James.galbraith

The real crime is that he was ever allowed within 10 miles of the White House.

Texas began a phased reopening of businesses on May 1. On May 14, it had its highest single-day COVID-19 death toll, at 58, along with 1,448 new cases, also a new high. Texas has had more than 1,000 new cases diagnosed every day for seven days straight. Does that sound like “time to reopen” territory to you?

Part of the increase in new cases diagnosed is that Texas is still ramping up its testing program, with Gov. Greg Abbott ordering testing at nursing homes and state health officials focusing on testing in meatpacking plants. But that raises questions, too. Questions like “You really thought it was a good idea to start reopening before having adequate testing to know the scope of the problem?”

Abbott argues that manageable hospitalization rates are a sign that it’s safe to reopen, and hospitalization rates are indeed important. But it’s kinda cherry-picking to look at that one measure when your testing isn’t where it should be and infections continue increasing.

Abbott isn’t alone, though. Many states have already started reopening or are starting to do so in the next few days, despite the fact that, at this writing, only North Dakota meets the White House guidelines. And the White House guidelines are weaker than the CDC guidelines the White House blocked from release.  

Therapeutics company Sorrento has made what it believes could be a breakthrough in potential treatment of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that leads to COVID-19. From a report: The company released details of its preclinical research on Friday, announcing that it has found an antibody that provides "100% inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 virus infection of healthy cells after four days incubation." The results are from a preclinical study that still has to undergo peer review. It was an in vitro laboratory study (meaning not in an actual human being), but it's still a promising development as the company continues to work on production of an antibody "cocktail" that could provide protection against SARS-CoV-2 even in case of mutations in the virus. Sorrento says it believes this antibody, which is labelled STI-1499, stood out among billions of candidates it has been screening from its extensive human antibody library for its ability to completely block the interaction of the SARS-CoV-2's spike protein with a human cell target receptor. That means it prevents the virus from attaching to the host's healthy cell, which is what leads to incubation and infection. The nature of the antibody's efficacy means that Sorrento currently believes it will be the first antibody to be included in the cocktail it is developing, which will be made up of a large number of different antibodies that show efficacy in blocking the attachment of the spike protein, in order to provide multiple avenues of protection that are designed to remain effective even if the virus mutates in transmission from person to person, or within the same individual.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Americans stuck at home have flocked in droves to video gaming, sending sales to a quarterly record. From a report: U.S. consumer spending on video games jumped to $10.9 billion in the first quarter, up 9% from a year earlier, research firm NPD Group said in a report released Friday. Game content reaped the lion's share of the spending, $9.6 billion, up 11% year-over-year, NPD said. Top titles included Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, DOOM Eternal, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto V, Minecraft, MLB The Show 20 and NBA 2K20, according to the firm. Sales gains for Nintendo's Switch console offset declines for other platforms, NPD said, sending game-hardware sales up 2% to $773 million. Accessory sales rose 1% to $503 million.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Facebook has agreed to buy Giphy, the popular platform of sharable animated images, Axios reported Friday. The deal value is around $400 million.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After repeatedly dodging questions on the subject, Georgia Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler admitted in a statement Thursday that she has turned over documents to federal authorities who are investigating alleged insider trading by her and other members of Congress.

Loeffler’s statement came on the same day that North Carolina Republican Richard Burr stepped down as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after the FBI seized his cell phone.

Burr and Loeffler sold millions worth of stock in January and February after receiving closed-door briefings about the impending COVID-19 crisis.

Politico reports: In a statement released Thursday, the Georgia Republican’s spokesperson said the documents showed that she and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, “acted entirely appropriately and observed both the letter and the spirit of the law.” “The documents and information demonstrated her and her husband’s lack of involvement in their managed accounts, as well the details of those accounts,” the statement said. Earlier Thursday, Loeffler repeatedly declined to answer questions about whether the FBI had contacted her about her stock trades as the agency did for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) in relation to her husband’s transactions.

More from the Daily Beast: Loeffler and her husband, New York Stock Exchange CEO Jeff Sprecher, unloaded millions in equities in the weeks after that briefing, as U.S. stock markets tanked, even as the two acquired a stake in a popular teleconferencing company whose stock has increased in value since that purchase. The Daily Beast first reported those transactions in March. … Loeffler’s office did not respond to a request to clarify the nature of her interactions with law enforcement officials. She and her husband have vehemently denied any wrongdoing. They insist that all of their stock trades are handled by a third-party investment adviser—though Loeffler has refused to name that adviser—and that their sales of stock this year were not informed or prompted by nonpublic information gleaned through her official duties.

Last month, Loeffler tried to dismiss the insider trading scandal as “a socialist attack.”

"We have taken extraordinary measures to make sure that we can't be attacked for our success … this is a socialist attack" — Fox News just had @SenatorLoeffler on for an interview and the one question they asked her about her coronavirus stock selling scandal was a softball pic.twitter.com/jNK3O0tK7K

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 17, 2020

The post Sen. Loeffler Finally Admits She Provided Documents to Feds in Insider Trading Probe appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden says he would not pardon President Donald Trump if he defeats the incumbent in November.

NBC News reports: Answering questions in a virtual town hall-style event on MSNBC Thursday, the Democratic presidential hopeful was asked by a voter about whether he’d follow the lead of former President Gerald Ford, who pardoned Richard Nixon in large part to help the nation move beyond the Watergate scandal. Biden, while not speaking to any specific potential charge, committed to ensuring that any prosecutorial decisions would be dictated by the law, in contrast to what he called the “dereliction of duty” by Trump and his attorney general, William Barr. “It’s hands off completely. The attorney general is not the president’s lawyer. It’s the people’s lawyer,” Biden said. “We never saw anything like the prostitution of that office like we see it today.”

Watch it below.

The post Biden Says He Wouldn’t Pardon Trump, Slams ‘Prostitution’ of DOJ Under Barr: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Democratic senators put Trump on notice about downgrading the coronavirus death count.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

President Donald Trump on Thursday said testing for coronavirus might be “overrated,” revisiting his concern early in the outbreak that testing for the disease would raise the nation’s case count.

After touring the medical supply distributor Owens and Minor in Allentown, Pa., the president — he and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were the only members of the tour group not wearing masks — talked about his plans for expanding the Strategic National Stockpile and lauded his administration for its coronavirus response, including increased testing.

