James.galbraith

On Fox News Sunday, Donald Trump promised his administration was putting together a comprehensive report on the coronavirus that clearly has a foregone conclusion: It's all China's fault.

“We’re going to be giving a very strong report as to exactly what we think happened,” Trump said during a virtual town hall. “And I think it will be very conclusive.”

Of course, Trump has already sent the U.S. intelligence community on a hunt to find out whether China initially hid information about an emerging outbreak. And last week, Trump told reporters he had seen evidence the coronavirus originated at a lab in Wuhan, China, though Trump immediately declined to detail any of that evidence. But whatever evidence Trump has fantasized seeing, it didn't come from U.S. intelligence services.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a clarifying statement following Trump's fabrication noting it agreed with scientific consensus that the virus was neither manmade nor genetically modified. But the statement left open the possibility that the outbreak was the result of an "accident," saying it was continuing to investigate the matter. The scientific consensus continues to be that the coronavirus most likely spread through an accidental transmission from animals to humans. 

Deprived of the conspiracy theory that China intentionally made the  virus, Trump embraced a position that was more in line with the statement from his own intelligence community. 

“My opinion is they made a mistake. They tried to cover it, they tried to put it out. It’s like a fire,” Trump said Sunday. “You know, it’s really like trying to put out a fire. They couldn’t put out the fire.”

Also on Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continued his series of cringeworthy TV appearances in support of whatever new snake oil Trump is selling. On ABC's This Week, Pompeo said "the best experts so far" seem to think the coronavirus was manmade. After journalist Martha Raddatz clarified that U.S. intelligence officials have disavowed that theory, Pompeo turned on a dime instantly, saying he instead concurred the intelligence assessment the virus was not manmade—thereby completely contradicting what he had said just seconds earlier.

Raddatz: "Your office of the DNI says the scientific consensus was not manmade or genetically modified."

Pompeo: "That's right, I agree with that."

Oh. When Raddatz asked him to clarify which of his two selves was correct, Pompeo dodged, simply getting back to what mattered—blaming China. 

"Here's what's important—the Chinese Communist Party had the opportunity to prevent all the calamity that has befallen the world," Pompeo said.

So after Trump spent late 2019 and early 2020 assuring Americans that China was doing a good job with the outbreak and had everything very well handled, suddenly China is the super villain. And apparently Trump had absolutely no agency in helping to prevent the calamity that has befallen the U.S. while he was piddling around praising China's initial handling of the burgeoning epidemic—even as his own intelligence officials warned him repeatedly about the impending crisis.

Trump officials may as well be jingling a set of keys in front of America while pointing at China. In fact, a report is obviously forthcoming and no matter what it actually concludes, Trump and his minions will be laying the entirety of the blame at China's doorstep. You can count on that.

Watch this Pompeo appearance. It's really special.

Trump speaks with anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum during Fox News’s town hall event inside the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday. | Oliver Contreras-Pool/Getty Images

Trump’s Fox News town hall showed how he keeps revising the death toll forecast upward — even as he pushes for businesses to reopen.

President Donald Trump’s “America Together: Returning to Work” Fox News town hall event was a remarkably dishonest affair, replete with lies about topics ranging from the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine on Covid-19 to the trajectory of new coronavirus cases in the country to how tariffs work. At one point, Trump whined that he’s treated worse than Abraham Lincoln — a president who was assassinated.

But one moment of unusual honesty stood out.

With the US coronavirus death toll approaching 70,000 as of May 4 — a grim milestone significantly beyond the “50 or 60,000” number that Trump said the country was “going toward” on April 20 — Trump revised his estimate upward. And he acknowledged he was doing so.

“I used to say 65,000. Now I’m saying 80 or 90, and it goes up and it goes up rapidly. But it’s still going to be, no matter how you look at it, at the very lower end of the plane if we did the shutdown,” Trump said, alluding to the 100,000-to-200,000 death estimate cited in late March by public health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

While it’s good that Trump is making an effort to level with the American people, 80,000 deaths is an extremely optimistic projection. Sunday saw the fewest single-day coronavirus deaths reported in the country in about a month, but prior to that, the number of daily deaths in the US had plateaued at around 2,000. Even at a reduced rate, the country would likely pass the 80,000-deaths mark this month.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that instead of deaths declining, the Trump administration is actually projecting “a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1” — a number significantly higher than the 1,700-2,000 deaths reported per day from Covid-19 over the past week or so.

Deaths can be a lagging indicator, but there’s little reason to believe the trajectory of new cases will bend down anytime soon. As I detailed on Sunday, despite Trump and others pushing for states to reopen businesses, when hardest-hit New York state is taken out of the equation, the national trajectory of new daily coronavirus cases shows an upward trend, and things are likely to get worse as states relax stay-at-home orders and businesses reopen.

It’s this reality that led Trump to say during the town hall, “We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80, to 100,000 people. That’s a horrible thing.”

Trump’s new death toll estimate is sobering — and is a stark departure from how he once framed the coronavirus

While’s Trump’s comments on Sunday are more realistic than much of what he’s said about the coronavirus, they represent a dramatic departure from what he was saying during the crucial period of February and early March when the virus was spreading largely undetected, in part because of his government’s failure to quickly devise an effective and widely available coronavirus test.

On February 26, for instance, Trump noted that there were only 15 known cases of Covid-19 in the country and claimed that “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” Two days later, he said, “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” As of May 4, there are more than 1.2 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the country, according to the Johns Hopkins tracker.

As recently as March 9, Trump posted a tweet suggesting that the measures taken by state governments to shut down economic activity in the hope of slowing the spread of the virus wouldn’t be necessary because tens of thousands of people die from the flu each year (including more than 30,000 in the 2018-19 season), yet with the flu, “[n]othing is shut down, life & the economy go on.”

During a press conference four days later, Trump compared his government’s handling of the coronavirus favorably with that of the Obama administration’s response to H1N1. “Interestingly, if you go back — please — if you go back to the swine flu, it was nothing like this,” he said. “They didn’t do testing like this. And actually, they lost approximately 14,000 people. And they didn’t do the testing. They started thinking about testing when it was far too late.”

Trump’s claim about the number of Americans who died from H1N1 in 2009 and 2010 is false. A CDC study conducted years after the fact found that about 12,500 died. And ProPublica recently detailed how the Obama administration presided over the CDC’s development of an H1N1 test that became available for use just two weeks after the first case was detected.

Trump, by contrast, oversaw a botched CDC test-development process that put the US behind the curve when it comes to detecting the spread of the coronavirus. He’s absurdly tried in recent weeks to pin blame for these testing failures on Obama.

Trump has doubled the projected death toll over two weeks

While the death toll goalposts have shifted dramatically since the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, they’ve moved noticeably in recent weeks as well. Since early April, when the numbers of per-day US coronavirus deaths began to exceed 1,000, Trump has gradually ramped up the projected death toll numbers.

On April 17, Trump said he expected “around 60,000, maybe 65,000” American deaths from the coronavirus. Ten days later, he cited 70,000 as a top-end projection. Last Friday, Trump moved the goalposts by saying “hopefully we are going to come in below that 100,000 lives lost.”

On Sunday, Trump revised that number yet again. Praising his own government’s response, he said, “That’s one of the reasons we’re successful, if you call losing 80 or 90,000 people successful.”

This changing perspective of what counts as successful — despite “success” entailing a massive loss of life — suggests the president would be willing to proclaim a number even greater than 100,000 a success, since such a figure would be “at the very lower end” of the 100,000-to-200,000 range identified in March by Fauci.

Trump also claimed he’s responded well because he’s saved “hundreds of thousands of lives.” But his baseline for this claim is a death projection based on a scenario in which he literally did nothing to slow the spread of coronavirus. In that scenario, experts estimated as many as 2.2 million Americans would die.

As Trump was declaring victory and congratulating himself, during an appearance on the latest Fox News Sunday, Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House’s coronavirus task force, gave a different assessment of the deaths to come, one that contradicted the president. She claimed that “our projections have always been between 100,000 and 240,000” deaths.

As recently as last Friday, however, Trump was expressing hope that the American death toll would come in under that number. And hopefully it does. But as the administration continues to struggle in its response, the goalposts continue to move.

---

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.

The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group of Republicans that includes George Conway—the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway—Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, and others, has a new ad out and it’s brutal. And spot-on:

“Mourning in America” is a play on the famous "Morning in America" campaign from then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1984. So doubly brutal. 

Kristin Lunz Trujillo, University of Minnesota and Matt Motta, Oklahoma State University

The availability of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus will likely play a key role in determining when Americans can return to life as usual. Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on April 30 announced that a vaccine could even be available by January 2021.

Whether a vaccine can end this pandemic successfully, however, depends on more than its effectiveness at providing immunity against the virus, or how quickly it can be produced in mass quantities. Americans also must choose to receive the vaccine.

According to some estimates, 50% to 70% of Americans would need to develop immunity to COVID-19 – either naturally, or via a vaccine – in order to thwart the spread of the virus. If these estimates are correct, that could mean that nearly twice as many Americans would need to elect to receive a COVID-19 vaccine than those who currently opt to be vaccinated against seasonal influenza. Just 37% of American adults did so in 2017-2018, even in the midst of a historically severe flu season.

Making matters more complicated is the possibility that people who hold skeptical views about vaccine safety – sometimes referred to as “anti-vaxxers” – will not opt to receive the coronavirus vaccine. According to some estimates, about one fifth to two fifths of Americans express reservations about vaccine safety. If most of these individuals forego receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, they could potentially jeopardize the recovery process.

One of us is a doctoral candidate, and the other is a professor, who both study vaccine resistance. We conducted a study, which is currently undergoing peer review, where we estimate the number of Americans who report being willing to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, once it becomes available. We also investigate the reasons some Americans might refuse the vaccine.

We found that about one fifth of Americans, and more than half of people who hold skeptical views toward vaccine safety, may be unwilling to pursue vaccination. Although most Americans do plan to get vaccinated, non-compliance rates may be high enough to pose a threat to collective immunity.

Is coronavirus changing minds about vaccine safety?

On the one hand, a pandemic may be encouraging anti-vaxxers to change their minds. One reason so many Americans doubt vaccine safety is due to complacency – the idea that, because high rates of vaccine compliance have kept us safe from diseases that once reached epidemic proportions in the U.S., segments of the population can hold anti-vaccine views without endangering public health.

Consistent with this view, research finds that when people are concerned that once nearly eradicated diseases might re-emerge to reach epidemic levels, people are more likely to trust recommendations from public health experts. Additionally,cross-national survey research suggests that people who live in parts of the world where the threat of epidemics are more likely tend to hold more positive views toward vaccines than the rest of the world.

