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Native American leaders and other activists have devoted decades to an unsuccessful campaign to convince Washington’s NFL franchise to change its racist name. But now these activists have landed a powerful new ally: corporate investors. According to Adweek, a group of 87 shareholders and investment firms—representing a total of $620 billion in wealth—have signed letters […]

Whether you were born and raised in DC or moved to town as an adult, you likely agree with this statement: Washington is a tough place to really know. People can’t even seem to agree about what the name even means. Does “Washington” connote senators and presidents and the national government? Or does it evoke […]

‘Archer: 1999’ Posed Many of the Show’s Greatest Challenges — Now Comes Season 11

A waiter wearing a protective face shield and mask serves customers at a Third Street Promenade restaurant on June 21, 2020, in Santa Monica, California. | David Livingston/Getty Images

“The customer is always right, even during the pandemic.”

“All of us workers, we’re scared shitless,” said Shanga McNair, a bartender in Florida who recently went back to work.

As states have aggressively pushed to reopen (and many too soon, according to experts), patrons are rushing to eat in restaurants for the first time in months. There are new regulations in place, varying by state and county, with some restaurants enforcing their own rules, including tables spaced 6 feet apart, reduced seating capacity, and disposable menus. But even wearing a mask is challenging in a restaurant setting: “You can’t wear a mask and eat your food and drink your drink,” said Kayla Harter, a server from Southern California.

Restaurant work looks very different than it did before the coronavirus, and those returning to serve customers in person are putting their lives at risk. Many employees have been out of work for months, scrambling to make ends meet, and are forced to go back to their jobs no matter what it costs their health. Others lost their employment during the pandemic — with restaurants closing or winnowing staff — and still others have chosen, as reopening ramps up, not to go back to work. Vox talked to five servers, bartenders, and kitchen staffers about the fears and necessities of working in the food service industry during a pandemic.

“We’re trying to do our best”

When we get into work we put our stuff down, we put a mask on, we clock in, and then we get our temperature taken. As long as we have a temperature under 100, we can start working. If it’s higher than 100, we need to wait five minutes and then try again because it’s really hot here. Once we’re ready to start work, we’ll wash our hands, put on gloves, and then open up our section.

Speaking through a mask, and people not always being able to understand what I’m saying, that means that there are sometimes errors in the order. So just being aware of that and learning, making sure I really clarify with my guests what they’re asking for as well as being spatially aware. I don’t have peripheral vision down from my mask. I’ve run into people way more than I have in the past, or tripped on things because I just don’t see below a certain point. But the guests have been excited to be back in the restaurant, and they often have, you know, empathy and compassion for us as we’re trying to do our best.

We’ve had a few issues with people almost wanting to get into fights with us about the fact that we only have five people sitting at each physical table. We’ve had multiple parties walk out or start a fight with the manager or just become hostile because of that rule. But other than that, people have been pretty compliant.

—Michaela Frantz, server, Las Vegas, Nevada

“I chose not to go back”

I chose not to go back, because [my] restaurant is in downtown Huntington Beach, which has been the site of a lot of anti-mask rallies and protests. So I chose not to go back quite yet, and I’m actually very glad I did because I guess it has been, first of all, a shitshow. This last week, four of my coworkers tested positive for Covid. Actually, a lot of different restaurants in the Orange County area have had staff outbreaks in the last couple weeks.

I only worked maybe two to three days a week, but it was about $1,500 to $2,000 a month and so it’s just been really interesting having to reallocate my funds and figure things out.

I have a respiratory immune deficiency where I don’t have the antibodies to fight off pneumonia, and I also got a kidney removed in December. Since Covid causes pneumonia and affects your kidneys, I really shouldn’t get this. So when the cases go down, I probably will [go back to work].

Most of the staff was not comfortable to go back, but a lot of people had no choice. So I strongly urge all my friends [not to] be selfish and sit in a restaurant just because you missed it. You’re putting other people’s lives at risk and their families’ lives at risk.

—Kayla Harter, server, Orange County, California

“People are still willing to come in and put in the effort to make sure the restaurant is going to survive”

Being back at work, it feels like more of a community push. Everyone at work isn’t necessarily there because they need to come back to work, and they’re worried about themselves. I’m in a fortunate situation where I work in a place where we’re all kind of gathered, or rallying around the business itself.

People are still willing to come in and put in the effort to make sure the restaurant is going to survive. I think that is a big driving factor behind everyone’s push right now. Before, it never really occurred to anyone that the business would not be able to keep up, and now it’s on the front of everyone’s minds.

—Zach Van Horn, cook, State College, Pennsylvania

“I’m scared of getting sick and then passing it on to my family, but there’s nothing I can do”

We’re not making money like we used to, but we can’t not go to work. You have to go to work; if you don’t go to work, you can’t get unemployment.

So, I mean, it’s just a shitshow right now. I’m scared, you know — I’m scared of getting sick and then passing it on to my family, but there’s nothing I can do.

I’m 40, and I have a daughter. She’s 20 and she lives in Mississippi and she works in the service industry. So [one day] I’m behind the bar and I get a call from my daughter. So I pick up my phone and she was like, “Ma, I tested positive.” I didn’t know what to do because she’s far away from me. She’s in Mississippi with my grandparents, and my grandparents are almost 80.

So I tell my boss, “Look, my daughter just tested positive, so I gotta go, I gotta figure out what to do.” And he was like, “If you leave, you’re fired.”

—Shanga McNair, bartender, Jacksonville, Florida

“The customer is always right, even during the pandemic”

We don’t give out condiments anymore. We give out little portions of steak sauces and ketchup and salt and pepper packages, but we don’t give bottles anymore. And we get lots of complaints about that. All of the servers and everybody who’s out on the floor has to wear a mask, and we get complaints about that. And we’re just sanitizing everything more now. We don’t give out menus anymore, we give out paper menus, or there’s a QR code on the table that they can scan for the menu. Because I work in Texas at a steakhouse, a lot of the guests that come in think the virus is a hoax, and they’ll resent us for wearing a mask and they’ll complain about the way things are different.

I’m making money again, but it’s my only option. I like being able to pay my bills, but they just kind of like threw us out there to the dogs; we’re not getting protected at all. We’re having to wear masks, we’re required to for the guest safety, but the guests can basically do whatever they want and we just have to take it, because the customer is always right, even during the pandemic.

—Kennedy Hogan, server, Temple, Texas

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

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

A girl wears a face mask in a classroom in Dortmund, Germany. | Ina Fasbender/AFP via Getty Images

States are doing reopening wrong. Here’s how to fix it.

