An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to block federal aid for the U.S. Postal Service unless it raises shipping rates for online companies like Amazon.com, prompting criticism that the move would hurt consumers relying more than usual on packages during the coronavirus outbreak.
The president has long accused the post office of charging too little for packages, saying that deliveries for Amazon and others cost the service money. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post newspaper, which Trump has accused of unfair coverage of his administration. "The Postal Service is a joke. Because they're handing out packages for Amazon and other internet companies, and every time they bring a package, they lose money on it," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. "The Post Office should raise the price of a package by approximately four times." The president also accused post office officials of being "very cozy" with big online merchants. With the U.S. Postal Service slated to run out of money this summer, the U.S. Congress authorized the Treasury Department to lend it up to $10 billion as part of an earlier $2.3 trillion coronavirus stimulus package. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said his team was meeting with post office officials "and actually, we are going to put certain criteria for a postal reform program as part of the loan."
Trump told Mnuchin at the event he would not support aid unless the postal service raised its rates. "If they don't do it, I'm not signing anything and ... I'm not authorizing you to do anything," Trump said. Later on Friday, Trump said: "I will never let our Post Office fail. It has been mismanaged for years, especially since the advent of the internet and modern-day technology. The people that work there are great, and we're going to keep them happy, healthy, and well!"
After closing down and sending students home due to the COVID-19 crisis, the Military Academy at West Point is being forced to bring back 1,000 cadets to its campus in New York — an epicenter for the virus — so President Donald Trump can deliver a commencement address.
The New York Times reported Friday that West Point had postponed its commencement, and school officials were unsure whether to hold one, before Trump announced that he would be speaking there.
From the NYT: And so last Friday, the day before Mr. Pence was to speak at the Air Force ceremony in Colorado, Mr. Trump, never one to be upstaged, abruptly announced that he would, in fact, be speaking at West Point. That was news to everyone, including officials at West Point, according to three people involved with or briefed on the event. The academy had been looking at the option of a delayed presidential commencement in June, but had yet to complete any plans. With Mr. Trump’s pre-emptive statement, they are now summoning 1,000 cadets scattered across the country to return to campus in New York, the state that is the center of the outbreak. “He’s the commander in chief, that’s his call,” said Sue Fulton, a West Point graduate and former chairwoman of the academy’s Board of Visitors. “Cadets are certainly excited about the opportunity to have something like the classic graduation, standing together, flinging their hats in the air. But everyone is leery about bringing 1,000 cadets into the New York metropolitan area for a ceremony. It’s definitely a risk.”
In the middle of the #COVID19 pandemic, Trump announces he'll speak at West Point – without telling them ahead of time – putting cadets at risk as they are forced to return to school. https://t.co/NnTqsyijnt
They're going to have to get on planes, and then trains up to West Point, then gather in close quarters to each other. This is totally unnecessary and endangers everyone involved, all to give Trump a platform to campaign and rant. https://t.co/J0LMNsE9rL
Class of '20 Med students took early Internships to aid in the Covid Pandemic. Trump, having failed to avert an avoidable crisis, will take a victory lap among cheering cadets. Teflon Don.
hey @WestPoint_USMA crawl out of trump's ass and don't endanger your own cadets just to appease this maniacal, dangerous lunatic. Ya gonna inject them with lysol next, just to make Trump happy?? https://t.co/Bqri5GbrIT
Sacrificing her credibility forever. That's unfortunate.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, is defending President Donald Trump’s suggestion that disinfectants could be injected or ingested to treat COVID-19.
Dr. Birx defends the President: When he gets new information, he likes to talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue and so that’s what dialogue he was having. I think he just saw the information at the time immediately.. and he was still digesting that information pic.twitter.com/3XrNvs8UjX
“When he gets new information, he likes to talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue and so that’s what dialogue he was having.,” Birx told Fox News. “I think he just saw the information at the time immediately before the press conference,.. and he was still digesting that information.”
As Trump made the remarks on Thursday, Birx reacted with visible discomfort, and a video of her seated in the background went viral.
Here is Dr. Birx's reaction when President Trump asks his science advisor to study using UV light on the human body and injecting disinfectant to fight the coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/MVno5X7JMA
Earlier Friday, Trump claimed he was being sarcastic when he made the remarks, while the White House said the president was just trying to emphasize that Americans should consult with doctors regarding treatment, and accused the media of taking his comments out of context.
Dr. Birx defends the President: When he gets new information, he likes to talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue and so that’s what dialogue he was having. I think he just saw the information at the time immediately.. and he was still digesting that information pic.twitter.com/3XrNvs8UjX
An Iowa jail administrator has been placed on administrative leave following the discovery of writings and YouTube videos in which he said the “gay lifestyle” is “an abomination,” and Muslims are “pawns of the devil” who will soon be hunting Christians.
Capt. Dean Naylor (pictured) has spent 10 years overseeing the Muscatine County Jail, which has about 250 beds and houses inmates from other counties as well as the federal government.
Muscatine County Sheriff C.J. Ryan confirmed Friday that he placed Naylor on leave pending an internal investigation, after the administrator’s writings and videos were discussed during a recent Board of Supervisors meeting, according to the Quad-City Times.
In response to Naylor’s writings and videos, officials in nearby Johnson County threatened to stop sending inmates to Muscatine County. Johnson County reportedly paid Muscatine County $657,415 to house inmates last year.
“Captain Naylor’s reprehensible comments about Muslims and members of the LGBTQ+ community have caused us to fear for the civil liberties of the inmates,” Johnson County Chairperson Ron Sullivan said in a statement to the Muscatine County Board of Supervisors.
In fact, a Muslim inmate once sued Naylor in federal court for refusing a request for a copy of the Quran.
Teamsters Local 238, the union that represents corrections officers at the Muscatine County Jail, also called for Naylor’s removal.
In a 11,500-word treatise titled “End Times — We Are Here!!,” Naylor once wrote: “The public and governmental acceptance of the gay lifestyle which is an abomination that according to scripture even defiles the land has caused great harm on our nation. Schools not allowing prayer and teaching atheistic views to our children has also caused great harm not to mention removing truths like the Ten Commandments from our courthouses and government offices.”
In YouTube videos, Naylor warned of an impending world war — presumably between Muslims and Christians — that would take place been 2016 and 2023 and kill one-third of mankind, according to Iowa Capital Dispatch.
“The people following the Muslim faith are nothing more than pawns to the devil,” Naylor wrote in his treatise. “Allah is Satan, no doubt. Christians need to wake up and understand this. The Muslim world is bowing five times a day to the devil and they don’t know it … Islam has 2 billion followers, they hate Jews and Christians (and) they can have a 200-million-man army … Our fellow servants will turn on us and rat us out to the Satanically led Muslims who will be hunting us.”
Rep. Jim Jordan speaks during a rally hosted by FreedomWorks in Washington, DC, on September 26, 2018. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
The organization best known for its links to the Tea Party movement is requesting a loan to shore up its foundation arm.
FreedomWorks, a conservative-leaning organization best known for its support of the Tea Party movement and its longtime opposition to government bailouts, has applied for a Small Business Administration loan through the Paycheck Protection Program, Congress’s emergency response to the economic downturn.
The loan is to support the group’s foundation arm.
Aprovision in the legislation, which socially conservative organizations recommended to Republican lawmakers, made clear that certain nonprofit groups could apply as well. The provision opened the door for taxpayer funding to subsidize well-connected organizations that are part of the political fray in an election year. And at least a few groups — on both sides of the political spectrum — decided to apply, so far with mixed results.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus Center’s application for a $160,000 loan is awaiting resolution, as is FreedomWorks Foundation’s request for $300,000, according to officials at the groups.
FreedomWorks has long opposed federal bailouts, describing the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 as “unconstitutional.” In response to the passage of the Phase 3.5 bill earlier this week, FreedomWorks’ Jason Pye said, “The line has long been crossed. No more spending. Period. At this point, we should be focused on reopening the economy and getting Americans back to work.”
And as I reported earlier this week, FreedomWorks is connected to many of the anti-stay-at-home-order protests taking place across the country. For example, in Wisconsin, the main anti-shutdown group, Open Wisconsin Now, was organized by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and by FreedomWorks.
While FreedomWorks is best known for the actions taken by the group’s political side, the FreedomWorks Foundation — aimed, according to its website, at “educat[ing] and empower[ing] Americans with the principles of individual liberty, small government, and free markets” — is eligible for an SBA loan.
According to its 2018 990, the FreedomWorks Foundation had roughly $1.1 million in total assets at the end of 2018. Brandon, the FreedomWorks president, told me the group chose to apply for the loan because “it’s responsible to explore all options.”
