves will harm the economy.
But on Sunday, his mood seemed somber as he conceded the need for another month of collective pain. Citing figures from his advisers that showed that as many as 200,000 people could die from the virus even if the country took aggressive action to slow its spread, Mr. Trump said the restrictions must continue, even if it meant more sacrifice in the days ahead.
“During this period, it’s very important that everyone strongly follow the guidelines. Have to follow the guidelines,” Mr. Trump told reporters, with members of the government’s coronavirus task force nearby. “Therefore, we will be extending our guidelines to April 30 to slow the spread.”
“We can expect that by June 1, we will be well on our way to recovery,” Mr. Trump said. “We think by June 1. A lot of great things will be happening.”
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said he and other public health officials had urged Mr. Trump not to relax the guidelines too soon. Dr. Fauci — who in television appearances earlier in the day had offered the estimate of 200,000 dead — said Mr. Trump was affected by those predictions.
“The idea that we may have these many cases played a role in our decision in trying to make sure that we don’t do something prematurely and pull back when we should be pushing,” Dr. Fauci said. He said extending the guidelines until April 30 was a “wise and prudent decision” that Mr. Trump reached after discussions over several days with Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the coordinator of the effort to fight the virus, and other health officials.
“Dr. Birx and I spent a considerable amount of time going over all the data, why we felt this was a best choice for us, and the president accepted it,” Dr. Fauci said.
Race to find COVID-19 treatments accelerates
In Section: IN DEPTH
WHO launches megatrial to test repurposed drugs and experimental drug candidates
By Kai Kupferschmidt and Jon Cohen
INFECTIOUS DISEASES
With cases of the new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) climbing steeply everywhere from Madrid to Manhattan , overwhelming one hospital after another and pushing the global death toll past 17,000, the sprint to find treatments has dramatically accelerated. Drugs that stop the novel coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), could save the lives of severely ill patients, protect health care workers and others at high risk of infection, and reduce the time patients spend in hospital beds.
The World Health Organization (WHO) last week announced a major study to compare treatment strategies in a streamlined clinical trial design that doctors around the world can join. Other trials are also underway; all told, at least 12 potential COVID-19 treatments are being tested, including drugs already in use for HIV and malaria, experimental compounds that work against an array of viruses in animal experiments, and antibody-rich plasma from people who have recovered from COVID-19. More than one strategy may prove its worth, and effective treatments may work at different stages of infection, says Thomas Gallagher, a coronavirus researcher at Loyola University Chicago’s Health Sciences Campus. “The big challenge may be at the clinical end determining when to use the drugs.”
Researchers want to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 2014–16 West African Ebola epidemic, in which willy-nilly experiments proliferated but randomized clinical trials were set up so late that many ended up not recruiting enough patients. “The lesson is you start trials now,” says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. “Make it a part of what you’re doing so that you can move rapidly to have the most efficacious interventions come to the front.”
To that end, WHO on 20 March announced the launch of SOLIDARITY, an unprecedented, coordinated push to collect robust scientific data rapidly during a pandemic. The study, which could include many thousands of patients in dozens of countries, has emphasized simplicity so that even hospitals overwhelmed by an onslaught of COVID-19 patients can participate. WHO’s website will randomize patients to local standard care or one of the four drug regimens, using only ones available at the patient’s hospital. Physicians will simply record the day the patient left the hospital or died, the duration of the hospital stay, and whether the patient required oxygen or ventilation. “That’s all,” says Ana Maria Henao Restrepo, a medical officer at WHO’s Department of Immunization Vaccines and Biologicals.
The design is not blinded: Patients will know they received a drug candidate, and that could cause a placebo effect, Henao Restrepo concedes. But it is in the interest of speed, she says. “We are doing this in record time.” The agency hopes to start to enroll patients this week.
Rather than taking years to develop and test compounds from scratch, WHO and others want to repurpose drugs that are already approved for other diseases and have acceptable safety profiles. They’re also looking at experimental drugs that have performed well in animal studies against the other two deadly coronaviruses, which cause SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). And they are focusing on compounds plentiful enough to treat a substantial number of patients.
COULD ONLY LOAD HALF THE ARTICLE - WRITE ME IF YOU WANT MORE
The Apocalypse
by Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell
This is the apocalypse
A daffodil has poked its head up
from the dirt and opened
sunny arms to bluer skies
yet I am filled with
dark and anxious dread
as theaters close as travel ends and
grocery stores display their empty rows
where toilet paper liquid bleach
and bags of flour stood in upright ranks.
My stomach twists and fingers shake
as I prepare to work the battleground
the place I’ve always loved and felt at home
is now a field of droplets sprayed across a room
or lurking on a handle or a sink to find their way
inside our trusting hands or mouths or eyes
the ones that touch you when you’re sick
speak soothing words and seek the answer to your pain.
This is the apocalypse
as spring begins again
and brightly colored flowers
deploy in my back yard
the neighbors walk their dogs
and march along the quiet streets
I stretch my purple gloves on steady hands
I tie my yellow gown behind my back
my hair inside a blue bouffant
my mouth and nose and eyes are
still and calm inside their waiting shields.
This is the apocalypse.
OldeGuy Blog (78)
/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-tronc.s3.amazonaws.com/public/BLAQ6E2FXVBOLBOD32UIYFWMGY.jpg)
