He must be on something:
Does he just not realize that he’s demanding that voters should pay 4X more for deliveries at a time when many of us are staying at home, riding out the pandemic. Jesus…
Marcy Wheeler had a good suggestion about how to deal with this: make a Donald Trump stamp.
Trump said today that he was just responding to a sarcastic reporter’s question when he directed his scientists to “look into” using UV light inside the body and injecting disinfectant to clean the lungs. It would be a big relief if that were true because it would mean the man in charge isn’t so dumb that he has forced disinfectant companies to issue warnings not to drink their product. during this pandemic.
But it isn’t.
It’s a bald-faced lie.
He was not responding to any question. He brought it up himself and he told the scientists sitting there he expected them to follow up:
As far as whether or not that stray comment will have any effect, here’s that Vanity Fair article about the Trump administration’s big hydroxychloroquine plan I mentioned in my Salon column this morning. People should be fired for this — starting with the president. And Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Fox News should be sued for millions:
Forget testing, ventilators, and PPE. Donald Trump’s big plan to beat COVID-19 involved distributing millions of doses of an unproven drug. Behind the scenes, senior administration officials pushed hard to bend the rules and back up his boasts.
On the afternoon of Saturday, April 4, President Trump stood at the White House podium and escalated his marketing blitz on behalf of hydroxychloroquine, hyping the old malaria drug’s alleged promise in treating COVID-19, as well as his administration’s success in acquiring huge amounts of it.
“We have millions and millions of doses of it—29 million to be exact,” he said, as the official tally of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. topped 260,000 and governors across the country pleaded for federal support to acquire tests, ventilators, and protective gear for health care workers. “We’re just hearing really positive stories, and we’re continuing to collect the data.” That evening, according to emails obtained by Vanity Fair, Trump’s political appointees would ramp up the pressure on career health officials to make good on the president’s extravagant promises, despite clear warnings from federal clinicians about the risks and unproven benefits of chloroquine-based treatments for COVID-19.
Vanity Fair has assembled this account based on documents and interviews provided by multiple federal officials with knowledge of internal Trump administration proceedings.
The president had been touting hydroxychloroquine for weeks, sparking worldwide shortages of the drug and prompting negotiations with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi to lift export restrictions on its active ingredients. But on March 24, the federal government’s top interagency working group of clinicians and scientists privately threw cold water on his claims, according to a federal official with knowledge of the working group’s deliberations. In an internal consensus statement, a medical countermeasures group within Health and Human Services recommended that chloroquine-based COVID-19 treatments should be studied only in controlled, hospital-based clinical trials, as their safety and efficacy was “not supported by data from reliable clinical trials or from non-human primates” and carried “potential risks.” The medicines—which are used to treat malaria as well as autoimmune conditions such as lupus—can have serious side effects, including heart arrhythmias.
And yet, just hours after that April 4 press conference, White House officials pushed ahead with a massive behind-the-scenes pressure campaign on the government’s top health officials to deliver huge amounts of chloroquine drugs to just about anyone who wanted them, according to documents reviewed by Vanity Fair. That night, Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services, sent an email with the subject line “Hydroxychloroquine” to a group including FEMA administrator Pete Gaynor, HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response Robert Kadlec, and Navy Rear Admiral John Polowczyk, who leads a supply-chain task force at FEMA.
The email read:
WH call. Really want to flood Ny and NJ with treatment courses. Hospitals have it. Sick out patients don’t. And can’t get. So go through distribution channels as we discussed. If we have 29 million perhaps send a few million ASAP? WH wants follow up in AM.
We can get a lot more of this. Right Bob? Millions per week?
The emails indicate that the administration’s top health officials were closely involved in a frenzied effort to make unproven chloroquine treatments widely available, even though the FDA’s new emergency rule limited distribution of the drug as a COVID-19 treatment to hospitalized patients. One hour after the first email, Gaynor replied to Kadlec, Giroir, and Polowczyk, seeming to suggest that FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn was on board with expanding COVID-19 patients’ access to the drug: “Hahn asked to distribute to hospitals and the drug stores.”
In a second email that appears to have been sent the same night, Gaynor indicated that he was working closely with Rear Admiral Polowczyk: “Me and Adm P are on it. More to follow in the am.”
