James.galbraith

CNN New Day host John Berman and Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro got in a heated exchange about the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients following a report that Navarro and Dr. Anthony Fauci had an epic showdown in the White House Situation Room after Fauci told Navarro the drug was unproven and not yet ready for prime time.

Said Berman: “What are your qualifications to weigh in on medicines more than Dr. Anthony Fauci? Why should we listen to you and not Dr. Fauci?”

Replied Navarro: “My qualifications, in terms of looking at the science, is that I’m a social scientist. I have a Ph.D. And I understand how to read statistical studies, whether it’s in medicine, the law, economics or whatever.”

Responded Berman: “I’m sorry, that doesn’t qualify you to treat patients. You know it doesn’t qualify to you treat patients.”

Navarro went on: “All I’m asking for you to understand, John, is that right in your city, in the New York health and hospital system, virtually every patient getting presenting with COVID-19 symptoms is given hydroxy.”

After Berman pointed out that chloroquine sometimes has “deadly” side effects, Navarro responded: “I don’t know why you’re so hard about this. Would you take [hydroxychloroquine] if you got sick?”

“Would I take it if I got sick? I would listen to my doctor about whether or not I should take it,” said Berman, “I would consult my doctor, not someone involved with trade policy. Do you want an internist striking trade deals?”

“Touché,” said Navarro. “Touché.”

JUST NOW: a remarkable discussion with Peter Navarro, who owned his disagreement with Dr. Fauci on hydroxychloroquine:

ME: "Do you want a medical doctor, an internist striking trade deals? "

Navarro: "Touche, touche."pic.twitter.com/7CIj8KJGts

— John Berman (@JohnBerman) April 6, 2020

NAVARRO: Would you take hydroxychloroquine if you got sick?@JohnBerman: I would listen to my doctor, not someone involved with trade policy. Do you want a doctor striking trade deals?

NAVARRO: Touche

BERMAN: That's my point! pic.twitter.com/GCjEzoWUV1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2020

The post CNN Anchor Grills Trump Trade Adviser Peter Navarro After ‘Epic’ Clash with Fauci Over COVID-19 Treatments: ‘Why Should We Listen to You?’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The intelligence community watchdog removed abruptly late Friday by President Donald Trump says he believes Trump ousted him because of his evenhanded handling of a whistleblower complaint that ultimately led to the president's impeachment.

"It is hard not to think that the President’s loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General," Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general said in a statement Sunday, "and from my commitment to continue to do so."

Atkinson was the federal official who revealed to Congress in September the existence of a whistleblower complaint against Trump, which indicated that the president improperly pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. When Atkinson sought to share that complaint with Congress under a federal whistleblower law, the White House and Justice Department intervened and blocked the transmission of the complaint for days.

Ultimately, amid withering pressure, Trump provided the whistleblower complaint to Congress, as well as a transcript of a July 2019 call with Ukraine's president, two pieces of evidence that became crucial factors in the House's decision to impeach Trump for abuse of power. The Senate later acquitted him on a nearly party-line vote.

"As an Inspector General, I was legally obligated to ensure that whistleblowers had an effective and authorized means to disclose urgent matters involving classified information to the congressional intelligence committees, and that when they did blow the whistle in an authorized manner, their identities would be protected as a guard against reprisals," Atkinson said in his statement. "Inspectors General are able to fulfill their critical watchdog functions because, by law, they are supposed to be independent of both the Executive agencies they oversee and of Congress."

Trump informed the House and Senate Intelligence Committees late Friday that he would be removing Atkinson after a required 30-day wait. But Atkinson was immediately placed on administrative leave, according to congressional sources, effectively circumventing the one-month delay. The move has prompted some Senate Republicans to demand more details about Atkinson's removal.

Trump indicated in his letters that he had lost confidence in Atkinson but didn't explain why. When asked about the matter at a Saturday press conference, though, Trump cited Atkinson's handling of the whistleblower complaint. Though Trump has repeatedly assailed the complaint as false, many of the underlying details were corroborated by a string of State Department and White Hopuse witnesses during impeachment hearings.

“I thought he did a terrible job. Absolutely terrible,” Trump said of Atkinson on Saturday at a press conference, adding, “He took this terrible, inaccurate whistleblower report and he brought it to Congress."

Atkinson's ouster occurred as Trump moved to remake the ranks of inspectors general, naming a handful to vacant posts late Friday. He also nominated a White House attorney, Brian Miller, to the newly created post of special inspector general for pandemic recovery. The position, created as part of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief law signed late last month, is meant to oversee a $500 billion fund in the Treasury Department meant to stabilize the economy. Though Miller, a former federal inspector general, won plaudits from some transparency advocates, the pick drew quick criticism from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who questioned whether a White House attorney could demonstrate independence from the president.

Trump's removal of Atkinson also drew a quick brushback from the Justice Department's current inspector general, Michael Horowitz, who heads a council of fellow IGs. Horowitz emphasized that Atkinson was widely respected in the IG community and was seen as having handled the Ukraine whistleblower complaint "by the book."

Atkinson, who remained silent through the impeachment process despite attacks from Trump allies in Congress, defended his handling of the whistleblower complaint.

"Those of us who vowed to protect a whistleblower’s right to safely be heard must, to the end, do what we promised to do, no matter how difficult and no matter the personal consequences," he wrote. "I will be forever grateful to the many public officials and others who fight tirelessly and consistently, in words and deeds, in ordinary and extraordinary matters, to protect the rights of all whistleblowers and, in turn, the best interests of the United States."

Employees work at AST Sportswear, one of a coalition of American brands working to make masks to meet the coronavirus demand. | Mindy Schauer/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register/Getty Images

Manufacturers, fashion designers, and 3D printing companies are making face masks, ventilators, and hand sanitizer.

In mid-March, amid mounting outcry over the critical shortages of masks, ventilators, and other medical supplies facing American hospitals fighting Covid-19, Jonathan Schwartz was one of the countless entrepreneurs scrambling to answer one question: How can we help?

Schwartz is a co-founder of Voodoo Manufacturing, a 3D printing company with two factories in Brooklyn, New York, including one that makes clear orthodontic aligners for companies like Smile Direct Club.

Because of that, the team already had experience getting clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make medical devices — but it still wasn’t immediately clear where their resources were most urgently needed.

“There was just a lot of noise that we were trying to filter out,” says Schwartz, recalling the cacophony of engineers, makers, and megacorporations jumping into the fray all at once.

Voodoo is part of a private-sector push that in recent weeks has mobilized fashion designers, automakers, distilleries, perfume producers, and others to repurpose their manufacturing lines to make health care products that traditional supply chains can’t provide fast enough. A similar effort began in China in early February as the coronavirus swept through Wuhan and put hundreds of millions under lockdown: Factories that usually made sneakers and iPhones switched over to masks to meet the unprecedented demand.

These initiatives are ongoing and have been expedited by a mandate from the Communist Party, according to Stanley Chao, managing director at All In Consulting, which helps Western companies do business in China. “The government is saying, ‘Whatever you make, we will buy.’ So you don’t worry about the supply and demand issues,” he said.

Today, the virus has become a global pandemic, and the countries with the most urgent needs don’t have the manufacturing infrastructure or labor pool that has made China the “world’s factory.” Even in the US — where Detroit automakers famously churned out military aircraft, artillery, and tanks in World War II in their efforts to “outbuild Hitler” — companies have run into hurdles as they’ve tried to scale up.

For one, while state and local governments have welcomed the assistance — and President Donald Trump has begun attacking companies who don’t produce fast enough — most of the work is still being coordinated from the ground up. Absent any central resources for private companies to find out what’s most needed and what the government itself will commit to buying, many have resorted to researching online, cold-calling medical institutions, and tracking down personal protective equipment (PPE) through their own supplier networks abroad (in some cases inadvertently driving up prices by outbidding other offers).

While the US saw its first confirmed case of Covid-19 on January 21, and the WHO warned about global shortages of PPE in early February, the Trump administration dragged its heels in invoking a federal act that would compel American companies to manufacture more medical equipment to fill the gaps in the supply chain. The Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950 can compel companies to prioritize orders from the federal government, and while Trump announced he had signed it on March 18, he said he only did so “should we need to invoke it in a worst-case scenario in the future.”

Apart from a somewhat confusing invocation just over a week later — ordering General Motors to go forward with a plan it had already announced — the administration’s first announcement that it would use these powers came on April 2 when it said it would work to procure 100,000 ventilators by the end of June along with tens of millions of PPE units.

Throughout the third week of March, Voodoo talked to dozens of doctors, health care organizations, and hospital procurement teams, eventually settling on protective face shields as the device it could produce quickly and safely at scale.

Face shields are typically worn in conjunction with N95 respirators or surgical masks, and like other forms of PPE, inventories are so limited at some hospitals that doctors have been forced to fashion their own using office supplies.

For a company like Voodoo, though, the product is fairly simple: a 3D-printed headband, interchangeable plastic sheeting, a foam pad for comfort, and elastic to help secure it to the wearer’s head.

“We can go from just a design file to the first 500 units in a single day, and so we’re really here trying to just act as a stop-gap to get these urgently needed supplies to hospitals so they can start ramping up their care of patients,” says Schwartz, acknowledging that major medical equipment suppliers will ultimately need to step in to provide long-term scale. For now, the company is producing 2,500 units per week and has set up a Shopify site — CombatingCovid.com — to sell directly to health care institutions.

Typically, hospitals don’t shop for medical equipment the same way the rest of us shop for leggings or mattresses, but these are extraordinary times.

As the coronavirus crisis has progressed in the US, doctors and nurses across the country have raised alarms about dwindling supplies of PPE. The shortfall not only puts front-line workers at risk of infection, it may also limit testing capacity (because someone wearing PPE is generally required to administer the tests) and reduce the number of doctors attending to patients at the most critical moments.

Similarly urgent is the need for ventilators, the machines that help the sickest Covid-19 patients breathe when they can’t do so on their own; too few, and doctors could be faced with the same horrifying triage scenarios as in Italy, where doctors had to decide which of their patients would be hooked up to the lifesaving equipment based on their odds of survival.

