Excellent Links

Some Longer Pandemic Reads

by Anne Laurie| August 2, 20205:16 pm| 61 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Excellent Links

Welcome to the New (Ab)Normal!

“There is a deepening national sense that the progress made in fighting the pandemic is coming undone and no patch of America is safe.” Sobering truths from @juliebosman @mannyNYT @thomasfullerNYT https://t.co/eW1EMxvSN8
— Patricia Mazzei (@PatriciaMazzei) August 2, 2020

Colleagues and I are out with a new report today with 10 recommendations for how the US should chart a new course. Here’s a thread with a quick rundown of the 10 –https://t.co/Sy42qDtPrS
— Caitlin Rivers, PhD (@cmyeaton) July 29, 2020

Tweets ‘stripped’ for your reading convenience…

1. Encourage and, where appropriate, mandate things like physical distancing, masks, and limit on indoor gatherings. Without these measures in place, it will be difficult to maintain control of an outbreak or turn the corner on an outbreak that is accelerating.
2. Close higher risk activities and settings in places where the epidemic is worsening and reinstitute stay at home orders in jurisdictions where healthcare systems are in crisis. Hope is not a plan. Communities that are not doing well need to act.
3. Bolster PPE supply chains and stockpiles and make information about the PPE manufacturing base and supply chain publicly available, with the ultimate goal of expanding PPE availability as much as possible.
4. Bolster test supply chains, plan for shortages, and collaborate with states and commercial laboratories to improve test turnaround times. We’re doing more tests than ever, but in many places it’s still not enough, and the results are taking too long to be useful.
5. Conduct and make public detailed analyses of epidemiology data collected during case investigations and contact tracing. Where are people getting infected? How is testing performance? How well is contact tracing working? These are things we should know.
6. Curate and fund a rapid research agenda to cope with major challenges that have arisen. How do we make masks better, and how can we encourage people to wear them? How can we easily improve ventilation? What is the role of children in transmission? We should find out.
7. Scale up contact tracing and continue to improve performance. There is no way to contact trace tens of thousands of cases a day. It’s too much. But we can build the infrastructure and improve tracing operations so that it becomes more and more useful as incidence falls.
8. Identify and disseminate best practices for improving the public health response. Thousands of public health professionals have been running at top speed for months. What have they learned, and how we can we share those best practices with everyone?
9. Plan for a vaccine, incl production, allocation, distribution, and community engagement to ensure a successful rollout. Finding a safe and effective vaccine is step 1. We need to have our eyes on steps 2-99 as well. Let’s do that now, so we’re ready to hit the ground running.
10. Develop policies and best practices to better protect group institutions. Nursing homes, prisons and jails, manufacturing have been very hard hit. We should be doing more to shift the burden of paying for and implementing needed mitigation measures away from facilities.

The social distancing to stop COVID-19 has resulted in cutting flu infections by more than half https://t.co/p2UO8hPD6l
— Doomscrolling (@Lee__Drake) August 1, 2020

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Reports of influenza and a host of other infectious diseases have plummeted as the COVID-19 pandemic has driven people into lockdowns.
In many places, social distancing measures aimed at curbing the spread of the new coronavirus may be smothering the spread of other infectious diseases at the same time. But, in other places, the pandemic may simply be masking disease spread, as people may avoid seeking care for more routine infections while health care systems stretched thin by the pandemic may struggle to conduct routine, surveillance, testing, and reporting.
Some of the resulting declines are dramatic. Countries across the Southern Hemisphere have reported much lower numbers of influenza than usual. Australia, for instance, began 2020 with a relatively high level of flu—reporting around 7,000 lab-confirmed cases in both January and February. But the outbreak crashed in March, with reports of only 229 cases in April, compared with nearly 19,000 in April 2019, as noted by the New Scientist…

Fixed linkhttps://t.co/BW5RjQJVrL
don't miss this one!
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) July 31, 2020