Studies based on in-depth interviews with parents further suggest that parents who chose not to vaccinate their children are often willing to accept treatments for children with life-threatening illnesses.

On the other hand, however, it could be the case that anti-vaxxers remain suspicious of a COVID-19 vaccine, when it becomes available. Prominent anti-vaccine websites have already begun circulating misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine – such as the idea that a vaccine has existed for years and has been kept from public consumption. Additionally, recent research suggests that anti-vaccine views are tied to deeply held psychological and moral aversions to inoculation, implying that attitudes may be difficult to change.

What do anti-vaxxers say now?

We set out to investigate this important question. In a demographically representative survey of 493 U.S. adults conducted on April 15, 2020, we investigated whether people who hold skeptical views toward vaccine safety plan to receive a vaccine against COVID-19.

Specifically, we asked respondents whether they would be willing to get vaccinated against COVID-19 once a vaccine becomes available. Nearly a quarter (23%) of respondents said that they would not.

Additionally, and consistent with the view that even a global pandemic may not persuade anti-vaxxers to get vaccinated, we find that 62% of people who are skeptical of vaccines said that they will forego COVID-19 vaccination.

To assess this, we measured vaccine skepticism by asking respondents three questions about whether they find vaccines to be safe, effective, and/or important – which is how vaccine skepticism is typically measured. Respondents indicated whether they thought each characteristic described vaccines “quite a bit,” “a moderate amount,” “a little bit,” or “not at all.” We then averaged the score across the three to create a scale of vaccine skepticism.

Nearly one-fifth (19%) of respondents were more vaccine skeptical than not. Among vaccine skeptics, 62% stated that they would not get vaccinated against COVID-19. By contrast, just 15% of those more supportive of vaccines than skeptical said that they would not get the COVID-19 vaccine.

We also asked respondents if they self-identified as anti-vaxxers, and nearly 16% said they did. For those that identified as anti-vaxxers, 44% said they would not vaccinate against COVID-19, compared to 19% of people who did not identify as anti-vaxxers.

A threat to collective immunity?

We believe that these findings, although preliminary, suggest that many people who hold anti-vaccine beliefs may jeopardize the effectiveness of a COVID-19 vaccine once it’s available, due to issues of non-compliance. Furthermore, it appears that anti-vaccine sentiment is at least as widespread as it was before the pandemic began.

We caution that a drawback of this study is that it doesn’t directly measure changes in vaccine sentiment over time. However, the levels of anti-vaccine sentiment found in this data are comparable to similar levels of anti-vaccine sentiment in the American public before the pandemic, according to previousstudies. Tracking public attitudes toward a COVID-19 vaccine can help public health agencies better understand who plans to receive the vaccine, and why some people might choose to refuse it.

[Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.]

Kristin Lunz Trujillo, PhD Candidate in Political Science, University of Minnesota and Matt Motta, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Oklahoma State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Study Suggests Majority of ‘Anti-Vaxxers’ Plan to Refuse COVID-19 Vaccine, and That Could be a Big Problem for the Rest of Us appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Donald Trump appeared at a FOX News town hall that some characterized as a campaign event on Sunday night, and lied about multiple topics, notable, previous administrations’ response to the AIDS crisis, coronavirus travel restrictions, what Fauci said about the threat of the virus, an apology from Joe Biden, false claims about hydroxychloroquine, trade with China, Hunter Biden, and the U.S. contribution to NATO. CNN fact checked him.

Politico reports: “Trump said he could unite the country by winning against the coronavirus, which has killed more than 67,000 people in the U.S. and put 30 million Americans out of work in the past six weeks despite Congress’ passage of trillions of dollars in stimulus funds. … In terms of death, Trump added, the U.S. is ‘at the lowest level predicted, and we may not hit that,’ though America has already surpassed that level: Trump previously said the low end of the death toll would be between 50,000 and 60,000, and his prediction as of Sunday ranged from 75,000 to 100,000.”

Of his coronavirus response, Trump clucked, “That’s one of the reasons we’re successful, if you call losing 80 or 90,000 people successful.”

Replied Bret Baier: “That number has changed Mr. President. You said 50-60…”

Said Trump: “It’s going up! I used to say 65k and now I’m saying 80 or 90 and it goes up and it goes up rapidly. But it’s still going to be, no matter how you look at it, at the lower end of the plane if we did the shutdown.”

Trump: That’s one of the reasons we’re successful, if you call losing 80k-90k people successful
Bret: That number has changed Mr. President. You said 60
Trump: I used to say 65k and now I’m saying 80 or 90 and it goes up and it goes up rapidly pic.twitter.com/v4FbbygF5Q

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) May 3, 2020

Trump also said he was treated worse than Lincoln: “I am greeted with a hostile press, the likes of which no president has ever seen. The closest was that gentleman right up there (pointing at Lincoln). They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse. You see those [coronavirus] press conferences, they come at me with questions that are disgraceful. Their manner of presentation and their words. And I feel that if I was kind to them, I would be walked off the stage. They come at you with the most horrible, horrendous biased questions – and you see it 94 or 95 percent of the press is hostile.”

At the Lincoln Memorial, Trump says he's being treated worse than Lincoln. pic.twitter.com/psZwWRE6WD

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) May 4, 2020

The post Trump on COVID-19 Response: ‘We’re Successful, if You Call Losing 80 or 90,000 People Successful’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

boomf

With coronavirus-related deaths in Texas hitting all time highs, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) appeared on FOX News Sunday morning to rail about …. Hollywood “kowtowing” to the Chinese government.

Host Maria Bartiromo asked Cruz about a piece of legislation he’s sponsoring called the Script Act: “[Chinese officials] have really bullied Hollywood and Hollywood producers roll over about it. You’ve mentioned a couple of films before Top Gun, Bohemian Rhapsody.”

“It really is tragic that Hollywood has been willing, over and over again, to kowtow to the Chinese communists and let the Chinese government censor American movies,” Cruz agreed. Referencing Top Gun, Cruz added that “we’re saying Maverick is afraid of the damn Chinese communists.”

“And how about Bohemian Rhapsody!” Bartiromo interjected. “The Chinese communist government wanted them to edit out part when [Freddie] was gay? How do you tell the story of Bohemian Rhapsody and not say that Freddie was gay?”

“You don’t,” Cruz frothed. “But Hollywood was more than happy to edit the scene out. They did it because the Chinese government didn’t want to acknowledge that Freddy Mercury was homosexual. Look, that’s a huge part of the story! The problem is Hollywood is more interested in making millions of dollars from the Chinese market than they are in free speech, than they are in artistic integrity. What the Script Act says is if you want access to the Pentagon, you can’t let the Chinese censor their movies.”

The post Ted Cruz Rails at Hollywood for Taking Gay Stuff Out of Movies for the Chinese: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Millions of pounds of fresh produce have been dumped or allowed to rot in open fields, even as hundreds of thousands of Americans have been lining up at food banks, and even as farmers begged Trump’s Department of Agriculture (USDA) to initiate emergency purchasing and distribution actions. As a result, both the farmers and the struggling American families they could be feeding during this COVID-19 pandemic are suffering, thanks to USDA’s mismanagement and disregard.  

Helena Bottemiller Evitch, writing for Politico, has a detailed report providing the latest reminder of how the administration’s incompetence during this crisis has become so glaringly visible.

While other federal agencies quickly adapted their programs to the coronavirus crisis, the Agriculture Department took more than a month to make its first significant move to buy up surplus fruits and vegetables — despite repeated entreaties.

With the near-total shuttering of restaurants due to social distancing orders now in place in nearly every state (as urged by the administration itself in response to the COVID-19 pandemic), an enormous glut of food previously intended for restaurants and caterers—and the wholesalers that supply them—appeared almost immediately. In March, Bottemiller Evitch writes, as the crisis became almost immediately apparent, farmers, produce groups, congressional representatives, and state legislators from agricultural districts contacted the Department of Agriculture headed by the Trump-appointed George Ervin “Sonny” Perdue, asking him to use his agency’s authority to coordinate an effort to involve farmers in the distribution of this unneeded surplus.

“There is no reason these high-quality, nutritious, farmer-grown products should be left in facilities to rot when there are so many American families who are suddenly faced with food insecurity,” the groups wrote to Perdue. “These growers and companies are already donating to food banks and others in need and will continue ... but they are also facing their own economic crises.”

Their request was ignored for almost a month. In fact, there still has been no official response by Perdue to this request in the midst of the most acute demand for food facing this country since the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, lines of cars literally extending for miles began forming at food banks across the country as demand for food distributions rose by 70%, fueled by a sudden increase in Americans trying to cope with massive job losses. Late last week, Perdue’s USDA finally announced a program to buy up some surplus food, but it will take upwards of another month to get that food to the food banks and pantries that needed it weeks ago. By now most of the produce that had been wasting away in fields or in packed silos for a month has completely rotted. It’s almost as if no one at the USDA had ever bought vegetables at the grocery store. Hint: They don’t last a month.

According to the Politico article, about 40% of the nation’s fresh produce is dedicated to the food service industry. In other words, had the USDA bothered to act promptly as this crisis swept through that industry, 40% of our entire agricultural production would have been available, at least in theory, to supply these food banks that are now being overwhelmed. Individual states such as New York and California initiated some attempts to distribute this surplus food, but simply did not have the resources to do it. A federal response was imperative, and of course, it has failed.

Farm owners interviewed by Evitch for the article are furious with the USDA because when it finally did choose to act, it imposed a strict payment cap per specific commodity that grossly undercut the farmers’ own costs in producing many of these crops. So the system now being set up too late by USDA not only wasted millions of pounds of produce; in most cases it doesn’t come close to compensating farmers for their own outlays, disincentivizing them to keep growing and shipping the food to food banks.

As Bottemiller Evitch summarizes, the amount of food now being wasted is mind-boggling.

The scale of produce waste is staggering. Farmers in Florida, which provides much of the fresh produce to the eastern half of the U.S. during the winter and spring, left about 75 percent of the lettuce crop unharvested, along with significant portions of the state’s sweet corn, cabbage and squash. Up to 250 million pounds of tomatoes could end up left in the fields, according to the Florida Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services. Florida officials estimate produce growers there have taken a half a billion dollar hit. In California, the industry is projected to lose more than $1 billion per month.

As for the hungry Americans lined up to receive the meager provisions made available, they—as well as the food banks themselves—will see little if any of the food surplus now being wasted for at least another month, and probably much longer. The USDA’s newest “plan” is to spend $100 million on produce and $100 million on cooked meat and dairy products to create “variety boxes” for America’s food-insecure population of 54 million (including 18 million children), the number of Americans projected by Feeding America likely to be lacking the means to pay for food due to the pandemic. Needless to say, the amount announced by USDA doesn’t even come close to what will be necessary to keep these Americans from going hungry. 