There’s something wrong with America’s discussion about reopening.

Federal and state guidelines for reopening economies amid the coronavirus pandemic tend to frame recommendations in individual terms: This is what your school, restaurant, or bar should do to reopen safely — minimize capacity, stagger students or customers, encourage mask-wearing, and so on.

But some experts say these recommendations miss the point. Reopening is a community-wide project. Whether a school can reopen safely, for example, doesn’t just depend on capacity, personal protective equipment, or individual actions. It depends on how widespread the coronavirus is in the community outside the school’s walls.

Ashish Jha, the faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, likened individual actions to putting up sandbags and other protective measures around a house during a flood. Yes, the sandbags can help. But if the water reaches a certain height, no amount of protective measures around the house are going to keep it safe.

“If the flood in your community is massive, there’s nothing you can do to keep the water out,” Jha told me. “So the first thing you want to do is make sure that the river doesn’t get too high. The second thing you can think about is how to protect your home.”

Coronavirus outbreaks play out in similar terms. Getting people to stay 6 feet from each other, wear masks, wash their hands, and stagger groups to keep overall numbers down helps. But if a community is flooded with infections, the chances are much higher that those infections will creep in no matter how many protective steps are embraced. The school or restaurant in question will become yet another place where people can meet and transmit the virus, and that will make the epidemic worse.

It’s this rationale that’s led some experts to frame reopening in more zero-sum terms — to argue that the most important thing we could do to reopen any particular place or venue is reduce community transmission.

In other words: If you want to reopen schools this fall, then you need to get the spread of Covid-19 down, as close to zero as possible, this summer. And that means opting not to reopen — possibly at all and definitely not at full capacity — restaurants, bars, nightclubs, or other places that will lead to significantly more coronavirus spread but have less value to society than schools.

“We need to recognize we won’t be getting back to normal for some time,” Helen Jenkins, an epidemiologist at Boston University who wrote about this concept in viral tweets, told me. “We need to recognize we’re going to have to make some sacrifices.”

One way to look at this, Jenkins said, is to imagine reopening as a budget. If the goal is to keep community transmission below a certain level, there are only so many places that can be opened before a jurisdiction’s reopening budget is spent. And each place that’s reopened, from parks to schools to bars, will likely increase transmission to some extent (though to different degrees — outdoor venues, for example, are generally safer than indoor ones).

That means establishing priorities: schools over bars and nightclubs, and major local employers over sporting events and movie theaters.

“Everybody’s been asking the question, ‘How do we open up schools safely?’” Jha said. “My argument’s been: Live in a community that doesn’t have a big disease outbreak. That’s how you open up schools safely.”

Individual actions help, but community transmission is key

It’s not that individual actions are worthless. Far from it: There’s solid and growing evidence that such steps, including wearing a mask, are key to mitigating coronavirus outbreaks overall. Experts say it’s important that individuals and places continue taking such measures.

But the most important consideration for any single place thinking about reopening may not be what steps it takes but how widespread the coronavirus is outside its doors. If 5 percent of a community is infected with Covid-19 at any given time — so there’s up to a 5 percent chance that anyone coming into a venue will be infectious — that’s, obviously, much worse than 0.1 percent of the community being infected and a 0.1 percent chance. (The math isn’t quite this clean in reality, but it gets the concept across.)

On the higher end of the spectrum, community transmission can even get so bad that almost nothing can stay open. If Covid-19 becomes so widespread in a community that simply interacting with anyone you don’t live with is too risky, then even relatively safe places, like beaches or parks, can start to pose a significant risk of transmission too.

“If we try to do everything, we can end up with a repeat of March,” Jenkins said. “And we end up with nothing, because we have to lock up everything again.”

This is why it can be misleading to draw comparisons between different regions reopening at different rates. For example, Denmark got attention after its schools and day care centers reopened without causing a spike in coronavirus cases. But Denmark has also experienced a relatively small Covid-19 outbreak — with almost one-twentieth the cases per person as the US, despite having nearly twice as much testing relative to its population. That makes it hard to say that reopening schools in the US would have the same effect.

Many people are probably already thinking in these terms to some degree, likely feeling safer eating at a restaurant in, say, Wyoming or Vermont than in a Covid-19 epicenter like Arizona or Florida.

But experts argue that policymakers, school administrators, and business owners should more explicitly operate under these terms when they’re making decisions about reopening.

“I get a lot of business folks who call me and say, ‘Here’s our testing strategy for employees. What do you think?’” Jha said. “But if you’re in Phoenix right now, you can have whatever testing strategy you want for your workers. It’s not going to do anything.”

Governments should think about reopening as a budget

One way to think about all of this is that each municipality, state, and country has a limited reopening budget.

The goal is to keep the basic reproduction number in a community below 1. That would mean that every person who gets coronavirus transmits it to, on average, fewer than one other person. Over time, that would lead to coronavirus cases falling closer and closer to zero. This number is typically calculated as the R0 or Rt, depending on the methods used. (Some websites, like Rt.live, calculate this figure for all states, and it’s at 1 or more in most states.)

Although different settings carry different risks, any place in which people who don’t live together interact likely increases the risk of Covid-19 transmission to some degree. Knowing that, different jurisdictions can only open a limited number of venues.

Some of that could come down to the effective “cost” — the amount of risk present in any given venue. For example, parks, beaches, and other outdoor places seem to carry a very small risk of coronavirus spread, thanks to the open air diluting coronavirus-infected droplets, wider distances between people, and, potentially, the ability of heat, UV light, and humidity to snare the virus.

Meanwhile, bars carry a large risk. They’re often cramped and poorly ventilated places where people can remain and possibly talk loudly — spreading droplets — for hours as drinking loosens their inhibitions. In the framework of the reopening budget, parks and beaches are cheap, and bars are expensive — so maybe it’s prudent to open parks and beaches first.

It can also come down to priorities. For example, schools likely carry some risk of Covid-19 transmission, as an indoor environment in which students, teachers, and other school staff interact for hours. But schools are also really important for day-to-day life — not just for kids’ education, but also for food, shelter, and child care while parents are at work. Knowing that, a community may decide to fit schools into its reopening budget. The trade-off would be that other places, such as restaurants, bars, or gyms, more likely have to remain closed.

Different communities could also prioritize different settings. If a specific factory is a big source of jobs in a city, maybe the local government there will deem it a priority even if it carries a certain risk of transmission. This is, in effect, what communities around the world have done as they deem certain goods and services “essential” and allow them to reopen or stay open.

On the flip side, certain measures — like aggressive testing, contact tracing, and isolating — may reduce the risk of transmission overall.