Pleased to share my contribution to @BostonReview's "Thinking in a Pandemic" series. My focus was applying solution-based thinking to move us towards our goal of living safely. I would love for you to read it, but summarizing the main points here. 1/11https://t.co/vY9gQPerrP
— Natalie E. Dean, PhD (@nataliexdean) July 30, 2020

… At this point, we know the problems. The novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, can spread before infected people develop symptoms—between 4 and 41 percent of people never develop symptoms, in fact—yet we are nowhere near herd immunity. At the same time, the United States continues to lack sufficient capacity for testing and contact tracing. Countries like Germany, Greece, Italy, and Australia conduct on average two hundred tests to find a single confirmed case; in the United States, every twelve tests uncovers a new infection. Widespread lockdowns imposed in March and April dramatically slowed epidemic growth, but they came with enormous costs, not only economic—leaving tens of millions unemployed—but also social and medical. Vital medical services have been disrupted, including infant vaccination, cancer screening, and HIV treatment programs. The impacts are far-reaching and severe. On the other hand, where lockdowns have been lifted too quickly, transmission has resurged, leading some states to reclose businesses.
It is natural to react to seemingly impossible situations by focusing on the problems. Why is this happening? Why were we so unprepared? Who is to blame? Our collective experience during the pandemic has been likened to the stages of grief; hundreds of millions of people have collectively experienced denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. The last, critical stage is acceptance. Given that the virus is here to stay, how do we learn to live with it safely?…
As we continue the work of implementing sorely needed solutions, there are four principles we can use to guide our action.
Be Specific
First, we must constantly work to shift the public discussion from the general to the specific, forcing ourselves into the proverbial weeds. Much of the national conversation surrounding lockdowns, for example, has operated at an unhelpful level of generality. Policies of this magnitude have large and broad-reaching impacts—medical and economic, of course, but also legal and social. They also are not implemented uniformly: they impact different geographic regions and different employment sectors in different ways. The reality is far more complex than a simple dualism: “lockdown good!” or “lockdown bad!”…

Some Longer Pandemic ReadsPost + Comments (61)

Trump Crime Cartel Open Thread: Young Prince Jared Hoped to Make Millions Off Dead Americans

by Anne Laurie| August 1, 202010:18 am| 155 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Excellent Links, GOP Death Cult, Trump Crime Cartel

So the White House made the explicit decision that it was a better political call to let people die in the blue states and blame the governors then try to fix the testing situation. https://t.co/1fKA5vhfWa
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 30, 2020

pic.twitter.com/lK8d0iWpiF
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 30, 2020

This excellent read has been getting a lot of social-media attention… but in case you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth reading the whole thing! Katherine Eban, at Vanity Fair — “How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”:

On March 31, three weeks after the World Health Organization designated the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, a DHL truck rattled up to the gray stone embassy of the United Arab Emirates in Washington, D.C., delivering precious cargo: 1 million Chinese-made diagnostic tests for COVID-19, ordered at the behest of the Trump administration.
This purchase did not appear in any government database. Nor was there any contract officer involved. Instead, it was documented in an invoice obtained by Vanity Fair, from a company, Cogna Technology Solutions (its own name misspelled as “Tecnology” on the bill), which noted a total order of 3.5 million tests for an amount owed of $52 million. The “client name” simply noted “WH.”
Over the next three months, the tests’ mysterious provenance would spark confusion and finger-pointing. An Abu Dhabi–based artificial intelligence company, Group 42, with close ties to the UAE’s ruling family, identified itself as the seller of 3.5 million tests and demanded payment. Its requests were routed through various divisions within Health and Human Services, whose lawyers sought in vain for a bona fide contracting officer.
During that period, more than 2.4 million Americans contracted COVID-19 and 123,331 of them died of the illness. First in New York, and then in states around the country, governors, public health experts, and frightened citizens sounded the alarm that a critical shortage of tests, and the ballooning time to get results, were crippling the U.S. pandemic response.
But the million tests, some of which were distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to several states, were of no help. According to documents obtained by Vanity Fair, they were examined in two separate government laboratories and found to be “contaminated and unusable.”…
Though Kushner’s outsized role has been widely reported, the procurement of Chinese-made test kits is being disclosed here for the first time. So is an even more extraordinary effort that Kushner oversaw: a secret project to devise a comprehensive plan that would have massively ramped up and coordinated testing for COVID-19 at the federal level…