And, as typical of this administration’s federal response  to the pandemic, none of the logistics on how to actually get these packages to needy Americans have been worked out. Politico interviewed Tony DiMare, a produce grower in Florida, who called the plan “a joke” and listed several of the logistical problems with creating such “variety boxes.”

It’s not clear how many companies are set up to pack mixed varieties of produce into boxes. What happens to highly specialized growers? If a business only grows tomatoes, will it have to go find other vegetables for the box, or will everyone sell to a third party?

If the administration’s nonresponse to the public health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic is any indicator, any plan hatched by Trump’s federal agencies like USDA is already predestined to fail. By now there is simply the lack of brainpower and will at these federal agencies, all of which, including USDA, have been hollowed out and replaced by Trump loyalists with no managerial experience and little regard for the agencies they are heading. The fact that Sonny Perdue’s USDA took over a month to respond to a crisis that his own agency should clearly have foreseen and prepared for is the best evidence of that.

It’s also notable that practically every official statement—including tweets supposedly from Perdue himself—by the Department of Agriculture includes effusive, apparently mandatory praise of Donald Trump’s leadership. Perdue’s response to the Politico article is typical: “This is a challenging time for many Americans, but it is reassuring to see President Trump and our fellow Americans stepping up to the challenges facing us to make sure kids and those facing hunger are fed.”

In the meantime, the produce continues to rot, the milk continues to be dumped, and tens of thousands of Americans are being turned away by food banks that cannot possibly cope with this crisis without assistance and leadership from a competent federal government.

Feeding America is the largest organization of food banks in the country. 

Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara appeared on FOX News’ Justice with Judge Jeanine on Saturday to discuss the sexual assault charges against Joe Biden.

Ignoring the 25 sexual misconduct charges by various women against her father-in-law, Lara Trump told Judge Jeanine: “I would think if you were being accused of something and you were totally innocent you would go to any length possible, Judge, to try and clear your name including allowing people to open up files like that and make sure you’ve turned over every single leaf to prove your innocence!”

Does she… know her father-in-law has been accused of sexual assault by like 25 women and hasn’t offered a shred of evidence to refute anything? https://t.co/DBI9xDB5KT

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) May 3, 2020

The full interview:

.@LaraLeaTrump is here to react to the latest sexual assault allegation against presumptive democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden and says that Biden stating “I don’t remember” is not an acceptable defense. pic.twitter.com/eV5SFuGQR0

— Jeanine Pirro (@JudgeJeanine) May 3, 2020

Here’s what people on Twitter are saying:

Lara Trump does something no one thought was EVER possible. She left Judge Jeanine SPEECHLESS with her thoughts on allegations against Joe Biden.

Um, she does realize what her father-in-law said on a hot mic in 2005 for Access Hollywood, right? https://t.co/RRNW9en7gv

— Peter Morley (@morethanmySLE) May 3, 2020

THEN WHY WON'T TRUMP GIVE HIS DNA IN THE LAWSUIT?

WHY WON'T HE RELEASE HIS TAXES, APPRENTICE TAPES, ETC?

WHY DID HE REFUSE TO TURN OVER ANY RECORDS TO THE HOUSE AND SENATE FOR THE IMPEACHMENT HEARINGS?

SHUT THE HECK UP LARA GRIFTER https://t.co/TosCnBiQYp

— kj martin= (@martin_kj) May 3, 2020

Then why doesn't Trump give his DNA to E. Jean Caroll's laeyers? Hmmm? How about that @LaraLeaTrump @realDonaldTrump? Why won't The Godfather give up his DNA to prove he is innocent?

— CKhodir (@ch_khodir) May 3, 2020

Typical of the Trump family. @realDonaldTrump has done nothing to prove his innocence of the allegations made by 20 plus women. @LaraLeaTrump is as stupid as stupid can be. https://t.co/hNk6XKWjp5

— Bill Wiesbach (@bill_wiesbach) May 3, 2020

@LaraLeaTrump is totally aware of how hypocritical she is. That's why she'll never try to pull this crap on any other place but Faux news.

— Jsavy (@jsavy) May 3, 2020

Has she met her father in law? Just when you think Lara Trump can’t be more stupid than her husband Eric she proves us wrong. https://t.co/q2ykAsQ9ZR

— GlindaGW (@GlindaGW1) May 3, 2020

@JudgeJeanine @LaraLeaTrump pic.twitter.com/SxWbd4ucSn

— RDK (@KolodyRussell) May 3, 2020

The post Lara Trump Says Biden Should Open All Files to Prove He’s Innocent of Sexual Assault Charges, Neglects to Demand Her Father-In-Law Do the Same: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

"Job interviews are broken," according to a recent New York Times piece by an organizational psychologist at Wharton who argues that his profession has "over a century of evidence on why job interviews fail and how to fix them..." The first mistake is asking the wrong kinds of questions. Some questions are just too easy to fake. What's your greatest weakness? Even Michael Scott, the inept manager in the TV show "The Office," aced that one: "I work too hard. I care too much...." Brainteasers turn out to be useless for predicting job performance, but useful for identifying sadistic managers, who seem to enjoy stumping people. We're better off asking behavioral questions. Tell me about a time when... Past behavior can help us anticipate future behavior. But sometimes they're easy to game, especially for candidates with more experience... The second error is focusing on the wrong criteria. At banks and law firms, managers often favor people who went to the same school or share their love of lacrosse... A third problem: Job interviews favor the candidates who are the best talkers... My favorite antidote to faking is to focus less on what candidates say, and more on what they do. Invite them to showcase their skills by collecting a work sample -- a real piece of work that they produced... Credentials are overrated, and motivation is underrated. It doesn't matter how much experience people have if they lack the drive to think creatively, work collaboratively and keep on learning. The article's subheading argues "Instead of focusing on credentials, let's give candidates the chance to showcase their will and skill to learn." Any Slashdot readers want to share their own experiences? And are job interviews broken?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he saw a “light at the end of the tunnel” when it comes to COVID-19. Unfortunately, Trump has been doing a lot of trainspotting. His “game changing” drug hydroxychloroquine has proven to be not just ineffective, but genuinely harmful when given to patients suffering from COVID-19. Though Trump’s weeks of relentless drug pushing surely did raise the value of his personal investment into a company that makes the malaria treatment.

But while Trump’s drug is a deadly dud, there are some genuine hopes on the horizon. One of those is the anti-viral remdesivir, which has demonstrated an ability to shorten the recovery time for some patients in critical condition. Those trials have gone well enough that rules have been altered to make the drug the new standard of care for some COVID-19 patients. But remdesivir isn’t the only drug showing promise, and out there on a horizon that may be much less than 18 months away, vaccines are starting to take shape.

remdesivir

When it comes to remdesivir, Anthony Fauci has described the drug as bringing “a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.” And those results came in a genuine medium-scale, random trial — meaning they’re enormously more important than the kind of observational “we gave it to someone and they got better” anecdotal reports about many potential treatments.

Skies are not entirely blue for the anti-viral. First of all, it’s not clear that remdesivir reduces the fatality of COVID-19. In the study cited by Fauci, 8% of those taking the drug still died, meaning there was no statistically significant improvement over those not taking remdesivir. Also, shortly after Fauci stood up to praise the drug, British medical journal The Lancet published another study from China in which remdesivir “was not associated with a difference in time to clinical improvement” and the trial was stopped early because some patients reported adverse effects and researchers had difficulty getting additional volunteers (Note: This is the same report which was accidentally released in pre-print form, then withdrawn, by the World Health Organization, so if that detail sounds familiar you may really have heard it before).

Why such a difference in the two studies? Well, to start with there was a different in scale. The U.S. trial included giving remdesivir to over 1,000 patients, while the Chinese trial had 158. Also, the Chinese study had limited access to patients at different stages of the disease. Finally, there were differences in how and when the drug was administered, age-ranges of patients … there were a lot of differences. All of this could be settled by the results of a global study being conducted as part of the “Solidarity” trials for COVID-19 treatments arranged by the WHO. But in the meantime, the U.S. results are encouraging enough that the drug, originally developed as a treatment for Ebola, is likely to be widely used, at least in the United States.

leronlimab 

Behind remdesivir is another antiviral called leronlimab. The developer of the drug, CytoDyn, has reported ‘impressive results’ in a small trial of COVID-19 patients. Leronlamab is interesting for two big reasons. One, it attacks the mechanism through which viruses are able to reproduce themselves in human cells. Second, it can supposedly block the overwhelming immune response known as a “cytokine storm” that were thought to be responsible for most deaths during the 1918 flu epidemic and are known to be involved in some COVID-19 deaths. Being able to both fight the virus directly, and fight a potential cytokine storm is a big deal.

However, there are reasons Anthony Fauci isn’t yet standing up to make leronamib standard treatment. First, the results CytoDyn is promoting came from small-scale phase 1/2 trials in which only a total of around 25 patients have actually received the drug. Second, though the fact that leronamib was developed as an HIV treatment (and is being studied for use against metastatic breast cancer)  rather than for Ebola may make it seem like it might be available in greater quantities, but in fact it is still in clinical trials for use against HIV. Finally, there have so far been few published results from the initial trials that allows objective review of the results.

In any case, the results from early trials of leronamib have been exciting enough that researchers have already jumped into a number of larger trials. And, in part because clinical trials for leronamib with HIV have shown limited side effects, it’s being used on patients with mild or moderate symptoms in addition to those with severe forms of COVID-19. In other words, loronamib might turn out to be a treatment that is given broadly to anyone showing symptoms, rather than just those on the border of critical conditions. Big emphasis on might.

But there do seem to be indications that general antivirals, like remdesivir and leronamib, can have an impact on COVID-19. And that’s a very good thing. The way in which viruses work, by hijacking the mechanisms of the cells they invade, means that fighting them can be extremely difficult. There is a reason there are many, many more antibiotics and antivirals.

Not every antiviral has proven effective against COVID-19. Part of the WHO Soldarity trials includes testing HIV treatment lopinavir—ritonavir. These trials have so far not demonstrated any positive results. The same appears to be true when this interferon is added to the treatment.

Oxford Vaccine

When the first case of H1N1 flu was uncovered in a California hospital in April 2009, the CDC kicked into high gear. It developed a test within two weeks. It deployed 25% of the nation’s stockpile of protective gear and antivirals to the states before the first death. Two days after that first death, the FDA announced that it had already secured a facility to begin growing seed materials for a vaccine. That same day, test kits were available in every state. On October 14, the first 11 million doses of the vaccine became available.

That, people, is what a sound response by a fact-driven White House looks like.