“America has now conducted its 10 millionth test. That’s as of yesterday afternoon. Ten million tests we gave. Ten million,” Trump said from a stage at the warehouse event, which had the trappings of a campaign-style rally. “And CVS has just committed to establish up to 1,000 new coronavirus testing sites by the end of this month, and the 10 millionth will go up very, very rapidly.”

“And don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world,” he added. “But why? Because we do more testing. When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”

Trump said the news media had refused to report his “common sense” explanation for the country’s high case numbers. He repeated the misleading claim that the U.S. has tested more people than other countries, sidestepping the reality that testing as a share of the population is lower than in other countries.

“So we have the best testing in the world,” Trump said. “It could be the testing’s, frankly, overrated? Maybe it is overrated. But whatever they start yelling, we want more, we want more. You know, they always say we want more, we want more because they don’t want to give you credit.”

The Biden campaign issued a statement Thursday evening criticizing the president‘s comments and his response to the crisis.

“With his statement today, President Trump has once again demonstrated that he is more concerned with his poll numbers and his reelection than he is with safeguarding American lives and delivering real economic recovery — both of which every expert tells us can only happen with adequate testing capacity to track and stop this disease,“ the statement said.

Trump’s comments about the quality and importance of testing have had an undertone of doubt in recent weeks, as the virus continues to spread and has made its way into the president’s inner circle. Katie Miller, the vice president’s top spokesperson, and Trump’s personal valet tested positive last week — heightening fears that the president could be exposed. Vice President Mike Pence has avoided contact with Trump since the announcement, and his schedule has been barren or limited since Miller’s diagnosis.

“This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great,” the president said last week during a meeting with congressional Republicans at the White House, referring to Miller. “The tests are perfect, but something can happen between a test where it’s good and then something happens. … She was tested very recently and tested negative, and then today, I guess for some reason, she tested positive.”

Trump has long expressed concerns regarding U.S. case numbers, accusing other countries, like China, of not accurately reporting their numbers. And in early March, the president visited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he expressed concern that letting infected passengers of the Grand Princess cruise ship being held at the port of Oakland, Calif., would increase U.S. case numbers.

“I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said at the time. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault. And it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship either, OK? It wasn’t their fault either, and they’re mostly Americans. So, I can live either way with it. I’d rather have them stay on, personally.”

As states across the nation continue to handle their coronavirus responses differently, Washington state is introducing a plan for restaurants in some counties to ready for reopening as early as June 1. Among other requirements, restaurants will have to keep a log of every patron who dines in at the restaurant, as reported by ABC News. Why? To help with contact tracing, which, as we know, seems to be just as important as getting everyone tested, though less discussed in the United States so far. 

On Tuesday, Gov. Jay Inslee put it simply at a press conference, stating: "If you have somebody who has become sick and they were sitting right next to a person at a restaurant, to be able to identify that person could be very valuable for their health to try to save their life.” But how will this work in practice? Let’s break down what we know so far.

The information required of sit-down customers isn’t terribly invasive, especially if you usually make reservations when you go out to eat; the customer’s name, email address, phone number, and what time they arrived. A notable difference from a reservation, however, is that every single person has to have their contact information recorded, not just one person per table.

Other requirements include seating no more than five guests per table, as well as overall keeping capacity at half or below the usual. Importantly, restaurants are required to test each employee for the novel coronavirus at the beginning of their shifts. Employers are also directed to provide masks for their staff. Perhaps unsurprisingly at this point, hand sanitizer must be available for both staff and customers in the entryway of the restaurant. There will also be no bar seating and no reusable menus. Tables should be six feet apart or have some kind of partition between them. No buffets or salad bar setups yet. Condiments, like ketchup or salt and pepper shakers, must either be sanitized after each use or simply be single-use.

Customers, notably, will not be required to wear masks while seated, but it will be “strongly suggested” that customers wear them otherwise, such as entering or exiting the restaurant or going to the restroom. 

Still, this plan isn’t without concern. "When a virus is caught up in an air stream, it has the potential to move much further than six feet," Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg told CBS News in an interview regarding air circulation specific in restaurants. 

As we saw at one restaurant in Colorado, for example, people are absolutely willing to go out to eat amid the pandemic, and they’re willing to do so in packed restaurants and without masks. We also saw that after Wisconsin’s stay-at-home orders were lifted by the state’s conservative Supreme Court, people rushed to go out to bars that very same night. Trying to answer a simple “why” for the reason people are going out to eat and drink during a public health crisis is probably unrealistic, but planning for a measured, controlled return to some aspects of social life, with clear, ongoing record-keeping is likely to be much safer than opening up to customers and relying on sheer luck.

Chrome plans to start blocking resource-heavy ads that drain a lot of battery in August, Google announced today on its Chromium blog (via VentureBeat). Chrome will block ads that mine cryptocurrency, are badly programmed, or are unoptimized for network usage.

We have recently discovered that a fraction of a percent of ads consume a disproportionate share of device resources, such as battery and network data, without the user knowing about it. These ads (such as those that mine cryptocurrency, are poorly programmed, or are unoptimized for network usage) can drain battery life, saturate already strained networks, and cost money.

In order to save our users' batteries and data plans, and provide them with a good experience on the web, Chrome will limit the resources a display ad can use before the user interacts with the ad. When an ad reaches its limit, the ad's frame will navigate to an error page, informing the user that the ad has used too many resources.

Chrome plans to limit the resources that an ad can use before the user interacts with the ad, and when that limit is hit, the ad's frame will redirect to an error page to let the user know that the ad has eaten up too many resources.

Google says that it extensively measured the ads in Chrome, targeting the most "egregious" ads that use more CPU or bandwidth than 99.9 percent of all detected ads for that resource.

Chrome will have thresholds that allow for 4MB of network data or 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30 second period, or 60 seconds of total CPU usage before an ad is blocked. Just 0.3 percent of ads exceed this threshold, but today, account for 27 percent of network data used by ads and 28 percent of all ad CPU usage.

Google will experiment with the changes for the next several months with the intention of releasing the feature on Chrome stable towards the end of August.
This article, "Chrome to Block Battery-Sucking Ads in August Update" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell admitted Thursday that he lied earlier this week when he said the Obama administration did not leave behind any “game plan” for responding to a pandemic.

Mitch McConnell is backed into a corner and forced to admit he lied about the Obama administration not leaving a pandemic plan, on Fox.pic.twitter.com/dQCNro43XS

— Joshua Potash (@JoshuaPotash) May 14, 2020

“I was wrong. They did leave behind a plan, so I clearly made a mistake in that regard,” McConnell said on Fox News. “As to whether or not the plan was followed, and who’s the critic, and all the rest, I don’t have any observation about that because I don’t know enough about the details of that to comment on it in any detail.”