The rest of the story is just stunning. He had the entire government running in circles to make Trump’s magical thinking come true. It’s hard to know the costs of this inane bootlicking project, but it certainly took time and energy away from the professionals dealing with the pandemic for no good reason. It’s not as if the government had nothing else to do — or the response was going well on other fronts.
And what are the chances this is the only time the political appointees of Donald Trump were influencing/pushing/demanding that government experts follow the daft directives of this fucking moron.
They were trying to put this drug out there for people to be able to get on their own from pharmacies, overruling the scientific experts who objected strenuously.
Look what’s happened today:
The Food and Drug Administration warned consumers Friday against taking malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 outside a hospital or formal clinical trial setting after “serious” poisoning and deaths were reported.
The agency said it became aware of reports of “serious heart rhythm problems” in patients with the virus who were treated with the malaria drugs, often in combination with antibiotic azithromycin, commonly known as a Z-Pak. It also warned physicians against prescribing the drugs to treat the coronavirus outside of a hospital.
“Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine can cause abnormal heart rhythms such as QT interval prolongation and a dangerously rapid heart rate called ventricular tachycardia,” the agency wrote in the notice. “We will continue to investigate risks associated with the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for COVID-19 and communicate publicly when we have more information.”
And if anyone’s still wondering where Trump got this:
Fox News host Laura Ingraham and two doctors who frequently appear on her show met with President Trump last Friday [April 3] to advocate for an unproven anti-malarial drug as a treatment for the novel coronavirus, The Washington Post reported on Monday. Just two days later, the president asserted that “a lot of people are saying” that the drug should be used to treat coronavirus patients.
This whole thing came out of the right wing fever swamps.
I keep thinking I can’t be shocked anymore, he manages to do it. It’s quite a talent.
Thursday’s White House coronavirus rally will go down in history as the day the president directed the scientists to investigate whether ultraviolet light can somehow be put inside COVID-19 patients to kill the virus, or whether disinfectant can be injected into their lungs to clean them. He was very proud of himself, obviously believing that he’d discovered some kind of breakthrough after hearing a briefing about how ordinary people can kill the virus in their homes.
One shudders to think what it must be like to be in meetings with this person. It brings to mind former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s famous quote after trying to teach him some basics about international relations: “He’s a fucking moron.”
Katherine Eban’s reporting for Vanity Fair about the White House hydroxychloroquine debacle reveals that Trump sent government health agencies into a tailspin trying to fulfill his desire for a miracle cure. So if anyone was thinking that these “directives” from Dr. Trump are ignored, we now know better. We can only imagine what kind of “trials” for internal UV light and Clorox cures they are scrambling to set up as we speak.
But that wasn’t the only disturbing thing Trump had to say. One might have thought he’d spend the entire rally patting himself on the back for Thursday’s passage of the CARE Act extension to help small business, but he seemed uninterested in that. When asked about the desperately needed help for state and local government, which he’d previously said he favored, this was the president’s response:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is planning to use this crisis to break the backs of public employee pension funds in liberal states and punish people who vote for Democrats. On Wednesday, McConnell told right-wing radio personality Hugh Hewitt that state and local governments facing revenue shortfalls from this crisis, some of which are forced by law to balance their budgets, may have to go bankrupt because he has no plans to allow the federal government to help them out.
He said these states and cities can use this crisis to solve their “pension problem,” and that he’s saving he’s saving future generations from their fiscal irresponsibility. He later made clear just exactly which states he was talking about by putting out a memorandum in which he described the states requesting help as “Blue State Bailouts.”
Of course the man who blithely passed massive tax cuts for the rich and allowed military spending to grow to unprecedented levels over the past three years, without batting an eye, is now deeply concerned about budget deficits in Democratic states.
This announcement was met with a sharp retort from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who will be faced with even more devastation if he’s forced to lay off first responders, firefighters, teachers and other state and municipal employees in the epicenter of the pandemic. Cuomo said:
It really is offensive. You talk about one issue where you think you can get past partisanship and pettiness, and now you talk about helping communities where people are dying, and you say they are blue states? If there was ever a time for humanity and decency … and a time to stop your obsessive political bias and anger, now is the time.
Rep. Peter King, a Republican from a suburban district on Long Island — where many of New York City’s police officers, firefighters and other public-sector workers live — was equally unamused:
McConnell’s dismissive remark that States devastated by Coronavirus should go bankrupt rather than get the federal assistance they need and deserve is shameful and indefensible. To say that it is “free money” to provide funds for cops, firefighters and healthcare workers makes McConnell the Marie Antoinette of the Senate.