In any case, since Donald Trump spent January, February, and early March splitting his time between the critical actives of golf and rallies, the schedule for when we might see a COVID-19 vaccine has often included the phrase “12 to 18 months.” And there have been a frightening number of articles, not all of them clickbait, indicating that such a vaccine may never be available (though really … such articles are 98% clickbait).

So the news that Oxford University researchers had completed animal trials of a potential vaccine and were moving on to a large scale trial in humans was very (x10) exciting. And when some of those researchers indicated that the vaccine might be ready as soon as September, it became an announcement that generated a worldwide sigh of enormous relief.

The reason Oxford has a lead is that it was already involved in coronavirus research and had already done some preliminary testing on a delivery mechanism showing that it could make coronavirus vaccines safely. By grabbing genetic components of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and plugging them into their existing vaccine, the Oxford team took advantage of that research lead and convinced the British government to begin a trial that will involve over 6,000 people by the end of May. That’s a large enough group that it should be a good test of both the vaccine’s effectiveness and its safety.

In fact, the biggest obstacle to the test is that researchers are not allowed, for very good reasons, to expose people to the virus on purpose. So they have to wait for their volunteers to go out there and mingle with the virus-laden public, in hopes that some of them should get sick, but don’t. Some of the researchers have even expressed concern that social distancing in the U.K. may even be effective enough to interfere with the trial. Which … yes, we should hope social distancing is effective. Please, yes. But selfishly, please not effective enough that they can’t compile good results.

In any case, it seems that the U.K. government may launch into the kind of pre-results vaccine manufacturing that the U.S. did in 2009, which could make the first round of doses available in September. It’s unlikely that the first batch would wash up on this side of the Atlantic, but any effective vaccine is a win and, assuming everything goes well, the U.S. could see benefits from this study before year’s end.

Chinese Vaccines

The Oxford news was exciting, but it’s far from the only team making progress toward a COVID-19 vaccine. Chinese company SinoVac has also reported that their vaccine generates a strong immune response in monkeys and protects them from COVID-19 infection. And in case you’re wondering a number of sad monkeys in the control groups, both at SinoVac and Oxford, did develop symptoms of disease. Monkeys have not developed the most severe symptoms of COVID-19 seen in humans, but this may be a factor of how many monkeys have been tested, which is still only in double digits.

In any case, the results would seem to put the Chinese company on par with the Oxford study … except that SinoVac doesn’t have the years of product safety research to leverage. Also, the number of monkeys in their test (< 10) really suggests that this team needs to do more animal research before moving on to human trials. 

The name SinoVac may not generate the kind of good vibes that come from hearing “Oxford.” But they are an experienced manufacturer of vaccines for both animals and people. That includes being one of the companies with vaccines against H5N1 “bird flu.” Even so, there is not yet the kind of large scale testing that the Oxford group is conducting and SinoVac has already raised warning flags about their ability to manufacture vaccines in the kind of quantities needed for COVID-19.

But SinoVac isn’t the only game in town. Or at least, not the only game in China. 

There are also vaccine trials underway from CanSino. If SinoVac wasn’t all that reassuring, the fact that CanSino is conducting its research in partnership with both the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology and the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences makes this one seem a little concerning, even for those not prone to leaping at every Evil China Virus conspiracy theory. And for folks outside the ranks of Chinese military medical researchers, the phase 1 trials of CanSino’s vaccine have been somewhat opaque. However, they apparently began work on this vaccine in January and announced plans in mid-March to proceed to phase 2 trials and to move forward rapidly. Hopefully, more details to come.

BioNTech / Pfizer Vaccine

Another vaccine that has recently gotten some positive attention is the one being developed by German firms Pfizer Pharmaceuticals and BioNTech. The reason this vaccine is getting special attention, including from the White House podium, is because it’s about to enter Phase 2 trials in the United States. 

It’s already had very limited human trials in Germany, with 12 patients receiving doses of the vaccine candidate last week. The next phase will look at 200 healthy adults in the U.S., with testing focusing on safety and appropriate dosage. To support these tests, the FDA has kicked out a quartet of Emergency Use Authorizations that allow the partners to bypass some of the safety stages usually included in vaccine trials.

And, as with the Oxford vaccine and that H1N1 vaccine back in 2009, Pfizer—the big manufacturing part of this partnership—seems prepared to being manufacturing vaccine even before all the results are in. They’re not promising that they’ll have doses as early as the Oxford team has indicated, but they could have hundreds of millions of doses available by the end of the year.

Again, that requires every possible thing to go right. There could be safety concerns. There could be negative responses. The vaccine may flat out be ineffective, or effective for only a subset of the population. For most drugs, the idea of some small amount of problems may be acceptable, but with a vaccine going out to a large part of the population, it really doesn’t take that high a percentage of problems to generate calls for a do-over.

In the best of all possible worlds, the BioNTech vaccine is available before the end of the year, and the Oxford vaccine is available. Because with any vaccine, there are sure to be reasons why it isn’t appropriate for some group.

Moderna Vaccine

And then there’s the American upstart in this arena. If you watch this March 2 White House roundtable on COVID-19, in which Trump meets with pharmaceutical executives, you can spot the moment in which he is profoundly uninterested in a whole line of big American pharmaceutical execs promising a vaccine in a year … maybe two. 

Then the CEO of biotech firm Moderna declares that he’s not just working on a vaccine, he’s already sent it to Anthony Fauci at the NIH. Game over. Thank you everyone for playing.

Of course, CEO Stephane Bancel then backs away a little as he mentions that it will take some time to get into phase two. And more time to get into phase three. And … basically, he’s laying out the same thing that all the other CEOs were saying when they talked about a year. But Bancel did it in a way that definitely caught Trump’s attention and turned Moderna into the go-to hope for a fast vaccine.

So, two months later, how is that going? Well, the vaccine did enter limited phase 1 human testing in late March, but since then very little has been released on how the trials are going. What has been released is announcements by Bancel that Moderna could begin production on vaccine in July and announcements that it has already licensed the vaccine to a European manufacturing partner. 

That July date makes it seem that Moderna, whose whole “encapsulated mRNA” vaccine represents a fundamentally different approach than some competitors, might even beat the Oxford crew to your local pharmacy, but the details are a little less exciting. Limited phase 2 trials are beginning in May. Moderna doesn’t expect to have large phase 3 trials—like the one Oxford now has underway—until an unspecified date in the fall.

Moderna could still get in under the wire with a 2020 vaccine. If they begin manufacturing in July, they could be ready to roll as soon as results are in on the Phase 3 trial, and considering the eagerness for an answer, it would not at all be surprising to see a big White House announcement that this U.S. firm was coming to market with the world’s salvation … say, sometime around Mid-October, a couple of weeks before the election.

Vacation Vaccine

Sorry, there are around 70 other vaccine candidates in some stage of development, but this isn’t a real thing. I just wanted to mention that, after being on this beat since January, I’m going to be away for a couple of weeks. Well … you know, not away, away. Not even away from my keyboard, because I’m hoping to use the time to finish a novel in progress. But away from Johns Hopkins, WorldOMeters, and CovidTracking. Away from fretting over the daily uselessness of the IHME model, and absolutely away from watching the daily indulgence at the White House.

So … see you soon, keep social distancing, and drop me a note if you want to chat about bees, bread, or the book. Take care.

President Trump at the White House on May 1. | Erin Schaff/Pool/Getty Images

Why Trump’s purge of US watchdogs is “a war on accountability.”

President Donald Trump’s purge of officials who question his leadership continues — this time targeting another watchdog, one who accurately described America’s dearth of medical supplies and tests as the country works to confront the coronavirus crisis.

Late on Friday, the Trump administration announced it had nominated Jason Weida — an assistant US attorney in Boston — for an inspector general position at the Department of Health and Human Services, one of the agencies tasked with responding to the country’s outbreak.

The problem is that position is already filled by Christi Grimm, who before the nomination had not publicly expressed a desire to step down as the department’s principal deputy inspector general.

So why the sudden change? The answer is easy enough to divine: her report released last month laid bare Trump’s feckless coronavirus response.

Why Grimm’s coronavirus report made Trump so angry

In late March, Grimm surveyed over 300 hospitals in nearly 50 states and territories to better understand what they faced as an influx of coronavirus patients flooded their facilities. What she found was “their most significant challenges centered on testing and caring for patients with COVID-19 and keeping staff safe. Hospitals said that severe shortages of testing supplies and extended waits for test results limited hospitals’ ability to monitor the health of patients and staff.”

“They also reported that widespread shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) put staff and patients at risk,” she also wrote. “In addition, hospitals said that they were not always able to maintain adequate staffing levels or to offer staff adequate support.”

While the report didn’t directly question the federal government’s response, it made clear hospitals still had serious concerns about their ability to care for patients many weeks after the first coronavirus case was detected in the US.

Trump was asked about this report during an April 6 press conference with the government’s coronavirus task force. He fumed at the conclusions.

“It’s just wrong. Did I hear the word ‘inspector general’? Really? It’s wrong. And they’ll talk to you about it. It’s wrong,” he asserted. And then he wanted to know exactly who wrote the report. “Where did he come from — the inspector general? What’s his name? ... No, what’s his name? What’s his name? ... If you find me his name, I’d appreciate it.”

When it became clear to him that Grimm served in the Obama administration, he derided the report as “a typical fake-news deal.” But, Grimm is a career official who’s been in government since the Clinton administration and has worked for two Democrats and two Republicans, including Trump. She took over her current role as acting inspector general after the last person in that position left.

None of that information seemed to sink in for Trump, as just one day later he assailed Grimm on Twitter.

It’d be one thing if Trump’s ire was reserved only for Grimm and her eventual dismissal was a one-off thing — as disturbing as such a one-off would be. But this is clearly a pattern for the president, one that’s a troubling sign about the health of good governance in America.

Ethics experts call Trump’s recent staffing changes “a war on accountability”

In early April, Trump went on a firing rampage.

He pushed out Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, the oversight official responsible for forwarding the Ukraine whistleblower’s report to Congress and triggering Trump’s impeachment. Days later, after attacking Grimm, news broke that Trump removed another inspector general, Glenn Fine, from his job overseeing coronavirus relief spending — abruptly and without explanation.

Vox’s Zack Beauchamp last month described what all of this really meant:

Atkinson’s firing was not merely revenge for impeachment. It was a warning that, during the coronavirus crisis, Trump would not tolerate similarly vigorous oversight of his conduct. Official watchdogs are on notice: Doing your job too effectively could be career suicide.

This is a war on the very concept of oversight — and a sign that the United States is not immune from a global trend of creeping coronavirus authoritarianism.

This was perhaps the logical end point after Trump pressured Ukraine into opening investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden’s family last year without an indictment from the Senate. The president has surely concluded he can now get away with anything, including punishing those who dare point out his presidency is anything other than a roaring success.