Fact check: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell falsely accused the Obama administration of failing to leave the Trump administration "any kind of game plan" for something like the coronavirus pandemic https://t.co/fuycSJaXH6 pic.twitter.com/DnI5ck2cBW

— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) May 13, 2020

On Monday, McConnell participated in a Trump campaign online chat, in which he said Obama “should have kept his mouth shut” instead of calling the president’s response to COVID-19 “an absolute chaotic disaster.”

“They claim pandemics only happen once every hundred years, but what if that’s no longer true?” McConnell said. “We want to be early, ready for the next one, because clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this.”

CNN later fact-checked McConnell’s statement: Obama’s White House National Security Council left the Trump administration a detailed document on how to respond to a pandemic. The document, whose existence was publicly revealed by Politico in March, is called the Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.”We literally left them a 69-page Pandemic Playbook…. that they ignored,” Ronald Klain, a campaign adviser to Democratic candidate Joe Biden and the former Obama administration Ebola response coordinator, wrote on Twitter.The playbook — 40 pages plus appendices — contains step-by-step advice on questions to ask, decisions to make, and which federal agencies are responsible for what. It includes sample documents that officials could use for inter-agency meetings. And it explicitly lists novel coronaviruses as one of the kinds of pathogens that could require a major response.

The post McConnell Admits He Lied About Obama Not Leaving Pandemic Plan For Trump: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Showing once again how little the Trump regime cares about the rule of law, according to unnamed insiders, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Chief Andrew Wheeler will in the coming weeks defy a court order to set a drinking water standard for a toxic chemical known to cause fetal and infant brain damage. The deadline for the standard under the Safe Drinking Water Act is the end of June. The EPA had looked at several options. It picked the most extreme one in its draft proposal: no standard at all. 

The chemical is perchlorate, an ingredient in munitions, fireworks, and rocket fuel that gives it more punch. Perchlorate has contaminated wells that provide potable water to 16.6 million people. In 2011, the Obama administration reversed a Bush administration decision not to regulate the chemical and said it would set a standard. But it was slow-going, and the Natural Resources Defense Council sued to speed things up. Out of that came a consent decree requiring that an EPA standard be proposed by October 2018 and finalized before the end of 2019. By then, of course, President Obama was no longer in the White House and the deadline had been extended to next month.

At the NRDC, Eric D. Olson writes:

Perchlorate contamination often occurs as a result of pollution from Department of Defense (DOD) or DOD contractor facilities. EPA required limited national testing of perchlorate in drinking water from 2001 to 2005, which was the basis of its finding of widespread perchlorate contamination. No nationwide monitoring has been required over the past 15 years, so few of us know if it’s in our tap water. Because perchlorate threatens the health of fetuses, infants, and young children especially, the American Academy of Pediatrics, multiple independent scientists, and many states (as discussed below) have weighed in, urging EPA to set a strict standard for perchlorate in drinking water. They have been ignored by Wheeler.

EPA staffers told Lisa Friedman at The New York Times that the EPA is making the decision even though agency experts know that exposure to high levels of the chemical can reduce IQs and mess with the production of hormones necessary for development in fetuses, infants, and young children. That apparently makes no never mind to the muckety-mucks and lobbyists from the aerospace industry who oppose regulating perchlorate. For years, they have led the fight to block regulation.

According to staffers, the EPA draft proposal reads: “The agency has determined that perchlorate does not occur with a frequency and at levels of public health concern, and that regulation of perchlorate does not present a meaningful opportunity for health risk reduction for persons served by public water systems.” 

Friedman points out a striking coincidence in that wording and the wording of public comments from the Perchlorate Study Group, a coalition of aerospace contractors pushing the EPA to take back the 2011 decision to regulate the chemical. No standard is needed, the group said, because “perchlorate does not occur with a frequency and at levels of public health concern” in public water systems.

In 2008, the EPA set an advisory standard—that is, a voluntary one—of 15 parts per billion for perchlorate. But under Wheeler, the agency has been calling 56 ppb safe; maybe even 90 ppb. This despite the fact, as Olson notes, that scientists say the standard of 56 ppb would generate an average IQ loss of two points in those exposed.

Several states in 2019 criticized what they thought would be EPA’s move to a standard allowing for more contamination. For instance, New Jersey experts, who proposed a 5 ppb standard, stated: “The decision to use a predicted decrease in children’s IQ of 2 percent as the basis for the perchlorate MCL [micrograms per liter] does not appear to be well supported or protective of public health. It should be noted that this decision was not reviewed by the peer reviewers of U.S. EPA’s approach for the risk assessment of perchlorate.”

That was before Wheeler decided to thumb his nose at the courts and set no standard at all. One would like to think that this is due merely to the absence of a few IQ points in the EPA’s leadership. But while that may also be true, the underlying cause is another round of the Trump regime’s greed and its deep allergy to an entire range of safety, health, and environmental regulations.

The virus continues to shift our political geography.

The Epic Games Store has been down for several hours as people flood the service to snap up GTA V for free. "We are currently experiencing high traffic on the Epic Games Store," Epic acknowledges in a tweet. "We are aware that users may be encountering slow loading times, 500 errors, or launcher crashing at this time and we are actively working to scale. We'll provide an update as soon as we can." ExtremeTech reports: The surge in traffic for the Epic Game Store has apparently been intense enough that it has actually created issues for related Epic services like Epic Battle Breakers and Fortnite. If you can't get on the EGS to pick up your copy of the game, don't worry -- it's going to be free through May 21. It isn't clear which edition of the game Epic is giving away, however, because nobody can log in to check. Rumors ran wild on this point, with some implying Epic would give away the "latest premium edition with additional content." At the very least, the rumor is that this represents the complete title, not just a front-end for accessing either the single-player campaign or GTA Online. Epic is having something of a banner week. "First, Tim Sweeney's company wowed the internet with the new PS5 demo built on Unreal Engine 5," reports ExtremeTech. "Now the EGS has broken down under the weight of Grand Theft Auto, which puts Epic news front-and-center before PC gamers who might not have cared about the console announcement." Also worth mentioning is the company on Wednesday launched Epic Online Services, giving developers free access to the same kinds of tools used to support Epic Games' massive Fortnite player base.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just how devastating (as intended) are the Stephen Miller-led border restrictions that have exploited the novel coronavirus pandemic to deport hundreds of migrant children, among a number of changes? Only two of the increasingly shrinking number of asylum-seekers who have been allowed to try to make their case have been able to pass their initial U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services screening since the end of March, The Washington Post reports.