In practice, a budget can’t be perfectly allocated. We don’t have data to say, to use a made-up example, that restaurants at limited capacity add 0.5 to a community’s Rt, the factory adds 0.3, schools add 0.2, parks add 0.05, and the test-and-trace program subtracts 0.1 — making it safe to do all that and remain below an Rt of 1. We don’t know enough about the spread of Covid-19, and possibly never will, to make those kinds of granular determinations.

A more realistic implementation, instead, is to some degree what states are already doing: slowly reopening parts of the state bit by bit, giving each phase of reopening some time to gauge the full effects, and slowing down or reversing course if rates of infection increase.

“Since this is new and we don’t have data and experience to guide us, it makes sense to take things slowly,” Lauren Ancel Meyers, a mathematical biologist at the University of Texas Austin, told me. “Relax things bit by bit and see if it’s working. If we relax a few measures, we watch the data for a few weeks; if it’s not going up, maybe we can relax a bit more.”

Where thinking of this problem as a state budget comes in is that it can make priorities more explicit. So far, states have generally proposed broad plans in which they’re opening all parts of their economies, with the goal of returning to normal, or as close to normal, as possible — letting bars, sports, and other entertainment venues eventually open in some capacity.

But if you know you have a limited budget, and this budget is truly zero-sum, that can make your calculations about priorities more explicit. If bars or sports stadiums add far too much to the Rt, all while not serving as much value as schools, then the risk of opening bars and stadiums before the fall just isn’t worth it — because that could endanger the prospect of reopening schools by letting community transmission get out of control.

“We may just be at a point where we say during the pandemic we’re not going to have nightclubs,” Jha argued. “If we want nightclubs, we may not be able to get schools and other businesses open, or we’ll have to deal with hospitals getting full. That is the right way to think about it.”

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

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

Eugene Scalia, the lawyer Donald Trump appointed to lead the US labor department, which handles worker safety, spent years in private practice helping corporations fight health and safety regulations meant to protect workers. Now, Scalia, the son of the late conservative supreme court justice Antonin, oversees the federal agency tasked with protecting such regulations.

For years we've noted how the United States has spent billions on broadband subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory favors for major ISPs, only to receive half-completed networks. That's largely thanks to lobbyists and the captured regulators who love them, resulting in a government that doesn't do a great job tracking where subsidy money is spent, refuses to seriously police fraud, still doesn't really know where broadband is or isn't available, and routinely approves terrible industry consolidating mergers.

The result: the US is mediocre in nearly every major broadband metric that matters -- some 42 million US consumers still can't get any broadband whatsoever, and Americans pay some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world. To fix this will require a deep look in the mirror, some significant campaign finance reform on the state and federal level, and the elimination of a revolving door regulator system that all but ensures the US broadband monopoly problem is perpetuated. Instead of doing that, we routinely try to thrown even more money at the problem in the hopes that this time will surely be different.

Enter the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act (H.R. 7302), which would create an $80 billion fiber infrastructure program run by a new Office of Internet Connectivity and Growth, coordinating the US government's response to our broadband dysfunction. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, the bill is certainly filled with a lot of good ideas, including the elimination of the 19 state laws giant ISPs have lobbied for (and in many cases literally written) that prohibit or hamstring towns and cities looking to build their own broadband networks, even if the private sector has failed them:

"The bill will also free up local governments to pursue community broadband. The removal of state laws advocated by the major national ISPs that ban local communities from building their own broadband access network is long overdue. The public sector has long ago proven essential to the effort to build universal fiber as rural cooperatives, small cities, and townships are building fiber networks in areas long ago skipped by the private sector."

There's a lot of other helpful portions of the bill, including a section that upgrades the standard definition of broadband from 25 Mbps downstream, 4 Mbps upstream, to a more symmetrical 25 Mbps downstream, 25 Mbps upstream. The bill also widely advocates for fiber networks that are "open access," meaning the construction of fiber networks that can then be shared between multiple ISPs, creating a strange concept known as "competition." It would also mandate "dig once" rules that would require laying fiber and fiber conduit alongside any new highway build project.

The problem, of course, is that giants like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter Spectrum all but own more than half of the current US Congress and current White House leadership, so it's unlikely to pass in the Senate or be signed into law:

"The big ISPs, which fail to deliver universal access but enjoy comfortable monopolies and charge you prices at 200% to 300% above competitive rates, will resist this effort. Even when it is profitable to deliver fiber, the national ISPs have chosen not to do it in exchange for short-term profits. A massive infrastructure program, the kind that helped countries like South Korea become global leaders in broadband, aren’t just desperately needed in the United States, it is a requirement. No other country on planet Earth has made progress in delivering universal fiber without an infrastructure policy of this type."

As always, we can't pass effective broadband laws or ensure we have consistent regulators armed with policies that promote competition because government has been largely corrupted by lobbying and campaign contributions. And, unfortunately, fixing this isn't likely to happen under the current Congress, even before you get to the whole "raging pandemic and massive pile of resulting debt" thing. Should the bill pass the House, it's all but certain to meet a swift death in the Senate. A bill like this could eventually be approved, but it's going to require a massive shakeup in Congress and campaign finance reform first.

A worker installs a photovoltaic panel for the Tenaska Imperial Solar Energy South project in the Imperial Valley west of El Centro, California. | Don Bartletti/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

A new select committee report is perfectly in tune with the growing climate-policy alignment on the left around standards, investments, and justice.

In 2007, shortly after Democrats took back the House of Representatives in the 2006 midterm elections, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi created the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, meant to gather expert testimony and develop policy plans to address climate change. Until Republicans killed it in 2011, the select committee amassed an enormous body of knowledge, which it contributed to the 2007 energy bill, the 2009 Obama stimulus bill, and the ill-fated Waxman-Markey climate bill (which died in the Senate).

In 2018, after Democrats re-took the House, Pelosi proposed reconstituting the committee. Climate change activists, led by newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, demanded that the new committee have teeth — that it be charged with developing a Green New Deal. The original sit-in at Pelosi’s office, where AOC drew scads of media attention by appearing after having been elected but before being sworn in, was in part about demanding a more robust committee. Activists eventually got dozens of lawmakers to sign on to the effort.

In the end, though, Pelosi gave the new select committee a purely advisory role, with neither subpoena power nor a specific legislative mandate. (I recount the fight in more detail in my Green New Deal explainer.)

After the initial hullabaloo, the select committee largely fell out of the headlines and got to work.