That, experts note, is scary. “This is a war on accountability,” tweeted Walter Shaub, the former White House ethics chief who stepped down over Trump’s actions, “and [it] won’t end until Trump destroys every last institutional safeguard against corruption.”

Based on Trump’s decision to replace Grimm, it’s a war the president seems to be winning.

---

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.

Having a sheriff who believes he himself—not the federal government, not the state—is the supreme law of the land in the county where you reside is probably always going to present problems for people who understand basic civics.

For the residents of Grant County, Oregon—where the biggest city, John Day, is home to some 1,700 people, and massive swaths of its land are under the administration of the federal government—that’s been an ongoing situation for the past four years, ever since their sheriff, Glenn Palmer, became a central player in the drama unfolding in neighboring Harney County, where a band of “Patriots” led by Ammon Bundy had seized control of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

As an Oregon Public Broadcasting report explored this week, Palmer’s continuing rule of the county has become a nightmare for anyone who dares oppose him politically, including a man named Gordon Larson, the former head of the Oregon State Patrol in the region and a fellow Republican—one who says he wants nothing to do with the sheriff’s political extremism.

For standing up to him, Palmer has made Larson pay. Anyone else who lives in the county—even dispatchers from the city of John Day police department—who has crossed him has tasted Palmer’s various forms of revenge.

Palmer came under investigation in 2016 for his role in the Malheur standoff. Due to his long history of involvement with the antigovernment “constitutional sheriff” movement—Palmer was “lawman of the year” in 2012 for Richard Mack’s Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, and made numerous speeches and appearances on CSPOA’s behalf in ensuing years—he was approached by leaders of the Malheur takeover about becoming involved, but he initially declined.

Mack’s organization—which has a long history of association with the Bundys—claims that the U.S. constitution grants sheriffs, and not federal or state officers, powers as the supreme law of the land. These powers include the ability to annul federal and state gun-control and land-use laws.

Despite rebuffing their initial plea, Palmer praised the occupiers as “patriots” in the local press, and met with some of them in a local café. He agreed to help organize a gathering of the Malheur militants, including leaders Ammon and Ryan Bundy and others, in the town of John Day (the county seat) on the evening of Jan. 26. It was as those people were en route to that gathering that afternoon that they were arrested by an FBI-led law-enforcement operation, and militant LaVoy Finicum was shot to death while resisting arrest.

Palmer’s role—or lack thereof—in that operation first raised attention to his behavior: The John Day city dispatcher handling Palmer’s radioed request for information about the Malheur arrests hesitated initially, because Palmer was considered “a security leak, not only by local law enforcement including his own staff, but by the Oregon State Police and the FBI.”

"I felt uncomfortable knowing that I had to relay vital and confidential information to someone who may not be trustworthy," the dispatch manager, Valerie Luttrell, later explained to her supervisor.

In fact, it shortly emerged that Oregon State Police had originally planned to make the arrest in Grant County, but moved the location of the planned traffic stop to Harney County to avoid dealing with Palmer.

Eventually, not only was Palmer cleared by the Department of Justice, he also was handily reelected sheriff, and his brother elected county commissioner. After the investigation opened, however, it emerged that Palmer had been using the power of deputization to create a private armed force comprised of his political supporters—and he gave them tremendous powers, including the ability to harass his enemies.

These “special deputies” were not officially cleared to receive secure law-enforcement information from the dispatch system, which caused a problem for John Day dispatchers. Sean Hart, a reporter for the local Blue Mountain Eagle, searched local records and found that Palmer had hired about 70 such “special deputies.”

Hart reported that public records showed Palmer had deputized seven people as deputies, seven as reserve, five as search and rescue, six as corrections, one as chaplain, nine as special deputies, three as land use deputies, 11 as public lands patrol, nine as public lands deputies, one as limited to concealed handgun license and 11 as a natural resource committee.

Gordon Larson, as OPB recounts, ran afoul of one of these “special deputies” while he was running for the county commission, against Palmer’s brother. Two of these “deputies” filed affidavits against his water rights, and Palmer himself accused Larson of timber theft. He lost by a wide margin.

At one time, the rural folk of Oregon were celebrated for their good common sense and their strong democratic values. In Grant County, at least, the bullies have taken over instead.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

At the beginning of April, Trump fired the Intelligence Community inspector general who followed the law by reporting the whistleblower report to the House Intelligence Committee. It was just a fraction of Trump’s targeting of truth-tellers and those deemed “insufficiently loyal” in government. But it was also part of something else — Trump’s ongoing purge of inspectors general that included not just replacing seven inspectors general at one time. There are currently 14 inspector general positions sitting empty, for half of these, Trump hasn’t even bothered to make a nomination. That includes the inspector general position at Health and Human Services, which has been vacant for a year.

But there has been an acting official in the HHS inspector general slot. That official is principal deputy inspector general Christi Grimm. In early April, Grimm issued a report on critical shortages in the healthcare system, including a lack of tests, lack of protective gear, and lack of ventilators. And this report has at last spurred Trump to move — to replace Grimm.

Trump responded to a reporter’s question about the report prepared by Grimm during an April 6 press conference. Asked about the report’s conclusion that there were shortages of critical materials at 300 major hospitals across the country, what followed was a remarkably telling exchange.

Trump: “It’s just wrong.  Did I hear the word ‘inspector general?’  Really?  It’s wrong.  And they’ll talk to you about it.  It’s wrong.

Reporter: “But this is your own government.”

Trump:  “Uh, it’s … well, where did he come from … the inspector general?  What’s his name?”

Reporter:  “It came from the inspector general report—“

Trump: “No, what’s his name?  What’s his name?”

Reporter: “I don’t know his name off of the top of my head.”

Trump: “Well, find me his name.  Let me know.  Okay?  If you find me his name, I’d appreciate it.”

Over three weeks ago, hydroxychloroquine was all the rage in MAGA world, despite flawed and scattered evidence about whether the drug could help cure coronavirus. Now there is another drug, remdesivir, with positive early scientific data.

Much of MAGA world wants little to do with it.

At first, it may seem like a head-scratching response. President Donald Trump’s base has been quick to trumpet any potential solutions to the coronavirus pandemic — especially those Trump himself promotes — regardless of the red flags from medical experts. But with remdesivir, it’s the Trump-boosting pundits who are raising the red flags, even as the president expresses optimism.

Indeed, the same segment of the right that claimed scientists and the media were deliberately downplaying hydroxychloroquine in order to hurt Trump’s standing are now the ones downplaying remdesivir. On Fox News, Laura Ingraham suggested that remdesivir, as a newer drug being produced by the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, could be unsafe and expensive. Those who initially helped raise the profile of hydroxychloroquine raised doubts about the remdesivir studies.

The unexpected reaction appears to stem from the differences in how the two drugs came into the public spotlight. Hydroxychloroquine bubbled up through the MAGA grassroots — little-known investors promoted it online, got on Fox News and suddenly the president was talking about it from the White House. Remdesivir’s progress came through a government-funded trial that had the blessing of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the bête noire of Trump hardliners who blame the government’s top infectious disease expert for undermining the president and causing unnecessary economic damage with his social-distancing guidelines.

Remdesivir’s connection to a pharmaceutical company also taps into suspicions on the right that corporate executives are trying to rake in huge profits from the coronavirus. Hydroxychloroquine, on the other hand, is already widely available in generic form.

These factors were likely enough to turn off people who had been using hydroxychloroquine as a political rallying cry, said David Rapp, a psychology professor at Northwestern University who studies how misinformation shapes beliefs and memory.

The hydroxychloroquine boosters, he said, “might find the alternative idea as not being pure, in the sense that it doesn't come from Trump. It's coming from other sources that they might not trust.”

The MAGA base’s suspicions about remdesivir began shortly after Fauci on Wednesday announced the results of a government-sponsored clinical trial that showed that the drug shortened recovery time for coronavirus patients, calling it a “clear-cut, positive” development in the fight against the coronavirus. Fauci also made clear that this is a first step; more research needs to be done into this and other potential treatments.

That night, Ingraham devoted a segment of her show that night arguing on behalf of hydroxychloroquine. Ingraham first suggested that remdesivir could present dangers, urging restraint until government regulators like the Food and Drug Administration could thoroughly review the treatment.

“It hasn’t been approved by the FDA,” she said. “They might do emergency authorization. Hydroxychloroquine was approved decades ago.”

The FDA — which Fauci does not run — in fact did move swiftly. On Friday it issued an emergency-use authorization to help patients get quicker access to remdesivir, the first antiviral to show promise against Covid-19 infection.

Ingraham added that remdesivir, as a new drug, could be expensive, whereas “hydroxychloroquine is obviously cheap and already readily available.” She then brought out a doctor who defended hydroxychloroquine as “safe” and expressed worries that remdesivir, originally developed to fight Ebola, could be dangerous.

The original promoters of hydroxychloroquine also chimed in with their concerns about remdesivir after Fauci’s announcement. James Todaro, a bitcoin investor who cobbled together a Google Doc pitching hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment that was widely circulated in conservative circles and caught the attention of Fox News, noted that several members on the government panel making treatment recommendations for coronavirus were affiliated with Gilead.

The controversial French doctor Didier Raoult, who was behind a disputed and scientifically flawed study about hydroxychloroquine’s benefits for coronavirus patients, was similarly dismissive of the remdesivir results.

“Two trials focused on remdesivir delivered their findings: one published in the Lancet, that concluded to an absence of clinical improvement, one another announced by Gilead then by Dr Fauci, that did not have any significative result concerning mortality,” Raoult tweeted.

Shiva Ayyudurai, a prominent proponent of the #FireFauci movement who advocates for unproven vitamin therapy to treat the coronavirus, claimed that presenting remdesivir as a “save-all, be-all cure” to coronavirus had the benefit of boosting Gilead’s stock.

“On the economic side, you have a situation where this is being moved in a fast track way and it is supporting their stock price,” he said in an interview. “On the health side, this is not about enhancing the immune health of the individual. It is a very, very short term solution.”

Officials, including Trump, have been careful to note that remdesivir is not a coronavirus cure-all. Trump on Friday called it “an important treatment for hospitalized coronavirus patients."

But the early success has come on the heels of several studies warning that hydroxychloroquine, or the related drug chloroquine, has little provable effect on treating coronavirus patients. One study in Brazil was halted after several patients began experiencing cardiac problems while on the drug, while an analysis of U.S. veterans’ hospitals suggested that patients who received hydroxychloroquine were more likely to die than those who did not. And earlier this week, the FDA published a warning that doctors should not prescribe either hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine to patients outside of a clinical trial.