To help prevent the spread of the coronavirus so hospitals don’t become even more overwhelmed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends using hand sanitizer if soap and water aren’t available. A ready supply is needed to protect essential workers like grocery store clerks, delivery drivers, and warehouse workers, but many have complained they don’t have access to it since it has been sold out almost everywhere since February.

With work slowing to a trickle across much of the economy due to store and restaurant closures, grounded flights, and supplier delays, American companies aren’t just motivated to help fight the virus — they also want to keep their teams employed if they can do so safely. Here’s how some are pitching in:

Fashion brands are sewing face masks and medical gowns

With the coronavirus battering the fashion capitals of Milan, New York, and Los Angeles, the industry has enlisted an army of seamstresses to come to their defense.

On March 20, designer Christian Siriano tweeted to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to offer the services of his 10-person atelier to make face masks for local health care workers. A week later, he delivered a box of 1,000 washable cotton-blend masks to front-line workers at a temporary medical center at the Javits Center in Manhattan, and more are on the way.

Siriano’s masks aren’t medical-grade, but they can be worn by nonclinical workers to free up supplies or over tight-fitting medical-grade N95 masks to extend their life — a tactic some institutions have instructed doctors and nurses to use in order to help conserve supplies.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services’ own estimates, the US would need as many as 3.5 billion N95 face masks over the course of a year fighting a “full-blown” pandemic. At the outset of the coronavirus crisis, the country’s emergency stockpile held about 1 percent of that: 12 million N95 masks, which filter out at least 95 percent of all airborne particles when worn correctly, and 30 million surgical masks, which are looser-fitting and provide a physical barrier against large droplets, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar testified on March 3.

In part because of this scarcity, the World Health Organization (WHO) and CDC have for months advised that healthy people need only wear masks if they’re caring for someone infected with the virus, despite evidence of the effectiveness of even homemade masks at helping reduce the risk of transmission. Because even asymptomatic carriers are thought to be able to spread the coronavirus and the US has been plagued with months of testing delays, many people could well have put others at risk while believing that they themselves were healthy.

On April 2, President Trump confirmed that the government will soon release new guidance on wearing face masks, though he erroneously claimed that scarves would “in many ways … [be] better” than a mask because of their thickness. (In its guidance for health care workers, the CDC says coverings like scarves and bandanas should be considered a “last resort” after respirators, surgical masks, and non-FDA-regulated face masks.)

Initiatives like Siriano’s have sprung up throughout the industry: Fellow Project Runway alum Michael Costello has made more than 2,500 masks so far — some cotton-blend, some with HEPA filters, and some medical-grade, thanks to a fabric donation from a surgeon friend. For Days, a closed-loop T-shirt line, has dedicated its sewing capacity to making 10 masks for every purchase on its site. OESH Shoes, a Charlottesville, Virginia-based brand, is 3D printing flexible masks and mask adjusters based on insight from co-founder Casey Kerrigan’s experience as an MD.

Apparel companies with scalable US-based supply chains are a vanishingly rare group these days, but a coalition of them is working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy to produce up to 10 million face masks per week in domestic and Central American plants.

The group includes Hanes, Fruit of the Loom, and yarn manufacturer Parkdale Mills, which is supplying the raw material for the cotton masks. American Giant, a San Francisco-based brand that specializes in hoodies, T-shirts, and other casual apparel, has redirected its two North Carolina cut-and-sew plants to make masks full-time.

Separately, Brooks Brothers has committed to producing 150,000 masks a day as well as gowns for health care workers at its plants in New York, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. Nordstrom, the country’s largest employer of tailors, is working with its partner Kaas Tailored and health care network Providence Health & Services to sew more than 100,000 masks made from surplus surgical wrap.

In Los Angeles, former American Apparel chief Dov Charney is hiring sewers, forklift operators, and other warehouse workers to help produce and distribute hundreds of thousands of masks and gowns for FEMA and other organizations. His new brand, Los Angeles Apparel, is selling three-packs of cotton-terry masks online for $30 to support the cost of labor, operations, and donations of masks to hospitals and first responders.

LA’s garment industry is focusing its efforts on non-medical masks through a program called L.A. Protects. Conducted by the mayor’s office in partnership with millennial-favorite brand Reformation and health care company Kaiser Permanente, it aims to provide 5 million masks to front-line workers like delivery drivers, grocery store clerks, and non-clinical health care staff.

Other countries are also seeing corporations and small brands work in tandem: In Italy, Prada and Gucci are manufacturing masks alongside family-owned facilities like the Everyn Calzaturificio factory, which produces shoes for luxury footwear brands like Nomasei.

The few American brands that have managed to procure medical-grade masks have done so mostly through their suppliers in China, where half of the world’s masks were produced before the crisis and where mask manufacturing has accelerated nearly twelvefold since, according to the New York Times. Even there, N95 masks account for less than 2 percent of daily mask production due to a shortage of melt-blown fabric, one of the key materials needed to make them. The ultra-fine particle-blocking material is made using expensive, highly specialized machines, so companies haven’t been able to simply pivot to producing it even as global demand has skyrocketed.

On March 21, luxury group LVMH announced plans to secure 40 million surgical masks and FFP2 respirators (the European equivalent of N95 masks) to help France fight Covid-19. Chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault funded the first delivery of 10 million masks at a cost of 5 million euros ($5.4 million), while the government is expected to finance the remaining shipments over the coming weeks.

Eddie Bauer is importing 20,000 masks, including 5,000 N95s, for donation to the Washington State Department of Enterprise Services, after some of the brand’s suppliers of technical outerwear pivoted to PPE.

Eugenia Kim, a New York-based designer of luxury hats and accessories, says she taught herself how to import masks in six days after seeing Cuomo’s call for aid and witnessing what her sister and father were experiencing as doctors on the front lines. Her hat factories in China, she says, “had previously been reaching out about mask production and I realized I could help the cause.” The facilities can produce between 10,000-50,000 units per day of N95 masks, surgical masks, and other PPE, and Kim is working with hospitals and government agencies to arrange direct shipments.

Booze, hemp, and perfume brands are getting into the hand sanitizer biz

The great Purell shortage of 2020 is still well underway, but other industries with access to hand sanitizer’s key ingredient — alcohol — are doing their best to fill in the gaps.

Morgan McLachlan, co-founder and chief product officer at LA distillery Amass, says she first started making the label’s “alcohol-based botanic hand wash” at the beginning of March when she couldn’t find any hand sanitizer in stores or online. Initially, it was just to protect herself and her friends and family, but as more and more people caught wind of the idea, it became something much bigger.

“We were going to have our people give it out to all of our accounts as a friendly thing to do to keep all of the service staff safe,” she recalls. “Well, bars and restaurants got shut down. But we’re getting orders from across the country now.”

The craft-distillery price tag — $38 for a 16 ounce bottle, with 10 percent going to the US Bartenders Guild Emergency Assistance Program, compared with $2.50 for a 10 ounce bottle of Purell, pre-price-gouging — hasn’t deterred customers, nor has the 10- to 14-day wait for shipping (a result, in part, of delays from packaging suppliers). On top of its direct-to-consumer sales, the distillery is also working with public health agencies to distribute the sanitizer more broadly.

“I think we all have our desert island skills,” she says. “As distillers, we’re usually creating little quotidian pleasures to help people get through the day — but now we’re keeping people safe.”

Some of the biggest liquor companies in the world have since taken a similar attitude: Diageo, whose brands include Smirnoff and Tanqueray, is donating up to 2 million liters of ethyl alcohol to hand sanitizer manufacturers, while the vodka maker Tito’s said it would produce 24 tons of its own hand sanitizer to give away to first responders and other front-line workers. (Initially, the Texas brand was forced to caution the public that its vodka didn’t meet the 60 percent alcohol threshold required by the CDC to make hand sanitizer after frustrated shoppers began formulating their own at home.)

Uncle Bud’s, a hemp-based personal care line, was already in the process of creating its hand sanitizer when the coronavirus outbreak arrived on its doorstep. The shortage convinced the team to push the October launch date up to March, which meant sidelining other projects and shifting manufacturing lines to make millions of units of hand sanitizer, all while scaling up the company’s online business as more and more of its retail partners closed stores.

“Being a smaller company, we were able to pivot quickly and fast-track finalizing formulation and production,” says co-founder Bruno Schiavi. The sanitizer launched online on March 23, selling for $9.99 per 8 ounce bottle.

Perfume producers, another major alcohol consumer, have also joined the fight: On March 16, LVMH began producing and delivering free hand sanitizer to French health authorities and hospitals, using the production lines that typically manufacture fragrance for Dior, Givenchy, and Guerlain. The luxury conglomerate pulled from its reserves of purified water, ethanol, and glycerine to create the sanitizing gel and bottled it in the same plastic dispensers used for Dior hand soap, getting the initiative up and running within 72 hours.

L’Oréal is distributing millions of bottles of hand sanitizer throughout Europe through two of its brands: La Roche-Posay is heading the initiative for hospitals, nursing homes, and partner pharmacies, and Garnier is doing the same for its food distribution clients so grocery workers can be protected on the job.

Stateside, the Estée Lauder Companies Inc. has pledged to reopen a factory in Long Island, New York, to manufacture and donate 10,000 bottles of hand sanitizer to its home state every week. Coty Inc. — which makes fragrances for brands like Marc Jacobs and Gucci — likewise said it plans to donate tens of thousands of units per week, including through a partnership with Kris and Kylie Jenner. Coty, which recently bought a majority stake in Kylie Cosmetics and Kylie Skin, plans to distribute the hand sanitizer to health care workers and first responders in Southern California.

As companies have rushed to get sanitizing products out the door, US agencies have eased some of the regulations around them: On March 27, the FDA updated its policies to allow producers of fuel ethanol to sell the product to hand sanitizer manufacturers provided it meets certain standards of purity. Prices of the ingredients typically used in hand sanitizer — either isopropyl alcohol or ethanol for food and drug manufacturing — shot up in March due to the surge in demand.

The Trump administration’s $2 trillion stimulus package also includes a temporary exemption for excise taxes on alcohol used to produce hand sanitizer during the course of the Covid-19 crisis.