“The statistics show that USCIS conducted just 59 screening interviews between March 21 and Wednesday under the Convention Against Torture, effectively the only category of protection in the United States that is still available to those who express a fear of grave harm if rejected,” the report said. Of those 59 initial interviews, USCIS officials rejected almost all of them: 54, with three still pending. “Just two people seeking humanitarian protection at the southern border have been allowed to stay,” the report said.

Read 26 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Remember back when Donald Trump got caught trying to use his leverage as a sitting U.S. president to pressure Ukraine into manufacturing a Joe Biden scandal? Remember how Trump got impeached for that (and then Senate Republicans came to his rescue so they could ensure the least competent man on the planet would preside over a shambolic response to a global pandemic that is ravaging the country)? 

Well, who even needs a foreign government? Trump has moved on to just manufacturing the scandal himself, out in the open, with a little help from his Republican friends. It's got a name—"Obamagate!"—and it was bad, folks. 

Here's Trump explaining it on Fox News Thursday morning. 

"It was the greatest political crime in the history of our country,” Trump said. “If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would've been in jail a long time ago, & I'm talking with 50-year sentences. It is a disgrace what's happened. This is the greatest political scam, hoax, in the history of our country. And people should be going to jail for this stuff, and hopefully a lot of people are going to have to pay. No other president should have to go through... (something something, Flynn, heroes, something something). ... This was all Obama. This was all Biden. These people were corrupt. The whole thing was corrupt. And we caught them."

Wow, whole lotta projection there, methinks.

*Quick reality check on what's happening in the rest of America outside of Trump's brain—a global pandemic rocking the U.S. has now claimed upward of 85,000 American lives. Okay, back to Trump's victimhood.

The good news is, more than likely, no other president will ever have to go through this again, because it's impossible to imagine any other president packing an entire administration with criminals, grifters, and traitors in the fashion that Trump has. It's singular. Full stop.

Second, what the hell was Trump even talking about with that fusillade of innuendo? He can't even explain it. Something vague about "unmaskers." Fortunately for Trump, he's now enlisted the U.S. government to try to pound this slap-dash fabrication into something digestible for voters.

It's effectively a two-prong effort mounted by Trump's top lawyer, Attorney General William Barr, and Senate Republicans to find anything at all with which to smear former president Barack Obama and former vice president Joe Biden, therefore invalidating the original sin in Trump's view—the Russia investigation. 

As we know, Barr has been abusing his power as the nation's top law enforcement official to try to unravel the underpinnings of the entire Russia probe. Barr’s latest move to drop the government's case against former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn (which has run into a delightful roadblock) is really the opening salvo in an ongoing effort.

But now Senate Republicans have picked up on this whole notion that Obama officials working on intelligence issues somehow did something sinister when they asked for the identities of U.S. citizens who had been under government surveillance to be "unmasked" to them. In fact, what they were doing is a totally routine part of doing one's job when you're working with sensitive intelligence. As the AP's Julie Pace points out, there were 9,529 unmasking requests in 2017; 16,721 in 2018; and 10,012 last year. Scandalous! Anyway, what these Obama officials wanted to know as they embarked on a transition in which people in the incoming administration had literally hundreds of contacts with Russians was to ascertain whether it was safe to reveal certain information and to whom. Ya know, an effort to protect the country from having sensitive information revealed to a foreign adversary that U.S. intelligence agencies concluded had interfered in the election.

In any case, several of the usual GOP suspects are taking up Trump's cause: Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and Rand Paul of Kentucky. Separately, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is launching yet another investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation. That makes four—three originating at DOJ, and now another in Congress!

Trump already tweeted out some prescient advice for Graham this morning.

That pulled Graham back into relative sanity for a nanosecond. “I don’t think now’s the time for me to do that. I don’t know if that’s even possible,” Graham told a Politico reporter. Then Graham added, “I understand President Trump’s frustration, but be careful what you wish for.”

No doubt. Please proceed, Trump (he really isn't smart enough to understand how badly Obama could shred him given everything he knows).

In case you want to listen to Trump’s drivel (the second clip below). 

In response to damning testimony from Dr. Rick Bright, President Donald Trump and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany claimed Thursday that the administration had created its own pandemic response plan prior to the COVID-19 crisis.

Trump and Kayleigh McEnany are now trying to dismiss the pandemic response plan Obama left for Trump as a mere “paper packet” that paled in comparison to Trump’s (nonexistent) plan pic.twitter.com/lsQ8UJUqK7

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 14, 2020

“The Obama-Biden plan that has been referenced, was insufficient and wasn’t going to work,” McEnany said as she and the president prepared to board Marine One for a visit to a medical-supply facility in Pennsylvania. “So what our administration did under the leadership of President Trump, is do an entire 28-team pandemic preparedness report. Beyond that, we did a whole exercise on pandemic preparedness in August of last year, and had an entire after-reaction report put together. In other words, the Obama-Biden paper packet was superseded by a President Trump-style Pandemic preparedness plan.”

Trump added: “Which was much better, which was much more complete, which was a lot tougher. We were given very little when we came in to this administration, and they’ve done a fantastic job.”

Dr. Bright: "There is no master coordinated plan on how to respond to this outbreak." pic.twitter.com/uuRY5CMXM5

— Erick Fernandez (@ErickFernandez) May 14, 2020

In his testimony before a House panel on Thursday, Bright said: “There is no master, coordinated plan on how to respond to this outbreak. We don’t have a strategy or plan in place that identifies each of those critical components and we don’t have as designated agency that is sourcing those critical components and coming up with a strategy to make sure that we have those supplies when we need them.”

Some background from The Courier: To help the incoming administration be better prepared to fight future pandemics, officials under President Obama took what they learned from these battles and prepared a 69-page playbook. Written by Obama’s National Security Council and finalized in 2016, the playbook detailed strategies for when and how to obtain personal protective equipment, and included recommendations on how the government should move quickly to detect and contain potential outbreaks, secure additional funding, and possibly even invoke the Defense Production Act to compel private companies to produce needed medical supplies. But the Trump administration ignored the playbook. Instead, as the Associated Press reported, the Trump administration wasted nearly two months that could have been used to bolster the federal stockpile of critically needed supplies and equipment. Federal agencies waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators, and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers. By then, it was too late. Doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators have spent weeks pleading for more PPE, ventilators, and medical supplies. 