To the remdesivir detractors, these developments were merely a sign that the elites were, once again, at work behind the scenes.

“Fauci loves insanely expensive drugs and hates cheap plentiful ones or any hint of preventative supplementation. You see how quickly he praised #remdesivir and has only scorn for #hydroxychroloquine?” tweeted commentator Bill Mitchell, who Trump has been retweeting this week.

Mitchell was initially one of the loudest voices on the right dismissing the coronavirus threat and has attacked Fauci in the past. His reasoning? Fauci is “a big pharma puppet.”

Fauci has been at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for decades. He receives a government salary and does not profit when a drug company makes money.

Rapp said that attacks in this vein have a clear, non-medical goal in mind.

“They're using rhetoric that allows them to not just think about which potential solutions might be useful for Covid, but also to push their political agenda,” he said, referencing the disease that develops from the coronavirus.

Another factor, he added, was that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine had entered the conversation first.

“From a psychological perspective, thinking about how memory works, the first things that people mention are the ones that people hold on to, and they stick around longest,” he said.

The best analogy, he said, could be found in the origins of the anti-vaccine movement, which continues to cite a widely-discredited medical study from the late 1990s. That study was so flawed that the journal that published it later retracted it — but it had lasting influence.

“Anti-vaxxers read something about autism being caused by vaccinations, and they won't let that go even though there've been refutations of the original claims,” he said. “That information has been floating out there and either it's become part of their argument, or it's become part of their identity, part of who they are, part of how they make claims.”

“Maybe,” he added, “hydroxy has a similar kind of effect on these particular audiences.”

Read 36 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday banned 1,500 models of military-style assault weapons in Canada, nearly two weeks after the deadliest mass shooting in the country's history.

Canadians are no longer allowed to buy, sell, use, transport or import those types of weapons, Trudeau said. Owners of those guns will have a two-year amnesty period to surrender the weapons, and Parliament will pass legislation to provide them with “fair compensation,” he said.

But gun owners also will have the option to have their weapons "grandfathered" under the new requirements, senior Canadian officials said. They did not provide more details on the buyback program or on grandfathering, which they said are still being worked out.

Officials advised owners not to surrender their firearms to police stations during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trudeau's announcement comes after nearly two dozen people were killed April 18 and 19 by a gunman in Nova Scotia, Canada's deadliest mass shooting since the 1989 murders of 14 women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. The Nova Scotia shooter reportedly obtained some of his weapons from the U.S., which has been beset by a series of mass shootings in recent years but has yet to enact significant changes to its national gun laws.

“Their families deserve more than thoughts and prayers," Trudeau said of those affected by last month's shooting. "Canadians deserve more than thoughts and prayers.”

The Nova Scotia shooter didn't have a gun license and thus possessed all of his weapons illegally, a fact Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer seized upon in blasting Trudeau's move.

"Taking firearms away from law-abiding citizens does nothing to stop dangerous criminals who obtain their guns illegally," Scheer said in a statement. “The reality is, the vast majority of gun crimes are committed with illegally obtained firearms. Nothing the Trudeau Liberals announced today addresses this problem."

Public Safety Minister Bill Blair said two of the long guns used by the Nova Scotia gunman are included on the prohibited list.

Liberals vowed in their campaign platform to ban "all military-style assault rifles, including the AR-15," and to institute a buyback program for those weapons while avoiding a long-gun registry — a controversial policy passed under a Liberal government in 1995 that was later scrapped by former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The ban got top billing in Trudeau's mandate letter outlining priorities for Blair, a former Toronto police chief.

Blair said the forthcoming legislation will include "red flag" laws to prohibit individuals considered too dangerous to own guns from obtaining them. It will also include an "evergreen" framework for weapons classification to ensure that any new firearms only enter the market if they're not a variant of a previously prohibited model, he said.

Canadians applying for a firearms license currently must undergo background checks and provide character references. Canada classifies weapons under three categories: prohibited, restricted and non-restricted. Friday's announcement instituted new limits on any firearm that exceeds a certain threshold of power and affects weapons previously classified as restricted or non-restricted.

The firearms now prohibited were chosen based on three characteristics: semiautomatic action with a large magazine capacity, modern design and wide availability in the Canadian market. Cabinet determined that the weapons in question are not suitable for hunting or sporting activities, which a senior official said was the test for today's decision.

"Assault-style" is still undefined for purposes of describing a firearm, the official said.

While the total number of weapons and owners affected by the ban is unknown, it includes approximately 105,000 restricted firearms owned by about 72,000 people, the senior official said, since that category was previously required to be registered.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police will reach out to the 2.1 million gun license holders in Canada, any of whom could own the affected firearms, the senior official said.

Thousands of foreign workers, many living overseas, are receiving stimulus checks designated for U.S. residents due to an unforeseen glitch that funneled taxpayer dollars to other countries, according to tax consultants and the recipients themselves.

College-age workers who spent time in the U.S. in the last two years — some of whom returned home long before the coronavirus pandemic — have been surprised to find $1,200 checks deposited into their bank accounts. And with no clear guidance on how to return it, they’re holding onto the money or racing to spend it before the Internal Revenue Service realizes the mistake.

The incorrect payments were likely distributed to thousands of foreigners in April, said Donna Kepley, president of the tax firm Arctic International who has spoken with dozens of clients over the past two weeks. The error stems from a common tax-filing blunder, particularly for those on F-1 student and J-1 exchange visas. These workers, studying at universities and working summer jobs, often turn to TurboTax and other e-filing systems without knowing that the systems are designed only for U.S. residents.

As a result, many temporary foreign workers each year file the wrong tax forms. The IRS rarely catches the error because nonimmigrant workers’ Social Security numbers have the same number of digits as those of U.S. citizens, and therefore appear to be identical, accountants say.

Usually, the error doesn’t much matter, but this year it’s causing the IRS to think certain foreign workers are eligible for one-time stimulus payments. The glitch affects both workers in the U.S. and those who recently left the country.

The IRS and TurboTax did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

There were 1.1 million foreign students in the U.S. last year, according to the Institute of International Education, and the government granted nearly 400,000 J-1 temporary visas. Accountants with expertise in nonresident taxes say the majority of these workers either don’t file or file incorrectly, and in recent days they’ve been flooded with calls about mistaken payments.

“We were contacted by a lot of our clients all of a sudden, on the one day when they started hitting their accounts or that the checks started going out, asking what to do,” Kepley said. “And so we had to try to figure out how to return it, which is not easy.”

Three student visa holders who spoke to POLITICO said they had received the payments this month but had been unable to contact the IRS. All of them were motivated to return the money out of fear they would be banned from receiving visas in the future — or worse, deported — if the government learned they had committed tax fraud.

“One day I just saw my account and I had 1,200 bucks without even requesting anything,” said a French citizen who completed a graduate program at University of Toledo in 2018. “I knew they were planning to give stimulus payments but I didn’t know when it was happening.”

The student left the U.S. in January 2019 and now lives in Zurich. After scouring online forums to see if others were having the same problem, the student learned that he had filed the wrong form — 1040 instead of 1040-NR — through TurboTax. The IRS, believing him to be a U.S. resident or citizen, deposited the money into his account on April 15.

The same week, the student said he called and emailed the IRS at least three times but never got through.

“I never tried to commit fraud or anything,” the student said. “I contacted the IRS to tell them that I’m not in the U.S. anymore and that I should not have received this stimulus check and I wanted to find a way to give the money back.”

“I don’t really want to use that money because it doesn’t really belong to me,” he added.

In an email, a University of Toledo spokesperson said the university recently gave additional information to students on how they could file an amended tax return to send back their stimulus checks.

The problem is common among universities. In a survey of more than 500 schools last week, 43 percent said they had students and scholars who believed they received a payment in error.

“There are so many people who aren’t getting the check who could use it, and so when you see people who weren’t intended it’s disconcerting,” said Enda Kelleher, vice president for Sprintax, the tax firm that conducted the survey.

The consequences of misfiling go beyond stimulus repayment. Nonimmigrant workers who claim to be residents also receive the $12,200 standard deduction. That prompts some students and workers to submit the wrong form intentionally, not understanding that it could jeopardize their immigration status and require them to pay penalties to the government.

“They don’t think they’ll necessarily ever be caught or they don’t think there’s really that big a problem,” said Kepley, the Arctic International president.

But many others were caught off guard. Robert Zheng, a student from China who recently graduated from University of Rochester in New York state, discovered $1,200 in his bank account last week, deposited after a friend told him that she had wrongly received the check. Zheng, who has a finance job in New York, said he combed the IRS website and online forums to find out how to return the check. But he still does not know how he will do it.

A student from New Zealand studying at a Pennsylvania university said she frantically called her bank when she realized she got the stimulus check to see if she could send it back — and was told, incorrectly, that she should just spend it.

Skeptical of the advice, she called the IRS but was directed to an automated line.

“I’m definitely worried that it’s either going to affect my status now or affect it if I ever try to apply for a different visa in the future,” the student said.

But for the time being, she and others who received wrong payments have little to do but wait.

“It’s in my savings account right now,” she added. “If it sits there for awhile at least I’ll get a couple dollars from it."

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Kayleigh McEnany during her first White House press briefing on Friday. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Kayleigh McEnany’s first press briefing got off to a promising start. It lasted all of 15 minutes.

Kayleigh McEnany’s first briefing as White House press secretary started off on a hopeful note — with a promise from her not to lie. That lasted for about all of 15 minutes.

“I will never lie to you. You have my word on that,” McEnany said early during the briefing, in response from a question from the Associated Press’s Jill Colvin.

It’s a standard question White House reporters ask new press secretaries, and one that is rarely, if ever, lived up to fully. But it took all of two questions for Trump’s fourth press secretary to break that promise.

McEnany’s first lie from the White House podium came in response to a question about comments President Donald Trump made earlier in the day characterizing Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden as “far more compelling” than the accusations made against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings. Asked to flesh out Trump’s thinking, McEnany characterized the Kavanaugh allegations as “verifiably false.”

“I think it was a grave miscarriage of justice with what happened with Justice Brett Kavanaugh. There’s no need for me to bring up the salacious, awful, and verifiably false allegations that were made against Justice Kavanaugh,” she said.

But that’s a lie. Instead of being “verifiably false,” multiple accusations against Kavanaugh were found to be credible during the course of an investigation conducted by the New York Times that was published last fall, roughly a year after his confirmation to the court.

That wasn’t the only lie McEnany told during her first briefing. Asked about newly released FBI notes regarding the investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn that Trump and White House officials have been hyping as evidence that Flynn was “set up,” McEneny misquoted what the documents say to make them sound more incriminating than they are.

“We have a handwritten FBI note that says, quote, we need to get Flynn to lie, quote, and get him fired,” she said.