It’s hard to see what Trump and the Republicans have to gain by this outrageous abdication of responsibility. After all, it isn’t only blue states that are affected by this virus. States that Trump needs to win the election — and that McConnell needs to hold the Senate — are also in dire need. Any hope of an economic upturn will be out of the question if half the country is in a state of financial ruin.
But this is McConnell’s style, and a reflection of his nihilistic worldview in general. He and his fellow travelers have decided that the coronavirus is mainly a problem for their political enemies, and they are going to seize the opportunity to kick them when they’re down. It’s hitting cities and black and brown people especially hard, and those people in those places don’t vote for Republicans. Cuomo said it plainly on Wednesday:
What he’s saying is the blue states are the states that have the coronavirus problem. They are Democrats — so why should he bail out the blue areas?
In fact, under current law state governments are unable to declare bankruptcy, and they can’t easily borrow money due to constitutional budgetary constraints. So the federal government is their only hope. If McConnell holds firm, vast numbers of public employees will lose their jobs since the states will simply be unable to pay them. Of course, for the likes of McConnell, that’s a feature not a bug. If services for vulnerable citizens have to be eliminated in the middle of a global catastrophe, that’s just fine too.
As for McConnell’s alleged worries about where the money will come from, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out last week, this is the time for federal borrowing:
Right now, the economy is awash in excess savings with nowhere to go. The interest rate on inflation-protected federal bonds is minus 0.56 percent; in effect, investors are willing to pay our government to make use of their money. Financing economic relief just isn’t a problem.
Anyway, we know for sure that Mitch McConnell has no real concerns about deficits or borrowing. After all, he had no qualms about offering “bailouts” to big companies with virtually no oversight just two weeks ago when he insisted, “We have an obligation to the American people to deal with this emergency.”
It’s unclear exactly how McConnell hopes to thread the needle of only helping red states while leaving the blue states twisting in the wind. But he’ll have to find a way, because plenty of red states are going to need the same kind of help. Perhaps he thinks he can hold any further aid hostage until blue-state governors agree to eliminate public employee pensions, but that’s a tricky business when his own voters will be hostages as well. But McConnell doesn’t gleefully call himself “the Grim Reaper” for nothing. If anyone’s willing to risk his own constituents’ lives to score political points, it’s him.
This upcoming campaign should be one for the books. The incumbent president and his party have decided that their best bet to win over the country during an unprecedented crisis will be too give as much money as possible to big business, force states into bankruptcy and destroy the pensions of cops, firefighters and teachers as the pile of dead bodies gets higher and higher.
McConnell famously said back in 2009 that his job was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. He failed. It looks as though he may get the job done for Donald Trump instead — while destroying the country in the process.
I don’t care about “American leadership” for its own sake. The world is going to reorder and it’s unnecessary that the United States be the nation at the top of the pyramid. Indeed, the paradigm of the future should be about cooperation, alliances, and shared responsibility as we go into a new era in which it’s more important than ever that the world works together to deal with global problems — pandemics and climate change being at the top of the list.
Still, the US used to be a world leader in science and technology and the ideal, if not the reality, of the modern promise of democracy: freedom, equality, and opportunity. It really was an inspiration to many people.
Who in the world would be inspired by America today?
As images of America’s overwhelmed hospital wards and snaking jobless lines have flickered across the world, people on the European side of the Atlantic are looking at the richest and most powerful nation in the world with disbelief.
“When people see these pictures of New York City they say, ‘How can this happen? How is this possible?’” said Henrik Enderlein, president of the Berlin-based Hertie School, a university focused on public policy. “We are all stunned. Look at the jobless lines. Twenty-two million,” he added.
“I feel a desperate sadness,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European history at Oxford University and a lifelong and ardent Atlanticist.
The pandemic sweeping the globe has done more than take lives and livelihoods from New Delhi to New York. It is shaking fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism — the special role the United States played for decades after World War II as the reach of its values and power made it a global leader and example to the world.
Today it is leading in a different way: More than 840,000 Americans have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and at least 46,784 have died from it, more than anywhere else in the world.
As the calamity unfolds, President Trump and state governors are not only arguing over what to do, but also over who has the authority to do it. Mr. Trump has fomented protests against the safety measures urged by scientific advisers, misrepresented facts about the virus and the government response nearly daily, and this week used the virus to cut off the issuing of green cards to people seeking to emigrate to the United States.