“We had to cancel our annual fundraiser because of the shutdowns, and that is [a] big blow to our fundraising,” Brandon said over text message. “My quote [in the New York Times] was out of context and I was being sarcastic since we will not get that opportunity for our fundraiser until next year.”
He reiterated that only the Foundation would receive PPP support and said, “I think it’s responsible to explore all options. We have no idea how long these shutdowns will last. We’re in a good position now with reserve funds, but I have no idea what the world looks like in six months if the lockdowns continue.”
I asked him if he saw any contradiction between FreedomWorks’ previous opposition to government bailouts and their decision to apply for and take an SBA loan. He said, “No,” adding, “It’s like when your land gets taken, you get compensation. It’s a takings issue. The moral hazard is when you get bailed out for negligent behavior.”
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Asked during a White House bill-signing ceremony on Friday to explain his comments — which were widely mocked for being ridiculous and more than a little irresponsible, became the top trending topic on Twitter, and prompted warnings from health agencies that it’s actually a bad idea to inject or consume bleach — Trump tried to rewrite history.
“I was asking a sarcastic, and a very sarcastic question, to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside,” Trump lied. In reality, he was looking at White House officials when he earnestly asked them to investigate whether there’s “a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”
Disinfectant “does kill it, and it would kill it on the hands, and that would make things much better,” Trump said.
Watch the two clips back to back for yourself:
Here's a mashup of Trump claiming today he was just asking "a very sarcastic question to the reporters in the room" when he mused about disinfectant injections as a possible coronavirus miracle cure, followed by the original clip showing beyond a doubt that he was not doing that. pic.twitter.com/wby4ucd59Q
Asked later on Friday if he wanted to clarify his comments for people who might have misunderstood his “sarcasm,” Trump reiterated, “I do think that disinfectant on the hands could have a very good effect.”
But that’s entirely beside the point. Trump’s bizarre comments during Thursday’s White House press briefing came after a Department of Homeland Security official presented research indicating that “commonly available disinfectants work to kill the virus” on surfaces. At no point did he suggest using them on human hands.
That’s likely because 1) disinfectants contain harsh chemicals that can cause skin irritation and even chemical burns, and 2) soap and hand sanitizer already exist.
When his disinfectant remarks came up for a third time on Friday, Trump seemed to get lost in his own lies, got corrected by a reporter about what the video shows him actually saying, and then abruptly ended the press event.
Watch:
TRUMP: I was looking at you yesterday when I was being sarcastic about disinfectants
JEFF MASON: I wasn't there yesterday
ANOTHER REPORTER: You were looking at Dr Birx
TRUMP: I was looking at Bill, the doctor, I was looking at some of the reporters
The scene was a quintessential example of gaslighting. Instead of simply admitting he said something dumb, Trump told people they didn’t see what they saw, then shut things down when reporters began to call him out on his contradictions.
Trump, however, has already primed his supporters to disbelieve their senses and just listen to him.
“Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” Trump said during a 2018 speech. “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
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.
Protesters block the street in front of the Supreme Court as it hears arguments on whether gay and transgender people are covered by a federal law barring employment discrimination on the basis of sex in 2019. | Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images
The new rule was released on the anniversary of the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
The Trump administration has finalized a Department of Health and Human Services administrative rule rolling back health care discrimination protections for LGBTQ people, according to an HHS press release.The rule was released Friday, June 12, the fourth anniversary of the Pulse shooting, which left 49 victims, including many queer and trans people, dead in an Orlando, Florida, nightclub.
First proposed in May 2019, the rule reverses an Obama-era interpretation that sex discrimination under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act applied to discrimination against queer and trans people, as well as people who are seeking or have had an abortion.
“HHS will enforce Section 1557 by returning to the government’s interpretation of sex discrimination according to the plain meaning of the word ‘sex’ as male or female and as determined by biology,” reads the agency’s press release.
Democratic lawmakers were quick to condemn the rule change, which is set to go into effect by mid-August. “No one should ever have to fear seeking health care because they may be discriminated against based on who they are or the care they seek,” said a joint statement by leaders of the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Congressional Black Caucus, and Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus.
Trans people especially face overwhelming levels of discrimination from health care providers. According to a 2010 study, almost one in five trans people said they had been denied care by a medical provider because of their gender identity, and 28 percent were subjected to harassment in a medical setting. It was that reality the Obama administration attempted to address by including LGBTQ people under the definition of sex discrimination, conforming to an increasing wave of state and federal court rulings.
The Obama-era rule made it illegal for doctors, hospitals, and other health care workers to deny care to someone whose sexual orientation or gender identity they disapproved of. The new Trump administration rule allows health care providers to deny care to anyone they perceive as trans or gay. It will allow hospitals to house trans women and men according to their birth-assigned sex, or condition emergency treatment on the stoppage of cross-sex hormones. It would also allow insurance companies to reinstate blanket bans on transition-related care like gender-affirming surgery or hormone replacement therapy.
The Human Rights Campaign has already announced its plan to sue the Trump administration over the rule. Meanwhile,National Women’s Law Center President and CEO Fatima Goss Graves said the organization has teamed up with the Transgender Law Center, the Harvard Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, and the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund to challenge the rule as well.
“This sanctioning of discrimination in health care is unlawful and immoral, and doing so while our country loses thousands of lives daily and health inequities across the board persist is especially egregious,” said Graves in a statement Friday. “No one should fear being turned away by a medical provider because of who they are or the personal health decisions they have made.”
In the age of Covid-19, the rule could also mean the life of a sick trans person is quite literally at the whim of a doctor’s personal beliefs about trans people. That fear was already permeating the trans community before news of the finalized rule was released. “I’m scared to say this out loud, but I’m afraid that trans people will face things like being deprioritized for ventilators or for care,” Bre Kidman, a nonbinary candidate for US Senate in Maine, told Vox in April.
Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the National Women’s Law Center, criticized the administration’s timing for moving forward with the rule in the middle of a pandemic. “It’s egregious that we are losing 3,000 Americans a day to an unprecedented public health emergency and a top priority of the Trump administration is making sure doctors can turn away trans people,” she told Vox in April. “We already know that trans people face a patchwork of health inequities that leaves them at risk for any number of health concerns. This rule threatened the well-being of trans people before this pandemic. During this pandemic, it is beyond immoral to worsen any group’s access to health care.”
The Trump administration’s war on trans health care began more than a year ago
The fight over the rule began in December 2016 with a nationwide injunction on the Obama interpretation. It was issued by federal Judge Reed O’Connor, a conservative favorite who has issued numerous rulings overturning Obama-era rules regarding the Affordable Care Act, abortion access, and access to birth control. That ruling was finalized in October 2019 by O’Connor.
It’s that ruling, an HHS spokesperson told Politico back in April, with which the department is complying. HHS head of civil rights Roger Severino defended that agency’s treatment of marginalized communities to Politico. “As we have shown in our recent efforts to protect persons from disability and age discrimination during the pandemic, HHS will vigorously enforce civil rights laws as passed by Congress, before, during, and after any rulemaking,” he said in a statement.
Before his stint as HHS civil rights chief, Severino was a fierce critic of the Obama administration’s efforts to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination. Proponents of the new rule have pushed the false notion that doctors were being forced to perform gender-affirming surgeries that they were uncomfortable with. In reality, transgender surgical care is highly specialized, and trans people are unlikely to go to a doctor who isn’t experienced in the procedure.
With the new rule, the US trans community is now looking at a possible return to a health care environment that allowed oncologists to deny cancer care to Robert Eads, a trans man who developed ovarian cancer and was never notified of his diagnosis. When he finally learned of it, his doctor said his first instinct was to send Eads to a psychologist rather than treating his cancer. Eads died in 1999. Or Tyra Hunter, who died in 1995 after an EMT discovered her trans status following a car accident and refused to touch her on the trip to the hospital, mere miles from the White House.
Aside from the new rule, the LGBTQ community also awaits two Supreme Court decisions on whether queer and trans people are protected under sex discrimination provisions of federal civil rights law.
“Trans people are terrified of the [Supreme Court] case,” Branstetter said. “Behind a lot of that fear is the understanding that the Trump administration has been hard at work instilling long-term damage to LGBTQ rights. It’s not just the Trump administration, it’s an entire sphere of right-wing organizations who have made their primary goal the erasure of trans people from public life.”
Conservatives haven’t let the pandemic slow down their political agenda
In many ways, the coronavirus pandemic has provided convenient cover for conservatives to enact several political priorities while the nation’s attention is on the virus and gatherings are strongly discouraged.