A few reactions from Twitter below.

Three months into the crisis, Trump is now suddenly claiming that he had his own pandemic “plan.”

Did he read it? Almost certainly not

Has it worked? 85,000 deaths and 36 million people filing for unemployment would suggest it hasn’t https://t.co/boD93rSt9Q

— Chris Lu (@ChrisLu44) May 14, 2020

Trump administration is clearly trying to reconstruct a fake history that they had a pandemic plan last August that somehow was different from the one Obama left them that they actually implemented with stunning success. Only 1.5 million cases and 85,00 dead, yay!

— Greg Pinelo (@gregpinelo) May 14, 2020

Obama administration left a Pandemic Task Force & 69 Page Emergency Response Plan. Trump dismantled one, ignored the other. Sick and tired of these criminal despots, that have zero character to take the f-ing responsibility for being a president. Resign. WE THE PEOPLE BLAME YOU. https://t.co/nY7qwnWRkK

— /M/O/S/A/ (@mosaisms) May 14, 2020

@PressSec The Obama Administration left on Trumps desk a 69 page Pandemic response binder on Pandemic Guidelines along with millions of archived research and Pandemic plan pages. You show us a binder you made in class with a $3 Staples binder. This is what's inside. 1 Page. pic.twitter.com/Yf8RYTQyd8

— RDH (@realDerekHardy) May 14, 2020

trump: Obama left us nothing.

t: Okay he may have left us a pandemic plan

t: He left us a detailed pandemic plan, but we have a new shiny plan. Don’t read and compare, but ours is better. https://t.co/4bE8SBHmUm

— President Dennison (@PrezDennison) May 14, 2020

Funny that Trump is now saying he produced a pandemic preparedness report & did exercises. I call BS. Never talked about it before. The only thing Trump has produced is a pack of matches, intending to burn down the rule of law. I want evidence of that plan and when it was filed. https://t.co/x6JE2yr2pc

— Nita Cosby (@5_2blue) May 14, 2020

@PressSec Not sure what was in your Fantastic World Best Covid-19 Pandemic Plan book (Good job on the cover art), But this is all that's available. 1 Page. I see you kept it very simple for Trump voters. Bigger font size next time!https://t.co/5zwMZaiN0L pic.twitter.com/UWVAQghT62

— RDH (@realDerekHardy) May 14, 2020

Trump .@PressSec Kayleigh McEnany claiming now, 4 months after the 1st US Coronavirus case, the nearly empty 1 inch binder she held was the Admin’s 2018 pandemic action plan, reminds me of folders filled with blank paper Trump called his “cancelled deals.” https://t.co/K0GCr4PBGT

— Chris #StayHome & #VoteBlue (@Chris_nDC) May 14, 2020

The post Trump Claims He Had His Own Pandemic Response Plan: ‘Much Better’ Than Obama’s ‘Paper Packet’ (WATCH) appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The United States is on track to produce more electricity this year from renewable power than from coal for the first time on record, new government projections show, a transformation partly driven by the coronavirus pandemic, with profound implications in the fight against climate change. From a report: It is a milestone that seemed all but unthinkable a decade ago, when coal was so dominant that it provided nearly half the nation's electricity. And it comes despite the Trump administration's three-year push to try to revive the ailing industry by weakening pollution rules on coal-burning power plants. Those efforts, however, failed to halt the powerful economic forces that have led electric utilities to retire hundreds of aging coal plants since 2010 and run their remaining plants less frequently. The cost of building large wind farms has declined more than 40 percent in that time, while solar costs have dropped more than 80 percent. And the price of natural gas, a cleaner-burning alternative to coal, has fallen to historic lows as a result of the fracking boom. Now the coronavirus outbreak is pushing coal producers into their deepest crisis yet. As factories, retailers, restaurants and office buildings have shut down nationwide to slow the spread of the coronavirus, demand for electricity has fallen sharply. And, because coal plants often cost more to operate than gas plants or renewables, many utilities are cutting back on coal power first in response.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The "insider trading" case that the Department of Justice has initiated against Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina is getting stinkier by the minute, and looking like it's less and less about shady stock dealing than Donald Trump and Russia as more information unfolds. Burr has been forced out of his chairmanship of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence by Senate Majority Leader Moscow Mitch McConnell.

The warrant served on Burr to obtain his cell phone had to have been approved "at the HIGHEST levels of the Department of Justice, and it was" a senior DOJ official told Fox News. That would be Attorney General William Barr, who is doing his level best right now to throw dirt on Robert Mueller's Russia report, a report that Burr's Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has backed up in reports of its own, the final of which is even now being finalized for release in August. In fact, in the confirmation hearing for Rep. John Ratcliffe to be Director of National Intelligence (a whole other awful story) at the beginning of May, Burr focused on the upcoming declassification and release of that report.

Burr asked, given that the most recent report from SSCI confirmed the findings of the intelligence community that Russia had interfered, would Ratcliffe "commit to bringing information about threats to the election infrastructure and about foreign governments' efforts to influence to Congress so we're fully and currently informed?" Ratcliffe said he would. Then Burr asked, "over the last three years we have issued four reports. Number five is finished. Number five will go for declassification. Do we have your commitment as DNI that you would expeditiously go through the declassification process?" Ratcliffe said yes, but Trump and by extension Barr do not want that report declassified. One way to accomplish its being buried is to get more of a toady than Burr in the chairman's seat.

Add to that stench, Burr's colleague, Georgia Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler (who also sold millions worth of stock seemingly based on insider information about the coming pandemic) has not been contacted by federal authorities, according to her office. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and ranking member of SSCI, has answered questions about her husband's stock trades, and handed over documents. And so far Loeffler has been left alone?

How much more blatant can Barr be? This absolutely reeks of two things: political retribution and cover-up. Yes, there was plenty of evidence to make Burr a subject of investigation for insider trading. But this investigation is so ham-handed, such a sledgehammer and so aggressive that it screams bad faith. Because, really, the Trump administration gives a damn about insider trading?

[On the possible risks of contagion, and why Evangelicals sue.]