Car companies are shifting production to ventilators

Even before Covid-19 was declared a national emergency in the US on March 13, ventilator manufacturers around the world were ramping up production to meet the escalating demand. Even at maximum capacity, though, they haven’t been able to keep up with health care needs caused by the rapidly spreading respiratory illness.

To help move the needle, American automakers have stepped in to offer their support. General Motors is working with Ventec Life Systems, a Seattle-area manufacturer that typically makes about 200 ventilators per month. On its own, Ventec expected to be able to increase production to 1,000 units per month, but with the help of GM, it has been able to source enough of the 700 components that go into the device to increase its capacity tenfold, according to the New York Times.

Ford, too, announced on March 30 that it is partnering with General Electric’s health care division to produce ventilators based on a “simplified” design licensed from Florida-based Airon Corp. The car company will reopen one of its plants in Ypsilanti, Michigan, to produce the devices beginning the week of April 20.

Even working around the clock, both of these initiatives will take time, however. Ford expects to be able to deliver 1,500 new ventilators by the end of April, 12,000 by the end of May, and 50,000 by July, ramping up to a capacity of 30,000 per month. Once they’ve finished overhauling a GM electrical components facility in Kokomo, Indiana, Ventec and GM expect to produce 10,000 units per month, with “hundreds” shipping by the end of April, according to The Verge.

Prior to the coronavirus crisis, the US had around 170,000 ventilators available for patient use spread among hospitals, smaller health care facilities, and the national emergency stockpile, according to a February report from the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. While that number is normally more than enough to serve the population, the report’s authors found that “the need for ventilation services during a severe pandemic could quickly overwhelm these day-to-day operational capabilities.”

Despite this, the federal government has waffled on its commitment to obtaining more ventilators, delaying the current production efforts.

As recently as March 26, President Trump questioned the need for more of the devices on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. “I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” he said. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.” (New York state, Gov. Cuomo has said, will need a minimum of 30,000 to deal with the crisis.)

The next day, Trump changed course, berating GM on Twitter for charging “top dollar” and not working fast enough to produce the ventilators, though the company had announced its partnership with Ventec just hours earlier and said it would sell the items at cost.

The administration said it would invoke the DPA to require the automaker to prioritize the government’s ventilator orders. As of March 30, the federal government still hadn’t indicated how many ventilators it planned to buy or what price it was willing to pay, according to the Times, though at a news conference the day prior, Trump changed his tune again. “General Motors is doing a fantastic job,” he said. “I don’t think we have to worry about General Motors now.”

Tesla, too, is chipping in, despite CEO Elon Musk’s tweets downplaying the severity of the pandemic. The company has donated more than 1,200 ventilators to the city of Los Angeles and hundreds more to New York City, shipping surplus stock from China while it works to establish production lines to manufacture more at several of its US plants.

3D printers and sportswear brands are manufacturing face shields

Schwartz and the Voodoo Manufacturing team aren’t the only ones that have latched onto the idea of face shields: Nike is prototyping a design in partnership with Oregon Health & Science University in the company’s home state, and according to a recent earnings call, its innovation and manufacturing teams are working on other PPE concepts for further down the road.

With the NHL season on hold, hockey equipment manufacturer Bauer has also shifted to face shields, effectively switching one type of protective gear for another. At its factories in upstate New York and Quebec, Canada, it’s currently producing 20,000 to 25,000 units per week, which will increase to 70,000 units per week later in April.

Demand, though, has far outstripped supply: The company has received inquiries from around the world for more than a million units and has taken orders for 300,000. It has also posted the product’s specs online, and so far, at least one other hockey company has joined in the effort. Bauer’s face shields cost about $3 each including shipping, which covers the cost of raw materials and overhead; it says it does not expect to make a profit on the sales.

At its own 3D printing and manufacturing facility in Nashville, Tennessee, Smile Direct Club has produced thousands of face shields for customers including St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center in Idaho and The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada. It’s also working to prototype respirator masks and nasopharyngeal testing swabs. The crisis has mobilized all corners of the 3D printing community, from the thousands of engineers and hobbyists organizing in private Slack groups to Carbon, the multibillion-dollar company that makes 3D printers for brands like Adidas and Johnson & Johnson.

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House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said on Sunday that a new congressional panel intended to oversee the distribution of coronavirus relief funds “will be forward-looking” and not probe President Donald Trump’s widely criticized initial response to the ongoing public health crisis.

“My understanding is that this committee will be forward-looking,” Clyburn told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The remarks from the No. 3 House Democrat come after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Thursday that he would lead a special bipartisan House committee tasked with providing oversight of the administration as it doles out more than $2 trillion in federal aid allocated in the recent stimulus package.

Pelosi emphasized that the committee “is about the here and now” and would not take the place of another potential panel, akin to the 9/11 Commission, meant to perform a comprehensive review of the outbreak’s origins in the United States.

But Clyburn’s reinforcement of Pelosi’s message and description of the committee’s mission is likely to further rankle some House Democrats who have called for more aggressive scrutiny of the federal government’s early management of the novel coronavirus’ rapid spread across the country.

Those efforts by the administration were marred by a failure to mount a comprehensive testing operation and muddled by Trump’s repeated attempts to downplay the coronavirus’ threat to Americans.

“We’re not going to be looking back on what the president may or may not have done back before this crisis hit. The crisis is with us,” Clyburn said Sunday. “The American people are now out of work. Millions of them out of work. The question is whether or not the money that’s appropriated will go to support them and their families or whether or not this money will end up in the pockets of a few profiteers.”

Despite the limited scope of Clyburn’s committee, lawmakers have introduced at least two measures seeking a deeper probe of the nation’s fight against the coronavirus within the past week.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, proposed on Wednesday a 25-member bipartisan commission that would conduct a sweeping 18-month investigation, and Reps. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) and John Katko (R-N.Y.) introduced a bill on Thursday calling for an inquiry into the government’s preparation for and handling of the pandemic.

The 9/11 Commission was established in November 2002, a little more than a year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The bipartisan panel, chaired by former Gov. Tom Kean of New Jersey, a Republican, and former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), issued a report in 2004 that, among other things, criticized government intelligence failures.

President Donald Trump arrives at a White House coronavirus press briefing on April 3. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images

White House lawyer Brian Miller has been selected for oversight of a $500 billion bailout fund.

On Friday evening, President Donald Trump announced that he had picked White House lawyer Brian Miller to oversee how billions of dollars in coronavirus-related relief money is spent.

Though Miller has a long history of serving as an agency watchdog and was celebrated as Trump’s pick by some transparency experts, Democrats have pushed back on the decision. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others said over the weekend that Miller’s current work within the administration means he will be insufficiently neutral as special inspector general over a $500 billion corporate bailout fund, part of a $2 trillion stimulus package passed by Congress to offset some of the economic damage caused by the spread of Covid-19.

In negotiations for the third coronavirus relief package, passed on March 25, Democrats pushed for transparency measures over the half-trillion-dollar fund, which was set aside for large industries. The final bill created the office of a Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery (SIGPR) within the Treasury Department to audit and investigate usage of that fund.

Miller is currently a special assistant to the president and serves as senior associate counsel in the Office of White House Counsel, so he was involved in the president’s defense during his impeachment trial.

For that reason, Democrats have criticized the pick, saying Miller is not sufficiently neutral.

“This oversight position, which will be responsible for overseeing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, requires complete independence from the president and any other interested party to assure the American people that all decisions are made without fear or favor,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement Saturday. “To nominate a member of the president’s own staff is exactly the wrong type of person to choose for this position.”

Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut likened the pick to putting the “fox in charge of the henhouse.”

Prior to working for the Trump administration, however, Miller worked as an inspector general for the General Services Administration, which operates federal properties, from 2005 until 2014. In that position, he investigated scandals within both the Obama and second Bush administrations.

“He was a very serious IG at GSA,” an expert on inspectors general, Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight, told the Washington Post, using an acronym for the position. “The best specific example is he went toe to toe with the GSA administrator and was largely responsible for [George W.] Bush firing GSA Administrator Lurita Doan. He wasn’t afraid of taking direct action.”

Doan was a GSA administrator who resigned from office in 2008 after being accused of using her office to help Republicans. Miller also investigated allegations that GSA officials had spent thousands of dollars partying in Las Vegas in 2010.

“He is a quality pick. You couldn’t do better. He combines loyalty to the administration with the independence you need in an IG,” agreed Keith Ashdown, former staff director for the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which has oversight over inspectors general, according to the same Post article.

Not all transparency advocates lauded the choice, however. Noah Bookbinder, who serves as the executive director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an advocacy group for ethics, criticized Miller’s nomination on Twitter.

Miller must still be approved by the Senate, at which point he would also sit on a council of watchdogs from other agencies, forming a broader oversight group. It is unclear when that confirmation would take place, however, because the Senate is out of session until at least late April.

We can add another failure to the litany of failures, indifference and incompetence of the Trump administration in responding to (or even reacting to) the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic. The Associated Press reports that newly obtained federal purchasing contracts show "federal agencies largely waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers."

Mid-March. Long after it was clear that the virus had already spread to the United States, was already threatening to overwhelm hospitals here, and long after events in China and in Italy demonstrated the likelihood of equipment shortages, rationing, and increased deaths. (California Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example, issued a statewide stay-at-home order on March 19.)

It was only then that the Trump-led federal government, after two months of Trump downplaying the virus and even members of Trump's appointed coronavirus task force insisting it was "contained,", took steps to acquire the sort of emergency medical equipment that hospitals were already warning were in short supply.

Mid-March.

US Surgeon General Jerome Adams appeared on Fox News Sunday as well as NBC’s Meet The Press this Sunday morning with a warning to the public. According to Adams, this upcoming week may be the "hardest and the saddest" for many Americans yet as the country struggles to face the novel coronavirus pandemic amid low supplies, overworked hospitals, and inconsistent messages from our government. “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized," Adams told Fox News viewers. “It’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that,” he added. 

He came short, however, of directing governors who have not yet issued a stay at home order to do so. Adams also did not ask for a national stay at home directive. Instead, he asked of those Republican governors, “give us what you can,” bargaining for a week if “you can’t give us a month” while on Meet the Press. Of course, governors can, and should, “give” a month—and more. And these messages would have been helpful at any point earlier, but are a better wake up call now than never.