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Countries that have successfully contained their outbreaks have empowered scientists to lead the response. But when Jared Kushner set out in March to solve the diagnostic-testing crisis, his efforts began not with public health experts but with bankers and billionaires. They saw themselves as the “A-team of people who get shit done,” as one participant proclaimed in a March Politico article…
The group’s collective lack of relevant experience was far from the only challenge it faced. The obstacles arrayed against any effective national testing effort included: limited laboratory capacity, supply shortages, huge discrepancies in employers’ abilities to cover testing costs for their employees, an enormous number of uninsured Americans, and a fragmented diagnostic-testing marketplace…
By early April, some who worked on the plan were given the strong impression that it would soon be shared with President Trump and announced by the White House. The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point. Simply working together as a nation on it “would have put us in a fundamentally different place,” said the participant.
But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.
Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.
That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said…
The gamble that son-in-law real estate developers, or Morgan Stanley bankers liaising with billionaires, could effectively stand in for a well-coordinated federal response has proven to be dead wrong. Even the smallest of Jared Kushner’s solutions to the pandemic have entangled government agencies in confusion and raised concerns about illegality…

Ms. Spiers was the editor of the NY Observer when Prince Jared decided to buy, and destroy, it:

Can confirm that Jared is both malicious and stupid. https://t.co/ePjGQrXnsq
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) July 31, 2020

If you're surprised by Jared Kushner's callousness re: people in blue states dying of covid-19, you should know it's not an aberration. Here's what I wrote in early May: https://t.co/Djmd6qF0SX pic.twitter.com/SBad1kaIts
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) July 31, 2020

I think people underestimate the extent to which both Jared and Trump are angry at blue state elites for never really accepting them. They both have massive inferiority complexes, even with all of their wealth and privilege. So of course they're happy to let, say, NYC die. https://t.co/U19DkzxPqR
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) July 31, 2020

They want validation from competent, smart people too, and the only way to get that is to be competent and smart themselves. Which would take work, and humility, neither of which they're up for. So not getting approval from those quarters makes them angry, too.
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) July 31, 2020

maggie, who works at the new york times, did not consider it newsworthy that her friend (the authoritarian president) was intentionally murdering her state https://t.co/08oL1nG85J
— etaoin shrdlu (@Theophite) August 1, 2020

she uncritically covered trumps claims of wealth when she was at the ny post and politico and i think she still essentially sees him as a clownish, harmless, self-aggrandizing NYC real estate guy instead of 'what if a cable news channel had nuclear codes'
— le loup garou (@turdducken) August 1, 2020

they’re job shopping for the next era
— kilgore trout, new tone haver (@KT_So_It_Goes) July 30, 2020

Trump Crime Cartel Open Thread: Young Prince Jared Hoped to Make Millions Off Dead AmericansPost + Comments (155)

GOTV Open Thread: Trending On Twitter, Last Night

by Anne Laurie| July 28, 202010:23 am| 317 Comments

This post is in: Election Year, Excellent Links, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It

Since this worry keeps popping up in the comments — and I’m sure elsewhere on social media — sharing is caring:

In an interview with Fox News last week, Trump seemed to suggest he might not accept the outcome of the election if he were to lose.
Can he really thwart the will of the American electorate?
Let’s look at what’s actually possible — and what isn’t. https://t.co/55gAuuxzKQ
— GEN (@GENmag) July 27, 2020

What if it’s a close election?
This is where it starts to get dicey. Trump may be able to use the two-month period between Election Day and Inauguration Day to weaponize constitutional procedures for his political advantage.
— GEN (@GENmag) July 27, 2020

Nut graf: Trump can’t steal the election if Biden gets enough votes to keep the Electoral College honest.

