Author: tristero

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

In case no one’s noticed, there’s something seriously wrong with the president of the United States:

Prime ministers, a king, a prince and Madonna all chipped in to an $8 billion pot to fund a coronavirus vaccine.

President Trump skipped the chance to contribute, with officials in his administration noting that the United States is pouring billions of dollars into its own research efforts.

A fund-raising conference on Monday organized by the European Union brought pledges from countries around the world — from Japan to Canada, Australia to Norway — to fund laboratories that have promising leads in developing and producing a vaccine.

For more than three hours, one by one, global leaders said a few words over video link and offered their nations’ contribution, small or large, whatever they could muster. For Romania, it was $200,000. For Canada, $850 million.

It was a rare show of global leadership on the part of the Europeans, and a late-hour attempt at international coordination. Countries the world over have been pursuing divergent — and often competing — approaches to tackling the pandemic.

While the European Union may have led this global fund-raising effort, the bloc has struggled to get its own 27 members on the same page with health, travel and financial measures to respond to the coronavirus crisis. And the details of how the money raised on Monday will be distributed still remain to be sorted out.

The European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union that spearheaded the initiative, said the money would be spent over the next two years to support promising initiatives around the globe. The ultimate goal is to deliver universal and affordable access to medication to fight Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

The multilateral effort stood in sharp contrast to the solo road the United States is on as scientists everywhere scramble to develop a vaccine to stop the virus that has ravaged most parts of the globe, leaving 250,000 dead so far.

In early March, German government officials said they believed that Mr. Trump had tried to lure a company based in southwestern Germany that was known to be working on a vaccine to move its research work to the United States.

The company, CureVac, has denied receiving such an offer, but reports of the American invitation were enough of a scare to prompt the European Commission to pledge another $85 million to the firm, which already had support from a European vaccine consortium.

In Washington on Monday, senior Trump administration officials sought to talk up American contributions to coronavirus vaccine efforts worldwide, but did not explain the United States’ absence at the European-organized conference.

Remind me again, why, why, does this chiseler, deadbeat, grifter, liar, and incompetent man have a job?

Note to my dear bloggy friends who will feel a compulsion to explain exactly why international cooperation on something like a vaccine might just happen to be a good pretty good idea:

Don’t take the bait. Everyone already knows this is completely wrong. It’s the political equivalent of suggesting people mainline disinfectant.

International cooperation doesn’t have to be explained. And patiently explaining this oh-so-fucking-obvious point distracts from what we should be doing, which is responding with unalloyed disgust and contempt at Trump’s despicable inactions.

Here’s the Trump plan for the America:

Get sick from Covid or starve. Your choice:

Iowa, Oklahoma and other states reopening soon amid the coronavirus outbreak are issuing early warnings to their worried workers: Return to your jobs or risk losing unemployment benefits.

The threats have been loudest among Republican leaders in recent days, reflecting their anxious attempts to jump-start local economic recovery roughly two months after most businesses shut their doors. In Iowa, for example, state officials even have posted a public call for companies to get in touch if an “employee refuses to return to work.”

For some states, the concern is that residents who are offered their old jobs back simply may not accept them, choosing instead to continue tapping historically generous unemployment aid. The $2 trillion congressional coronavirus relief package signed by President Trump in March greatly added to weekly benefit checks for out-of-work Americans, and some people may be earning more than they did previously.

Business leaders say they desperately need workers to return to stores, restaurants and other operations to stay afloat financially. Labor activists, however, contend the reality is far more complicated: Some now-unemployed Americans weren’t making much money in the first place, so they may not want to risk their safety just to return to underpaid old gigs.

In the process, some states’ public comments have frustrated federal lawmakers, labor activists and public health officials, who say forcing workers to return so quickly might be dangerous — and could undermine the country’s response to the deadly pandemic.

“These states are offering people the choice to endanger your life or starve,” said Damon A. Silvers, the director of policy and special counsel for the AFL-CIO.

That this is even an issue is a sign of how sick this country’s political class has become.