At the state level, Idaho enacted two anti-trans laws in late March, while South Carolina held a hearing on a bill that would ban transition care for trans minors while the state was under a shelter-at-home order. Additionally, Trump’s DOJ filed a statement of interest in a federal lawsuit seeking to ban trans girls from high school girls’ sports in Connecticut.
The anti-trans moves join multiple state-level attacks on abortion access during the pandemic, with some conservative states moving to ban or restrict the procedure under bans on “nonessential surgeries.” Texas eventually eased its ban on nonessential surgeries, while three states saw most of the attempted bans stopped in federal court. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, only Arkansas’s partial ban remained in place as of May 19.
On March 26, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a directive saying it would “not expect to seek penalties for violations of routine compliance monitoring, integrity testing, sampling, laboratory analysis, training, and reporting or certification obligations in situations where the EPA agrees that Covid-19 was the cause of the noncompliance.” The move allows air polluters to flout federal law without fear of penalty, right when clean air is perhaps most important for the health and safety of everyday Americans.
Several conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation, also released plans for the administration to pursue deregulation of business and environmental rules. Among the Heritage plans the White House found intriguing was a call for the president to ask agencies not to enforce small business regulations altogether.
“A presidential call for a wide-scale policy of non-enforcement would send a very strong signal to businesses that the government is not going to come down hard on them as they try to get back up and running,” the Heritage plan said.
Left-leaning policy experts disagree. “This sounds exactly like the type of opportunistic political move that absolutely should not be attempted right now,” Jared Bernstein, a former adviser to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, told the Washington Post in April.“Correlations between regulations and economic activity are far shakier than they assume, and I don’t believe this idea will help at all.”
It’s been clear since the pandemic started that there is no bad time for the Trump administration to push their political agenda, even if that means costing Americans — LGBTQ or not — their lives.
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.
Lysol was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter on Friday morning, after the product’s manufacturer urged people not to ingest or inject it following President Donald Trump’s insane comments on Thursday.
Following a Department of Homeland Security presentation about the effects of disinfectants and sunlight on the novel coronavirus, Trump wondered aloud whether same techniques could be used as treatments inside the body.
“I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute,” Trump said during his daily White House briefing on on COVID-19. “One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”
#Disenfectant was the No. 2 trending topic on Twitter, followed by #DontDrinkBleach at No. 3. Check out a few of the top memes below.
Is this the reason why my stimulus check hasn’t arrived yet? We’re still waiting for the free lysol injectable? #lysolpic.twitter.com/ZJztf5ohwb
Remember to always Chill your domestos #disinfectant before drinking , toilet duck is best taking as a shot at room temperature … enjoy pic.twitter.com/XguKPIlYgj
At That Very Moment, Doctors Should Have Motioned Their Predetermined Signal To Pence To Have Marines Come Hoist Him Into His Gold Decorated Padded Room Because They Knew, They KNEW This Day Was Coming. #StayAtHome Please #DontDrinkBleach@PaulLidiculpic.twitter.com/8mmJElJDcD
He seems to have forgotten that there's tape. This is shit he suggested and now he's trying to walk it back yet again.
President Donald Trump claimed Friday he was being “sarcastic” when he suggested a day before that disinfectants could be ingested or injected to treat COVID-19.
“I was asking a sarcastic, & a very sarcastic question, to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside. But it does kill it.” — Trump tries to rewrite history, says he was speaking “sarcastically” when he mused about disinfectant injections being cure for Covid. pic.twitter.com/bWRU8EV6FZ
“I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
Earlier Friday, the White House attempted to walk back insane suggestion.
“President Trump has repeatedly said that Americans should consult with medical doctors regarding coronavirus treatment, a point that he emphasized again during yesterday’s briefing,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement. “Leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President Trump out of context and run with negative headlines.”
Asked about his comments about injecting disinfectant, Trump says, "I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you, just to see what would happen." That's just a lie. Here's the transcript. pic.twitter.com/uLx0KnPTZ6
More from the Washington Post: The question, which Trump offered unprompted, immediately spurred doctors, lawmakers and the makers of Lysol to respond with incredulity and warnings against injecting or otherwise ingesting disinfectants, which are highly toxic. “My concern is that people will die. People will think this is a good idea,” Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, told The Washington Post. “This is not willy-nilly, off-the-cuff, maybe-this-will-work advice. This is dangerous.” … Even before the president’s musings, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Monday found U.S. poison control centers were seeing a surge in calls about exposure to cleaners and disinfectants amid the coronavirus outbreak. Between January and March, there were 45,550 calls — a 20.4 percent increase from the same period last year.
More below.
Please don’t poison yourself because Donald Trump thinks it could be a good idea.
A reminder to all Americans- PLEASE always talk to your health provider first before administering any treatment/ medication to yourself or a loved one.
Your safety is paramount, and doctors and nurses are have years of training to recommend what’s safe and effective.
— U.S. Surgeon General (@Surgeon_General) April 24, 2020
We shouldn’t be drinking or injecting disinfectants. Let's not further overwhelm our medical professionals—and let’s not take medical advice from someone who tried to convince America that the coronavirus was a hoax.
ALERT: We have received several calls regarding questions about disinfectant use and #COVID19.
This is a reminder that under no circumstances should any disinfectant product be administered into the body through injection, ingestion or any other route.
— Maryland Emergency Management Agency (MDMEMA) (@MDMEMA) April 24, 2020
Rudy Giuliani in the Fox Businesses studios last year. | Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
Hours after President Trump mused about injecting disinfectant, his lawyer pushed misinformation of his own.
Thursday’s edition of Fox News’s Ingraham Angle featured egregious coronavirus misinformation, courtesy of President Donald Trump’s personal attorney.
Rudy Giuliani and Laura Ingraham teamed up to mock the idea of contact tracing — a surveillance tool experts broadly agree is key to getting the US coronavirus outbreak under control. (Contact tracing involves the strategic deployment of testing so anybody who comes in contact with a coronavirus can be tested and, if necessary, quarantined, hopefully nipping outbreaks in the bud.) Giuliani, however, thought it useful to compare Covid-19 to other potentially deadly, but non-infectious, maladies like cancer or heart disease.
After Ingraham brought up a $10.5 million contact tracing program Bloomberg Philanthropies and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) are working together on, Giuliani said, derisively, that “we should trace everybody for cancer, and heart disease, and obesity, and — I mean a lot of things kill you more than Covid-19, so we should be traced for all those things.”
Ingraham responded by shaking her head and saying, “Yeah.”
Watch:
Rudy Giuliani mocks contact tracing by asking why we don't also do it for cancer, obesity and heart disease pic.twitter.com/QzyBMGilhv
But here’s the thing: Covid-19 is a highly communicable disease that’s easily transmitted from person to person. Cancer, by contrast, cannot be spread by someone coughing on someone else. Nor can obesity, or cardiovascular disease.
This basic insight explains why, in lieu of pairing contact tracing with far more testing capacity than the US currently has, stringent social distancing measures are necessary to slow the spread of the disease.
Giuliani seems not to understand this. Yet America’s top-rated cable network nonetheless showcased his opinions as though he’s some sort of expert.
Trumpists seem to feel no shame about terrible coronavirus takes
Fox News may no longer be portraying coronavirus as a Democratic hoax, but network personalities are falling short in other ways, like by touting unproven miracles cures and making amoral arguments to push for businesses to reopen.
In mid-March, as the network suddenly pivoted away downplaying the coronavirus as the “Coronavirus Impeachment Scam” and “this new hoax,” Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and president Jay Wallace sent a memo to staff urging them to “keep in mind that viewers rely on us to stay informed during a crisis of this magnitude and we are providing an important public service to our audience by functioning as a resource for all Americans.” The Ingraham/Giuliani clip serves as perhaps the starkest example of the network not living up to that, but it’s nowhere near the only one that could be cited just from Ingraham’s show.
For instance, during an interview with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci last week, Ingraham pushed a false equivalency between HIV — another virus that can’t be spread by coughing — and the coronavirus, prompting Fauci to say, “I think it’s a little bit misleading to compare.”
Ingraham, undeterred, went on to say that “but we don’t know — [coronavirus] could disappear.”
“It’s an extraordinarily efficient virus in transmission from one person to another,” Fauci pointed out. “Those kinds of viruses don’t just disappear.”
INGRAHAM: We don't have a vaccine for SARS or HIV. Life went on, right?
FAUCI: HIV/AIDS is very different. We have effective treatments. And SARS went away. So your comparison is misleading.
But Ingraham — who had worked hard to push the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential miracle cure until this week, when a new study found it can be dangerous as a coronavirus treatment — defended Trump’s comment on Thursday’s edition of her show.