But the notes don’t say that. All they reveal is that before a January 2017 interview with Flynn, one investigator wrote down, “What is our goal? Truth/admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” It’s important to keep in mind that at the time, the FBI had already gathered evidence that Flynn had broken the law. The notes do not indicate investigators went into the interview with the goal of manipulating Flynn into lying, as McEnany suggested.

There was more. Asked later why the public should find the sexual misconduct allegations against Trump from more than 20 women less credible than the one against Biden, McEnany said that “the president has swiftly denied all of these allegations that were raised four years ago.” While many of the allegations against Trump were made in 2016, E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of rape just last year.

McEnany then concluded the briefing by reiterating her lies about the Flynn notes.

If her first outing is any indication, McEnany may end up being less hostile with reporters than Sarah Sanders. She may be less gaffe-prone than Sean Spicer. She may be more available to the public than the recently departed Stephanie Grisham, who never held a press briefing, making Friday’s the first one held by a White House press secretary in more than a year.

But like her predecessors, McEnany will use the White House briefing room to tell lies — even right after she promises reporters she won’t.

---

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.

The most amazing fact about the entire Trump White House is not that they’re constantly wrong. Any deliberately ignorant, boneheaded ideologue can be wrong—just ask Louie Gohmert. Nope, what has set Team Trump apart from the very beginning is their inability to admit to being wrong about the smallest, most obvious thing. Ever. The phone call was perfect. The inauguration crowd was huge. Little things like transcripts and photos be damned.

Fast climbing the ranks of things that are wrong, undeniably wrong, fully documented wrong, obviously, on camera, in your face wrong … and yet still being inexplicably defended by people who just can’t let anything go, is Mike Pence’s face mask. Or rather, the fact that Mike Pence doesn’t apparently have a face mask. Four days after Pence offered himself up as the great white virus vector, his staff isn’t just finding new ways to justify the unjustifiable—they’re threatening to sue reporters for showing what Pence actually did.

These are the facts:

The Mayo Clinic informed Mike Pence that anyone coming to visit their facility needed to wear a mask. Not only was that information previously acknowledge by the Mayo staff (in a now deleted tweet), Pence himself didn’t deny it when the White House was in Excuse Round #1.

Everyone with Pence at the clinic was wearing a mask. The video of him strolling around exhaling his milk breath into everyone’s face is immediately striking expressly because everyone else is clearly following the rules, and Pence is so clearly not following the rules. 

Pence initial response when questioned about why he wasn’t wearing a mask wasn’t to say he didn’t know he needed to wear a mask—because it was just damn obvious that he knew he was supposed to be wearing a mask. Instead Pence claimed he didn’t wear a mask because he wanted to look healthcare workers “in the eye.” Which shows that Pence knew he should have been wearing a mask, but doesn’t know how to wear a mask. 

Pence then engaged the claim that he didn’t need to wear a mask because he gets tested for COVID-19 all the time. That’s maybe not the best thing to say in a nation where most healthcare workers, nursing home workers, and people who are displaying symptoms still can’t get tested. It also offers absolutely no protection to people who could be infected by Pence between those regular tests.

In the third round of how to bungle a response, “Mother” Karen Pence was dispatched to Fox, where she denied everything up to that point and claimed that her husband was unaware that everyone in the clinic was required to wear a mask. Because the idea that Mike Pence is just intensely, intensely ignorant is always an acceptable position. Also, it’s apparently okay for Mother to blatantly lie on nationwide TV.

And now The Washington Post is ready with the next round in this thing that might be funny if it wasn’t putting people’s lives at risk. Pence’s office is threatening to sue a reporter for revealing the fact that Pence’s own office warned journalists accompanying Pence to the clinic that they would need to wear masks.

Not only did Pence’s office know that masks were required, they—not Mayo Clinic, but Pence’s team—told journalists they would have to wear masks to go along. Voice of America Reporter Steve Herman spilled the beans that all the journalists “were notified by the office of @VP the day before the trip that wearing of masks was required by the @MayoClinic and to prepare accordingly.” Clearly showing that latest claims offered up by Mother Pence are, shockingly, a big fat lie.

For making it clear that Karen Pence was simply out-and-out lying to America in the continued effort to cover up this event, an event that would be the silliest aspect of the entire crisis had not Donald Trump suggested drinking bleach, Trump’s staff is now claiming that Herman “violated the off-the-record terms” of the memo telling him to wear a mask for the trip. He has also been banned from Air Force Two and from coming along on future Pence trips.

Notice what’s not in these statements is any claim from Pence’s staff that Herman is lying. That’s exactly the problem—Herman told the truth. But his truth is getting in the way of their lies … and that clearly can’t be allowed.

Everyone with more than three brain cells to rub together tried to tell dubiously elected Republican Gov. Brian Kemp that his science-free idea of reopening Georgia amidst the novel coronavirus pandemic was a terrible idea. Even strange South Carolina racist Sen. Lindsay Graham thought Kemp was moving too fast. Now, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that within a 24-hour span, the Peach State confirmed more than 1,000 new COVID-19 cases.

On Thursday, the Georgia Department of Public Health had a confirmed number of 26,000 cases in the state. On Friday, with 164,465 tests reportedly administered, that number has shot up to 27,023. This comes after Gov. Kemp decreed that gyms, barber shops, massage parlors, tattoo parlors, and bowling alleys could reopen today, with restaurants and theaters being allowed to reopen on Monday, May 1.

As anyone who can read the previous paragraph can tell you, gyms, barber shops, massage parlors, tattoo parlors, and bowling alleys are not places where one can easily socially distance. For one, they tend to be places where the activity being participated in means hands on heads and bodies. That, by definition is the opposite of social distancing. AJC.com has reports that new cases in the metro Atlanta area have continued to climb by the hundreds every day: “As of Thursday, there are at least 2,845 cases of the virus in Fulton, 2,041 in DeKalb, 1,818 in Gwinnett, 1,660 in Cobb, 1,364 in Hall, 720 in Clayton, 491 in Henry, 474 in Cherokee, 370 in Carroll, 322 in Douglas, 317 in Bartow, 304 in Forsyth, 198 in Newton, 191 in Rockdale and 188 in Paulding.”

Gov. Kemp is attempting to have it both ways by lifting restrictions while continuing to advise everyone to stay home. The order does not lift the shelter-in-place directive from “medically fragile” or elderly citizens. And, of course, that order still allows those groups to move about based on being an ‘essential worker,’ or participating in ‘necessary travel,’ or having medical needs. Gov. Kemp’s order does keep bars and nightclubs closed through May 13. So, maybe Georgia will solve this COVID-19 pandemic issue in the next two weeks?

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) heads to the Senate floor at the Capitol on April 21. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Coronavirus testing shortages pose a major obstacle to reopening the economy — and Congress.

When senators return to DC on Monday, there won’t be enough coronavirus tests for all of them to get proactively screened.

According to a report from Politico’s Burgess Everett and Marianne LeVine, the Capitol’s attending physician, Brian Monahan, informed Republicans about the dearth of tests during a phone call on Thursday. In this conversation, Monahan said that lawmakers and staffers who are in need of tests would likely be able to get one, but added that capacity is so limited that it wouldn’t be enough to cover all 100 senators.

Despite ongoing concerns about the coronavirus’s spread, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has nevertheless expressed confidence in the decision to have the Senate return to the Capitol on May 4. The House, however, will not be following suit. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced that members would not physically come back to DC just yet, after conversations with Monahan earlier this week.

The Capitol’s limited testing capacity is concerning in itself: Many senators are over the age of 65 and within the range of individuals who are more likely to experience severe coronavirus symptoms. And while in the Capitol, their work inherently brings them, and staffers, into close contact with one another.

Prior to departing for recess, senators were spotted in tight groups on the chamber floor during a stimulus vote. And when Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) tested positive for Covid-19, several of his colleagues including Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Mike Lee (R-UT) had to self-isolate out of concerns about their exposure.

The Senate’s testing shortage is also emblematic of a broader problem the country continues to face: Even after recovering from a slow start on the subject, America’s testing capacity is still very far from what it needs to be for regular business and social gatherings to resume.

The limited testing capacity on the Hill is emblematic of the issue the country is still struggling with

There are many compelling reasons for Congress to return to the Capitol including, specifically the need to advance more much-needed stimulus for workers and businesses that are reeling from the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We have a crisis to continue to work through. Our services are necessary. And in order to perform those services, we have to perform them here in Washington,” Lee said in a floor speech in April.

The big question, however, is whether lawmakers will be able to return and work on legislation — as well as McConnell’s coveted judicial nominations — in a safe way. Several Democrats have voiced concerns about the ability to do so given the information offered by the Capitol physician about the current state of the pandemic.

As Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) noted in a statement, one senator, eight Capitol police officers, and 11 construction workers on a House renovations project have already tested positive for the coronavirus. She argued that lawmakers would be increasing the risk of spreading the disease to themselves and their staff by returning.

“The Attending Physician of Congress, Dr. Brian Monahan, advised House leadership that he recommends against resuming their session,” Feinstein said in a statement. “That’s why I ask the majority leader to reconsider his plan to reconvene the Senate.” The House, after all, announced earlier this week that it would not return next week based on concerns that Monahan had expressed about the growing number of cases in the Washington DC area.

McConnell has said there will be certain precautions taken to address lawmakers’ worries, including staggered voting.

Still, given the Capitol’s limited testing capacity, it’s unclear if Congress actually has the resources it needs to proceed in a secure fashion. As Politico reports, the Capitol physician notes that tests will take roughly two days to turn around for those who need them.

The uncertainty surrounding Congress’s return is similar to that hanging over states’ decisions to slowly reopen businesses and the broader economy: While there’s obviously an urgency around doing so, the shortages in testing make it very difficult to move forward without running the risk of spreading the virus even further.

As Vox’s German Lopez has reported, increasing the number of available tests is vital because it enables doctors and the government to identify who’s sick and attempt to trace others they’ve contacted in order to prevent further spread. As of last week, the US wasn’t doing enough, Lopez writes.

Whatever the case, even the best days of testing in the US are still far from what experts say is necessary to allow the country to safely reopen the economy. On the low end, experts say the US should be able to do a minimum of 500,000 tests a day. At the high end, some have called for much more — up to the tens of millions a day.

So far, America isn’t even getting close to the low-end requirement.

In lieu of ramping up testing to a sufficient level, the main option is to continue social distancing — both in Congress and beyond.

Congress’s stumbles over remote voting have made it tough to advance legislation from afar

Since the pandemic hit earlier this year, Congress has struggled to legislate remotely, in part because there’s no clear mechanism to vote remotely on bills.