At the Law & Liberty site, I have an essay on constitutional challenges to state and local bans on religious gatherings. (Eugene has covered these cases here and here). My essay addresses some of the legal issues: whether bans are "generally applicable" under Employment Division v Smith, how courts might weigh the burden on religion against the state's interest in curbing the epidemic, whether less-restrictive means are available, etc. I'd like to follow up here with a couple of additional comments, first, about church services and contagion, and second, about the sort of churches bringing these lawsuits.

First, on the risk of contagion, some evidence now suggests that churches are more like theaters, concert halls, and lecture rooms than grocery stores. Contagion is a function of viral load and time exposed: the longer people are together in an enclosed space, the more likely it is that they will receive a high-enough concentration of the virus to be infected and for the disease to spread. The risk also increases when people sing together, as in a choir. Many church services last an hour or two and involve lots of congregational singing, which could mean a much higher risk of exposure than simply walking through a supermarket.

This point hasn't appeared prominently in court decisions so far. For example, in this past weekend's Sixth Circuit opinion striking down the Kentucky ban on church services, the panel dealt with the point only obliquely. "It's not as if law firm office meetings and gatherings at airport terminals"—which remained legal under the Kentucky ban—"always take less time than worship services," the judges explained, and it would always be possible to limit the number of people attending. That's true, but there may be something about church services, like concerts and lectures, that make them more apt to be sources of viral spread than other gatherings, something that approximates a qualitative difference, when it comes to contagion. And if that's true, it would explain why church services, like movie screenings and concerts and lectures, aren't in the same category as grocery shopping, and, consequently, why the government could curtail the former while allowing the latter. We'll have to see what courts make of this argument, once they fully address it.

Second, about the churches bringing these lawsuits. As I explain in the Law & Liberty essay, so far, all the plaintiffs are Christian, and virtually all of them appear to be Evangelicals. The only example of which I'm aware in which a non-Evangelical church has challenged the constitutionality of one of these orders involves a schismatic (or "irregular") Catholic parish in New Jersey. Although some prominent lay Catholic voices have expressed skepticism about the bans, the Catholic Church hierarchy in this country has so far complied, as have the various Orthodox jurisdictions.

Now this is a puzzle, because in Christian terms (I can't speak to other traditions), Evangelical worship is non-liturgical. It emphasizes the teaching of Scripture, not the sacraments. The main point of Evangelical worship is for people to gather to hear the Gospel truly preached. As a result, Evangelical services can be adapted to the online idiom fairly easily. Something important is lost, of course: the fellowship of other believers. But the faithful can listen to a powerful sermon over the internet, at home.

The main point of Catholic and Orthodox Christian worship, by contrast, is the distribution of Holy Communion, which Catholics and Orthodox faithful hold to be the real Body and Blood of Christ. One cannot distribute Communion online. I know I'm painting with a broad brush and that everything is comparative. I don't mean that preaching is unimportant to Catholics and Orthodox, or that corporate worship is unimportant to Evangelicals. But, in liturgical terms, Catholic and Orthodox churches should be the ones complaining about state-ordered closings, since the closings impinge on their worship much more. Yet they have not. What explains this?

The difference may have more to do with attitudes towards authority than the theology of worship. First, Evangelical churches lack a hierarchical structure. As the heirs of the free-church tradition, they typically are independent congregations that can decide for themselves how to respond to government action. Catholic and Orthodox parishes, by contrast, answer to bishops who can discipline priests and congregations when they go astray—and, so far, the hierarchies have been willing to comply with government orders to curtail services, though that may not continue indefinitely.

Second, Evangelical Christians generally may be more suspicious of state action than are Christians in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, which have a history of greater interconnectedness with state authority. Finally, there may well be a political component. White Evangelicals overwhelmingly support President Trump, and Trump supporters generally express more suspicion of the public health authorities just now.

To be sure, the number of lawsuits, so far, is very small. Most Evangelical Christians in America have complied with the bans on worship services, just like most Catholic and Orthodox Christians—and just like most non-Christians. And non-Evangelicals may file lawsuits in the future. But the overrepresentation of Evangelicals as plaintiffs at this point is striking, and I doubt it's just a coincidence.

FBI agents seized a cell phone belonging to North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr on Wednesday night, as part of an investigation into alleged insider trading, after he dumped up to $1.7 million in stock in February following private committee briefings on the impending COVID-19 crisis.

Burr turned over the phone after agents served a search warrant at his Washington-area home, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. Authorities reportedly seized the phone after a separate search warrant was used to obtain information from Burr’s Apple iCloud account.

News of the seizure prompted immediate questions about why the FBI isn’t similarly investigating Georgia Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who also sold hundreds of thousands worth of stock after receiving COVID-19 briefings. Some experts suggested the DOJ’s decision to go after Burr, but not Loeffler, could be politically motivated. Burr has been a thorn in the side of Donald Trump, while Loeffler has been fiercely loyal to the president. 

CBS News reports: “We’ll decline to comment,” Burr communications director Caitlin Carroll said late Wednesday. … Several of the stocks sold were in companies that own hotels, an industry that has been decimated by the coronavirus. The bulk of Burr’s stock sales took place on February 13, just before he made a speech predicting extreme measures would have to be taken to check the spread of the virus, including closing schools and cutting company travel, according to audio obtained by National Public Radio. A week earlier, on February 7, Burr coauthored an opinion piece with Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander that offered reassuring words for Americans concerned about the coronavirus. … It’s illegal for members of Congress to trade stocks based on information the public doesn’t have that they receive through their positions as lawmakers. Burr was among only three senators who voted against the legislation banning such trading in 2012.

More from the Washington Post: Burr was not the only senator accused of abusing coronavirus-related information that was not available to the general public to make personal financial decisions. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) also came under fire after the Daily Beast reported that she had sold a significant share of stocks in January after attending the same briefings as Burr. … Some legal observers noted there would be a potential disparity if Burr was being investigated but not other members of Congress who engaged in similar trades, particularly Loffler. After the Justice Department’s investigation into Burr became public, a Loeffler spokesman said she had not been contacted by federal law enforcement officials. Burr and President Trump have had a tense relationship at times.