“If you listen long enough to Democrat governors and their poodles in the press these days, you’re going to realize that there’s really no good news in the Covid era,” she said, “no developments positive enough to get us to think that the science or the data is changing to justify reopening the states that really want to open anytime soon.”
President Donald Trump’s administration appears to be just days away from rolling back an Obama-era policy prohibiting discrimination against LGBT patients.
Politico reports: The health department is close to finalizing its long-developing rewrite of Obamacare’s Section 1557 provision, which barred health care discrimination based on sex and gender identity. The administration’s final rule on Thursday was circulated at the Justice Department, a step toward publicly releasing the regulation in the coming days, said two people with knowledge of the pending rule. The White House on Friday morning also updated a regulatory dashboard to indicate that the rule was under review. Advocates fear that it would allow hospitals and health workers to more easily discriminate against patients based on their gender or sexual orientation. … “If the final rule is anything like the proposed rule, HHS is adopting changes that would be harmful in the best of times but that are especially cruel in the midst of a global pandemic that is disproportionately affecting vulnerable communities and exacerbating disparities,” said Katie Keith, alawyer and Georgetown professor who’s tracked the rule.
Keith and other advocates fear the new rule will deter LGBT people from seeking care during the COVID-19 crisis.
Last month, more than 100 LGBT organizations signed a letter calling on public health officials to address the community’s heightened vulnerability to the coronavirus. And, earlier this week, the Center for American Progress issued a report highlighting the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on the LGBT community, including when it comes to healthcare discrimination.
From CAP’s report: Even when LGBTQ people have insurance coverage, discrimination can prevent them from accessing medical care. A growing number of courts are interpreting the ACA’s prohibition on sex discrimination to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in federally funded health programs; however, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is currently finalizing a rule that would remove explicit protections for LGBTQ patients. A nationally representative survey commissioned by CAP found that 1 in 4 LGBTQ people reported experiencing discrimination in the year prior, while 8 percent of lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults and 29 percent of transgender adults reported that a health care provider refused to see them because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. LGBTQ people who experienced any form of discrimination were nearly seven times more likely to report avoiding a visit to a doctor’s office to avoid discrimination. No one should be denied medical care because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, particularly not during a pandemic.
Well, here we are. Meet the members of the Congressional Bleach Injection Caucus.
Who are they? Just every single Republican senator who voted to acquit Donald Trump after he was impeached for abusing his power and covering up his crimes.
The choice was really simple. We could have had a president who doesn’t suggest that injecting bleach into your body might cure a virus responsible for a global pandemic. Instead, we have Trump.
The good news, at least, is that a number of Bleach Injection Caucus members are up for election this fall and vulnerable:
Martha McSally, Arizona
Cory Gardner, Colorado
Kelly Loeffler, Georgia
David Perdue, Georgia
Joni Ernst, Iowa
Susan Collins, Maine
Steve Daines, Montana
Thom Tillis, North Carolina
John Cornyn, Texas
Even better, if we beat this lot, we’ll also take down the chair of the bleach caucus: Sen. Mitch McConnell himself.
This is why I just can't deal with the Times. They're so invested in normalization and "both sides" that they refuse to actually report on the plain facts.
Donald Trump suggested sunlight and disinfectant as treatments for coronavirus—as in, he suggested injecting disinfectants like bleach into sick people, perhaps directly into their lungs—which is a sentence it is simply unbelievable to be typing. This is a moment that shows how dangerous and dangerously ignorant this man is, a moment that shows how absolutely misguided it is to treat him as a reasonable source on anything.
Somehow, that remains a challenge for The New York Times. Even in the face of “And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute—one minute—and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that,” The New York Times, the newspaper of record, maintained its absolute commitment to reporting on Trump as if everything’s normal and it’s all business as usual.
“President Trump has long pinned his hopes on the powers of sunlight to defeat the Covid-19 virus,” William Broad and Dan Levin open their piece on Trump’s sunlight-and-disinfectants outburst. “On Thursday, he returned to that theme at the daily White House coronavirus briefing, bringing in a top administration scientist to back up his assertions and eagerly theorizing—dangerously, in the view of some experts—about the powers of sunlight, ultraviolet light, and household disinfectants to kill the coronavirus.”
”Dangerously, in the view of some experts.”
Perhaps what they are saying there is that some experts think it’s dangerous because someone might actually go ahead and inject themselves with bleach or somehow try to “hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light” and bring “the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way,” and that doing so would be dangerous. That is, the “some say” skepticism is not that maybe bleach injections are a good idea, it’s that anyone would ever do such a thing.
Nonethe-f’ing-less. The New York Times found a way to hedge on the advisability of suggesting people inject themselves with bleach on national television. And by the way, for any cable network still wondering whether it should stop airing Trump’s press briefings live, here’s a great reason to do so.
This wording even made it to the official New York Times tweet about this article, so top to bottom the newspaper is really committed to letting us know that experts are not unified on this issue, that there are experts who do not think it is dangerous for the president of the United States to go on live television and suggest injections of household disinfectants.
Notably, The Times did not find an expert to quote who thought this was a good idea. The experts actually quoted in the article thought it was a very bad idea, although the article doesn’t bother to quote very many experts on that question, heading off instead into contemplation of whether warmer weather will make coronavirus go away.
If only the GOP were capable of learning that loyalty to Trump is only one way. And yet, they keep acting like lemmings and then being surprised when they drown. Good riddance.
As nonessential businesses in Georgia reopen Friday despite federal coronavirus guidelines, the Associated Press is reporting that President Donald Trump signed off on GOP Governor Brian Kemp’s ill-advised plan before publicly coming out against it.
President Trump: "I could've stopped him… I said you do what you think is best. But if you ask me am I happy about it? I'm not happy about it and I'm not happy about Brian Kemp." pic.twitter.com/uEWjee1XXr
The AP reports that both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence repeatedly told Kemp they approved of his decision to allow gyms, barber shops, hair salons, tattoo parlors and bowling alleys to reopen. According to one coronavirus model frequently cited by the White House, Georgia should not allow those businesses to reopen for nearly two more months, on June 22.
Asked to say more about his disagreement with Gov. Kemp about his move to reopen businesses, Trump changes the topic to talking about how Kemp's victory represented a win in his proxy war against the Obamas pic.twitter.com/w1DEJzkSVk
From the AP: The green light from Pence and Trump came in separate private conversations with the Republican governor both before Kemp announced his plan to ease coronavirus restrictions and after it was unveiled on Monday, the officials said. Trump’s sudden shift came only after top health advisers reviewed the plan more closely and persuaded the president that Kemp was risking further spread of the virus by moving too quickly. … The extraordinary reversal — and public criticism of a GOP ally — is only the latest in a series of contradictory and confusing messages from the president on how and when he believes governors should ease stay-at-home orders intended to stop the spread of the deadly virus. It demonstrates the political risk for governors in following the unpredictable president’s guidance.
Earlier today, I discussed Georgia's plan to reopen shuttered businesses for limited operations with @POTUS. I appreciate his bold leadership and insight during these difficult times and the framework provided by the White House to safely move states forward. (1/3) #gapol
Fearless Leader Speaks! 4/13: “I have total authority” 4/15: “Never mind. You’re in charge” 4/17: “Liberate your state” 4/22: “Don’t open up your state” https://t.co/kgnvk6pKx1
[Another big legal victory for environmental groups this week.]
One of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt's primary initiatives at the EPA was an attempt to reform the agency's science advisory committees in order to remove what he and others perceived as a pro-regulatory bias. Pruitt did not last particularly long at the EPA, and this initiative did not last too long either.
Earlier this week, in Physicians for Social Responsibility v. Wheeler, a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of of Appeals for the the D.C. Circuit threw out Pruitt's October 2017 directive that barred scientists receiving EPA grants from serving on EPA scientific advisory committees, rejecting the EPA's claim that the directive was unreviewable and concluding the directive was arbitrary and capricious. Judge Tatel wrote for the court, joined by Judges Rogers and Ginsburg.
The central failing of the Pruitt directive, Tatel explained, was that the EPA failed to engage in reasoned decisionmaking insofar as the Agency failed to provide an adequate explanation for the dramatic change in policy concerning who could serve on its scientific advisory committees. For years, the EPA followed the guidance of the Office of Government Ethics, precluding scientists from serving on committees with a genuine conflict of interest, but not defining such conflicts so broadly as to exclude any scientist receiving EPA grants from all scientific advisory committees without regard for whether there was any relationship between the committee work and the subject of the grants. In abandoning this longstanding approach, and departing from the OGE's advice, Tatel reasoned, the EPA was obligated to explain the basis for the change and, in particular, acknowledge the nature of the change being made.