In speaking to hold-out governors on NBC, Adams invoked national tragedies once again. “The next week is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, it’s going to be our 9/11 moment,” he told viewers. “It’s going to be the hardest moment for many Americans in their entire lives. And we really need to understand that if we want to flatten that curve and get through to the other side, everyone needs to do their part.”

Here are those clips… Including a moment where, on Fox, Adams mentions more people will die from “cigarette smoking in this country” than the coronavirus. 

Given that more than 300,000 cases have been confirmed across the nation, as well as over 8,000 deaths, Fox News viewers in particular probably need a reminder. After all, as Daily Kos previously covered, less than a month ago barely over one-quarter of Republicans believed the coronavirus would change daily life in a major way. Similarly, according to a recent poll, only 21% of Republicans were worried about a local outbreak. Less than 20% of polled Republicans believe the government moved too slowly in responding to the pandemic. 

That’s not to mention the number of religious leaders openly encouraging people to forego social distancing recommendations and come to service anyway. One pastor from a Florida megachurch was actually arrested over a state order violation because too many people came to service. The CDC and WHO have been abundantly clear—stay home when and if you can, wash your hands, and don’t get together with friends, family members, or community members you don’t already live with. Still, with dismissive messages from the president and others in power, the general public has been confused. While it’s long past the time people should have started taking this public health crisis seriously, taking preventative measures and making smarter, safer choices now is better than never.

And Trump? On Saturday afternoon, Donald Trump suggested that “there will be a lot of death” to come as the nation struggles to face the novel coronavirus pandemic. Of course, that’s a far cry from just two weeks ago, when he hypothesized the country would be running as normal again by Easter Sunday. Just three weeks ago, Trump suggested, “it will go away.”

“We want everyone to understand you've got to be Rosie The Riveter... You've got to do your part,” Adams stressed on Meet the Press. "As hard as this week is going to be, there is a light at the end of the tunnel if everyone does their part for the next 30 days," Adams added on Fox. The easiest way to do your part? Stay home.

The deadly coronavirus pandemic may have closed schools, shuttered businesses, ended sports seasons and postponed the Democratic National Convention, but it hasn’t canceled Wisconsin’s primary on Tuesday.

Despite a last-minute maneuver from the governor, a stay-at-home order, a massive shortage of poll workers and pleas from mayors across the state to postpone the primary amid one of the worst public health crises in U.S. history, Tuesday’s election is on track to go on.

In an extraordinary snub on Saturday, Wisconsin’s Republican-led Legislature collectively shrugged its shoulders at an 11th hour call from Gov. Tony Evers to halt in-person voting, gaveling in and out of a special session in seconds without taking action.

A source close to the governor told POLITICO on Saturday that Evers had no plans to take further action in an attempt to stop the election, despite his suggestion on Friday that he might explore other options.

“It is highly likely, if not a certainty, that this election is going to happen on April 7 no matter what the governor does,” said the source.

The source cautioned that the coronavirus pandemic continues to quickly evolve and Evers could be prompted to take more action if an unforeseen circumstance arises.

And Evers is expected to face more pressure from his own party to reconsider. Already, a slew of mayors were drawing up a letter Saturday evening to send to the governor, calling on him to do more to stop the election.

“Republicans in the Legislature are playing politics with public safety and ignoring the urgency of this public health crisis. It’s wrong. No one should have to choose between their health and their right to vote," Evers said in a statement. “This, however, is an easy decision. It's time for every Republican legislator to do their jobs and take a vote on this commonsense proposal to extend the election date so everyone can vote safely from home. I urge every Wisconsinite to contact their legislators and demand a vote.”

Republicans seemed unmoved. The Wisconsin GOP has signaled it has no intention to relent on the issue and, in fact, Republicans on Saturday went further, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to block a lower court ruling that expanded absentee balloting in the state.

The governor's reasoning in deciding not to take additional action, such as attempting to order polls closed by his own action or having a health official shutter them, is that it could backfire on him, the source close to Evers said.

If the issue went before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which holds a Republican majority, Evers risks inadvertently creating precedent that could adversely affect his emergency powers, the source said. Beyond that, the governor’s office doesn’t want to expend all of its political capital in a fight over moving the election because it needs GOP legislative leaders to play ball on a broader coronavirus funding package.

“The decision-making for us – we have to look beyond April 7 as we respond to this public health crisis. The surge is coming, it’s going to happen after April 7,” the source said.

Mayors across the state have for weeks pleaded for a delay, amid a severe shortage of poll workers sickened by coronavirus or fearful of contamination. The shortages have meant the closure of polling sites, including in predominantly minority areas of Milwaukee. Milwaukee, which typically has about 180 polling sites, announced it would have just five open.

On Saturday, the Republican National Committee, the Wisconsin Republican Party and the GOP-controlled state legislature sought an emergency stay at the U.S. Supreme Court of a lower court's ruling that expanded absentee voting in the state.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge William Conley said absentee ballots in the state can be returned through 4 p.m. on April 13, nearly a week after in-person voting is still scheduled to take place. Conley also extended the deadline that has since passed to request an absentee ballot, and waived a witness signature requirement for voters who were unable to “safely obtain a witness certification despite reasonable efforts to do so.”

Following an appeal from Republicans, the 7th Circuit restored the witness signature requirement. The circuit court, however, left the extended absentee ballot timeline in place.

Now, Republicans are asking the highest court in the land to also strike the absentee ballot extension. Republicans are asking for a "stay of the district court’s injunction to the extent it requires the State to count absentee ballots postmarked after April 7, thus clarifying that absentee ballots must be postmarked (or personally delivered to the polls) no later than April 7 in order to be counted."

Outside of the court order, Wisconsin laws usually requires that absentee ballots be returned by 8 p.m. on Election Day. There is no postmark requirement.

A report from the Wisconsin Elections Commission on Tuesday found that nearly 60 percent of Wisconsin’s municipalities were reporting a shortage of poll workers, including more than 100 jurisdictions that said they lacked the ability to staff even one voting site right now.

Evers had previously asked the Legislature to mail out ballots to Wisconsin residents – something Republicans shot down – though the governor did not call for a delay in the primary until Friday. That was after officials in his own party expressed frustration that the governor had not done more to exercise his powers to halt the election amid the health crisis.

In a joint statement on Friday, legislative GOP leaders dismissed Evers’ last-minute plea, saying that hundreds of thousands of workers still were attending their jobs every day.

“There’s no question that an election is just as important as getting take-out food,” the statement said.

Wisconsin's health officials have reported more than 2,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19, and 56 deaths.

It’s not as if utterly failing at the response to a global pandemic doesn’t have its upsides. Donald Trump has already used this moment to neuter what remained of the EPA and set back efforts at reducing carbon emissions by a decade. And now he’s using this prime moment in history to fire Intelligence Community inspector general Michael Atkinson, who just last year proved to be the one man in Washington who still remembered that there are rules. 

It was Atkinson who saw the whistleblower report concerning Donald Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President Zelensky and immediately realized that this was critically important information that needed to go before Congress, even as other members of both the IC and the Department of Justice were finding ways to sweep that report under the rug. But being honest and competent has a price in Trump’s Washington — and it’s always the same one; Atkinson is out.

As CNN reports, Trump has given Atkinson 30 days to clear his desk. Whether or not he will bother to fill the role is unclear. Several other inspector general slots are currently sitting empty. There is now no inspector general at the Department of Defense. No inspector general at the Treasury. And, critically in the midst of the ongoing crisis, no inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services. Those are just a fragment of the areas where the answer to “Who watches these people to see that they’re following the law” is “absolutely no one.”

In signing the recent coronavirus stimulus bill, Trump even added a signing statement saying explicitly that he would not bother to brief the inspector general that the bill requires, or respond to issues that the inspector general surfaces. 

Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell may love packing the courts with conservative judges, but when it comes to the people who are supposed to provide a check on abuse of office, Trump wants nothing to do with them. And he’s doing his best to make sure there are none of them to worry about.

Removing Atkinson comes after Trump has made literally hundreds of changes within the Intelligence Community, conducting a series of purges to ensure leadership at the FBI, CIA, NSA and other agencies puts protecting Trump first, and concerns about the nation somewhere far down the list. Concerns about following the rules are … what rules?

Responding to the firing of Atkinson, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff described Trump’s actions as "another blatant attempt by the President to gut the independence of the Intelligence Community and retaliate against those who dare to expose presidential wrongdoing.”

Schiff also called this an act of “retribution against a distinguished public servant for doing his job and informing Congress ...”  Which is, of course, exactly the point of Trump’s action. It might be seen as a signal to others, if there were any others left to signal.

Another eyebrow-raising stock transaction by Sen. Kelly Loeffler has surfaced. Because apparently the ones we already knew about weren’t shady enough. In the latest case, Loeffler bought shares in an online travel booking company on March 6 … and then turned around and sold them on March 10 and 11, immediately before Donald Trump announced his Europe travel ban.

Loeffler continues to claim that her portfolio is managed by professionals without her input. Her outside advisers sure made some very interesting choices on her behalf, from investing in two companies that stood to benefit from coronavirus to selling off millions of dollars in stocks immediately after a closed-door Senate briefing on the virus’s threat.

The amount at stake in the latest transaction is just over $46,000, which, admittedly, is a teeny tiny amount of money for Loeffler and her husband, who have around $500 million.

“So, all of these stories that you are seeing attacking me are nothing but fake news. These are politically motivated attacks that prey on the fears of Americans during a global pandemic,” Loeffler said on Facebook. Which … I dunno if the top fear of most Americans during a global pandemic is that their vastly wealthy senators are cashing in—that’s more just something that happens alongside the stuff we’re most afraid of—but she does have her Trumpian messaging down.

Nurses and supporters protest the lack of personal protective gear available at UCI Medical Center in Orange, California amid the coronavirus pandemic on April 3. | Mario Tama/Getty Images

States are competing for supplies, and manufacturers aren’t sure who to ship PPE to first.

For weeks, state legislators and health care providers across the country have called on the Trump administration to help with the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) available to fight the coronavirus pandemic. The Trump administration has meanwhile argued it is the states’ responsibility to procure PPE, a stance that has led states to compete with one another for supplies — and that has led to confusion on the part of suppliers.