Misinformation has deadly consequences:

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, media critics have warned that the decision from leading Fox News hosts to downplay the outbreak could cost lives. A new study provides statistical evidence that, in the case of Sean Hannity, that’s exactly what happened.

The paper — from economists Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth, and David Yanagizawa-Drott — focused on Fox news programming in February and early March. 

At the time, Hannity’s show was downplaying or ignoring the virus, while fellow Fox host Tucker Carlson was warning viewers about the disease’s risks…

Greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight leads to a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths,” they write. “A one-standard deviation increase in relative viewership of Hannity relative to Carlson is associated with approximately 30 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14, and 21 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28.”

This is a working paper; it hasn’t been peer reviewed or accepted for publication at a journal. However, it’s consistent with a wide body of research finding that media consumption in general, and Fox News viewership in particular, can have a pretty powerful effect on individual behavior…

“It’s a good paper; they took pains to control for many alternative explanations,” writes Zeynep Tufecki, a professor at the University of North Carolina who studies technology and research methods. 

“This really looks like a causal effect of misinformation [leading] to deaths.”

A new study found no benefit and a higher death rate for Trump’s unproven cure:

Coronavirus patients taking hydroxychloroquine, a treatment touted by President Trump, were no less likely to need mechanical ventilation and had higher deaths rates compared to those who did not take the drug, according to a study of hundreds of patients at US Veterans Health Administration medical centers.

The study, which reviewed veterans’ medical charts, was posted Tuesday on medrxiv.org, a pre-print server, meaning it was not peer reviewed or published in a medical journal. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the University of Virginia.

In the study of 368 patients, 97 patients who took hydroxychloroquine had a 27.8% death rate. The 158 patients who did not take the drug had an 11.4% death rate.

“An association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone. These findings highlight the importance of awaiting the results of ongoing prospective, randomized, controlled studies before widespread adoption of these drugs,” wrote the authors, who work at the Columbia VA Health Care System in South Carolina, the University of South Carolina and the University of Virginia.

Researchers also looked at whether taking hydroxychloroquine or a combination of hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin, had an effect on whether a patient needed to go on a ventilator.

4 ways Trump was wrong about hydroxychloroquine studies
“In this study, we found no evidence that use of hydroxychloroquine, either with or without azithromycin, reduced the risk of mechanical ventilation in patients hospitalized with Covid-19,” the authors wrote.

Emphasis Added:

There are currently no products approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat Covid-19, although research is underway on many drugs.

Strictly speaking, it’s The Conservative Death Cult, but seeing how he likes his name on everything and this is his policy:

A senior scientist at a government biomedical research laboratory has been thwarted in his efforts to conduct experiments on possible treatments for the new coronavirus because of the Trump administration’s restrictions on research with human fetal tissue.

The scientist, Kim Hasenkrug, an immunologist at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, has been appealing for nearly a month to top NIH officials, arguing that the pandemic warrants an exemption to a ban imposed last year prohibiting government researchers from using tissue from abortions in their work.

According to several researchers familiar with the situation, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive internal dispute, such experiments could be particularly fruitful. Just months ago, before the new coronavirus began to infect people around the world, other U.S. scientists made two highly relevant discoveries. They found that specialized mice could be transplanted with human fetal tissue that develops into lungs — the part of the body the new coronavirus invades. These “humanized mice,” they also found, could then be infected with coronaviruses — to which ordinary mice are not susceptible — closely related to the one that causes the new disease, covid-19.

Outside researchers said the scientists who created those mice have offered to give them to the Rocky Mountain Lab, which has access to the new virus that causes covid-19, so the mice could be infected with the source of the pandemic and experiments could be run on potential treatments. Candidates include an existing drug known to boost patients’ immune systems in other circumstances, as well as blood serum from patients recovering from covid-19.

“Kim Hasenkrug is one of the world experts in immune responses to persistent viral infection, including HIV and a whole bunch of other viruses,” said Irving Weissman, a leading stem cell researcher at Stanford University. In addition, the Montana NIH site has a biosafety lab equipped with high-level protections for experiments with dangerous microbes.