As Judge Tatel explained:
nothing prevents EPA from developing an appointment policy that excludes individuals it previously allowed to serve. To do so, however, EPA must explain the basis for its decision. Because the Directive contains no discussion of OGE's or EPA's prior conclusion at all, the Directive "cross[ed] the line from the tolerably terse to the intolerably mute." Greater Boston Television Corp., 444 F.2d
at 852
As was true with many EPA initiatives undertaken during Pruitt's tenure, the agency simply failed to provide the degree of reasoned explanation that courts have come to expect. In other words, this was yet another unforced error.
The GOP doesn't get to say a goddamned word. Benghazi. Enough said.
The House voted Thursday to establish a new investigative committee to monitor President Donald Trump's implementation of nearly $3 trillion in coronavirus relief measures, a step they said would safeguardthe massive sums flowing to businesses, hospitals and individual taxpayers.
"It will be laser-focused on ensuring that taxpayer money goes to workers' paychecks and benefits and it will ensure that the federal response is based on the best possible science and guided by health experts — and that the money invested is not being exploited by profiteers and price gougers," said Speaker Nancy Pelosi in remarks on the House floor.
But the measure passed on a party line vote of 212-182, with Republicans unanimously slamming the effort as a veiled attempt to damage Trump politically. They described it as redundant to the multiple congressional committees already have jurisdiction to monitor the law.
"Why do we need another oversight committee? Speaker Pelosi said it's all going to be bipartisan. I'm sorry, I don't believe it," said Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.), who accused other Democrat-led committees of working "nonstop to criticize President Trump and try to influence the 2020 election."
"I'm sorry. I call B.S.,” she added.
Democrats said the newly established select committee, which will operate under the umbrella of the House Oversight Committee, is a crucial addition to an lengthening list of entities tasked with guarding against waste or mismanagement by the Trump administration, which has been notoriously averse to any form of independent scrutiny.
They noted that Trump has already begun resisting efforts by internal watchdogs — the inspectors general placed inside each federal agency — to communicate potential problems to Congress. Trump has also repeatedly stonewalled congressional oversight in non-coronavirus-related probes, eventually fueling an article of impeachment in the House.
But Republicans insisted from the start that Pelosi's intention could not be bipartisan. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, said the panel appeared to be an effort to aid former vice president Joe Biden's presidential bid.
He noted that multiple congressional committees were already responsible for conducting oversight, as well as several new mechanisms created in the multitrillion-dollar coronavirus relief laws. Those include a five-member Congressional Oversight Commission, a committee of inspectors general given broad authority over implementation of the law and a newly established inspector general for pandemic response. Lawmakers also sent millions of dollars to shore up the auditing power of the Government Accountability Office.
The measure passed after a remarkable House floor debate that featured lawmakers and aides clad in face masks, adhering to social distancing on the House floor. Several members, including Pelosi, removed their masks to deliver remarks.
A handful of Republicans, including Jordan, disregarded the House physician's recommendation that lawmakers wear masks when in the chamber and in other Capitol rooms shared by colleagues. Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) thanked Pelosi for setting the trend of briefly removing face masks to speak, though some lawmakers wore theirs during floor remarks.
Pelosi reiterated that she intends to name House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) to lead the new select committee, citing his work overseeing the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. The new panel will be established as a 12-member subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, but it allows the speaker to name seven members and House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to name five. McCarthy previously told Pelosi he would hold off on appointing Republicans until he sees whom Democrats tap.
The new subcommittee will begin with a $2 million budget, and Clyburn will be authorized to issue subpoenas or take depositions. The committee's official charge is to examine the use of taxpayer funds to address the coronavirus crisis, potential waste or mismanagement, the effectiveness of new laws meant to address the pandemic, federal preparedness, the economic impact of the crisis, socioeconomic disparities in the impact of the crisis, the Trump administration's handling of the crisis, the ability of whistleblowers to report waste or abuse and the Trump administration's cooperativeness with Congress and other oversight entities.
Pelosi quickly dismissed Republican assertions that the panel would be a partisan weapon, suggesting it would focus less on Trump and more on those who would seek to exploit the massive infusion of taxpayer funds for wasteful or nefarious purposes.
"This isn't about assigning blame," Pelosi said, citing scam artists who have already sought to divert funds from pots of money meant to aid small businesses or support hospitals with lifesaving equipment. "This is about taking responsibility."
Mass casualties from the coronavirus could upend the political landscape in battleground states and shift contests away from President Donald Trump, according to a new analysis.
Academic researchers writing in a little-noticed public administration journal — Administrative Theory & Praxis— conclude that when considering nothing other than the tens of thousands of deaths projected from the virus, demographic shifts alone could be enough to swing crucial states to Joe Biden in the fall.
“The pandemic is going to take a greater toll on the conservative electorate leading into this election — and that’s simply just a calculation of age,” Andrew Johnson, the lead author and a professor of management at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, said in an interview. “The virus is killing more older voters, and in many states that’s the key to a GOP victory.”
Johnson and his colleagues Wendi Pollock and Beth M. Rauhaus projected that even with shelter-in-place orders remaining in effect, about 11,000 more Republicans than Democrats who are 65 and older could die before the election in both Michigan and North Carolina.
In Pennsylvania, should the state return to using only social distancing to fight infections, over 13,000 more Republican than Democratic voters in that age category could be lost.
The study is based on early fatality projections from CovidActNow.org that are orders of magnitude higher than what's borne out so far in battleground states — a point some outside experts have seized on to inject a dose of skepticism in the study’s findings. In an interview, Johnson acknowledged the high numbers used for the study, but he contended it remains early and that easing of stay-at-home orders could spark more cases and deaths.
William Galston, a Brookings Institution scholar on governance, said the effects are large enough only to affect outcomes in states that are very narrowly divided. But he concluded the study made sense.
Trump supporters, especially in Greater Appalachia, tend to be older and heavier, traits correlated with underlying conditions that make Covid-19 more lethal, he said. Smoking levels — another leading indicator of vulnerability — also tend to be higher in red areas.
The analysis comes as Trump’s handling of the coronavirus increasingly is turning away seniors who buoyed him in 2016, when the cohort supported him over Hillary Clinton by 7 percentage points. Older voters consistently vote at higher rates and have broken in the GOP’s favor for the better part of two decades.
Seniors by significant numbers nationally prioritize defeating the virus over reviving the sputtering economy, a spate of recent polls shows. And Trump himself has started to acknowledge the impact of his policies on the older cohort.
In a tweet Wednesday, the president cheered on states moving to reopen. “Special care is, and always will be, given to our beloved seniors (except me!),” Trump added in his message. “Their lives will be better than ever ... WE LOVE YOU ALL!”
He used similar language late last month, saying. “Seniors will be watched over protectively and lovingly.”
Researchers on the fatality study said they found the virus could also ravage Republicans across Florida and Georgia, where GOP leaders have been pulling back on aggressive defenses. The study looked at total anticipated deaths on a statewide basis, which accounted for spiraling projections of the virus in densely populated urban areas that are home to more Democrats.
Still, there are caveats beyond the death figures used: Researchers used national fatality rates because deaths by state were scant when they started. They similarly applied national percentages of voters by age, not state-by-state figures. But Johnson noted that could actually understate effects in places like Florida, where the GOP relies more heavily on older voters.
A leading coronavirus drug candidate showed no benefit in results from a hotly anticipated clinical trial that were mistakenly posted to the World Health Organization's website today.
The experimental drug, an antiviral called remdesivir, is being studied in several late-stage trials and has recently drawn praise from President Donald Trump after a sliver of early data from a differentclinical trial leaked last week.
The draft documents posted to the WHO website — and then quickly removed — suggest that the drug did not help patients enrolled in a randomized clinical trial in China, and caused significant side effects in several people that led them to end treatment. More participants who received remdesivir died compared to those in the control group, although the difference between the two groups was not statistically significant.
Gilead thinks the results were mischaracterized because the study ended early due to low enrollment, spokesperson Sonia Choi said. "As such, the study results are inconclusive, though trends in the data suggest a potential benefit for remdesivir, particularly among patients treated early in disease."
"We regret that the WHO prematurely posted information regarding the study," Choi added.
The Financial Times first reported the mistakenly posted results. Gilead's stock price dropped more than 7 percent in the hours after the news.
Multiple "phase III" remdesivir studies are still ongoing in the U.S., with early results from some expected this month.
Trump during the White House coronavirus press briefing on Thursday. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
It is highly unlikely that injecting humans with disinfectants will turn out to be a safe or effective treatment.
With his hype for hydroxychloroquine in the rearview mirror, President Donald Trump used Thursday’s White House press briefing to muse about whether disinfectants and sunlight might be the new miracle coronavirus cures of the moment — much to the bewilderment of Dr. Deborah Birx.