Since March, US hospitals have faced shortages as the disease became widespread: Health care workers say they’re rapidly running out of masks, gowns, gloves, ventilators, and other protective supplies to treat Covid-19 patients, some of which are necessary to protect doctors, nurses, and providers on the front lines.

Some workers are wearing bandanas and scarves as an alternative to masks, fashioning gowns from trash bags, and rationing or even reusing medical equipment. The federal emergency stockpile is nearly depleted and “the supply chain for PPE worldwide has broken down,” a DHS official told the Washington Post. The situation is dire, and states, especially those with increasing numbers of coronavirus cases, are desperate for supplies. However, the federal distribution of supplies has occurred unevenly and several actions taken by the Trump administration will likely make it harder for hospitals to get the PPE and ventilators they need in the weeks to come.

There’s not enough PPE in the federal stockpile. States are forced to compete for supplies.

After President Donald Trump declared the coronavirus a national emergency in March, he instructed governors to order their own ventilators and other PPE, saying the federal government is “not a shipping clerk.” Trump added the administration will “help out wherever we can,” but state leaders say that current efforts aren’t enough — and that the Trump administration’s refusal to coordinate PPE distribution has forced them to compete with one another for supplies.

“It’s like being on eBay with 50 other states, bidding on a ventilator,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a press briefing on March 31.

“We the states are trying to actively get every piece of PPE that we can. We’re bidding against one another, and in some cases, the federal government is taking priority,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said on CNN’s State of the Union.

A number of governors — including Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker — have said they’ve seen orders for masks and other needed equipment canceled because the federal government outbid them. This has led to some finding creative ways to disguise their orders to mask them from the Trump administration.

Baker’s administration worked with Patriots owner Robert Kraft, the Chinese UN ambassador, and other Chinese officials to secure a shipment of 1.2 million face masks to the state. The governor told reporters Thursday he worked with the Kraft family to create a “‘private humanitarian mission’ to keep the Feds from finding out” about the mask shipment and seizing it, according to reporter Adam Gaffin — and the masks came to the state on the Patriots’ team plane.

Jim Davis/Boston Globe/Getty Images

Trump administration policy has left other states having to make similar extraordinary efforts to obtain PPE — for example, Illinois legislators rushed to deliver a $3.4 million check to a middleman at a McDonald’s parking lot so that the supplier he represented wouldn’t cancel the deal in favor of other, potentially more lucrative offers. They successfully handed off the check, and secured a shipment of 1.5 million N95 respirators from China.

The goods states have received from the Trump administration haven’t always been helpful. Local governments, in some cases, have received broken or damaged PPE. Montgomery County, Alabama’s shipment of 5,880 masks had dry rot and were expired, although the county later received a replacement order. The city of Los Angeles was also given 170 broken ventilators, which had to be repaired before use.

And distribution of medical supplies from the stockpile also appears to be uneven, the Washington Post reported in late March. Massachusetts officials said the city of Boston has received 17 percent of the protective gear it requested, while the state of Maine got a shipment of 25,558 N95 respirators, or 5 percent of what it sought. On the other hand, Florida has received all the supplies it requested — two shipments for 430,000 surgical masks, 180,000 N95 respirators, 82,000 face shields, and 238,000 gloves.

The amount of supplies left in the federal stockpile is dwindling, and as Recode’s Adam Clark Estes reported, it appears that what the US currently has on hand isn’t close to meeting the overall demand that’s expected to last through the coronavirus pandemic.

Supplies are being made, but companies are struggling with where to send them.

Critical medical supplies are being produced in the US, but instructions as to who will receive the products haven’t been made clear to suppliers — a situation that has reportedly left badly needed supplies sitting in warehouses. Manufacturers who are making PPE at the request of the Trump administration told CNN recently they have not yet heard whether they should ship their products to states, to FEMA for distribution, or elsewhere.

On March 24, the Advanced Medical Technology Association wrote a letter to FEMA, urging the Trump administration to decide “how to allocate these products in the most effective way” among state and local governments. “Some of these potential purchasers should have a higher priority than others based on the acuity of patient needs in their areas,” the letter read. “It is difficult for manufacturers to establish these priorities.”

The solution to this would be for the federal government to make greater use of the Defense Production Act, which would allow the Trump administration to coordinate production, procurement, and delivery. Trump, however, has made limited use of the act thus far, first to ask General Motors to manufacture ventilators, and later using the law to prevent the hoarding or exporting of critical medical gear like gloves and surgical masks — a move some in industry, like 3M, have warned “would likely cause other countries to retaliate and do the same.” As a result, 3M claimed, “the net number of respirators being made available to the United States would actually decrease.”

These policy choices ultimately mean there will continue to be delays in getting PPE into the hands of health workers, putting greater strain on hospitals and caretakers — and that local officials and hospital procurement officers will continue to have to take extraordinary measures to get PPE.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon is postponing its major summer shopping event Prime Day at least until August and expects potentially a $100 million hit from excess devices it may now have to sell at a discount, according to internal meeting notes seen by Reuters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah tweeted out a video, cutting together the “Heroes of the Pandumbic.” In the tweet, The Daily Show name checked the luminaries we have seen and written about over the past few weeks: Hannity. Rush. Dobbs. Ingraham. Pirro. Nunes. Tammy. Geraldo. Doocy. Gutfield. Schlapp. Siegel. Watters. Dr. Drew. Henry. Ainsley. Gaetz. Inhofe. Pence. Kudlow. Conway. Trump.

It’s not like Fox News doesn’t know that it willingly mislead its viewers in order to support the continuing deadly incompetence of our current administration. The video doesn’t even cover people like Republican senators like John Kennedy who promoted racist sideshow excuses and scattershot blame while doing nothing to stem the spread of the public health crisis.

It’s been a team effort on the part of conservative outlets and libertarian types who make their money off of saying the media is too liberal and sensationalist and politically correct. All things that have become dog whistles to people who hate the idea that they themselves are not the expert of everything and are angry that people don’t always find their dumb ideas funny or smart.

Slashdot readers schwit1 and Futurepower(R) are sharing news about a potential coronavirus vaccine that has been found to produce antibodies capable of fighting off Covid-19. The Independent reports: The vaccine, which was tested on mice by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, generated the antibodies in quantities thought to be enough to "neutralize" the virus within two weeks of injection. The study's authors are now set to apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for investigational new drug approval ahead of phase one human clinical trials planned to start in the next few months. [T]he Pittsburgh research is the first study on a Covid-19 vaccine candidate to be published after review from fellow scientists at outside institutions. The scientists were able to act quickly because they had already laid the groundwork during earlier epidemics of coronaviruses: Sars in 2003 and Mers in 2014. What's also neat about this potential vaccine is that it can sit at room temperature until it is needed and be scaled up to produce the protein on an industrial scale. The fingertip-sized patch of 400 tiny microneedles "inject the spike protein pieces into the skin, where the immune reaction is strongest," the report says. "The patch is stuck on like a plaster and the needles -- which are made entirely of sugar and the protein pieces -- simply dissolve into the skin." While long-term testing is still required, "the mice who were given the Pittsburgh researchers' Mers vaccine candidate developed enough antibodies to neutralize the virus for at least a year," reports The Independent. "The antibody levels of the rodents vaccinated against Covid-19 'seem to be following the same trend,' according to the researchers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Friday’s government jobs report is already three weeks old. As Daily Kos’ Meteor Blades wrote, while not by design, the true magnitude of job losses in the United States will not be represented at all by those numbers. But to get even the slightest handle on the scope of what is coming in the next few days and weeks and months, estimates range from 9 million to 26 million jobs directly impacted by the pandemic so far. What we do know is that new unemployment claims rose well over 6 and half million just last week.

We know that unemployment claims numbers have been designed to undersell the true numbers of people in need of help and employment. But that only means that the numbers are almost always artificially lower than the real problem. The surge in unemployment claims is the result of a national crisis that tests Trump and friends’ bogus assertions that America has a bad cold. To put that into perspective, here’s a short GIF you can send off to friends and family that illustrates the historic nature of our current unemployment issues.

Remember to breathe.

One of the failures of the multitrillion-dollar bailout that Trump and the GOP dragged their heels on is that it does not take into account how weakened and booby-trapped our social safety net programs have become under conservative leadership. This is something that Florida is dealing with right now. For years, conservatives have used a two-pronged attack on protections for citizens in the unemployment sphere, the first being to try and cut the budgeting of unemployment benefits, and the second was to create sizable hurdles while choking off the infrastructure that provides those benefits. Both of these gimmicks create the singular result bootstrap conservatives want, which is to artificially lower the numbers of people applying for and receiving unemployment. It is an sham lowering because it elides the issue of how many people actually need, want, and could benefit from some financial help.

As Politico writes, Republicans know that GOP-built unemployment systems were made to hide problems and not deal with them. The big issue for Republican leadership now is that those chickens have come home to roost, and every active GOP operative wants someone else to take the blame. Florida’s unemployment system uses a measly $77.9 million, and predictably the surge in unemployment numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic is a test it is not equipped to pass.

“It’s a sh-- sandwich, and it was designed that way by Scott,” said one DeSantis advisor. “It wasn’t about saving money. It was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about.”

To be clear, the Republican Party is not interested in seeing this problem as a reckoning of bad policy. They are in conservative crisis mode where it’s rat-eat-rat, and the blame game is the only maneuvering being done. Remember, this political party isn’t even interested in saving the lives of Americans—they could care less about whether or not the ones that do survive thrive.

Graph credit: Len Kiefer.

Remember when Sen. Mitch McConnell blew off the second stimulus response bill to take a long weekend back in Kentucky? Yes, it was just under three weeks ago, but in novel coronavirus time that’s 30 years. Anyway, Mitch took that long weekend just as the shit was hitting the fan to celebrate with Brett Kavanaugh and a guy named Justin Walker, who McConnell had secured a federal judgeship for just a few months previous. Now, thanks to that undeserved promotion, Walker is up for a much bigger job: Trump has nominated him to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Kavanaugh, who was in Kentucky with McConnell for the party, recommended Walker, who had been one of his clerks. Which was about all Walker has done. At just age 37 and a law professor, he had never in his life tried a case. The American Bar Association rated him as unqualified because of his inexperience—he hasn't even been out of law school long enough to qualify by their standards. When he was nominated, McConnell said Walker was "unquestionably the most outstanding nomination that I've ever recommended to Presidents to serve on the bench in Kentucky." And he promptly bulldozed the nomination through.