“America has not done badly, it has done exceptionally badly,” said Dominique Moïsi, a political scientist and senior adviser at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne.
The pandemic has exposed the strengths and weaknesses of just about every society, Mr. Moïsi noted. It has demonstrated the strength of, and suppression of information by, an authoritarian Chinese state as it imposed a lockdown in the city of Wuhan. It has shown the value of Germany’s deep well of public trust and collective spirit, even as it has underscored the country’s reluctance to step up forcefully and lead Europe.
And in the United States, it has exposed two great weaknesses that, in the eyes of many Europeans, have compounded one another: the erratic leadership of Mr. Trump, who has devalued expertise and often refused to follow the advice of his scientific advisers, and the absence of a robust public health care system and social safety net.
“America prepared for the wrong kind of war,” Mr. Moïsi said. “It prepared for a new 9/11, but instead a virus came. It raises the question: Has America become the wrong kind of power with the wrong kind of priorities?”
The priorities have been skewed for a long time. But Trump combination of cretinism, cozying up to dictators, breaking alliances and recklessly building up the military to levels that make absolutely no sense has brought us to the brink.
Ever since Mr. Trump moved into the White House and turned America First into his administration’s guiding mantra, Europeans have had to get used to the president’s casual willingness to risk decades-old alliances and rip up international agreements. Early on, he called NATO “obsolete” and withdrew U.S. support from the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal.
But this is perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking to the United States for leadership.
In Berlin, Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, has said as much.
China took “very authoritarian measures, while in the U.S., the virus was played down for a long time,” Mr. Maas recently told Der Spiegel magazine.
“These are two extremes, neither of which can be a model for Europe,” Mr. Maas said.
America once told a story of hope, and not just to Americans. West Germans like Mr. Maas, who grew up on the front line of the Cold War, knew that story by heart, and like many others in the world, believed it.
But nearly three decades later, America’s story is in trouble. The country that helped defeat fascism in Europe 75 years ago next month, and defended democracy on the continent in the decades that followed, is doing a worse job of protecting its own citizens than many autocracies and democracies.
There is a special irony: Germany and South Korea, both products of enlightened postwar American leadership, have become potent examples of best practices in the coronavirus crisis.
But critics now see America failing not only to lead the world’s response, but letting down its own people as well.
“There is not only no global leadership, there is no national and no federal leadership in the United States,” said Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development. “In some sense this is the failure of leadership of the U.S. in the U.S.”
Of course, some countries in Europe have also been overwhelmed by the virus, with the number of dead from Covid-19 much higher as a percentage of the population in Italy, Spain and France than in the United States. But they were struck sooner and had less time to prepare and react.
The contrast between how the United States and Germany responded to the virus is particularly striking. While Chancellor Angela Merkel has been criticized for not taking a forceful enough leadership role in Europe, Germany is being praised for a near-textbook response to the pandemic, at least by Western standards. That is thanks to a robust public health care system, but also a strategy of mass testing and trusted and effective political leadership.
Ms. Merkel has done what Mr. Trump has not. She has been clear and honest about the risks with voters and swift in her response. She has rallied all 16 state governors behind her. A trained physicist, she has followed scientific advice and learned from best practice elsewhere.
Not long ago, Ms. Merkel was considered a spent force, having announced that this would be her last term. Now her approval ratings are at 80 percent. “She has the mind of a scientist and the heart of a pastor’s daughter,” Mr. Garton Ash said.
Ms. Merkel, like everyone, would like to find a way out, too, but this week she warned Germans to remain cautious. She is listening to the advice of a multidisciplinary panel of 26 academics from Germany’s national academy of science. The panel includes not just medical experts and economists but also behavioral psychologists, education experts, sociologists, philosophers and constitutional experts.
Trump could not understand any of that. It’s much to complex for his small mind. He listens only to people who lick his boots and tell him what he wants to hear, or people he’s been told could interfere in some way with his re-election prospects if they turned on him (like Fauci.) The November election and his bank accounts are his only concern.
Today, he opened his rally with this fatuous lie:
The man who promised to make America great again, (whatever he thought that meant) has instead hastened its descent into and object of pity and derision at warp speed. All he can do it lie to his Death Cult and hope its enough to save him, if not them.