Although House Democrats are interested in advancing a proposal that would enable “proxy voting” in which some members can designate others to physically represent them on the floor, these plans have generated pushback from Republicans. In the Senate, too, McConnell has shot down an effort by Paul to advance a temporary remote voting procedure.

The push for lawmakers to return makes a lot of sense in the context of what’s still needed to help the US weather the massive unemployment and business shortfalls that have resulted since the coronavirus spurred stringent social distancing policies and closures.

The need to risk their personal health — and that of their staffers — in order to advance the country’s legislative needs, however, is a dilemma that could be resolved by approving remote voting procedures.

---

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.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Slowly, Taco Bell became the punchline to every episode of SMBC.

Today's News:

Donald Trump wants the governor of Michigan to negotiate with terrorists.

Yes, very good people. One might even say “fine” people.

Governor Whitmer declined to heed Trump’s—or the terrorist’s—advice, instead listening to science and reality, and extended the state’s emergency declaration until May 28. 

The federal government is reportedly preparing for a much worse outcome from the coronavirus pandemic than President Donald Trump has predicted.

For example, the Trump administration ordered more than 100,000 new body bags for COVID-19 victims in April, one day after Trump predicted the U.S. death toll from the virus would be between 50,000 and 60,000. The death toll has already exceeded Trump’s prediction.

Trump on the coronavirus death toll: “We are going toward 50,000 or 60,000 people … many of the people that have this theory — ‘maybe we could’ve gone right though it’ — I was somebody that would’ve loved to have done that, but it wouldn’t be sustainable.” pic.twitter.com/TrXGEhwzWF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 20, 2020

NBC News reports: Body bag contracts bid by Homeland Security and the Veterans Affairs Department are just one illustration of how Trump’s sunny confidence about the nation’s readiness to reopen is in conflict with the views of officials in his own administration who are quietly preparing for a far worse outcome. Around the same time it wrote the contract for the body bags, FEMA opened up bidding to provide about 200 rented refrigerated trailers for locations around the country. The request for proposals specifies a preference for 53-foot trailers, which, at 3,600 cubic feet, are the largest in their class. The cache of internal documents obtained by NBC News includes an April 25 “pre-decisional draft” of the coronavirus task force’s “incident outlook” for the response, a summary of the task force leaders’ meeting the same day and various communications among officials at several agencies. The documents show that task force members remain worried about several major risks ahead, including insufficient availability of coronavirus tests, the absence of a vaccine or proven treatments for the coronavirus, and the possibility of a “catastrophic resurgence” of COVID-19.

More from the The Hill: Other internal documents obtained by the media outlet showed that the White House coronavirus task force has serious concerns about what lies ahead for the U.S., with fears that the country might endure another spike in infections in the future. Members of the task force were reportedly concerned over the lack of coronavirus tests, a vaccine or proven treatments for coronavirus and the possibility of a “catastrophic resurgence” of the disease. The news outlet’s findings underscore what seems to be a disconnect between the president’s optimism about the state of the coronavirus impact and public health official’s concerns regarding the pandemic. As of Thursday evening, 63,001 people have died of the coronavirus in the U.S and more than 1 million have tested positive for the disease, according to data compiled from Johns Hopkins University. 

The post ‘Catastrophic Resurgence’: Feds Ordered Over 100K Body Bags One Day After Trump Predicted 60K Deaths (VIDEO) appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Apparently determined to keep Mask-gate alive, Vice President Mike Pence’s office is threatening retaliation against a White House pool reporter who revealed on Twitter that Pence’s staff knew about the Mayo Clinic’s requirement that visitors wear face coverings.

Pence chose not to wear a mask during his visit to the clinic’s Minnesota headquarters on Tuesday, sparking harsh criticism. After Pence’s wife, “mother” Karen, claimed Thursday that he didn’t know about the policy prior to the visit, Voice of America reporter Steve Herman revealed on Twitter that the vice president’s staff was certainly aware of the rule.

All of us who traveled with him were notified by the office of @VP the day before the trip that wearing of masks was required by the @MayoClinic and to prepare accordingly. https://t.co/LFqh27LusD

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) April 30, 2020

Pence’s office was none-too-pleased with Herman’s tweet, and has threatened to bar him from Air Force Two until he apologizes. At issue is whether the memo to which Herman referred was “off the record.”

The Washington Post reports: A copy of the document obtained by The Washington Post explicitly stated that masks are required for the visit and instructed reporters to wear them. “Please note, the Mayo Clinic is requiring all individuals traveling with the VP wear masks,” the document said. “Please bring one to wear while on the trip.” The directive confirms that Pence’s staff was well aware of the need for masks, raising the possibility that none of his aides alerted him to the requirement or that Pence had intentionally flouted it, perhaps to avoid being photographed in a mask. (Pence himself told reporters after the visit that because he doesn’t have the coronavirus — he is tested frequently — he decided he could “speak to these researchers, these incredible health-care personnel, and look them in the eye and say thank you.”) However, the planning document is marked, “OFF THE RECORD AND FOR PLANNING PURPOSES ONLY.” The off-the-record designation is standard for such logistical memos, indicating reporters are obligated not to publish or report the information. The White House typically keeps planning information confidential to maintain security for official trips. But there’s some question about how long the obligation lasts — whether it is permanent or only applies to the period before and during the trip.

VP Pence wears mask while touring a GM facility producing ventilators in Kokomo, Indiana. pic.twitter.com/VssPxMJjtO

— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 30, 2020

On Thursday, Pence wore a mask during a visit to a General Motors facility making ventilators in Indiana.

But WaPo notes there could be more to the story. President Donald Trump recently attacked Voice of America, a government-funded independent news agency. And Pence’s office didn’t threaten another reporter, Gordon Lubold of the Wall Street Journal, who also accompanied Pence to the Mayo Clinic, and posted a tweet similar to Herman’s on Thursday.

Read the full story here.

https://t.co/nf9XOwRBmh https://t.co/v6bUgQUSh5

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) May 1, 2020

The post Pence’s Office Threatens Reporter Who Revealed That VP’s Staff Knew About Mayo Clinic Mask Requirement appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Michelle Caruso-Cabrera is considered one of the more viable candidates running against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the primary for her Bronx-Queens district seat. Caruso-Cabrera has a lot of money behind her. She has a lot of money behind her because Caruso-Cabrera used to be a Republican who is now a pro-business small government “centrist” Democrat. That’s her selling point. She’s also a CNBC correspondent and anchor, so she’s been on television—you know, like Donald Trump.

One of Caruso-Cabrera’s political angles on Ocasio-Cortez is saying AOC is out of touch with her constituents. As Business Insider points out, Caruso-Cabrera has attacked AOC’s Bronx roots, in essence calling AOC a carpetbagger. Of course, Caruso-Cabrera forgets to mention that while AOC moved back to her birth borough after college, where she lived while she worked as a bartender, Caruso-Carbrera is from New Hampshire and lived in Trump Tower in Manhattan up until last year—when she moved to Queens.

Calling Caruso-Cabrera an opportunistic carpetbagger does a disservice to the actual hard work carpetbaggers usually put into deceiving the public. According to Business Insider, the super in-touch with the working class Caruso-Cabrera lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Trump Tower with her husband for anywhere between $9,000 to $15,000 a month in rent. 

Caruso-Cabrera’s bid to topple Ocasio-Cortez has been funded by big Wall Street executives. What makes Caruso-Cabrera such a great Democratic candidate? Maybe it’s her former Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan-inspired desire to end Medicare and Social Security? Unsurprisingly, amongst Caruso-Cabrera’s supporters are a slew of rich Republican donors who would love nothing more than to get rid of a Democratic representative that seems to want to end business as usual politics.

Yet again, Donald Trump and his band of incompetent sycophants are prioritizing their own propaganda efforts over the security of this nation and the health of Americans. We previously learned that the bizarre White House focus on hydroxychloroquine extended to actually stockpiling large quantities of the drug even as efforts to procure more urgent supplies like masks and ventilators sputtered; trials would soon prove the drug to be dangerous, and sometimes deadly, to COVID-19 patients, but not before the White House fired the government's chief vaccine expert for refusing to endorse the drug.

The New York Times is now reporting that "senior" Trump officials have similarly been pressuring United States intelligence agencies to find "evidence" for the far-right conspiracy theory that the virus responsible for COVID-19 was the product of a Chinese government laboratory, rather than a naturally occurring virus that jumped from animal to human hosts. The Times identifies the leader of those efforts as still-unindicted Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

There is not one iota of evidence for this conspiracy theory, and it has been debunked, with confidence, by the scientists who have studied the actual composition of the virus. It is closely related to viruses that use bats as their natural hosts, and likely evolved via some secondary host or hosts that carried the virus from bats to humans. Gene editing tools leave markers that can be found; this virus has none. The virus infects via a mechanism that a human designer would be hard-pressed to design, and is both too infectious and too unpredictable to be an attempted bioweapon. Intelligence officials themselves have been confident, based on our own nation's espionage, that Chinese laboratories weren’t involved.

Nonetheless, the conspiracy theory remains attractive to racists, xenophobes, crackpots, and Trump's advisers because it provides for a satisfying geopolitical enemy to blame all our current woes on. That natural virus mutations could and do create new variants that sweep through our populations with regularity is hard to deal with; saying the Chinese Communists did it is, for people whose brains are predominantly pudding, something that can be instantly grasped and believed. If there is an enemy, there is someone to rally against. If there is an enemy, it allows Donald Trump to declare that his myriad failures in combatting the pandemic during the early weeks when it mattered were, when it comes down to it, the fault of some malevolent outside force rather than his own self-absorbed indifference and stupidity.

Pressuring intelligence services to "find" evidence for something that they have already debunked is similar, of course, to the Iraq War-era manipulation of intelligence by the Bush/Cheney administration. It is also a mirror of the hydroxychloroquine fiasco in which the Trump team took government resources away from actual pandemic response to instead focus on one of Dear Leader's own political narratives. The Trump administration is leaning on intelligence agencies to provide "dirt" that Donald Trump's campaign can use to boost his political prospects. As with Trump's efforts to extort Ukraine into providing similar election-year "dirt," whether the information is true or false is irrelevant. It is intended as propaganda; it will be disbursed to the public in that form. And Mike Pompeo’s involvement in both efforts should not escape notice.

Trump continues to run the United States government solely as a vehicle for himself and his own self-interest. He continues to actively harm the nation, weakening or delaying competent government responses during a national emergency to instead pursue self-promotional, propaganda-premised goals.

He has the full support of his entire White House team, Republican lawmakers, and the Republican Party apparatus in doing so. We are at 60,000 deaths, and Trump is directing his government to redirect resources once again away from the reality of the situation before us and into fantasy versions that he believes would make him look more heroic, and less like a catastrophic, history-altering failure.