Enough of this. Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats and end McConnell's career as majority leader.

Now he's saying—about a guy who has served for just 5 months and never been in a courtroom before that!—"I think you cannot credibly argue that Justin Walker is not a judicial all-star." Certainly the ABA could credibly argue that.

On top of all that's infuriating about this nomination is the fact that right now—in the middle of a pandemic—they're pushing a guy to the second most powerful court in the land who is notoriously opposed to the Affordable Care Act—as much as his former boss, Kavanaugh. That and the fact that McConnell is still trying to get judges crammed onto the bench—and leaning on current judges to retire so he can get even more extremists in—in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis.

And he's doing all this while telling the suffering and unemployed of the nation to pound sand, he's done enough for them.

Every day seems to bring another round of the great national question: “How is it possible that Donald Trump missed so many chances to stop this?” In fact, Trump so consistently veered in the pro-death direction that it’s hard to believe he’s not #TeamCovid.

But because that evidence is piling up, and going past, with such regularity, here’s a quick catalog of some of Trump’s biggest screw ups and moments when he so tortured competence that everyone screamed. The nation is lurching to the end of a week from hell, and it’s headed toward months in hell’s subbasement. It only seems right to make another review of exactly who put us here.

Trump canceled the PREDICT program

PREDICT was a global program bringing together American scientists and foreign scientists in an effort to spot new threats in viruses making the leap between animals and people. Among the labs that were part of the PREDICT network was one in Wuhan, China that was looking specifically at SARS-related coronaviruses as a potential source of a pandemic. Both SARS and MERS had demonstrated the potential threat behind these viruses, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine a virus that was a little less deadly, and a little more contagious, turning into a massive global threat.

That program had identified over 150 such viruses, and that lab in Wuhan was the first to identify the virus behind COVID-19. But two months before that moment, Trump chopped the funding and dropped U.S. involvement, despite being repeatedly warned about the value of the program—an action that blinded the nation, just at the critical moment.

Trump ignored a “Black Swan” warning from the Army

Throughout January, as the 2019 novel coronavirus exploded in China and experts in the United States and around the world warned that the threat of pandemic was becoming all but certain, various agencies took a swing at trying to explain to Trump just what that would mean. Among them was the Army, who on Feb. 3 assembled a presentation showing that COVID-19 was potentially a massive “black swan” event that would completely disrupt the U.S. economy and result in over a 100,000 deaths. Even though many aspects of that Army analysis have turned out to be optimistic, the impact projected made COVID-19 the biggest threat the nation has faced since the Cold War. It didn’t matter … because Trump completely ignored it.

Trump dismissed a CDC report showing America unprepared for the next pandemic

In 2018 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention commemorated the 1918-1919 flu pandemic by conducting a review of America’s current standing. The outcome of the seminar that capped that review: A talk co-hosted by Dr. Nancy Messonnier, warning that the U.S. was completely unprepared to face a repeat visit from a pandemic respiratory disease. Warnings indicated that the health care system would be overrun, that the supply chains—both for medical products and consumer products—would be strained, and that deaths could actually exceed what was seen a century earlier. Similarly blunt assessments got Messonnier sidelined from handling the novel coronavirus response and kept her off the coronavirus response team … even though she is the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Messonnier’s co-host for that event? Dr. Luciana Borio, who was a part of the National Security Council pandemic response team that … well …

Trump dismantled the National Security Council’s pandemic response team

After 9/11, it seemed only reasonable that the National Security Council (NSC) expand to look at a broader range of threats. That included threats such as biological weapons and pandemics. But Donald Trump, and his then National Security Advisor John Bolton, weren’t interested in dealing with novel threats. They were concentrated on the old-fashioned “who can we blow up today?” sort of option. So the entire global health security team was disbanded in May 2018. That included firing Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, an expert in dealing with both disasters and organizing a response to epidemics. However, before they were all gone, the pandemic response team produced a playbook on how to handle these emerging threats. And that playbook … well …

Trump developed the nation’s first serious defense against biologic attack

Psych. In 2017, Trump announced that it was “about time” that the nation have a coordinated plan for dealing with biological attacks—at about the same time Trump’s team was warning against the threat of disease spread by “Central American caravans” and pondering if “prayer rugs” left on the border might be sprinkled with Ebola. However, this was a twofer screw you, America. Because not only did the U.S. already have a plan for both pandemics and biological attack, but the guy who was supposed to be heading this effort was, yup, Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer. Who Trump then canned.

Trump failed to follow playbook on how to handle pandemics

If there is anything that Trump hates more than competent experts, it’s competent experts who worked for Barack Obama, which is a large overlapping set since Obama didn’t share Trump’s fear of people who might know more about a specific topic than he does. So it didn’t help that the NSC’s pandemic team completed their pandemic playbook in 2016 and handed it to an incoming Trump. That book took everything that had been learned in dealing with H1N1 flu and with Ebola and distilled it down into rules that made it dead simple to understand the weak points in the system and determine appropriate first steps when dealing with a new disease. If anyone in the Trump team bothered to read it, they certainly didn’t use it—particularly the part that emphasized the importance of testing, testing, testing.

Trump shrugged off his own team’s failure in a simulated pandemic

Maybe no one on Trump’s team read the pandemic playbook, but multiple members of the incoming White House staff were brought into a simulation of a pandemic as part of their training during the transition. That simulation explicitly dealt with a flu-like illness that emerged in Asia, spread around the world, and threatened the planet with the biggest pandemic since 1918. It warned that the United States could face “shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was 'paramount.'" But Trump’s team seemed as uninterested in this exercise as they were in every other thing that had to do with the real threats facing the nation.

Trump scrapped the annual DHS review of pandemic preparedness

Every year from 2005 to 2017, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) conducted a review that included modeling the effect that a pandemic would have on critical infrastructure across the nation. After that many years of effort, the DHS simulation was robust, and modeled not just the spread of disease but the effects on transportation, the economy, and how America could shift its workforce into work-from-home situations. In fact, it anticipated an amazing number of the issues that have appeared during the current crisis … so it might have been a very good thing if Trump hadn’t killed the process as soon as he came into the White House, putting all the results three years out of date.

Trump blew off a warning from a simulation that came just last fall

Operation Crimson Contagion (CC) has to be right up there in terms of spy game coolness. But that didn’t seem to help anyone in the entire Trump White House either pay attention to the results or refer to the results of the pandemic simulation that happened just weeks before COVID-19 emerged. CC was actually a whole series of exercises that tested every aspect of the government’s response to the outbreak of a novel disease, and the end result was a report stamped “not to be disclosed.” Not shockingly, it’s been disclosed. And what’s inside is a report that says … Honestly, you can guess what it says. It says the federal response was nothing short of terrible. It says that different agencies weren’t clear on who was responsible for various aspects of the response. It said there was no clear federal guidance. It said that hospitals were short on ventilators, and protective gear, and overrun with cases. Without necessary federal coordination, states and localities were left on their own when it came to determining things like school closings and other restrictions. The whole thing was a fair description of chaos. Or an incredibly accurate simulation.

This doesn’t even start to look at the ways that Trump has screwed up the real thing since it started. This is just how many times someone tried to wave a flag in the face of his team and get them to pay attention to what they were repeatedly told was the greatest potential threat facing the nation. It’s an amazing catalog of not just failures, but deliberate failure and willful ignorance. 

Officials warned of a pandemic last year? Who cares -- it's China's fault!

After defying coronavirus orders in several states, insisting that it was an essential business, Hobby Lobby will finally close stores nationwide on Friday night.

USA Today reports: All of the Oklahoma City, Oklahoma-headquartered arts and crafts chain’s locations will close effective 8 p.m. Friday and remain closed until further notice, according to a notice posted on its website. “As the country continues efforts to manage and mitigate the devastating health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 virus, Hobby Lobby will, after careful consideration, close the remainder of its stores, and furlough nearly all store employees and a large portion of corporate and distribution employees,” the notice said. Earlier in the week, some Hobby Lobby stores in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Colorado were shut down by law enforcement after reopening, defying the state shelter-in-place orders.

Last month, Hobby Lobby founder David Green, a conservative Christian, reportedly cited the power for God as part of his justification for keeping stores open.

More from Business Insider: According to three employees, each speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, managers at their stores called teams into a meeting to deliver the news on Friday afternoon. During the meetings, they were told the furlough will impact all workers below management level, and is expected to run through at least May 1. An employee in Indiana told Business Insider his manager said she will continue to work, though “has no idea why she will still be there” if stores are closed. “The line our manager gave us was, ‘The employees got what the employees wanted, the stores were closed,'” the Indiana employee said in an interview shortly after he learned of the furlough. “My question was, did God tell them they needed to close the stores and not pay us?”

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Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis garnered national attention this week when he was finally pressured into issuing statewide stay-at-home orders after weeks of footage showing vacation revelers flooding the state's beaches. But DeSantis is hardly alone in his inexplicably weak and craven leadership of a state that some experts fear may emerge as a new coronavirus hotspot in the weeks ahead.

As of Friday morning, the remaining 12 states that had failed to issue statewide stay-at-home orders were all run by Republican governors.

Here's the Republican governors putting an untold number of lives at risk in the name of so-called "freedom."

Alabama—GOP Gov. Kay Ivey Arkansas—GOP Gov. Asa Hutchinson Iowa—GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds Missouri—GOP Gov. Mike Parson  Nebraska—GOP Gov. Pete Ricketts  North Dakota—GOP Gov. Doug Burgum Oklahoma—GOP Gov. Kevin Stitt South Carolina—GOP Gov. Henry McMaster South Dakota—GOP Gov. Kristi Noem Texas—GOP Gov. Greg Abbott Utah—GOP Gov. Gary Herbert Wyoming—GOP Gov. Mark Gordon

Some state residents are celebrating the lack of restrictions. "Let's be honest, what country do we live in?” Brian Joens of Iowa City, Iowa, told USA Today. “It’s the USA, which is freedom, freedom to choose. When we get notes from the government saying do this or do that, it feels like that’s not what this country is built on."