Its just depressing …
Some of the armed COVID-19 shutdown protesters likely have a year’s supply of nitrogen-packed legumes, MREs, and weapons they’ve stockpiled to survive doomsday, a well-prepared friend mused. But a few weeks’ worth of social distancing and no paychecks and they’re the first in the streets whining that they can’t take it anymore. She says it’s because the doomsday they’ve prepped for involves shooting people and they can’t shoot a virus.
The protesters are being spurred on by a pro-gun family from Iowa (among others), reports the Des Moines Register:
Aaron Dorr, executive director of Iowa Gun Owners, and several of his brothers created Facebook groups to organize the protests in those states and elsewhere. The Dorr brothers — Chris, Ben, Aaron and Matthew — have made themselves known among conservatives for their profitable anti-establishment Facebook groups that are pro-gun and anti-abortion. Their anti-quarantine pages were developed with the same private registrar, according to an NBC analysis, and the brothers are reportedly listed as administrators on those state-specific anti-quarantine pages.
The Dorrs’ Facebook groups have functioned as a digital hub that has elevated misinformation, such as alleging that health officials are intentionally inflating COVID-19 death tallies and comparing the new virus to the flu, ABC and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported.
They are not the only ones pushing back. In a March 27 video that came over the transom, Peter Robinson of Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institute asks Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD and professor of medicine at Stanford Medicine, why in his March 24 Wall Street Journal commentary he questioned whether “coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines.” It’s because without adequate testing, we don’t know how many have been infected. We don’t know the denominator to get the death rate from infections: deaths over infections. We’re guessing.
Robinson seems more concerned about the economy than about the number of deaths. In a followup interview (4/17), Bhattacharya explains he ran a drive-through antibody screening in Santa Clara County (the Bay area and Silicon Valley). His sample of 3,300 volunteers (not without flaws) suggests the infection rate is vastly undercounted, meaning the death rate is not ten times that of the flu. Without initially disclosing his role in the study, Andrew Bogan issued a April 17 WSJ commentary suggesting, “If policy makers were aware from the outset that the Covid-19 death toll would be closer to that of seasonal flu … would they have risked tens of millions of jobs and livelihoods?”
Robinson says [timestamp 16:00], “You’re telling me that we shut down the American economy for the flu.“
Bhattacharya balks, “No, because we don’t have a vaccine for this thing.” Many more people would have died without the shutdown. It’s not for nothing.
About half the population gets a flu shot every year. That’s why the CDC estimated only between 12,000 – 61,000 deaths annually since 2010. After about two month of social distancing, the US is on track to exceed the number of deaths in the Vietnam War by the end of this month.
A chart created by the San Francisco Chronicle (at top) demonstrates the effect of early actions to impose social distancing. Santa Clara and surrounding California county health officers issued a stay-at-home order March 16. Contrast the Bay area curve infections with the rest of the US.
Rachel Maddow Thursday night interviewed Santa Clara County public health officer Sara Cody on the impact of early action in minimizing the pace of infection there. Her early action may have saved countless lives.
This is serious. Unprecedented. Many people infected are dying before they can get to the hospital, unaware of how sick they are until it is too late to save them. In New York, “cardiac calls” to emergency services spiked in March:
On March 23, EMS call volume started rising to record levels, from 4,000 on an average day to more than 6,500 calls a day.
The fire department’s chief of emergency medical services, Lillian Bonsignore, said at the time, “I’ve been in this profession for about 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this in my whole career — or in my life, for that matter.”
From March 1 to April 13, poor neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens recorded two to three times the number of cardiac calls compared to the same period in 2019, with three to five times as many patients dying.
Maybe the death rate, unchecked, is lower than previously thought. We don’t have all the data we need. That’s still coming in. We don’t know enough about how this virus kills. What we do know is they are digging mass graves on an island in Long Island Sound and bodies are stacking up in refrigerated trailers outside New York City hospitals.
Don’t let the Midas cultists sacrifice your life on the altar of an economy that cares not one whit about you.
UPDATE: About that “not without flaws” Bhattacharya study.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
Imagine what meetings in the White House must be like.
Without being racist:
The Never Trumper Lincoln Project is making the best ads of the cycle. They aren’t afraid to criticize daddy’s little girl which is totally fair. Ivanka is a member of the administration and a total hypocrite.