Winning back the Senate wouldn’t hurt:

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… What’s the biggest potential problem?
The big one is absentee ballots and the issues with counting them. Throughout 2020, elections have required extended periods to count absentee ballots and produce final results. Because of this, there is already a broad expectation on both sides that there may not be a clear winner of the presidential election on election night or even in the days after that…
This creates a potential scenario where, on election night, Trump is ahead in states that have the 270 or more electoral votes needed to claim victory, while Biden wins in the final tally days or weeks later, once all the votes are counted.
But isn’t the final count the one that matters?
It all depends. The three closest states in the 2016 election—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—all have Democratic governors but Republican legislatures. It’s conceivable in a close race that the Democratic governor certifies one result and one set of electors, but the Republican legislature certifies an entirely different result and set of electors. That’s where all these scenarios can start to go haywire.
However, they require one other precondition: a divided Congress in 2021.
Any conflict over the 2020 election results, including competing returns, would be decided by the next Congress, the one elected in November and seated on January 3, 2021. (Yes, the new Congress is sworn in almost three weeks before the president and three days before the presidential election is certified by Congress.) If Capitol Hill continues to be divided, with Democrats controlling the House and Republicans controlling the Senate, these scenarios come into play. It is unlikely to be an issue, however, if Democrats control both chambers…

Bonus paranoia points, regarding the looming pandemic-funding eviction crisis: ‘Persons experiencing homelessness’ can register and vote in all 50 states. The FindLaw website has more detail on what’s involved. Like all other voting-rights organizations, I’m sure they can use any help you may be in a position to provide.

GOTV Open Thread: Trending On Twitter, Last NightPost + Comments (317)

Due Respect: Honoring Rep. John Lewis

by Anne Laurie| July 25, 202010:31 am| 40 Comments

This post is in: Absent Friends, Excellent Links, Racial Justice

BREAKING: Speaker Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader McConnell announce that the late Rep. John Lewis will lie in state in the U.S. Capitol rotunda. https://t.co/YgW6sZ7DiT
— NBC Politics (@NBCPolitics) July 23, 2020

… House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a joint news release that Lewis, the civil rights icon who was known as the “conscience of Congress,” will have an invitation-only arrival ceremony Monday, followed by a public viewing at the top of the east front steps of the U.S. Capitol on Monday and Tuesday.
There will also be a procession through Washington, where members of the public can pay their respects.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, masks will be required to enter the line, and social distancing will be enforced.
Lewis’ family is also asking members of the public not to travel from across the country to Washington. Instead, virtual tributes may be posted online using the hashtags #BelovedCommunity or #HumanDignity, the release said…
Lewis’ family Thursday night announced Celebration of Life ceremonies over six days, starting Saturday. Not all are open to the public because of concerns about the pandemic, and precautions like masks and social distancing will be required.
The events include a procession across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where Lewis was beaten in a march on March 7, 1965, known as Bloody Sunday. Sunday’s event is called “The Final Crossing.”
Lewis will lie in state at the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery before going to Washington. He will then lie in state at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta.
A celebration of life will be held at Ebenezer Baptist Church Horizon Sanctuary in Atlanta on Thursday…

Full schedule at the link.

INBOX: Fairfax County, Va. School Board Renames Robert E. Lee High School for Late Congressman John Lewis
— Ed O'Keefe (@edokeefe) July 23, 2020

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“You must be prepared if you believe in something. If you believe in something, you have to go for it. As individuals, we may not live to see the end.”
—John Lewis pic.twitter.com/8kjD5c3EI0
— Ways & Means Committee (@WaysMeansCmte) July 20, 2020

It is the most American of desires to demand this country for your own, and to demand it fulfill the promises it made to the world. John Lewis had the most American soul I ever saw. https://t.co/WT3UuWITGd
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 18, 2020