Freedom to choose an increased likelihood of death for both you and your fellow citizens isn't exactly on what the country was founded. Individual life, liberty, and happiness was never intended to trump the public good of an entire nation. But this is what you get when the chief executive of the country, Donald Trump, fails to exhibit anything resembling clear and consistent leadership.

Social distancing works. The early measures taken in Seattle and California appear to be paying off, possibly averting the swamped hospitals that come with a glut of cases peaking all at the same time. Not only are all those Republican governors risking an untold number of lives, the economies they think they are boosting now will take far longer to recover to the extent that the coronavirus takes hold in their communities. The laissez-faire policies are as shortsighted as they are misguided and asinine.

Meetings on Zoom, the increasingly popular video conferencing service, are encrypted using an algorithm with serious, well-known weaknesses, and sometimes using keys issued by servers in China, even when meeting participants are all in North America, according to researchers at the University of Toronto. From a report: The researchers also found that Zoom protects video and audio content using a home-grown encryption scheme, that there is a vulnerability in Zoom's "waiting room" feature, and that Zoom appears to have at least 700 employees in China spread across three subsidiaries. They conclude, in a report for the university's Citizen Lab -- widely followed in information security circles -- that Zoom's service is "not suited for secrets" and that it may be legally obligated to disclose encryption keys to Chinese authorities and "responsive to pressure" from them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thousands of Americans are dying, and this is how the Trump administration handles it.

The Trump administration has updated the website of the Strategic National Stockpile to match a statement from Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, on Thursday.

The Trump administration just changed its language about the Strategic National Stockpile on an HHS website to jibe with Jared Kushner's claim that this isn't for the states.

(h/t @LEBassett)

Before vs. After: pic.twitter.com/yD4O2b1IEw

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) April 3, 2020

The Washington Post reports: Kushner on Thursday evening offered a novel argument about the national stockpile. He said some states still had stockpiles that they hadn’t been employing and that localities should go to them first. And then he suggested that the national stockpile wasn’t even meant for them. “And the notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile,” Kushner said. “It’s not supposed to be state’s stockpiles that they then use.” As reporters quickly noted, that didn’t jibe with how the Department of Health and Human Services was describing the program. On its website, it said, “Strategic National Stockpile is the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out.” It continued to say, “When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.” That language suddenly disappeared from the site Friday morning, as journalist Laura Bassett noted, and was replaced with something de-emphasizing the role of the federal stockpile in helping states and casting it as a “short-term stopgap.”

Jared Kushner actually said this yesterday on the much-needed supplies governors were requesting to help with the coronavirus pandemic:

"The notion of the federal stockpile was it's supposed to be our stockpile. It's not supposed to be states stockpiles that they then use." pic.twitter.com/Nw2PBVThfa

— PoliticsVideoChannel (@politvidchannel) April 3, 2020

The muthafucka really said federal stockpiles are for "us" not the states. Who the fuck is "us" Jared? Why didn't anybody in that room ask him that obvious follow up question so we could see that robotic simpleton glitch live on screen?!?!

— Stephen White (@sgw94) April 2, 2020

"our stockpile." I mean: Our is the citizens of the United States, right? Or, like, Jared's personal stash? https://t.co/9Jvdbdehuj

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) April 2, 2020

Apparently, the federal stockpile is only for bribing red states and extorting blue states. Impeachable. @HouseDemocrats @SpeakerPelosi @RepAdamSchiff @SenateDems

— CountryOverConman (@TrumpNewsPolls) April 2, 2020

Someone should tell Kushner that we’re the UNITED STATES of America. We’re supposed to be all in this together. https://t.co/sDq06Kp8GB

— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) April 3, 2020

The post Trump Administration Alters Strategic Stockpile Website to Match Jared Kushner’s Idiotic Claim: VIDEO appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The missed warnings and canceled programs to stop a pandemic like the one we’re experiencing now are getting to the point of being ridiculous. The latest is almost cartoonish.

In September, two months before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China, the Trump administration stopped funding a pandemic early-warning program … that included work on novel coronaviruses and work with labs in Wuhan. Seriously. 

The PREDICT program worked with foreign labs to identify viruses with the potential to become pandemics. The program trained scientists around the world to accomplish that, and had identified 160 new novel coronaviruses before shutting down just before this one, SARS-CoV-2, emerged. Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab that ultimately did catch the emergence of COVID-19, was part of the PREDICT program.

PREDICT was launched in 2009 and funded through two five-year cycles before the Trump administration defunded it just in time for the exact scenario it was supposed to catch. It joins a genuinely astonishing list of other canceled programs and missed warnings.

In 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held a conference and webinar warning of pandemic. Also in 2018, Donald Trump dismantled the National Security Council's global health section, which was supposed to fight pandemics. Under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security stopped running pandemic simulations for preparedness. But the Department of Health and Human Services did run Operation Crimson Contagion, exercises about a global pandemic conducted just last fall, months before completely missing the ball on an actual pandemic. Also last fall, White House economists warned of the economic effects of a pandemic. The Trump administration inherited a pandemic playbook from the Obama administration, which drew on the lessons of Ebola and H1N1. And the Obama administration tried to prepare the Trump administration with a pandemic response exercise during the transition.

Every time one of these stories comes up, you think “this is ridiculous, there can’t possibly be any more missed warnings.” And practically every day, we learn about a new one.

Blunderkind Jared Kushner made a rare public appearance Thursday in his daddy-in-law’s daily “press briefing” on the coronavirus, and demonstrated yet again why he’s so rarely let out in public. And why he should be in charge of anything more critical that the White House’s office supplies. Defending his decision, because apparently he’s now making decisions, to not provide New York all the ventilators it needs, Kushner claimed that the national stockpile is “ours” and not the states’. “The notion of the federal stockpile is supposed to be our stockpile,” he said, “not supposed to be state stockpiles.” Get that? They’re Trump’s stockpiles now, and until he can figure out how to make a buck off of them, states had better get their grubby hands away. 

The same goes for those masks all the doctors and nurses seem to think they’re entitled to, Kushner went on to claim in all his newfound expertise about the public health system. “The N95 masks is an item that was not used as frequently in the medical profession before this,” he declared. “It was used mostly for diseases.” Um, Jared? Do you know what that word “disease” means?

He then said that “we are encouraging the state to make sure they're assessing the needs, getting the data from their local situations and trying to fill it with supplies we have given them.” Which is exactly not what he did with New York in the first place.

When New York was pleading for ventilators, assessing their need and trying to get ahead of the coming disaster by having an adequate supply, Kushner nixed the request because he knew better. He reportedly told Trump "I have all this data about ICU capacity. I'm doing my own projections, and I've gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn't need all the ventilators."

For the record, the Strategic National Stockpile is intended to provide “life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out.” That’s what their website says. “When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.”

There’s blood on Kushner’s hands, as much blood as on Trump’s.

The shocking new unemployment numbers suggest a terrible scenario ahead.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted the role of two Navy hospital ships — one in New York City and one in Los Angeles — in fighting the coronavirus crisis.

But on Thursday, with many hospitals overrun and the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 surpassing 6,000, the two ships had only a combined 35 patients, according to the New York Times.

The USNS Comfort, in New York City, had 20 patients, while the USNS Mercy, in Los Angeles, had 15. Each ship has 1,000 beds and more than 1,000 crew members.

The #USNSComfort is fully loaded with 12 operating rooms, 1,000 hospital beds, a medical lab, a pharmacy, an optometry lab, digital radiology, a CAT scan, 2 oxygen-producing plants, and more. pic.twitter.com/Kk1SV6nQO9

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 28, 2020

The ships were meant to relieve the strain on hospitals in the two cities by treating non-coronavirus patients. However, the ships have strict guidelines about which patients they’ll accept, and because the cities are largely shut down, there are fewer non-coronavirus emergencies.

“If I’m blunt about it, it’s a joke,” Michael Dowling, the head of New York’s largest hospital system, told the NYT. “Everyone can say, ‘Thank you for putting up these wonderful places and opening up these cavernous halls.’ But we’re in a crisis here, we’re in a battlefield.”

Dowling and others are now calling for USNS Comfort to accept coronavirus patients.

“It’s pretty ridiculous,” Dowling said. “If you’re not going to help us with the people we need help with, what’s the purpose?”

So the Comfort, sent with such hoopla to NYC a few days ago, is taking care of all of three patients. But not to worry! Navy brass is on the job! They've relieved the captain who told the truth about COVID-19 aboard the Theodore Roosevelt of command.https://t.co/OsX5y4x1k8

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 3, 2020

69k tons of publicity stunt with 20 patients. #TrumpPandemic #USNSComfort

— MannequinHybrid (@MotJuinCattleya) April 3, 2020

Like all Trump's promises, delivered with great fanfare, but worthless. #USNSComfort #NewYork #COVID19Pandemic #TrumpLiesAmericansDie

— BrezzyG (@BrezzyG5) April 3, 2020

Wait for it! And scene. Expect Trump to proclaim ”MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” upon learning that #USNSComfort only Has 3 Patients. Back to golf. pic.twitter.com/XX2tbXQPFK

— ScanMyPhotos.com® STAY HEALTHY, STAY AT HOME (@ScanMyPhotos) April 3, 2020

The post ‘It’s a Joke’: Trump’s Navy Hospital Ships Have Only 35 Patients as U.S. Death Toll Surpasses 6,000 appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The White House is close to selecting a nominee to be the Pentagon’s policy chief, following the ouster of John Rood in February as part of President Donald Trump’s loyalty purge.

Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel and frequent Fox News commentator, and Anthony Tata, a retired Army brigadier general, former state bureaucrat and also a Fox News regular, are the leading candidates for the job of undersecretary of defense for policy, two administration officials tell POLITICO.

The Pentagon is moving to fill 17 vacancies in the upper echelons of the department, including Rood’s former job, as leaders scramble to respond to a global pandemic. Rood was forced out in late February once he was deemed insufficiently loyal to the president, administration officials said at the time.