“It isn’t clear if this added layer of urgent investigations will find more effective” treatments for people infected in the pandemic than other approaches being tried, Weissman said, “but it’s stupid not to try.”

No therapies or vaccines for the new coronavirus exist yet.

The inability of the Montana lab, part of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to pursue these experiments on the coronavirus is the latest example of disruptions to scientists’ work caused by the administration’s restrictions on research involving fetal tissue.

“When I hear the vice president saying [they’re] doing everything they can to find vaccines [and treatments], I know that is not true,” said one scientist familiar with the situation, referring to Vice President Pence’s daily news briefings of the White House’s coronavirus task force. “Anything we do at this point could save hundreds of thousands of lives. If you wait, it’s too late.”

A story I want to see so badly my teeth hurt:

A majority of US governors called today for the entire Trump administration to resign immediately, citing its gross incompetence in the face of the pandemic and open corruption. “Just go, get outta here,” said Andrew Cuomo of New York, employing his thickest Queens accent. “You betcha,” echoed Minnesota governor Tim Walz, “Scat. And stat!” 

The governors proposed that Nancy Pelosi, in her role as interim President, appoint a Covid czar to supervise and coordinate a national response to the pandemic as well as a new cabinet to normalize the country’s frayed foreign relations. 

Pelosi, initially reluctant to endorse the governors’ proposal, was finally persuaded to support the plan when the governors agreed to go along with her efforts to recall every judge appointed to the federal judiciary since 2017, including Supreme Court nominations. 

Across the country, as word of the governors’ proposal spread, Americans flung open the windows of their homes and apartments and chanted at the top of their voices “Get out now! Get out now!” 

Because diners remained closed across the country, news reporters for the major media were unable to locate any white Americans prepared to go on record in defense of the Trump administration.

Earlier today, I wrote:

It is simply impossible to grasp how badly Trump has failed. No movie plot would be ever be green-lighted that featured such an implausibly inept national leader. 

Turns out the screenwriter for Contagion, which is actually a very good movie with an excellent score by Cliff Martinez, agrees with me:

I never contemplated a federal response that was so ignorant, misguided and full of dangerous information. I thought our leaders were sworn to protect us. I don’t get to write this story this time. This is a story we are all writing together.

Are there scenes or characters you would change or adjust based on what we are seeing now with this novel coronavirus?

I would have never imagined that the movie needed a “bad guy” beyond the virus itself. It seems pretty basic that the plot should be humans united against the virus. If you were writing it now, you would have to take into account the blunders of a dishonest president and the political party that supports him. But any good studio executive would have probably told us that such a character was unbelievable and made the script more of a dark comedy than a thriller.

The entire interview is worth a read. He’s clearly appalled at Trump and not afraid to say it out loud. All of us need to.

It is simply impossible to grasp how badly Trump has failed. No movie plot would be ever be green-lighted that featured such an implausibly inept national leader. When you describe Trump’s fail, it sounds like it simply can’t be true, no one could screw up that badly. But he has. And he still is screwing up.

Nearly a quarter million Americans are at risk of dying this year alone as a direct result of Trump’s incompetence and neglect. That’s roughly 80 times the Americans who died on 9/11.

Nearly a quarter million American deaths from Covid-19. That is more than the combat deaths of every single war Americans have fought except for World War 2.

That is how bad a job Trump is doing. He turned a deeply serious crisis into… there aren’t words to describe the level of his failure. “World-changing catastrophe” sounds hopelessly inadequate.

Why, why is he still president?

My heart goes out to the students who followed Falwell’s utterly insane decision to re-open Liberty University and returned to school:

…Mr. Falwell — a staunch ally of President Trump and an influential voice in the evangelical world — reopened [Liberty University] last week, igniting a firestorm. As of Friday, Dr. Eppes said, nearly a dozen Liberty students were sick with symptoms that suggest Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Three were referred to local hospital centers for testing. Another eight were told to self-isolate.

I am at a loss for words and sick to my stomach over this. I can only hope and pray that these poor kids recover. And that somehow, Falwell and Trump are held accountable.