The committee’s initial request for input in the fall of 2019 drew about 700 substantive responses. Through March 2020, committee staffers have had more than a thousand meetings with various stakeholders — the report cites “elected officials, tribal leaders, scientists, business representatives, policy experts, public health advocates, youth activists, and individuals representing communities on the front lines of climate change” — alongside 17 official hearings, seven member-level roundtables, and several meetings with staff and members of other committees. Since March, there have also been a number of online member briefings about Covid-19 and its impact on public health and clean energy.

“We didn’t need subpoena power to do our work,” says Melvin Félix, the committee’s communications director. “People were eager to share their views on how to solve the climate crisis.”

All those consultations, hearings, and meetings have culminated in the release of the select committee’s official report and recommendations: “Solving the Climate Crisis: The Congressional action plan for a clean energy economy and a healthy and just America.”

It is the most detailed and well-thought-out plan for addressing climate change that has ever been a part of US politics — an extraordinary synthesis of expertise from social and scientific fields, written by people deeply familiar with government, the levers of power, and existing policy.

“I am very heartened to see the detail and ambition that the committee has put forward,” says Leah Stokes, an energy policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It shows that the Democratic Party is waking up to the scale and urgency of the climate crisis.”

The report weighs in at well over 500 pages, with hundreds of individual policy recommendations — even the bullet-pointed list goes on for four pages. I will not presume to try to summarize it. Instead, I will just lay out the basic structure, the twelve policy “pillars” identified, and then say a few things about the political landscape in which the report arrives. We now have as close to a definitive answer as can be provided in advance of the question, “How can we do this?” What remains, politically speaking, is the question of whether we’ll do it, i.e., the question of power.

Energy Innovation

The 12 pillars of a comprehensive response to climate change

The overall goal of the recommendations is net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the US by “no later than” 2050, and negative emissions thereafter. (As I explained in a recent post, net-zero by 2050 is the new climate baseline in US politics — even conservatives are signing on to it.)

It’s worth a note of clarification here. The recent IPCC report recommends net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. But carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas — there is also methane, nitrous oxide, and others, some of which are particularly difficult to eliminate. Getting to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, all inclusive, is actually a bolder target than the IPCC’s.

It’s that bolder target that the report recommends as the US national goal, though, as we’ll see, the policies within it don’t quite get all the way there.

The report’s policy recommendations were assessed by the independent energy consultancy Energy Innovation using peer-reviewed modeling. It found that they would get the US to net-zero carbon dioxide emissions a little before 2050, but not quite net-zero GHG emissions.

Energy Innovation

Specifically, they would reduce net GHGs at least 37 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and 88 percent by 2050. “The remaining 12% of [GHG] emissions comes from the hardest to decarbonize sectors,” the report says, “such as heavy-duty and off-road transportation, industry, and agriculture.”

In meeting these targets, the policies would prevent 62,000 premature deaths every year by 2050, most of them through a reduction in fine-particle pollution. “The cumulative net present value of the estimated monetized annual health and climate benefits,” the report says, “are equal to almost $8 trillion (real 2018 U.S. dollars) at a 3% discount rate.”

That’s $8 trillion in savings — up to $1 trillion a year by 2050, relative to the no-policy baseline. Pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

The report also recommends that the president set interim 2030 and 2040 targets and that the US Academy of Sciences conduct regular assessments of decarbonization progress, focusing especially on distributional impacts, i.e., environmental justice.

So, how can the US move toward net-zero? Here are the 12 pillars:

1. Invest in infrastructure to build a just, equitable, and resilient clean energy economy.
2. Drive innovation and deployment of clean energy and deep decarbonization technologies.
3. Transform US industry and expand domestic manufacturing of clean energy and zero-emission technologies.
4. Break down barriers for clean energy technologies.
5. Invest in America’s workers and build a fairer economy.
6. Invest in disproportionately exposed communities to cut pollution and advance environmental justice.
7. Improve public health and manage climate risks to health infrastructure.
8. Invest in American agriculture for climate solutions.
9. Make US communities more resilient to the impacts of climate change.
10. Protect and restore America’s lands, waters, ocean, and wildlife.
11. Confront climate risks to America’s national security and restore America’s leadership on the international stage.
12. Strengthen America’s core institutions to facilitate climate action.

Under each of these pillars there are multiple subsections, each with their own list of supportive policies. No matter your idiosyncratic climate policy interest, it’s in there somewhere. Multi-modal urban transportation options? Page 104. Resilience-focused building codes? Page 419.

For each policy, the report identifies the congressional committee with jurisdiction. What’s notable is that just about every committee in the House, from Agriculture to Natural Resources to Transportation to Financial Services to Defense, has a full menu of things to do. There is lots of work to go around.

“This is an ambitious and comprehensive plan,” says Stokes. “It shows that the committee listened to stakeholders, watched the Democratic primary carefully, and learned from climate champions like Governor Jay Inslee.”

Atilgan Ozdil/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Does it constitute a Green New Deal? It doesn’t contain a job guarantee or universal health care. It doesn’t nationalize any industries. But it does “represent a major shift in congressional leaders’ approach to climate policy,” says Maggie Thomas of Inslee campaign spin-off group Evergreen Action, “toward a more urgent plan built on clean energy standards, investment, and environmental justice.”

The select committee report, in other words, is perfectly in tune with the growing climate-policy alignment on the left around standards, investments, and justice (SIJ). It contains the same strong standards on electricity, cars, and buildings that served as the core of both Inslee’s and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s plans. It recommends a wide array of investments in infrastructure, domestic industries, and community resilience. And throughout, there is a focus on the hardest-hit communities. It’s like an SIJ policy encyclopedia.

Will it do any good? Let’s conclude with three quick points about the politics around the report.

Policy is not the sticking point — it’s making policy matter

There are some areas of the report with which the climate left will take issue. It places great emphasis on carbon capture, storage, and reuse, is friendly to nuclear, and does not ban fossil fuel infrastructure. But there are two points to make about that.

First, anything the report might lack in Sanders-style top-line ambitions, it makes up for in terms of Warren-style policy specificity. It is enormously valuable for policymakers, when they stumble into those rare opportunities to get something done, to have a detailed policy blueprint available. Wherever and whenever those opportunities occur, there will be plans ready to take advantage.

Second and more importantly, in political terms, the ambition of climate policy is not going to be settled by pre-election intramural left debates. The differences between this plan and the Green New Deal or Inslee’s plan or various plans from green groups are minuscule relative to the yawning gap between any of those plans and the capacities of the US political system.