This is a very, very big deal. This is not something the FBI or DOJ does lightly. It requires layers of review, the blessing of a judge, and consideration of severe reputational harm to a sitting US Senator. https://t.co/PtETZtPPbz

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) May 14, 2020

A search warrant requires a judge to find probable cause of a crime. Search warrant of a *senator* requires approval at the highest levels of DOJ. Investigation of Sen. Richard Burr just got serious. https://t.co/BD91xtfb9x

— Barb McQuade (@BarbMcQuade) May 14, 2020

A lot more is needed to develop the record, but I do think this is a moment to be seriously on guard for DOJ being used to carry out political retribution. Serving a warrant on a senator is a very significant and rapid escalation and Trump has long had an axe to grind with Burr. https://t.co/mGravZJyoq

— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) May 14, 2020

This may be entirely legit. But it tells a lot about our extraordinary times that Burr and not Kelly Loeffler – the former having issued Senate Intelligence Committee reports fingering Russia, the latter slavish,y loyal to Trump-raises questions of FBI motive and role of Barr. https://t.co/OgBiuLWWqy

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) May 14, 2020

The post FBI Seizes Richard Burr’s Cell Phone in Probe of COVID-19 Stock Dump, But What About Kelly Loeffler? appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

President Donald Trump in the White House on May 13. | Doug Mills/Getty Images

Trump wants to change the topic from coronavirus to conspiracy theories. Fox is helping him out.

President Donald Trump previewed his 2020 reelection messaging with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business in a lengthy interview that aired Thursday morning — one that amounted to an elaborate, conspiracy theory-driven attempt to change the topic from the coronavirus to his desire to imprison his political opponents.

That’s not to say the pandemic didn’t come up at all. At the beginning of the interview, Trump once again moved the goalposts about what he expects the ultimate US death toll to be, saying “we’re gonna lose over 100,000 perhaps.” But he compared that grim reality favorably with a situation in which the federal government took no action at all to slow the spread of the virus, and more than 2 million people died.

Trump has gradually increased his projected death toll as the number of lives lost in the US thanks to the coronavirus has increased. As recently as May 1 he was saying that “hopefully we are going to come in below that 100,000 lives lost.” But with nearly 85,000 already dead and the number of daily deaths not yet showing a clear downward trajectory, Trump keeps revising the numbers upward.

Instead of pressing Trump on the point, however, Bartiromo — who has a history of letting Trump rant about anything and everything during interviews — changed the topic to the economy. Trump acknowledged that the US unemployment rate will be over 10 percent on Election Day but expressed confidence he’ll win another term anyway. If that ends up happening, he’ll become the first president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win another term amid such a dire jobs situation.

With such bad news on the human and economic fronts, perhaps it’s not surprising that Trump seemed to be most excited about pushing his new “Obamagate” conspiracy theory about his predecessor, Barack Obama. While Trump himself hasn’t been able to explain what exactly “Obamagate” is, the general idea is that Obama was part of a conspiracy to use an FBI counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia to undermine his presidency before it even began.

There is no evidence that Obama did anything untoward — on the contrary, his administration was careful arguably to a fault to be perceived as not favoring Hillary Clinton — yet that didn’t stop Trump from suggesting that both Obama and Joe Biden should be in prison right now. It looks like for the second straight election cycle, Trump plans to make his desire to imprison prominent Democrats a central part of his campaign.

“If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would’ve been in jail a long time ago, and I’m talking with 50-year sentences,” Trump claimed. “People should be going to jail for this stuff ... this was all Obama. This was all Biden.”

Later, as part of his attempt to rewrite the history of the Russia investigation, Trump went as far as to claim that “actually, [Russia] wanted Hillary Clinton to win.”

“Nobody’s been tougher — you can speak to Putin or anybody else — nobody has been tougher on Russian than I have,” he added. “They wanted Hillary Clinton to win.”

This claim is at odds with the consensus conclusion of the US intelligence community, a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, and even the words of Vladimir Putin himself — all of them affirming that Russia wanted Trump to win. But if viewers were hoping that Bartiromo would push back by pointing out the obvious, they were disappointed.

Fox is aiding in Trump’s effort to make his 2020 campaign a referendum on his favorite conspiracy theories

Over the course of Bartiromo’s Thursday morning show, “coronavirus” or “Covid-19” were mentioned the same amount of times (22) as “Obama.”

This reflects a broader trend at Fox News. According to a Media Matters study released Wednesday, Fox News’s coronavirus coverage has dropped by more than 40 percent from its peak. In recent days, the network has echoed Trump in trying to make “Obamagate,” whatever it is, into a story equal in stature to a pandemic that’s still killing about 1,500 Americans a day.

Shortly after Trump’s interview with Bartiromo aired, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce began to hear testimony from Dr. Rick Bright, the former director of the federal agency overseeing the development of a coronavirus vaccine who claims he was removed from his post following clashes with Trump administration officials over their pushing of unproven and potentially dangerous coronavirus treatments.

“The American health care system is being taxed to the limit,” Bright warned in his opening statement. “Our economy is spiraling downward and our population is being paralyzed by fear, stemming from a lack of a coordinated response and a dearth of accurate, clear information about the path forward.”

Trump, meanwhile, posted tweets alluding to his desire for Senate Republicans to hold an “Obamagate” show trial of sorts.

Tellingly, as Bright made his explosive opening statement, Fox News instead aired a lengthy interview with the White House press secretary. The network then spent most of the rest of the morning hyping “Obamagate.”

---

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

How the conventions of political reporting reward Trump's bad faith and lying.

White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx answers a question in the Oval Office of the White House on April 28, 2020, in Washington, DC. | Doug Mills/The New York Times/Getty Images

Experts say the official numbers are too low. The White House wants to make them lower.

Experts have a range of ideas to suppress the Covid-19 pandemic, save lives, and avert new waves of economic misery. But President Donald Trump seems to be embracing another plan — massaging the numbers to make inconvenient deaths go away.

But experts believe the problem with the numbers is the opposite — official statistics understate the Covid-19 death toll.

Recent methodological changes have annoyed the president by pushing death numbers higher. These changes, according to experts, are a sound and reasonable effort to reduce the amount of undercounting. They factor in that deaths have surged by more than the official coronavirus stats say.

On Wednesday, the Daily Beast reported that Trump and members of his coronavirus task are now pressuring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to get states to change how they count deaths, a campaign designed to lower the numbers.

As Trump tries to juke the stats, he’s committing the original sin of America’s pandemic response — falling way beyond the curve in terms of testing and surveillance. For Trump, that seemingly doesn’t matter because it’s more politically convenient to keep official infection numbers low.

Coronavirus death count methodologies, explained

The original way the United States counted coronavirus deaths started with the fact that if you were seriously ill, you might (or might not) be tested for Covid-19. If you were tested, the test came back positive, you were admitted to the hospital for Covid-19 treatment, and then you died, that was counted as a Covid-19 death.