… He was the bravest man I ever met. Heroes in war, most of them, know that the country will embrace them when they come home. They have that to sustain them in the worst circumstances. They already know they have a country worth fighting for. When John Lewis was riding buses, and using forbidden washrooms, and walking across the bridge, he didn’t have that on which to rely. In that violent, freighted time, he was a man without a country. His courage came from a different place. It came not from being a man without a country, but from being a man demanding a country, and he wanted this one. It was the same fire that burned in the Founders, in the 54th Massachusetts on the beach before Battery Wagner, in the Tuskegee Airmen over Europe, and in the 183rd Engineers when they walked, horrified, into Buchenwald to liberate the survivors. It was the same fire that illuminated the Civil Rights Movement when he was young, and the new one that rose in the years before his death. It is the most American of desires to demand this country for your own, and to demand it fulfill the promises it made to the world. John Lewis had the most American soul I ever saw.
Providence being the great tragedian that it is, he died at a time when citizens are being rounded up on the street by anonymous elements of law-enforcement and hustled into unmarked vans. He died at a time when a desperate and failed president* is threatening to bring this kind of Bull Connor policing to every city in the country. He died at a time when the Voting Rights Act lies in ruins, and when Florida has found a clever way to bring back a poll tax. He died at a time of bad trouble, when the country is desperately in need of the “good trouble” he always recommended to his fellow citizens. He boycotted the inauguration of this president, a misbegotten shell of a man, because he saw all the old, howling ghosts who were lining up behind him, waiting for another turn at perverting the country John Lewis demanded with his own blood. He saw it all coming, right up to what’s happening at this very moment, from the peak in the middle of the bridge from which he first saw the lines of troopers, slapping the nightsticks into their palms. He got as far as his mighty American soul would carry him. It’s up to us to get ourselves the rest of the way.

From student activist to elder statesman, John Lewis – who died Friday – continually encouraged the nation’s youth to start “good trouble." In exclusive interviews with the AP, Black Lives Matter organizers reflect on Lewis’ kinship with their generation. https://t.co/93uVraBtEE
— The Associated Press (@AP) July 19, 2020

Former AG ?@EricHolder? calls out GOP “performance mourning” for John Lewis & speaks truth to power – the only way to honor Lewis is to protect the right to vote. https://t.co/ZqjZVF4vcP
— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) July 20, 2020

How John Lewis Founded the Third American Republic – The Atlantic https://t.co/ZyQ8iWFD5o
— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) July 18, 2020

If you are a reporter quoting or interviewing a Republican officeholder praising John Lewis and you do not note their opposition to restoring the Voting Rights Act, please resign.
— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) July 18, 2020

We were beaten, we were tear-gassed. I thought I was going to die on this bridge. But somehow and some way, God almighty helped me here. We cannot give up now. We cannot give in. We must keep the faith, keep our eyes on the prize. pic.twitter.com/eOw9uMYAAL
— John Lewis (@repjohnlewis) March 2, 2020

Due Respect: Honoring Rep. John LewisPost + Comments (40)

Excellent Read: Dave Roth Understands the Squatter-in-Chief Almost As Well As Mary Trump

by Anne Laurie| July 24, 20206:05 pm| 193 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Trumpery

I wrote about the big man's enduring dedication to The Bullshit, and how much he wishes us ill. https://t.co/KudnSqrdjB
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) July 22, 2020

I guess TNR isn’t conclusively dead yet:

It’s not nearly the same thing as getting used to it, but there is by now an identifiable rhythm to the Trump presidency. That rhythm is jittery, chaotic, and atonal, just one squashed-flat brown note after another. But as the Trump presidency bumbles from one skronking improvisational tantrum to the next, there is also a discernible pattern. Trump only knows how to play a few notes, but he absolutely fucking lives to make noise. And for better or worse, the sounds the man makes are distinctive, to the point where there’s both a bleak comedy and buried burlesque in his staffers’ game attempts to replicate his usual bombast and peevy rhetorical curlicues in his more overtly ghostwritten tweets.
This is what it means to elect an absolutely finished man—someone who cannot grow or care or even reconcile himself to any new thing—to a job like the presidency. Everything Trump does sounds the same, because whether it happens on Twitter or in the quintuple-byline newspaper stories about bleary behind-the-scenes White House upbraidings, it fundamentally is the same. Trump will always and only be upset about the same things in the same stupid way; he will stay mad about them even as the country shudders and cracks around him. It will never be any way but this for him, because Donald Trump will never be any way but this.
Every day unfolds in the shadow of this sour and soggy fact—that recursive and stubborn idiocy is at the heart of why the federal government has effectively and intentionally abandoned the management of a (still) rampaging pandemic because the president thinks it’s both boring and a loser of a campaign issue. This blank, militant incomprehension of the world at large is also the chief explanation for the new battalions of uniformed state agents loyal only to the president who’ve been dispatched to kidnap and gas protesters in American cities because the president saw statues being toppled on the news. Living with the knowledge that we’re being governed by a bottomly malicious dope who actively and openly wishes much of the country ill is unsettling. There is a basic presumption of good faith built into the broader American project: Presidents might be right or wrong, but they are at least supposed to try. But that is not where we are, because that is not the kind of president we have. And so all of this is still very much being worked out from one moment to the next, as Americans try to figure out how to live in a country so manifestly abandoned.
That’s not really new work for many communities, but it is also a lot to try to pick up on the fly. Trump’s presidency has long played as a vicious satire of American politics in the way that it stripped every cheesy grift and smug savagery of its familiar euphemism and disguise: All the violence that previous administrations in both parties had justified with administrative static or ideological fuzz are now scuttling and swaggering hideously in the open. The long-standing technocratic debate over whether and how well it all “worked” was answered in the most unflattering way through the exposure of how it worked. What had once seemed a flawed but extant system grounded in variously compromised institutions was suddenly visible as a series of naked and individuated deals; “working” for any other purpose, least of all a rough approximation of the common good, was simply never the point…
Through it all, Trump’s tweets and damply volatile public presence have always been just what they were; the sheer bulk of the man’s damage has always crowded out subtext. There was never any chance that he would grow with or into his important new job, and he has never even suggested otherwise. He has had exactly the presidency that his public life would suggest—a brazen win, followed by an inevitable decline born of laziness and pure hubristic dipshittery, and finally a catastrophic and vehemently denied collapse. This is the story of his life, and the story of his presidency…

Excellent Read: Dave Roth Understands the Squatter-in-Chief Almost As Well As Mary TrumpPost + Comments (193)

Pandemic Notes: “Anthony Fauci: ‘We are living in the perfect storm’”

by Anne Laurie| July 12, 20207:45 pm| 123 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Excellent Links

Fauci had several TV hits slated for this week, but then he went on Facebook Live w/ @SenDougJones and disputed "Trump's assertions that a lower death rate showed the country's progress against the pandemic." His TV bookings were cancelled, source says 👇🏼 https://t.co/duepvmcuG9
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) July 11, 2020

Not for the first time, I really wish the Financial Times had a weekend-only subscription. They’ve made this article free to read, and you should:

I hear Anthony Fauci before I see him. Out of view of our video call, he asks his tech assistant: “Have you wiped down the table?” The assistant, who has already sprayed down the 79-year-old’s chair, hurries to disinfect the desk. The top adviser on the White House’s coronavirus task force cannot afford to fall ill.
Of all the unenviable jobs in this pandemic, Dr Fauci may have the trickiest. He is a leading public health scientist in a world growing suspicious of expertise; an affable self-described humanist in a society where soundbites get more play than sound advice. After 36 years as director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he is facing a challenge that eclipses even the epidemics he has previously battled — Aids and Sars.
Now, Fauci reports to his sixth president: Donald Trump. The president flouts his advice — refusing to wear a mask and holding rallies — and, Fauci tells me, hasn’t even met him for more than a month. Trump appears to me to be preoccupied with polls and economic data, rather than the soaring case counts in the country hardest hit by Covid-19 in terms of confirmed cases and deaths…
“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we have a serious ongoing problem, right now, as we speak,” Fauci says, in an accent tinged by his native Brooklyn. He warned Congress late last month that the number of new cases could rise to 100,000 a day. “What worries me is the slope of the curve,” he explains, using his fingers to draw a chart in the air. “It still looks like it’s exponential.”
The country will not respond well to locking down again, he fears. He thinks health officials need to get the message across to young people in particular that they are not “in a vacuum”, where their disease affects only themselves.
The spreading distrust of experts makes everything harder. “That is a real problem. We can’t run away from it,” he says. Fauci may have developed a fan base that is snapping up Fauci T-shirts, mugs and bobblehead dolls — but he has also been disparaged and even received death threats from people who believe coronavirus is a con.
The US has always valued individual rights, he says, but warns that this could make it hard to tackle the pandemic, even when we have a vaccine. “Our forefathers . . . had the guts to come by boat from Europe and wherever else. That’s the general spirit: you don’t always trust authority,” he says. Now it has been taken to an “extreme”, with a movement against science and authority helping to form “the foundation for the anti-vaccine movement, that we don’t trust what the government is telling us. That is very, very problematic right now.”