More bluntly, policy ambition won’t be constrained by policy visions and plans, it will be constrained by power. It’s something neither the right nor the left enjoys hearing, but it’s true: To a first approximation, the more power Democrats have in the federal government, the more climate policy will get done. Even if Democrats take the presidency and the House and the Senate, each additional vote in that Senate majority — 51 vs. 52 vs. 53 — will give them more room to maneuver and make more climate policy possible.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

The closer the election gets, the less pressing it is to answer the question, “What would Democrats do if they could do everything they wanted?” However much or little that may be, it’s much less than what they can do in the face of Republican opposition. It is their strength and numbers in the face of that opposition that will determine the outer bounds of climate policy in 2021.

So at this point, the best thing climate advocates and activists can do is demonstrate to Democrats that their new embrace of SIJ policy is a political winner, by translating it to electoral success. Politicians who run and win on an issue are more likely to stick with it.

A third and final point: Can you imagine Republicans doing this? Assembling a policy committee and holding more than a year’s worth of consultations, meetings, and hearings to gather expert testimony and translate it into a detailed policy blueprint?

There’s simply nothing like this happening on the right side of the aisle, on any issue. There’s no demand for it.

Trump has no policy plans or principles, he lurches from one gesture to another, trying to get good coverage on cable news. And Republicans in Congress are hardly better. They pass tax cuts for the wealthy and increase military spending; otherwise, they have effectively shut down Congress as a legislative body. As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell boasts, the Republican Senate is a graveyard for legislation, accomplishing little beyond stocking the federal judiciary with unqualified right-wing judges.

With no demand for policy expertise, there’s less and less supply. “One of the biggest problems faced by the GOP today is how degraded its policy shops have become,” says Jerry Taylor, a former libertarian who now heads the center-right think tank the Niskanen Center. “Conservative think tanks are heavily loaded with ideologues will little concrete legislative knowledge. Few have ever been involved in writing real (non-messaging) legislation.”

Zach Gibson/Getty Images

This was illustrated recently when Republicans got nervous about polling on climate change and decided they needed something to call “climate policy.” They came up with R&D subsidies to oil and gas companies and ... trees. Policy-wise, it was puddle-deep, and it’s not clear the GOP’s diminished policy shops are capable of coming up with anything better.

There are plenty of people on today’s right familiar with the latest conspiracy theories about the deep state or antifa, but there’s almost nobody left who knows how to craft policy. Everyone in the conservative coalition has become the same shitposter, competing to go viral owning the libs. What policy development capacity still existed on the right before the Trump era has either embraced ethnonationalist hackery or faded into irrelevance.

And so, as the select committee report illustrates in the starkest possible terms, if you want serious policy to address urgent national problems, there’s only one party offering it.

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Putin and Trump shake hands at the G20 summit in Osaka, June 2019. | Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

Russia seems to have put bounties on US troops in Afghanistan. Trump seems to have been warned — and did nothing.

The past few days in American politics have been dominated by revelations that Russia may have paid Taliban militants to kill US troops in Afghanistan in 2019 — and that the Trump administration knew about the scheme and did nothing to stop it or punish Russia.

The New York Times reported Friday that US intelligence officials found evidence indicating that a unit of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, had put out bounties on US troops in Afghanistan. It’s not clear how many Americans may have been killed as part of this plot, but at least one incident in April 2019 that killed three Marines in a car bomb attack near Bagram Airfield is reportedly being investigated in connection to the alleged Russian effort.

The Times reported that President Donald Trump was briefed about the Russian operation months ago but chose to do nothing in response.

Trump loudly denied this claim on Sunday, tweeting that “Nobody briefed or told me, [Vice President Mike] Pence, or Chief of Staff [Mark Meadows], about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians,” adding that “everybody is denying it & there have not been many attacks on us.”

But there’s mounting evidence that this is false.

The Associated Press reported on Monday night that in March 2019, then-National Security Adviser John Bolton personally briefed Trump on the Russian scheme. Also on Monday night, the New York Times reported that the intelligence had been included in the February 27 edition of the President’s Daily Brief, a daily summary of what the CIA describes as “the highest level of intelligence on the president’s key national security issues and concerns” prepared specially for the president by his intelligence chiefs.

So what to make of all this?

Experts on Russia and Afghanistan say the underlying claim — that Russia paid bounties to Afghan militants to kill US troops — is quite plausible. Since at least 2015, Russia has attempted to undermine and weaken the US and its allies from the shadows, sometimes violently. The GRU has been the tip of Putin’s spear in this effort; it makes sense that it would target US troops in Afghanistan in particular, a kind of delayed payback for America’s support for anti-Soviet Afghan rebels in the 1980s.

“Russia, or at least some Russian agencies, apparently feel free to assassinate regime opponents in London, Salisbury, and Berlin,” says Steven Pifer, an expert on Russia at the Brookings Institution. “It’s not that big a step from there to going after coalition soldiers in Afghanistan.”

But at this point, Trump’s apparent failure to do anything about the revelations is becoming as big a story as the Russian scheme itself.

It seems pretty clear now that senior officials in the Trump administration have had intelligence of a Russian plot to kill Americans for more than a year and have briefed the president about it several times. Yet Trump not only failed to mount any kind of response but also seems to be, at best, alarmingly unaware of information he was apparently given several times, or, at worst, outright lying about his knowledge of it.

Either way, it’s further proof that the Trump administration’s approach to policymaking is profoundly broken. It once again raises disturbing questions about Trump’s policy toward Russia. And now, lawmakers of both parties — and the mother of one of the Marines killed in the Bagram attack — are demanding answers.

“We’re going to have a hearing,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) told me. “And we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

Is Russia paying the Taliban to murder Americans? And why would they?

Initially, it wasn’t particularly clear how this Russian program worked or how solid the US intelligence about it was. But in the past day, the strength of the intelligence in question become disturbingly clear.

According to a Tuesday New York Times piece, American spies grounded their assessment in two major sources of information: interrogations of captured Afghan militants revealing the program’s assistance, and intercepted bank records showing large payments from a GRU bank account to the Taliban. This conclusion is supported by the Afghan government’s security forces, who captured a group of local moneymen who seem to have worked as go-betweens connecting the Russian government to the Afghan militants.

This finding, per the Times, helped “reduce an earlier disagreement among intelligence analysts and agencies over the reliability of the detainees.” The intelligence was evidently compelling enough that the US shared it with its British counterparts (British forces are also active in Afghanistan as part of the US-led coalition fight, and may have been targeted as well, according to the Times).

Both the Russian government and the Taliban have denied the allegations, and the militants pointed out in a statement to the Times that they don’t need any incentives from the Russians to want to kill Americans.