But we’ve known all along that many more people were infected with the virus than were actually receiving tests and obtaining positive results. Tests have been in short supply, and some of the most widely used tests have fairly high false negative rates.

Consequently, people who’ve died at home or in a long-term care facility without making it to the hospital were initially not counted as Covid-19 deaths. In mid-April, however, New York City added nearly 4,000 “probable” Covid-19 deaths to its official count based on doctors’ assessment of the symptoms of the deceased.

This shift is in part an effort to obtain more accurate statistics and in part an effort to use testing capacity in a more efficient way. There is no Covid-19 pill to give people who test positive, so it makes little sense to prioritize gravely ill people for testing when those scarce tests could be better used on sick people’s close contacts.

That makes sense as a process, but adding these suspected cases into the mix makes the situation look worse, and Trump isn’t happy about it.

Trump wants to lowball coronavirus deaths

On May 6, Jonathan Swan and Sam Baker reported for Axios that “Trump has complained to advisers about the way coronavirus deaths are being calculated, suggesting the real numbers are actually lower — and a number of his senior aides share this view, according to sources with direct knowledge.”

They specifically reported concern about the CDC moving broadly to adopt New York’s method of classifying probable Covid-19 deaths as Covid-19 deaths.

Then on May 13, Erin Banco and Asawin Suebsaeng reported that the White House, including Dr. Deborah Birx, is pressuring the CDC to exclude not only probable Covid-19 deaths but also the deaths of some people who have tested positive for the infection:

The White House has pressed the CDC, in particular, to work with states to change how they count coronavirus deaths and report them back to the federal government, according to two officials with knowledge of those conversations. And Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the administration’s coronavirus task force, has urged CDC officials to exclude from coronavirus death-count reporting some of those individuals who either do not have confirmed lab results and are presumed positive or who have the virus and may not have died as a direct result of it, according to three senior administration officials.

This stems from an idea, long simmering in virus-skeptical circles, that public health officials are improperly classifying people who died “with” coronavirus as having died “of” coronavirus instead. The basic thinking is that a large share of the dead are older, a large share of Covid-19 cases are mild, and consequently, older people with mild Covid-19 infections may be dying for unrelated reasons. It’s a fair hypothesis to offer, but empirically it seems to be false — many more people are dying than can be accounted for by the official statistics.

Experts say the US is undercounting Covid deaths

Testifying before the Senate’s health committee on Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci expressed the view of most public health professionals that even with the attempted adjustment for probable cases, the official numbers still underestimate the true death toll.

The basic issue is that even the “probable” standard still requires an individualized assessment of symptoms, while broad statistical aggregates show that a lot of people are dying.

You see this by doing an excess deaths calculation. First, you take the number of people who would die in a typical month in the United States, and then you look at how many people actually died. When a Yale School of Public Health team did this for March 2020, they found about 15,400 excess deaths, of which only 8,128 were officially attributed to coronavirus.

Are all 7,000 of the unexplained deaths really Covid-19 cases? Probably not. Some excess mortality is due to people not getting medical treatment for other ailments. On the other hand, it’s likely fewer people will have died in traffic accidents than you see in a typical March. A group of economists calculated that several hundred air pollution deaths were avoided in April with fewer cars on the road.

At the same time, the death reporting infrastructure in the United States is very decentralized and a little clunky, so the strong tendency is for all death counts to be revised upward over time as more jurisdictions report. The big picture is that it’s going to take a long time and a fair amount of statistical work to get a really clear picture of how many people died of Covid-19 this year.

But it’s pretty clear that the CDC’s case counts are an underestimate, a product of a gap between the health care system’s ability to make individualized determinations about cause of death and the statistical reality that people are dying at an unusually high rate. Trump is pushing to make inaccurate numbers even less accurate, and it’s dangerous.

Bad data makes bad policy

It’s not unusual for politicians to want to spin away unflattering facts or for Trump to lie about something.

But as policymakers, business leaders, school officials, and individual citizens are making day-to-day decisions about how to cope with the pandemic, spreading bad information is risky. The more people underestimate how bad the situation is, the more likely they are to engage in excessively risky behavior and make the situation worse.

Trump is a shrewd person attuned to the political relevance of data. In early March, he infamously opined that he didn’t really want to see infected American citizens on cruise ships brought home for treatment because “I like the numbers where they are.” Bringing them on shore for treatment would create a worse statistical record, but also lead to a better outcome in the real world since they could get better treatment. In that case, Trump was persuaded to do the right thing and simply complained about it.

But the same basic tension has bedeviled American policy since at least February.

Stark warnings to the public could have saved lives but also risked spooking the stock market. Widespread testing would have made it easier to contain the outbreak but also would have meant much higher confirmed case numbers. Accurate death counts help people make smart decisions but also undermine the president’s push for a quick relaxation of restrictions on business.

Throughout his career in both business and politics, Trump has gotten far by relying on spin and bluster to paper over problems of substance. And while this seems unlikely to be the best way to cope with the pandemic, it’s something he’s good at and there’s at least an outside chance he could make it work for himself politically. But a strategy focused on juking the stats is overwhelmingly likely to end with more real-world deaths than necessary.

---

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Donald Trump has nominated a former chemistry industry executive to the top role protecting consumers—yeah, right—and now we find out that this very same person also played a role in blocking CDC guidelines on reopening safely. Sen. Maria Cantwell, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, is asking questions about the role Nancy Beck played in keeping those guidelines from the public, the Associated Press reports.

Beck, the nominee for head of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, is currently in the White House on detail for the Office of Management and Budget, and in that role, she was the point person between the White House and CDC as officials at the latter tried to get the reopening guidelines approved, only to be told they’d “never see the light of day.”

The Associated Press has obtained emails showing that as the CDC’s chief of staff pressed to have the guidelines reviewed and approved, Beck responded repeatedly stalling, while a colleague responded to say that the White House Principal’s Committee had “given strict and explicit direction that these documents are not yet cleared and cannot go out as of right now—this includes related press statements or other communications that may preview content or timing of guidances.”

Cantwell wrote a letter suggesting that the incident raised “serious questions about whether you believe in preserving and respecting the scientific and professional integrity of scientists and health professionals that work at agencies like the CDC and the CPSC.”

It’s nothing more than you’d expect from someone who previously lobbied against protecting people from toxins if those toxins were profitable to the chemicals industry, then went to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, where she worked to weaken or block Obama-era protections on things like asbestos.