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Fauci last saw Trump in person at the White House on June 2 — and says he has not briefed the president for at least two months. He tells me this in a matter-of-fact tone, but I suspect that his indifference is feigned. While Trump holds potential superspreader events, Fauci meets with the task force run by the vice-president.
He says he is “sure” that his messages are passed along — but Trump is evidently not listening. On July 4, the president declared that 99 per cent of Covid-19 cases were “harmless”. Stephen Hahn, the US Food and Drug Administration commissioner, refused to tell CNN whether this was right or wrong. So I try Fauci: “Is Trump wrong?”
He chuckles, deflecting by calling it the “famous question”. Fauci tries to account for it as an accidental error, rather than part of a pattern of the president playing down the pandemic. “I’m trying to figure out where the president got that number. What I think happened is that someone told him that the general mortality is about 1 per cent. And he interpreted, therefore, that 99 per cent is not a problem, when that’s obviously not the case,” he says.
In fact, Fauci believes some of the “extreme confusion” about the virus is because it affects people so differently, from the asymptomatic to patients on ventilators. “I have never seen a virus or any pathogen that has such a broad range of manifestations,” he says. “Even if it doesn’t kill you, even if it doesn’t put you in the hospital, it can make you seriously ill.”…
As he heads off to an afternoon coronavirus task force briefing where he expects an “intense” discussion about state surges, he imparts a message that is far from sugar-coated. He wants me to know that this pandemic really is “the big one”. Covid-19 has the worst elements of previous epidemics combined. “You have a random virus jump species from an animal to a human that is spectacularly efficient in spreading from human to human, and has a high degree, relatively speaking, of morbidity and mortality,” he says. “We are living in the perfect storm right now.”

As if their views on epidemiology are somehow equal. https://t.co/rAnkhfpAdb
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 11, 2020

Pandemic Notes: “Anthony Fauci: ‘We are living in the perfect storm’”Post + Comments (123)

GOP Massive Fail Open Thread: The Lying in Winter

by Anne Laurie| July 5, 202010:30 pm| 130 Comments

This post is in: Biden For President, Election Year, Excellent Links, Republican Stupidity, Trumpery

locking down the swing states https://t.co/arN8OvV2Hr
— kilgore trout, suburban female understander (@KT_So_It_Goes) July 5, 2020

This is not much more than an hour’s drive from Boston, and so will inevitably re-seed the pandemic in one of the few areas of the country that’s been managing to bend the curve downward. Massachusetts and Maine may have to erect physical barriers to (re)entry at our borders. Does this putz have a sponsorship deal with Covid-19?