At the briefing, William Bryan, under secretary for Science and Technology at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), discussed preliminary government research indicating that “heat and humidity suppress Covid-19” and “commonly available disinfectants work to kill the virus.”
After Bryan’s presentation, Trump took to the podium and made a deeply bizarre inference.
“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light ... and then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re gonna test that,” Trump said, addressing Bryan. “And then I see disinfectant, where it knocks it [coronavirus] out in a minute — one minute — and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So, that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”
"The disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. It gets in the lungs" -- Trump seems to suggests that injecting disinfectant inside people could be a treatment for the coronavirus pic.twitter.com/amis9Rphsm
While there is a lot we don’t yet know about the coronavirus, it is highly unlikely that injecting humans with disinfectants will turn out to be a safe or effective treatment.
But if his ill-fated push for hydroxychloroquine wasn’t already proof, Trump made it abundantly clear during Thursday’s briefing that he has no qualms about making huge leaps of faith to sell some hope.
And he didn’t stop there.
At the same time that his own government is urging people to stay in their homes to slow the spread of coronavirus, Trump seized upon DHS’s preliminary finding that sunlight helps kill the virus and said, “I think a lot of people are gonna go outside all of the sudden.”
He then attacked Washington Post reporter Philip Rucker after Rucker advised him, “People tuning into these briefings — they want to get information and guidance and want to know what to do. They’re not looking for rumors.”
“I’m the president and you’re fake news,” Trump said, adding that his comments “are just a suggestion.”
"I'm the president and you're fake news" -- Trump to @PhilipRucker after he asks him if it's responsible to make all sorts of wacky and unproven suggestions about possible coronavirus treatments pic.twitter.com/8ag4izDrGj
There are indications that people do take Trump more seriously than they should. For instance, during the weeks in which Trump was pushing hydroxychloroquine at every opportunity, an Arizona man died after he tried to self-medicate with chloroquine phosphate. The man’s wife told NBC that she took the drug with her husband because they were thinking, “Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?”
At another point during Thursday’s briefing, Trump told Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the coronavirus task force, “I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can apply light and heat to cure [coronavirus] ... I’m not a doctor, but I’m, like, a person who has a good you know what.”
The ensuing expression on Birx’s face was akin to a parent trying to stay patient with a child as they spout complete nonsense. Watch:
Get a load of Dr. Birx's demeanor after Trump tells her, "I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there's any way that you can apply light and heat to cure [coronavirus]." pic.twitter.com/TP0QoSzkYl
While the totality of Trump’s comments suggest he’s hoping to find new potential miracles to take the place of hydroxychloroquine — an anti-malarial drug whose potential as a coronavirus treatment was further diminished this week after a study of coronavirus patients at US Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals found it’s not only not beneficial but also potentially dangerous — Trump wants you to believe that there’s actually been no shift in his attitude.
Trump says "I haven't at all" stopped promoting hydroxychloroqunie as a #COVID cure. That's a lie. This chart shows all the times he mentioned it at his daily briefings and on Twitter as well. More context here --> https://t.co/d74WOMk1VOpic.twitter.com/00R7ehHZSy
Trump told even bigger lies on Thursday. At one point he claimed, “statistically we are doing phenomenally, in terms of mortality ... when you look, Germany and ourselves are doing very well.” But Germany has had just over 5,500 coronavirus deaths as of April 23; the United States, by contrast, leads the world with over 49,600.
Let's not forget that he was also on the 2016 campaign
Michael Caputo is a former adviser to Donald Trump’s 2015-2016 presidential campaign. He is now the brand new spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A New York Republican operative, you may remember Caputo from his very worried and somber post-Mueller investigation interview in May of 2019. Since the Republican Party is unwilling to do anything to remedy the issue of our treasonously impeached and corrupt president, people like Caputo continue to rise.
CNN reports that Mr. Caputo has all kinds of conspiracy-laden, illogical, and bigoted ideas that we have come to expect from the Trump administration, the Tea Party, and their conservative base. In a series of tweets, which Caputo deleted—but exist forever because it’s the internet, stupid—Caputo has all kinds of truly terrifying ideas about the COVID-19 pandemic. According to CNN’s KFile, Caputo did away with his entire Twitter history of over 1,300 tweets and retweets. And none of these ideas are good or smart or remotely helpful to the public health in general.
Using an internet archive, some of Caputo’s statements have been saved here. So what sort of things does one of Trump’s “best people” think? On Feb. 28, 2020, Caputo had this to say about the novel coronavirus:
“Bottom line, a lot of Americans have to get sick and die for coronavirus to tank the Trump economy.
The Democrats’ only hope for 2020 victory is a sunk economy. They’re talking it down right now.
But their strategy only works if a lot of Americans get sick and die.”
On March 8, 2020, Caputo—clearly tweeting his resume to Trump directly—wrote this:
“Coronavirus is the Democrats’ new Russia, their new Ukraine. And nobody will believe them except their zombies.
But know this: The Dems’ strategy to defeat @realDonaldTrump requires 100s of thousands of American deaths.
Will on of their nutjobs make it happen, a la Hodgkinson?”
“Hodgkinson” here is James T. Hodgkinson, the man who opened fire at a congressional softball practice, injuring Rep. Steve Scalise. The right-wing conspiracy world has floated all kinds of theories about Hodgkinson since he is the only domestic terrorist of the last few decades to reportedly not be an entirely racist right-wing asshole. On March 12, 2020, as the novel coronavirus pandemic became considerably more real and the evidence began mounting that the Trump administration has completely dropped the ball on this, Caputo—clearly feeling a bit testy—attacked people who questioned the administration’s racist pivot to calling COVID-19 “Wuhan flu,” or “the Chinese virus.”
”Sure, millions of Chinese suck the blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters but some foreigner snuck in a bottle of the good stuff. That’s it. [frowny face emoji]”
Replying to a tweet by right-wing dirtbag and “Pizzagate” extraordinaire Jack Posobiec, who was attacking Democratic donor and billionaire anti-Semitic conspiracy theory flash point George Soros for not funding coronavirus aid (Soros has directed a reported $130 million in foundation funds to coronavirus aid), Caputo wrote:
“Are you kidding? Soros’s political agenda REQUIRES a pandemic.”
Caputo is the prefect spokesperson for this administration: He’s the opposite of what his job requires.
Yep, and this is why Amazon is on the "no way no how" work list.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
A report on Amazon from the Wall Street Journal appears to contradict statements made under oath by a top company lawyer during a congressional antitrust hearing.
Two US members of Congress overseeing an antitrust investigation into Amazon want to know if a top official for the company lied while giving congressional testimony about whether or not the e-commerce giant unfairly competes against smaller, independent sellers on its marketplace.
The representatives are reacting to a report from the Wall Street Journal that revealed Amazon employees have at times accessed data from individual marketplace sellers to help decide which products Amazon would create and sell under its own brand names, known as private-label brands. The report appears to contradict statements made under oath by a top Amazon lawyer, Nate Sutton, who stated at a congressional hearing led by one of the lawmakersthat Amazon does not use data from individual sellers — and only uses data aggregated from multiple sellers — to create its own products.
In a statement sent to Recode on Thursday, Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), who leads the House antitrust subcommittee that is investigating Amazon and other tech giants, said, “At best, Amazon’s witness appears to have misrepresented key aspects of Amazon’s business practices while omitting important details in response to pointed questioning. At worst, the witness Amazon sent to speak on its behalf may have lied to Congress.”
House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) added, “We plan to seek clarification from Amazon in short order, in light of this troubling report.”
An Amazon spokesperson did not immediately respond when Recode questioned them aboutthe politicians’ remarks, but previously said in a statement, “It’s simply incorrect to say that Amazon was intentionally misleading in our testimony. As we told the Wall Street Journal and explained in our testimony, we strictly prohibit employees from using non-public, seller-specific data to determine which private label products to launch. While we don’t believe these claims made by the Wall Street Journal are accurate, we take these allegations very seriously and have launched an internal investigation.”
The question of whether Amazon unfairly competes with the hundreds of thousands of sellers who help line the virtual shelves of The Everything Store has been an area of focus for the congressional antitrust investigation that launched last year, as well as an informal probe by regulators at the Federal Trade Commission. Amazon both acts as a platform on which small and mid-sized merchants can sell directly to Amazon shoppers — these sellers make up nearly 60 percent of all Amazon retail sales — as well as a retailer that competes against these sellers through the sale of its own brands like Amazon Basics, as well as by reselling popular national brands. Other retailers like Walmart and Target also sell successful in-house brands, but politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have argued that Amazon’s unique role as both a platform and a retailer allows it to unfairly compete against its own sellers. Warren last year outlined a plan to separate Amazon’s own lines of brands from the rest of its business in the case that she became president.