Macgregor and Tata did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the National Security Council also did not respond to a query from POLITICO.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper has expressed reservations about Macgregor, who is a lightning rod in military circles, according to one of the administration officials. The West Point graduate is revered by some fellow former officers and analysts as a renegade who made a career out of questioning orthodoxy in the Army and for his contention that the military leadership has never been held accountable for the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But Macgregor also has an army of detractors who see him as an opportunist still bitter that his ideas were not adopted and that he was not promoted to the rank of general like some of his peers. And they also question whether he has a well-developed worldview for such an important policy writ.

Macgregor would be a controversial choice to head the Pentagon’s policy shop. He was one of the most vocal critics of the military strategy in Iraq and was particularly disdainful of then-Gen. David Petraeus, whom he saw as a media darling, prima donna and battlefield failure.

His supporters assert Macgregor’s opposition to overseas military engagements is the best evidence of his good judgment over the years, and why he is a perfect fit to work for Trump, who has made it a priority to wind down America’s open-ended military commitments in the Middle East.

“I've seen Doug under fire in direct combat and I’ve seen him be right, time after time, on the most consequential foreign policy issues of the past two decades,” said Daniel Davis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who famously publicly opposed an extended U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

“As important, no one is more skilled at being able to translate Trump’s best foreign policy instincts into successful policy,” added Davis, who is now a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates against an interventionist foreign policy.

“Too many senior advisers over the past three years have been more interested in trying to bend Trump’s views to match their own instead of faithfully executing his,” he said.

Others who know Macgregor and have watched his career closely have a very different take.

“He enjoys being a contrarian,” said retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a fellow former armor officer and longtime international relations professor who is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “He gets great joy in skewering senior military officers. He thinks the four-stars are stupid.”

But that’s not going to help him if he ends up becoming Pentagon policy chief.

“Although it certainly is true that an undersecretary of defense for policy has a wide mandate,” Bacevich said, “I think it’s also true that the individual holding that office needs to have working relations with the senior military."

The bigger question, several said, is whether he is qualified for the post.

“What is his worldview,” asked a former colleague, who said Macgregor has published few insights into his views on America’s role in the world or the recent National Defense Strategy. The person asked to remain anonymous because he still deals with the Pentagon. “I’m just not aware of any of that. And I am a reasonably assiduous reader of this stuff. Some of us get paid to do that.”

But in recent months, Macgregor has been writing about a wider range of issues — from how Trump should deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the turmoil with Turkey and the future of NATO.

“Basically, you are the Defense secretary’s secretary of state,” said Thomas Ricks, a journalist and military historian, of the undersecretary for policy position. “What is his expertise besides armored warfare?”

Tata, meanwhile, is an avid Trump defender who regularly appears on Fox News, and is a novelist known for writing the "Threat" adventure series. He has been featured in Trump tweets for lauding him on the cable network, where he has defended the president for sending troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and for the firing last year of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer after he resisted Trump’s efforts to intervene in the legal case of former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher.

“President Trump is fulfilling campaign promises,” Tata wrote last year on Fox’s website. “He is acting consistently with what he said he would do on the campaign trail. Ultimately, the president is a nationalist in the best sense of word — a patriot who wants the best for his nation and all our citizens — not someone hostile to other parts of the world, as the distorted leftist rewrite of the term falsely asserts.”

Tata was particularly outspoken on Trump’s decision to fire Spencer over his handling of Gallagher’s war crimes case. Gallagher was accused of shooting civilians and fatally stabbing a wounded captive with a hunting knife, but was acquitted by a military jury last year of all but one charge and granted clemency in November by Trump.

“As Spencer and his hashtags fade over the next several days, the president’s support of warfighters over bureaucrats will increase the morale of those in the rank and file,” Tata wrote in another piece on Fox’s website. “The critics will angrily accuse the president of supporting a war criminal, but the real crimes in this case have been papered over by a secretary of the Navy eager to avoid embarrassment at the expense of a sailor who, on the whole, served honorably.”

On sending troops to the border, Tata also told Fox that “the left has an immediate visceral reaction in the opposite direction to anything that President Trump does for a lot of different reasons.”

Tata retired from the Army in 2008 under mysterious circumstances, after an Army probe found he had been having affairs with “at least two” women. He served as North Carolina transportation secretary but resigned in 2015, citing a need to spend more time with his family and the demands of his side career as a novelist. He also considered running for Congress.

Elbridge Colby, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Trump administration, was also in contention for the job, but took himself out of the running, one of the administration officials said.

Most of the 100,000 ventilators that President Donald Trump promised the U.S. would obtain won't be available until June, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials told the House Oversight Committee this week.

FEMA officials, according to a readout of a pair of briefings by the panel's Democrats, indicated that a shortage of ventilators would worsen by the middle of this month before the coronavirus outbreak peaks. FEMA indicated there were just 9,500 ventilators in the national stockpile, with just 3,200 more expected by the week of April 13, the tail end of what Trump described recently as a "painful two weeks" as the outbreak is expected to worsen.

Most of the ventilators Trump said would be ready before the end of June won't be available until that month "at the earliest," the Oversight Committee said FEMA indicated.

FEMA officials told committee members in a March 30 meeting and briefed the top Democrat and Republican at an April 1 briefing.

The ventilator shortfall could worsen what is already expected to be a sharp spike in the number of cases and deaths from coronavirus around the country, as the spread of the disease is expected to climb until peaking perhaps by the middle of April. Trump has bristled at suggestions that the federal government has fallen short, criticizing governors and lawmakers who have complained about his response and declaring that some states had shown an "insatiable appetite" for equipment they don't necessarily need.

The Oversight Committee released documents suggesting dramatic shortfalls of equipment requested by states in FEMA's Region III, which includes Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware and Washington, D.C. Collectively, the states and D.C. sought 5.2 million respirator masks, but received less than 10 percent of their requests. And they received less than 1 percent of their request for 194 million pairs of gloves. A request for 15,000 body bags went unfulfilled as well.

As of Monday, Washington D.C. had requested 1.1 million N95 respirators and received just 5,000, had requested 663,000 pairs of gloves and received just 5,000 and had requested 500,000 face shields and received none. Maryland requested 420,000 N95 respirators, 330,000 pairs of gloves and 181,000 face shields; it received 110,000 respirators, 140,000 pairs of gloves and 50,000 face shields.

Democrats on the panel also raised alarms about the Trump administration's call for medical professionals to reuse protective equipment. The FEMA briefer, they said, indicated that "reusing this equipment increases the risk that health care providers will be infected with coronavirus" but that it was important to do because of shortages.

At the March 30 briefing, FEMA officials also acknowledged that they knew in mid-January that the supply of N95 respirator masks would fall short, according to the readout.

“The president must act immediately to take all steps within his authority to get personal protective equipment and medical supplies to our nation’s front-line responders who are risking everything to save their fellow Americans," said the panel's chair, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.).

Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida is a sorry sack of week-old guano. The majority of his political career seems to consist of narcissistic, frequently racist, half-provocative, all-show-and-no-substance publicity stunts. The most realistic thing to happen to Rep. Gaetz in the past decade or so is he’s been able to skirt being punished substantially by our justice system, mostly because he’s a rich kid with good political connections to a corrupt Republican apparatus. Laura Ingraham is what happens when the troll under the bridge steals your soul in exchange for a bag of cheese doodles. So it is no surprise that when Rep. Matt Gaetz goes on Ingraham’s Fox News performance art piece of a show, the results are a special kind of fascism.

Ingraham decided to have Gaetz on her show to give his hot take on how the Democratic Party is using the COVID-19 pandemic and its far-reaching public health concerns to push vote-by-mail legislation for all 50 states. Figuring out a safe way for Americans to continue to participate in our democracy while protecting Americans from spreading the deadly virus sounds like corruption to Ingraham and Rep. Gaetz because … well … people might actually vote!

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Rep. Gaetz explained to the Fox News viewer that “It's perhaps Joe Biden's failures as a candidate that animate the left's desire to get these vote-by-mail provisions in coronavirus legislation, so they're able to have the mechanism of voting that even MIT professors are saying is the most susceptible to fraud." Ah, Republicans and their almost unsightly obsession with invisible voter fraud. Gaetz goes on to explain that Joe Biden is a bad candidate and bad candidates want voter fraud so that they can win. It’s Matt Gaetz math! One plus one equals pajamas!

Well, it turns out that the MIT study that Rep. Gaetz is referring to doesn’t actually say what Matt Gaetz wants you to think it says. In fact, what the MIT study did say about voting by mail (VBM) is that “As with all forms of voter fraud, documented instances of fraud related to VBM are rare. However, even many scholars who argue that fraud is generally rare agree that fraud with VBM voting seems to be more frequent than with in-person voting.” The MIT study did also say that the biggest voter fraud seen through VPM seems to have been perpetrated in North Carolina—by Republicans. I am shocked that Ingraham and Gaetz forgot to mention this!

But, this isn’t a Laura Ingraham joint unless Laura Ingraham gets to slip in some profound misinformation that does her viewers a serious disservice. After superficially trying to scare Fox News viewers away from voting by mail, Ingraham explains that we don’t know how “deadly” COVID-19 actually is. This is because we haven’t done enough testing—something Ingraham forgets to mention. Instead, Ingraham says we don’t know because some people with mild symptoms are already better and are now immune to the virus while “other people just have immunity to it.” That’s not a thing. There is zero evidence of this. Zero. Telling people that they may have some genetic lottery ticket that immunizes them from the world of viruses is not simply wrong: it’s irresponsible.

But Matt Gaetz does not want to be outdone in doing disservices to the American people. So he explained that Florida’s pandemic numbers, while not clear or even remotely sufficient to make any definitive statements as to the virus’ mortality rate, show that “the morbidity rate and mortality rate look more and more like the flu,” every day. I’ve got a ship Rep. Gaetz should go visit.

Gaetz then went to his bread-and-butter racism, attacking provisions for immigrants in Pelosi’s bill (something that was clearly left out of the final package passed last Friday). So, Gaetz should be happy that he was able to freeze taxpaying undocumented folks out from getting relief.

Of course, the congressman is not the only craven Republican lackey running around trying to drum up anti-Democratic sentiment. Georgia’s State House Speaker David Ralston has very bluntly pushed back against the Democratic Party’s attempts to expand vote by mail, saying it would "be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia." What a thing to say.