Capturing a Trump speech in all its calculated ugliness is not easy on a tight deadline. So when it’s done well, as in this punchy, well-framed story by ??@anniekarni?, it’s worth pointing out. https://t.co/NgRZeKKWMa
— Mark Landler (@MarkLandler) July 4, 2020

The NYTimes — if not Chief Court Stenographer Haberman — has turned:

Standing in a packed amphitheater in front of Mount Rushmore for an Independence Day celebration, President Trump delivered a dark and divisive speech on Friday that cast his struggling effort to win a second term as a battle against a “new far-left fascism” seeking to wipe out the nation’s values and history.
With the coronavirus pandemic raging and his campaign faltering in the polls, his appearance amounted to a fiery reboot of his re-election effort, using the holiday and an official presidential address to mount a full-on culture war against a straw-man version of the left that he portrayed as inciting mayhem and moving the country toward totalitarianism…
The scene at Mount Rushmore was the latest sign of how Mr. Trump appears, by design or default, increasingly disconnected from the intense concern among Americans about the health crisis gripping the country. More than just a partisan rally, it underscored the extent to which Mr. Trump is appealing to a subset of Americans to carry him to a second term by changing the subject and appealing to fear and division…
Most politicians, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, this year were forgoing any of the traditional holiday parades and flag-waving appearances. The vast majority of fireworks displays in big cities and small rural towns have been canceled as new cases reported in the United States have increased by 90 percent in the past two weeks.
Mr. Trump’s itinerary Friday and Saturday, however, had a different message: The sparkly, booming show must go on at all costs in the service of the divisive message and powerful images he wants to promote…

Throughout his presidency, Mr. Trump has tried to bend events to his will, often using social media to drive home his alternate version of reality and, thanks to the power of repetition and the loyal support of his base, sometimes succeeding. But the president’s attempt to drive deeper into the culture wars around a national holiday, during an intensifying health crisis that will not yield to his tactics, risked coming across as out of sync with the concerned mood of the country at a moment when his re-election campaign is struggling and unfocused.
“I don’t think it will work, because what he is trying to do is pretend that the situation is better than it is,” Mr. Beschloss said.
Mr. Beschloss compared Mr. Trump to Woodrow Wilson, who presided over the influenza pandemic in 1918 by trying to pretend it was not happening, and to Herbert Hoover, who in 1932 tried to project that the Great Depression was not as bad as people were saying…

You'd think Russia was offering Trump bounties for killing American citizens or something.
— Daily Trix (@DailyTrix) July 4, 2020

In case you were wondering, it took less than ten minutes for Trump to pivot from talking about the rights of Americans to bragging about jailing protestors.
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) July 4, 2020

People this speech helped:
• Joe Biden
• Funeral Directors
People this speech hurt:
• Donald Trump
• ER Doctors
— Daily Trix (@DailyTrix) July 4, 2020

The most widely-read report on the President's speech last night at Mount Rushmore will probably come from the AP, as news organizations big and small around carry their stories on the web.
The headline: "Trump pushes racial division, flouts virus rules at Mount Rushmore" pic.twitter.com/7YGP9guBpZ
— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) July 4, 2020

it is possible that trump turns his campaign around with a demagogic “we must preserve our white heritage” message but i think it is more likely that voters punish him even further for abandoning the country to plague and economic distress. https://t.co/cXKe8RFpCD
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) July 4, 2020

GOP Massive Fail Open Thread: The Lying in WinterPost + Comments (130)

Nevertheless, she persisted

Our job is not to persuade Republicans but to defeat them.

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

Yes we did.

This is how realignments happen…

Word salad with all caps

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Good luck with your asparagus.

Mission Accomplished!

Militantly superior in their own minds…

Women: They Get Shit Done

An army of rabid, anonymous commenters

Also, too.

The Math Demands It!

Wetsuit optional.

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

No one could have predicted…

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Some Longer Pandemic Reads

Trump Crime Cartel Open Thread: Young Prince Jared Hoped to Make Millions Off Dead Americans

GOTV Open Thread: Trending On Twitter, Last Night

Due Respect: Honoring Rep. John Lewis

Excellent Read: Dave Roth Understands the Squatter-in-Chief Almost As Well As Mary Trump

Pandemic Notes: “Anthony Fauci: ‘We are living in the perfect storm’”

GOP Massive Fail Open Thread: The Lying in Winter