But experts find the claim fairly credible, noting that such schemes are broadly consistent with how Russia operates these days.

“Five years ago ... it would have been very, very shocking,” Alina Polyakova, the president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis, said. “But now,” she said, the Russians “feel like there’s an open playing field — that there haven’t been real consequences for similar operations in the past.”

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

The GRU, the military intelligence agency believed to be behind the bounties, was also a central player in Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election. The specific part of the GRU that allegedly issued the bounties, Unit 29155, tends to handle more violent operations — like the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Britain in 2018.

These operations reflect broader Russian strategic doctrine under Putin. Russia is, despite its nuclear weapons and massive oil deposits, a fundamentally weak country compared to its American rival.

Lacking anything like America’s conventional military strength or global network of alliances, it uses covert operations as a form of low-grade asymmetric warfare — weakening the United States, which Putin sees as an obstacle to expanding Russian geopolitical influence, without having to court an open fight with a much stronger enemy.

The result is a military intelligence agency empowered to engage in covert operations across the world, ranging from hacking to espionage to outright murder, with the aim of creating chaos and weakening America’s ability to serve as a check on Russian expansionism.

“If the higher-ups in the Kremlin didn’t authorize activity in Afghanistan, this wouldn’t have happened,” Polyakova says. “The practical details of how they carried out the bounty program — I’m sure those details never go up as far as Putin himself. But the broader directive to undermine US interests certainly does come from the top.”

Afghanistan is an ideal site for this kind of anti-American activity. War zones are inherently violent and chaotic, making it easier for the Russians to get American troops killed without having to do it themselves. It also serves as a kind of (perceived) symmetric retaliation for American involvement in Ukraine, where the US has given the government lethal weaponry to aid in its fight against Russian invaders.

It is also a sort of symbolic payback for America’s decision to arm Afghan militants fighting back against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Reportedly, some members of the GRU’s Unit 29155 are veterans of that war — and see getting Americans killed as a “dish served cold” kind of retaliation.

“Remember for some Americans, Afghanistan in the 1980s was payback for Vietnam,” says Barnett Rubin, a political scientist at New York University who studies Afghanistan. “What goes around comes around.”

This isn’t just a more violent extension of the 2016 election hacking campaign, in short. It’s a reflection of the way in which, under Putin, Russian foreign policy has become a project of attaining a particular vision of national greatness — a tool for avenging historical humiliations and restoring the Kremlin to its rightful place as one of the world’s great powers.

To do that, America must be punished.

What did the president know, and when did he know it?

If the intelligence turns out to be true — and, again, we don’t know that it is — then the Russian government hired terrorists to kill Americans. This isn’t routine spying or even “cyberwar”; it’s literally an act of war from a nuclear-armed power.

That’s certainly something one would expect the president of the United States to be concerned about, or at the very least aware of.

The general expectation would be that the president would be briefed on the intelligence assessment. If the intelligence community has credible evidence about something so politically and strategically explosive, the president needs to know in order to start thinking about how to potentially respond. At the very least, he’d be expected to try to figure out just how likely it is that the plot is real — asking questions about the sourcing, for example, and how seriously he needs to take it.

But Trump claims he was never told about the intelligence because his officials “did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP [Mike Pence].”

And White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Monday that Trump hadn’t been briefed because there isn’t “consensus” among intelligence agencies about the veracity of the claims in question. “It would not be elevated to the president until it was verified,” McEnany said.

But there doesn’t need to be total agreement among every agency for an intelligence assessment to make it to the president’s desk; for one thing, it’s possible that not every agency has seen the underlying evidence (e.g., interrogation tapes and financial records) and been able to make an independent judgment. And, again, it was apparently credible enough to brief a foreign ally, Britain, about.

“It’s one of those things that’s serious and obviously seems credible enough to send all the way to the White House — the kind of thing you want to get to the bottom of,” says Mieke Eoyang, the vice president for national security at Third Way, a center-left think tank.

Trump’s top intelligence official, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, said in a statement Saturday that he had “confirmed that neither the President nor the Vice President were ever briefed on any intelligence alleged by the New York Times in its reporting yesterday.”

CIA Director Gina Haspel was more vague on the question of whether the president had been given the intelligence, saying in a Monday statement that “when developing intelligence assessments, initial tactical reports often require additional collection and validation.”

But two reports from the AP and New York Times suggest Trump was briefed on the intelligence — not once, but multiple times, and as far back as March 2019.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

“Top officials in the White House were aware in early 2019 of classified intelligence indicating Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans,” the AP reports. “The assessment was included in at least one of President Donald Trump’s written daily intelligence briefings at the time, according to the officials. Then-national security adviser John Bolton also told colleagues he briefed Trump on the intelligence assessment in March 2019.”

While the AP notes that “officials said they did not consider the intelligence assessments in 2019 to be particularly urgent,” they also reported that “the classified assessment of Russian bounties was the sole purpose of the [Trump-Bolton] meeting.” Moreover, they report that Robert O’Brien, the current national security adviser, also personally spoke with Trump about the issue (O’Brien denies this).

Separately, two intelligence officials also told the New York Times that the assessment had been included in Trump’s daily briefing in February 2020 — with one official identifying the exact date of the written brief, February 27.

So a few scenarios are possible here, though some are more plausible than others:

1. Trump was never briefed on the intelligence, and all of these intelligence officials saying otherwise are lying to the press.
2. Trump was briefed on the intelligence several times and wasn’t paying attention, didn’t think it was important or credible enough to pay attention to, or just forgot about it despite being told about it repeatedly.
3. Trump was briefed on the intelligence and is lying about it.

Whichever scenario turns out to be true, any one of the three would be a damning indictment of the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy.

Whatever the explanation, it’s a bona fide scandal

Let’s take each of the three scenarios in turn.

1) Trump was never briefed on the intelligence, and all of the intelligence officials saying otherwise are lying to the press

This is extremely hard to believe.

For one thing, the New York Times’s reporting on this has been extremely, almost surprisingly specific. The details on financial records, in particular, was reportedly included in the late February briefing on the topic.

Notably, the Times reporters cite a specific date — February 27, 2020 — as one where Trump received a President’s Daily Brief with information about the Russian plot. This is really, really easy to disprove; if the information isn’t there on that day, the White House could simply leak the PDB from February 2020 and embarrass the “failing” New York Times. If an intelligence official provided a specific date and the Times reporters cited it, they’re probably pretty confident that it was in there.