She’s also a criminal. Read this shocker to see all the Trump projects where Ivanka and her Dad misled buyers. She was an integral member of the Trump family con game, more important than either Jr or Eric, by far. She deserves a lot more opprobrium than she’s gotten.
Trump has made the above comment numerous times over the past three years.
In a heated exchange about immigration during an interview with CBS show 60 Minutes aired Sunday, President Donald Trump hit back at host Lesley Stahl, stating: “I’m president and you’re not.”
“I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right. Hey, look, in the meantime, I guess I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m President, and you’re not,” he told Time’s Washington bureau chief, Michael Scherer.
“The fake media is trying to silence us, but we will not let them,” he said. “The fake media tried to stop us from going to the White House. But I’m president, and they’re not,” he told attendees at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
At a late rally in Indiana, Trump predicted that the press and others would say the enthusiasm at the rally would be “wanting.” But he shrugged it off by saying he knows better.
“See, you have to understand, I have a better education than they do, from a much better school,” he said as the crowd cheered.
“Elite, they’re the elite,” he said. “They’re the elite. I went to better schools, I went to better everything.”
“And by the way, by the way, you ready for this, and I’m president and they’re not,” he said to applause.
At yesterday’s coronavirus rally he said this , which isn’t exactly the same but it’s close:
Q: Do you feel like, or were you concerned that downplaying the virus that maybe got some people sick?”
A: And a lot of people love Trump. A lot of people love me, to see them all the time, I guess I’m here for a reason. To the best of my knowledge, I won.
He added that he thinks he’s going to win again in a landslide…
These comments are the ones that betray his emotional immaturity most clearly. It’s the retort of a spoiled child, not a world leader. (Well, maybe Kim Jong Un might say something like that…) The idea that he must be right because he got elected and has supporters is puerile, to say the least.
And even more than that, he is apparently too dumb or addled to know that the “… and you’re not” line is a patented Saturday Night Live joke from back in the day when was too uptight and unhip to understand it:
… in Trump’s orbit. So predictable:
When President Donald Trump revealed his guidelines for “opening up America again” last week, among the bolded names of businesses and institutions that could reopen were restaurants, movie theaters and places of worship — so long as they adhered to strict social distancing protocols.
Tucked near the bottom of the list, right above a warning that bars should stay closed, was a curious inclusion: gyms.
While an integral part of many Americans’ routines, gyms and fitness clubs would seem to present a particular risk for contact spread of a contagious virus. Filled with people sweating and breathing hard, sharing equipment and spaces, gyms are in many ways the last kind of business to prioritize during a deadly pandemic.
Their inclusion follows a last-minute lobbying push by an industry not known for flexing its muscles in Washington. While not every major company was part of the effort, conversations with 10 leaders in the fitness-club business reveal an influential network of relationships that kicked into gear over the past few weeks and helped move gyms to the front of the line — even to the surprise of many in the industry.
Noteworthy figures in the effort include a Trump-loving fitness-center owner in Pennsylvania, Rudy Giuliani’s son Andrew, billionaire real-estate mogul Steve Ross and the US Surgeon General.
Among the most influential advocates is an Iranian-born founder of one of the country’s largest fitness club chains, Bahram Akradi of Life Time Fitness. Akradi has been pitching governors and the Trump administration on what he calls a “comprehensive, multifaceted tactical plan” to fight the coronavirus and rebuild the economy. He now finds himself on one of Trump’s economic recovery working groups and in conference calls with the President himself, including on the day before Trump released his new guidelines.
Multiple people at fitness-center companies — from executives at giants like Gold’s Gym to independent health clubs — told CNN they did not expect gyms to be mentioned in reopening plans from either the Trump administration or Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who announced Monday fitness centers were included in several public-space business that could begin reopening by the end of the week.
“We just really lucked out and were able to get our message into a couple of the right people’s hands,” said Meredith Poppler, a top official at the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association, the industry’s main trade group.
Of course. That’s how a crooked patronage system works. And that’s what we have.
Here’s a little reminder of what can happen when you are in close quarters with a carrier breathing heavily:
With the coronavirus quickly spreading in Washington state in early March, leaders of the Skagit Valley Chorale debated whether to go ahead with weekly rehearsal.
The virus was already killing people in the Seattle area, about an hour’s drive to the south.
But Skagit County hadn’t reported any cases, schools and businesses remained open, and prohibitions on large gatherings had yet to be announced.