The Wall Street Journal, citing former and current employees, reported on Thursday that in “one instance, Amazon employees accessed documents and data about a bestselling car-trunk organizer sold by a third-party vendor. ... Amazon’s private-label arm later introduced its own car-trunk organizers.” The data included nonpublic information like how much advertising the third-party seller spent on Amazon for each unit it sold.
Amazon told the Journal that such behavior would violate its policies, but it is not clear what, if any, safeguards Amazon had put in place to prevent employees from accessing such data. An Amazon spokesperson also told Recode that there was more than one seller of the original car-trunk organizer — meaning the company used data aggregated from multiple sellers — though the Journal reported that the one additional seller sold just 17 units over the period of time in question.
The House antitrust subcommittee overseen by Cicilline originally planned to file a report on its investigation into Amazon, as well as Apple, Google, and Facebook, by the end of March. The coronavirus pandemic has delayed the completion of the report, but Cicilline has said it will still be released,though he didn’t say when.
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The director of the Centers for Disease Control made headlines on Tuesday after an interview he did with The Washington Post went viral with this headline: “CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus is likely to be even more devastating.” The summation of this headline was that this coming winter might test Americans even further, as public health conditions will likely be compounded by the onset of flu season. CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview with the Post, that “we’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time.” He explained that this opened up a very real “possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through.”
For many Americans living in a surreal limbo with a slow and inadequate response from the Republican-led federal government, this statement is incredibly distressing. The fact that an official in the CDC made the statement—as opposed to Donald Trump or any number of conservative lying clowns—means that there is a much better chance that it’s a true statement. It also poses a problem for the president and his GOP underlings, who have been pushing a sociopathic and scientifically ill-informed narrative that our country can return to normal business and social behaviors well before there’s any containment of the virus or a vaccine. So Wednesday afternoon, during the daily Trump/rant/rally/coronavirus press conference thing that happens, Trump did what he does: a lot of Orwellian public relations spin.
During the Wednesday “press briefing,” Trump called the Post headline fake news and misleading, and then encouraged Dr. Redfield, along with human shoe polish Vice President Mike Pence, to say nobody knows anything. Trump said Redfield was “totally misquoted” by the Post and explained that Redfield was really just promoting the importance of Americans getting the flu shot this coming fall.
Trump went on to ramble that Dr. Redfield did say “it’s possible, if the corona even comes back—and he doesn’t know that it’s going to and neither do I.” Then Dr. Redfield, who was at the briefing, explained himself by saying that yes, he believes if we have two viruses, the seasonal flu on top of the novel coronavirus, things will be “more difficult.”
The Trump administration then focused on the word “worse,” as the adjective was used by numerous news outlets to describe the CDC director’s statements to the Post.
DR. REDFIELD: So the comment that I made: It’s more difficult. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be more impossible. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be more, as some people have said, ‘worse.’ It just means it’s going to be difficult because we have to distinguish between the two.
And then this exchange happened between the president of the United States and a reporter, with the vice president of the United States chiming in like a true heel:
DR. REDFIELD: I’m accurately quoted in the Washington Post as “difficult.” But the headline was inappropriate.
TRUMP: What does the headline say? What does the headline say? Go ahead, read the headline.
REPORTER: The headline says, “CDC Director Warns Second Wave of Coronavirus is Likely to be Even More Devastating.” And isn’t that correct? Because—
TRUMP:—That’s not what he says.
PENCE: It’s not what he said.
TRUMP: It’s not what he said.
REPORTER: But if you have the two things happening—
TRUMP:—The headline doesn’t correspond to the story.
DR. REDFIELD: No. I actually think it’s actually going to be — I think the American public is going to heed the request to relook at their vaccine hesitancy, to vaccine with confidence for flu. And I’m confident that the public health infrastructure that we’re putting together now across this country so that we can early-case diagnose, isolate, and contact trace — as I say, block and tackle, block and tackle — that system is going to be there, and we’re going to be able to contain this virus.
REPORTER: Why did you retweet the article if it was inaccurate? Doctor, why did you retweet it?
TRUMP: You weren’t called.
People voted for this guy and still think he’s doing a competent job.
If you have a room of monkeys hitting keys on typewriters for an infinite amount of time, do you eventually end up with a Shakespeare play? For The Pudding, Russell Goldenberg and Amber Thomas put the infinite monkey theorem to the test directing the computer to randomly generate musical note patterns to match classic songs.
All said and done, the point here isn’t the real numbers, but the faith that given enough time, randomness will prevail. Will our experiment eventually play even the simple Nokia ringtone in our lifetime? Almost certainly not. Given enough time would it? Almost surely.
The experiment has been running for 10 days so far, currently working on “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen.
These days it seems like you can’t even scroll through goat videos on Twitter without hitting a COVID-19 chart — and people trying to use the chart to understand whether the epidemic has “peaked.”
Some good news: This graph shows diagnosed cases statewide over the last couple of weeks. We think our actions have started to bend the curve in our hardest hit counties.
It’s tempting to look at charts like these and try to find reason for optimism. That curve sure seems like it’s bending! Or, that new case number seems lower than yesterday’s!
But it’s not that easy. Each chart you see reflects a host of decisions — which data to chart, which source to use, how to compare countries or states, how to display the data — that can drastically change what you see and what you can safely take away from the chart. To truly understand whether a place has reached the peak of its infection curve, you need to be a savvy reader of the charts and the underlying data. And, ideally, you need to look at more than one chart.
So what should you keep in mind when you’re trying to interpret all these data visualizations?
What is the chart showing?
Before you can know whether the chart is showing you a peak, you need to know what data it’s showing you in the first place. Are you looking at total confirmed cases? Total hospitalizations? Total deaths? Or is the chart showing you day-by-day counts? Each of these numbers provide information — but each is incomplete. And they’re not interchangeable.
Confirmed cases
It’s really hard to tell whether someplace has hit a peak using a chart of confirmed cases. Obviously, we’d like to see the number of people who have tested positive for the coronavirus decline. But anytime you see something tracking the number of cases, remember how hugely dependent it is on the number of tests being done. Anyplace that doesn’t test for the coronavirus is not going to find cases. That’s especially true in the U.S., where the number of tests done is reportedly minuscule relative to how many people report symptoms.
“When we see a plateau, it may just be because we’ve maxed out our testing capacity rather than a true flattening of incident cases,” said Tara C. Smith, a professor of epidemiology at Kent State University. In other words, a flatter curve might just mean that the number of tests is failing to keep up with the number of infections. And as some states look to resume certain economic activities, they may have an incentive to keep testing levels low so the number of cases doesn’t appear to increase.
So let’s change our understanding of these kinds of charts off the bat: These aren’t visualizations of the number of cases, they’re visualizations of the number of confirmed cases, a number that, in most countries, drastically underestimates the true number of people who are sick.
Even if testing was sufficient, the tests themselves still need to be accurate. There are reports that some tests might have shockingly high rates of false negatives — that is, people who have the disease but get a negative test result at least some of the time.21
Even if all cases were somehow measured, there would still be a lag between when someone is infected and when they get tested. It takes time to develop symptoms (the incubation period), have those symptoms get bad enough to send someone to the doctor for a test, and for the test to come back. While the lag likely differs by person, the numbers on a chart of confirmed cases are (even in the best case) quite out of date.
This lag is also one reason why charts showing the daily number of new cases can be somewhat misleading. What looks like a change happening that day might actually be reflecting a change that started a week or two ago. And lots of funky things can happen as data is collected and reported that can artificially depress or inflate a day’s tally.
All of that could be dealt with — if all those factors stayed constant. That is, if people were generally getting tested at the same point in the course of their illness … and how health care professionals administered the tests wasn’t changing … and the tests themselves weren’t changing … and the delay in reporting results wasn’t changing … then the trends in confirmed cases would still be informative about the virus’s spread, even though the number of confirmed cases wouldn’t directly reflect the number of infections. We’re just looking for a change in the trend line on the chart, after all.
But the problem is that we don’t know if any of that is staying constant. So it’s very difficult to glean a useful signal from a metric as noisy as confirmed case counts.
Deaths
So counting cases is fraught. What about just counting deaths? Surely that’s less questionable, since every place already tracks how many people die there, so those numbers should be more reliable. This might be true — but it’s hard to be sure.
To track coronavirus deaths, you still need to confirm that a person who died had COVID-19 — and it’s unclear that that’s being done. Some people aren’t being tested before or after they die, and COVID-19 may not appear on someone’s death certificate even if it seemed likely they had the disease. For people who don’t die at a hospital, establishing the cause of death might be even more challenging, especially if coronavirus tests are scarce and being reserved for the living. And some countries have changed how they count deaths outside of hospitals as this pandemic has ground on, making it harder to interpret the trend over time.