On the off chance that the White House is telling the truth, it would still be not great for the White House. It would suggest that people in the intelligence and national security community don’t trust him with information of this sort with regards to Russia — a fear that seems vindicated by the way the president has handled this issue since it’s gone public.

2) Trump was briefed on the intelligence several times and wasn’t paying attention, didn’t think it was important or credible enough to pay attention to, or just forgot about it (over and over)

It may be hard to believe that a president might not remember being briefed about a Russian plot to kill American soldiers, but in Trump’s case, it’s certainly believable.

During the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has repeatedly blamed the intelligence community for failing to warn him about the risk from the virus early. Yet the New York Times reported that he had been warned — but that he’s so uninterested in learning, so unreceptive to new information, that he can’t be made to internalize what he’s told:

Mr. Trump, who has mounted a yearslong attack on the intelligence agencies, is particularly difficult to brief on critical national security matters, according to interviews with 10 current and former intelligence officials familiar with his intelligence briefings.

The president veers off on tangents and getting him back on topic is difficult, they said. He has a short attention span and rarely, if ever, reads intelligence reports, relying instead on conservative media and his friends for information. He is unashamed to interrupt intelligence officers and riff based on tips or gossip he hears from the former casino magnate Steve Wynn, the retired golfer Gary Player or Christopher Ruddy, the conservative media executive.

Mr. Trump rarely absorbs information that he disagrees with or that runs counter to his worldview, the officials said. Briefing him has been so great a challenge compared with his predecessors that the intelligence agencies have hired outside consultants to study how better to present information to him.

This is consistent with every insider account of the White House we’ve heard, from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury to Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened: The president doesn’t read and just doesn’t seem to care about learning things about the country he leads. It’s entirely possible this disinterest in knowledge and policy explains why he’s done nothing to respond to what sure seems like a Russian plot to kill Americans.

3) Trump was briefed on the intelligence and remembers it, and is lying to the American people

That the president and his staff lie all the time is something we’ve all just come to accept.

But in this case, lying would be particularly disturbing. The president has a strangely warm relationship with Russia’s strongman leader, to the point where it seems like he doesn’t take objectively threatening behavior from Russia all that seriously.

If Trump is lying, the fact pattern here is really disturbing. Former counter-ISIS envoy Brett McGurk, an Obama appointee who served under Trump, notes that Trump had multiple opportunities to raise this with Putin directly. Not only didn’t he, but he actually worked to better Russia’s international image during this time period:

So this isn’t just another one of Trump’s lies, in short. It would be an epically bad lie — one covering up his decision to literally let Putin get away with murder.

This is all great for Russia

Given how bad the situation is, the Trump administration is defaulting to its typical playbook: lie and blame others. On Sunday evening, Trump speculated that the New York Times had invented this story out of whole cloth to hurt him:

This just so happens to dovetail with the official Russian approach to the scandal. Compare Trump’s tweet with one from the Russian Embassy to the United States on Saturday:

“Seeing the Kremlin and the White House aligned on the narrative around this is really shocking to me,” says Polyakova. “These kinds of operations are intentionally [designed for] plausible deniability by the Kremlin. ... It’s in chaos and in ambiguity that they [the Russians] thrive.”

The problem here, at base, is that the president is both unreliable and uninterested in the actual mechanics of US policy (both foreign and domestic). In the American system, the president has an indispensable role in foreign policy decision-making. Only the president can adjudicate among different bureaucratic interests and set an overarching policy.

When you have a leader who will not and maybe cannot play that role, the entire ship of American state becomes rudderless. US foreign policy becomes unfocused and chaotic.

And that’s exactly how the Russians like it.

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

CDC says U.S. has ‘way too much virus’ to control pandemic as cases surge across country

Fadel Dawood/picture alliance via Getty Images

If you’re experiencing some sticker shock, don’t panic — too much.

Remdesivir, the antiviral drug that appears to reduce the recovery time for hospitalized Covid-19 patients, has a price tag: $3,120 for the typical five-day regiment for a patient on private insurance. Gilead, the drug’s manufacturer, announced the news on Monday.

The drug has been one of the most promising treatments, reducing the hospital stay for Covid patients by several days in early trials. Remdesivir has been around for a while, but, as you might recall, drug discovery experts have always thought this was the most promising avenue for an effective treatment to come on the market quickly: repurposing an existing drug to fight Covid-19. The Food and Drug Administration authorized the emergency use of remdesivir in May.

But here in America, where even people who have health insurance coverage can often face high medical bills, the news of the drug’s promise was quickly followed by the question: Yeah, but what’s it going to cost?

Now we have an answer — or the start of one, at least. Let’s get into it.

How much are patients going to pay for remdesivir?

As the Wall Street Journal covered, the sales price to hospitals will be about $5,700 for a private insurance patient getting the longer 10-day course, and that $3,120 price tag for the shorter one. For patients covered by military government programs or Indian Affairs, the price will be a little bit lower: $2,340 for the shorter treatment and about $4,300 for the longer one.

If you’re experiencing some sticker shock, don’t panic — too much. These are the prices at which Gilead is selling the drug to hospitals. Patients will generally not be asked to pay the sticker price, although their out-of-pocket costs will depend on their health insurer. (Uninsured patients are supposed to have their costs covered by the government, although there are questions about whether enough funding is available.)

Medicaid patients will be asked to pay very little, if anything. Medicare patients will have their treatment covered by the program’s inpatient benefit, which has a $1,400 deductible before costs are fully covered. Deductibles vary for people with commercial health insurance, but because of the ACA, there is a hard cap (about $7,300 per person) on annual out-of-pocket costs.

So the bad news is, if you are in the hospital for Covid-19, the cost of your medical care is likely to exceed those limits. Your bills would include not only any drugs you might receive, but also room charges, doctor fees, etc. Those typically add up to thousands of dollars on their own.

But the good news is, because those out-of-pocket limits are in place, you won’t bear the full brunt of those costs. The addition of remdesivir shouldn’t add much to your bottom line if you’re already being hospitalized.

“In effect, this is good news for patients,” Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, said. “There’s a treatment option, and if they find themselves in this scenario, at least this won’t add a huge amount of additional spending to them.”

What Gilead’s remdesivir price means for hospitals?

(Update from the Wall Street Journal: The government price will not apply for Medicare and Medicaid, by far the largest government health care programs.)

While patients might side-eye the price tag for remdesivir, Gilead’s pricing strategy could also be a headache for hospitals.

That’s because Medicaid payment rates for a hospital stay — which, as with Medicare, cover all the necessary services — are typically set in advance, and when those rates were established for 2020, nobody knew that the Covid-19 pandemic would happen or that remdesivir would prove to be an effective therapy.