On March 6, Adam Burdick, the choir’s conductor, informed the 121 members in an email that amid the “stress and strain of concerns about the virus,” practice would proceed as scheduled at Mount Vernon Presbyterian Church.
“I’m planning on being there this Tuesday March 10, and hoping many of you will be, too,” he wrote.
Sixty singers showed up. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes.
“It seemed like a normal rehearsal, except that choirs are huggy places,” Burdick recalled. “We were making music and trying to keep a certain distance between each other.”Advertisement
After 2½ hours, the singers parted ways at 9 p.m.
Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.
The outbreak has stunned county health officials, who have concluded that the virus was almost certainly transmitted through the air from one or more people without symptoms.
I suppose there will be some people whose desire to work out in the gym will override any concerns. Hopefully the vast, vast majority will not and the gyms will have natural social distancing because so few will be in there. If not, people are going to die.
I had understood they were backing off, presumably because the legal department had a little chat with them. Apparently not. Last night they were right back at it.
Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham attempted to discredit a large retrospective study, which found that more COVID-19 patients who took the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine died than those who only received standard care.
Unlike “experiments,” where researchers typically study the differences between the experimental group and a control group, retrospective studies look at existing data to find trends. A retrospective study by researchers at the Columbia VA Health Care System in South Carolina, the University of South Carolina and the University of Virginia School of Medicine of 368 veterans in the Veterans Health Administration medical centers found that COVID-19 patients who took the drug died at a higher rate than those who did not.
About 28% of veterans who received hydroxychloroquine and standard care and 22% of veterans who received a combination of hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin died compared to only 11% of patients who received standard care alone, according to the study, which was submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine but has yet to be peer-reviewed.
Though the study looked at actual patients treated in the VA health system, Hannity and Ingraham claimed that it was bogus because it was not a “rigorous experiment” (as noted by the Associated Press). The Fox News hosts, meanwhile, first touted the drug as they cited a tiny French study later discredited by its publisher after researchers omitted patients who died or were taken to an intensive care unit from their results. After repeatedly hyping the drug for weeks, Fox News hosts had largely gone silent on hydroxychloroquine until Wednesday.
“Notice the mob and media, you know, going with this VA study,” Hannity said Wednesday on his radio show. “It’s even in the write-ups of it by the AP — they’re acknowledging it’s flawed from the get-go and not a rigorous experiment.”
The Fox News host, who has repeatedly touted the drug, focused on that single study even though a panel convened by the National Institutes of Health issued guidelines this week warning doctors against using the drug as a treatment for COVID-19, especially in combination with azithromycin, which President Donald Trump has also urged.
Ingraham, who is not a doctor, went a step further, citing the same French researcher behind the earlier discredited study in an apparent attempt to debunk the latest findings.
“When we use the phrase ‘scientific study’ in a headline or on TV, it’s meant to convey a sense of seriousness — of scientific rigor,” she said Wednesday on her show. “. . . The manner in which that data is organized, examined and then reported can determine a lot about whether a study is credible or not.”
Ingraham, who repeatedly touted the discredited French study, claimed that the VA study “shockingly irresponsible” and “perhaps even agenda-driven.”
The Fox News host, whose tweets promoting the drug ran afoul of Twitter’s misinformation policy, mockingly played clips of CNN hosts using the study to criticize Fox News and the president for promoting the unproven drug therapy as she claimed that they had “zero credibility.”
“Well, the jackals at Media Matters thought they had their prey trapped. And now, journalism is such a joke that even The Washington Post and tonight the New York Times reflexively joined the pig pile. It’s just pathetic,” she said. “Now, I’m not a doctor. I don’t play one on TV, but renowned French virologist Dr. Didier Raoult released his own study on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin just a few weeks ago. It demonstrated 91% effectiveness in more than 1,000 patients with zero side effects. There was one outcome that was not good, but in the patients that recovered, there was zero side effects.”
While Ingraham touted the research of the doctor behind the earlier discredited study, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently removed guidelines for doctors using the drug, warning that “there are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19.” Though there has been what Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country, calls “anecdotal evidence” that the drug can be helpful, there have similarly been reports of patients suffering severe side effects and even death in certain situations.
Even Trump has backed off a little, acting like he doesn’t really know what’s going on with his miracle cure anymore . Fox has doubled down.
You cannot make this shit up.
Lawyers, start your engines.