Are hospitalizations the most accurate type of data? New York City, for example, has started releasing the number of people who have been hospitalized. Assuming that this data is collected correctly, we might think that this is the chart that would provide us the most reliable trend. If it peaked, then that would seem to be a good indicator that the infection has as well, even if most people with COVID-19 are never hospitalized.
But what happens if the criteria for hospitalization change as the outbreak progresses? If hospitals increase the threshold for admission as they run out of beds — if, for example, any shortness of breath was enough to get someone admitted in the early days of the pandemic, but health care workers start turning away those patients as resources get scarcer — then a chart that shows a plateau in hospitalizations could be a sign of a system approaching capacity rather than (or in addition to!) a change in the number of infections. (The same is true, for instance, if people are increasingly told to avoid hospitals unless absolutely necessary.)
How is the data being displayed?
The kind of chart you’re looking at also matters. Peaks are even harder to see if charts use a logarithmic scale, which many COVID-19 visualizations do. Using a log scale means that the chart’s vertical axis doesn’t increase the way you might expect, with the distance between 0 and 1,000 being the same size as the distance between 10,000 and 11,000. Instead, the number multiplies for each equally sized space on the y-axis — that is, if one space on the y-axis goes from 100 to 1,000, the next space of the same size will go from 1,000 to 10,000, and the one after that will go from 10,000 and 100,000, but the size of the gap between each set of those numbers stays the same even as the numbers jump up by bigger and bigger margins. This kind of trick has several advantages, including that it lets you compare a location’s curve when it has a relatively low number of cases and when it has a high number of cases. (If you have a linear scale, in contrast, showing the top end of the scale necessarily means that small values will be very hard to see.)
On the other hand, using a log scale also means that once you get to higher values, small-looking fluctuations in case counts can reflect pretty big differences in raw numbers. This makes it even harder to visually draw inferences about peaks from charts.
Of course, all of these concerns are even more serious when the chart shows data from more than one place, regardless of whether what’s being compared are different countries or different states. These kinds of charts have all the same issues as the ones tracking numbers in a single place, but that set of problems is multiplied by the number of places on the chart.
What happens next?
Let’s say that, according to one of the metrics above, the curve does seem to be bending downward. What does that mean? Well, first, you might want to look at the other metrics too. If all three measures — confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths — are going down, and the total number of tests administered hasn’t dropped, that makes it more likely that there really is good news. And a better metric — though still one with issues — is the share of positive tests out of all tests administered, which tries to account for testing in some way (though it doesn’t address whether who is being tested is changing). (Though if the number of cases is still growing, even if it’s at a lower rate, that would continue to increase the strain on an already burdened health care system.)
And as Joshua Epstein, the director of the New York University Agent-Based Modeling Lab, said in an online seminar: With any infectious disease, “There’s a lot of transmission after the peak.” Reaching the peak on a chart doesn’t mean you can go outside again — it means that the outbreak is at its worst. Even if it is getting better, you might still need to be extremely careful for a while.
And even if you are fully convinced that things are truly improving — new cases are going down, hospitals are nowhere near overcrowding, and the sick are getting better — what do you do when restrictions ease? Germany, which tested very high rates of people early on in the outbreak and had relatively low case numbers and deaths, has come up with a plan for gradual reopening. But if the peak has been successfully averted and relatively few people have had the disease, that might mean that a second, potentially larger peak is in the offing. Even after the infection peaks, the danger may be on the rise.
CORRECTION (April 23, 2020, 5:41 p.m.): An earlier version of this story misstated how the y-axis on a logarithmic chart would look. Instead of saying that the distance between 0 and 1,000 would be the same as the distance between 1,000 and 10,000, it should have said that the distance between 100 and 1,000 would be the same as the distance between 1,000 and 10,000.
No shit. Republicans don't actually believe in responsibility. Just more of their wingnut welfare.
Already, impeached president Donald Trump and his parry of idiots is creating conditions for a breakup of the United States of America. They think their efforts to suppress democracy while punishing blue states for caring for their residents will be allowed to continue indefinitely. But that’s not going to happen. And with blue state governors joining in interstate compacts in the west and northeast, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom calling California a “nation-state” (it is the fifth largest economy in the world!), the seeds for a devastating crackup have already been sown. Now, Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley are pouring gasoline on those first sparks.
Imagine that: McConnell is calling additional federal funding for states suffering under the pandemic lockdown and Trump’s breathtakingly inept handling of the crisis a “Blue State Bailout.”
It’s a theme that supposed “frontier Americans” like to tout, along with their self-reliance and pull-up-their-bootstraps attitudes. Just look at those city folks—especially the Black ones—all relying on government largess. Who can trust those tax-and-spend Democrats anyway? So you get bullshit comments like this:
States should always plan for a rainy day just like any business. I disagree that states should take Fed money or be bailed out. This will lead to taxpayers paying for mismanagement of poorly run states. States need to tighten up, make some cuts, and manage.
There is no rainy day fund that would prepare any state for a catastrophe of this magnitude. Is Haley saying that she’s happy to skip receipt of any federal money? Because of course that’s not happening.
But it’s worse than that: South Carolina would not exist in its current form without the largess of the federal budget. According to analysis by the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York, South Carolina got backed $1.73 billion in 2017, and $1.61 billion in 2018. That’s quite the return. And who is carrying South Carolina’s dead weight?
Net $ sent to Feds
Return on $1 sent to feds
New York
$22 billion
$0.90
New Jersey
$11.5B
$0.91
Massachusetts
$9.1B
$0.90
Connecticut
$8.1B
$0.84
Colorado
$1.6B
$0.97
Minnesota
$725 million
$0.99
How much extra did South Carolina pull in? $23 billion. So it’s not just those blue states— you can pretty much say that New York bailed out the Palmetto State.
And keep in mind, these numbers are exaggerated by the Trump trillion-dollar deficit, in which tax cuts for the rich meant that billionaire New Yorkers and Californians pay less in taxes. (If you want to see for yourself, here’s the data for 2017, pre-tax cuts.)
Kentucky is extra special, though. If you wonder why McConnell survives reelection every year despite deep personal unpopularity, it’s because Kentucky is the single biggest bailed out state in the entire country.
In 2017, it received a whopping $40.8 billion more than it paid in federal taxes, or a rate of return of $2.35 for every dollar spent. In 2018, it was an even bigger $45 billion, or $2.41 for every dollar sent to Washington.
No state is bailed out the way Kentucky is. It is a black hole of federal resources—a deficit-creation machine.
(The only other states that come close in federal largess are Virginia and Maryland, because of federal government infrastructure like the Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.)
Now McConnell, of all people, is going to walk around talking about “bailing out” blue states, when it is those blue states that make Kentucky possible?
Haley is going to complain about bailing out blue states while her state sucks in tens of billions of dollars generated by blue states?
It is clear that conservatives only see blue America as a foil for their bigotries and a source of revenue for states run so poorly that they can’t compete economically with the Californias, Massachusetts, New Jerseys, and New Yorks of America. They lag in education. They lack in health and fitness and diet. They lag in clean air and water.
And through it all blue states have gamely carried that burden, because it’s what liberals do—we help people. But is there gratitude, respect, empathy for the extra weight blue Americans have to shoulder? Of course not. There’s nothing but contempt and the use of undemocratic institutions (like the Senate and the Electoral College) and techniques (like voter suppression) to maintain their lock on power.
That way, McConnell can continue wailing about the federal deficit and those boogeyman blue states, while his state and those of his pals continue to suck blue America dry.
Remember, the seeds are planted. Either Republicans start acting like this is a United States of America, or the seeds of a national breakup will continue to germinate. Because this status quo? It can’t and won’t continue.
Rep. Jim Jordan speaks during a rally hosted by FreedomWorks in Washington, DC, on September 26, 2018. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
President Donald Trump in the White House. | Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times/POOL/Getty Images
Protesters block the street in front of the Supreme Court as it hears arguments on whether gay and transgender people are covered by a federal law barring employment discrimination on the basis of sex in 2019. | Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images
(@JimJordanJacket) April 24, 2020
pic.twitter.com/XguKPIlYgj
(@mtrlguy) April 24, 2020
(@polbikers) April 24, 2020
(@AstridWinegar) April 24, 2020
: We have received several calls regarding questions about disinfectant use and #COVID19.
Nigga please FYDAUAMPUFDHB
Rudy Giuliani in the Fox Businesses studios last year. | Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
Trump during the White House coronavirus press briefing on Thursday. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