Edwin Park at the Georgetown Center on Children and Families told me that hospitals could be made whole on the back end. With the new hepatitis C drugs, the same situation played out: A novel treatment came on the market that hadn’t been accounted for in the Medicaid program’s budgeting.

“They got retrospective adjustments,” Park said, though, “sometimes it took several years.” With hospitals already facing a crunch because of postponed elective surgeries, this won’t make keeping their finances afloat any easier.

It is a reminder of US health care’s rickety patchwork system for valuing and paying for prescription drugs — though, I was surprised to learn, the experts I spoke with thought the price Gilead arrived at is actually pretty fair.

Is this a fair price for remdesivir as a Covid-19 therapy?

This was the bottom line for Dusetzina: “I think this is a reasonable price and it’s a surprising price.”

We’re so used to price-gouging headlines, in an American system that enables drug companies with monopolies to charge whatever they want, that “reasonable” certainly is a surprise.

The simplest way to look at it is the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review’s estimates of remdesivir’s value as a Covid-19 treatment. ICER has come under criticism from drugmakers (perhaps no surprise), but it is maybe the closest thing we have to the kind of independent arbiter of a drug’s value that other countries like Australia have set up within their government health systems.

ICER estimated that if you account for the recent results showing another drug called dexamethasone reduces Covid-19 mortality and is therefore likely to become part of the standard of care, remdesivir has a cost-effectiveness price benchmark between $2,520 and $2,800. Gilead’s topline price was about $3,100. That’s pretty close to the ICER number, especially as US drug prices go.

The value proposition is pretty simple: Patients will spend less time in the hospital. I asked about the possibility of patients being kept longer to finish the remdesivir course if they would have otherwise been sent home earlier, but Peter Bach at Memorial Sloan Kettering told me that, thinking of the situation as a clinician, “if it’s reducing viral load, it’s a good thing.” He said it would be “pretty normal” to keep a patient under those circumstances — even if they said they felt well enough to leave.

There could be a number of reasons Gilead set a price lower than some analysts expected. It might want to build some goodwill with the public. It probably would have been a public relations catastrophe to come in with a price that is seen as high for an effective treatment to stave off a pandemic that has killed more than 125,000 Americans and shut down much of the economy.

“If you come out and you price really aggressive high pricing here, you are gonna be in the crosshairs of the entire American public,” Dusetzina said “The president, everyone.”

Dexamethasone also might have played a part, because its clinical results are even more impressive than remdesivir’s. The latter reduces recovery time by a few days; the former reduced deaths by one-third in ventilated patients.

Knowing it had another competitive product likely coming on the market, and that hospitals are feeling a financial squeeze because of the issues described above, it may have behooved Gilead to set this “reasonable” price of its Covid-19 therapy. Competition had the desired effect.

Still, value is all relative and America still has the highest drug prices in the world. Now the country’s private insurance patients will face the highest price for remdesivir. And while their insurance benefits will limit their out-of-pocket obligation, the bill they receive in the mail, the whole system is still absorbing that price.

America does not have the kind of system that other countries do to extract the maximum value for a drug. If Gilead delivered remdesivir at a reasonable price, thanks to this confluence of PR and competitive pressure, it is really an exception to prove that rule.

“We are still paying for it. It’s just through a chain of various intermediaries. It’s still all our money being leached out of our economy,” Bach said. “Your taxes are gonna go up, your benefits are gonna get skinnied, your grandkids are going to take on more debt. We’re talking billions of dollars here.”

This story appears in VoxCare, a newsletter from Vox on the latest twists and turns in America’s health care debate. Sign up to get VoxCare in your inbox along with more health care stats and news.

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When the Washington Nationals take the field next month for their first game as defending World Series Champions, they’ll be without the face of their franchise, veteran infielder Ryan Zimmerman and pitcher Joe Ross. In a statement released Monday afternoon, Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo announced that the two players had decided to skip the […]

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An organizer with ReOpen Maryland, a group that has been campaigning against pandemic-related closures across the state, said in a Facebook video on Thursday that he has contracted COVID-19. He also said he would decline to cooperate with government contact tracers trying to determine who he may have exposed to the virus. 

Tim Walters, a Republican and two-time candidate for the House of Delegates from Anne Arundel County, announced in a post on the group’s Facebook page that he tested positive for the virus earlier in the week and would be self-quarantining for 14 days. This comes after Walters led multiple protests across the state to pressure Gov. Larry Hogan to ease restrictions on businesses. The group has also held a number of other events including  “no face mask flash mobs,” where members arrived at local businesses without a face covering, according to the Daily Record.

“Here I am months after not wearing a mask at rallies, churches and so on, and so it’s funny how capricious this thing is,” he said in one of multiple Facebook videos discussing his diagnosis. He started a video series to document his experience with the virus, but his video posts have since been deleted. 

Walters and other protesters were seen on video multiple times without masks and in close proximity to one another. He also said in a video that he has “no idea” where he contracted the virus.

A preacher at his church who turns 53 in July, Walters has a history of diabetes and strokes. He said he has been dealing with a dry cough, which came back “with vengeance” this week, since March.

“I personally believe that this is just a component of spiritual warfare that we’re all in and Satan is trying to stifle my voice, and it won’t work because Jesus has told me that just rest, I got this for you. So I’m going to rest and I’m going to preach from my couch for a while,” he said on Facebook.

Walters did not immediately reply to a request for comment. 

Walters encouraged anyone who was in close proximity to him over these last few weeks to get tested. He says he expects to get a call from the county health department inquiring about his contacts, but said, “I will not share anybody’s personal information. I will not do it.”

Contact tracing is a key part of the government’s efforts to contain the virus, as it allows officials to track who may have been exposed to the virus and direct them to quarantine. 

While Maryland has surpassed 3,000 virus-related deaths this week, hospitalizations have fallen below 500 for the first time in 12 weeks and the positivity rate, or the proportion of people who test positive for the virus, is at a new low of 4.92%, according to state health department data. In Prince George’s and Montgomery counties, the positivity rate and hospitalizations have also declined. 

In Prince George’s County the positivity rate is around 8%, according to county health data. County Executive Angela Alsobrooks plans to move into a full Phase Two on Monday. Montgomery County has also seen a decline to its positivity rate, which averages around 6%, and County Executive Marc Elrich already moved into Phase Two and intends to open additional public library services starting Monday.

State officials, county leaders, and health experts continue to encourage people to wear masks, wash their hands, avoid large crowds, and stay at home when possible because the virus is still out there and there is still no vaccine.