A verified Twitter account purportedly linked to a World Health Organization official claimed the Trump administration was secretly testing a coronavirus vaccine on Black Americans.
The bogus account, whose verification Twitter blames on a partner organization, uses similar tactics as the Iran-aligned "Endless Mayfly" network of inauthentic websites and personas to push disinformation and sow chaos, reported The Daily Beast.
“Recall your racist and secretive offer to WHO for coronavirus vaccine to be tested on poor Americans, black people of Birmingham, Alabama; prisoners and immigrants!" the account tweeted. "WHO has flatly rejected the offer, and firmly stated that clinical trials would only apply to volunteers."
The account purportedly belonged to WHO assistant director-general Dr. Jaouad Mahjour and was apparently aimed at discrediting U.S. vaccine research with a conspiracy theory that called to mind historic racist conspiracies like the U.S. Public Health Service's experiments on unwitting Black men at Tuskegee.
The verified Twitter account surfaced in May and began tweeting criticism of the Trump administration's handling of the pandemic, and the account was suspended after Twitter realized the account owner had submitted false information to a partner organization.
The quick suspension was expected by the account owner, who tried to use that as evidence of a fake coverup to make their bogus claims seem even more provocative.
“It is likely that some will claim that this official account was hacked or even worse when I’ll be forced to deny myself as the Director General was on many occasions, and even received online death threats,” the account predicted soon after going active.
Endless Mayfly is aligned with Iran, according to intelligence experts, and primarily targets Israel, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. with disinformation, although Iran's government isn't necessarily behind the propaganda operations.
Iran is currently conducting an active campaign to hurt Trump's re-election chances, according to intelligence officials, although the bogus WHO tweets' link to the country remain unproven.
“[Iran is] spreading disinformation on social media and recirculating anti-U.S. content” as part of an attempt to “to undermine U.S. democratic institutions, President Trump, and to divide the country in advance of the 2020 elections,” said Trump's top counterintelligence official, William Evanina.
The coronavirus might have been stamped out more quickly had it emerged in democratic Taiwan instead of autocratic China, the US health secretary said Tuesday during a historic diplomatic trip to Taipei.
Alex Azar's renewed criticism of China's handling of the pandemic is likely to further stoke already fiery tensions between the United States and China, where the disease first appeared late last year.
The two powers are clashing over a wide range of trade, military and security issues, as well as the pandemic.
"The Chinese Communist Party had the chance to warn the world and work with the world on battling the virus. But they chose not to, and the costs of that choice mount higher every day," Azar said in a speech at a public health college.
"I believe it is no exaggeration to say that, if this virus had emerged in a place like Taiwan or the United States, it might have been snuffled out easily," he added.
"Instead, Beijing appears to have resisted information-sharing, muzzling doctors who spoke out and hobbling the world's ability to respond."
Azar's three-day trip is billed as the highest-level visit from the United States since it switched diplomatic recognition from the island to China in 1979.
Earlier Tuesday, he held a rare meeting with Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu, who said Taiwan lives under the constant threat of having its freedoms taken away by China.
"Our life has become increasingly difficult as China continues to pressure Taiwan into accepting its political conditions, conditions that will turn Taiwan into the next Hong Kong," Wu said.
A crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong has gathered pace since China imposed a sweeping security law on the financial hub in June, with opposition politicians disqualified and activists arrested.
That has caused alarm in Taiwan -- a self-ruled island of 23 million people that Beijing claims as its own territory and has vowed to one day seize, by force if necessary.
'Familiar' threats
"The people of Taiwan are all too familiar with dealing with threats, be it military, diplomatic or the threats of epidemics," Wu said.
Beijing has ramped up diplomatic, military and economic pressure on Taiwan since the 2016 election of President Tsai Ing-wen, who won a second term earlier this year with a landslide.
She rejects Beijing's stance that Taiwan is part of "one China" and instead views the island as "already independent".
China has suggested Taiwan could be granted a version of the "one country, two systems" model it uses for Hong Kong, which supposedly guarantees certain liberties and autonomy from the authoritarian mainland.
All mainstream political parties in Taiwan have rejected the proposal.
And what little enthusiasm there was for the idea has all but evaporated as China cracks down on Hong Kong's democracy movement.
On Monday, Taiwan said China sent fighter jets over a de facto border separating the two rivals in the Taiwan Strait shortly before Azar met President Tsai.
Taiwan, which has fewer than 500 confirmed COVID-19 cases including seven deaths, has been able to contain the virus because of its democracy and transparency, Wu said.
"In contrast to an authoritarian model where the authority is too crippled to disclose fact, in the transparent Taiwan Model, we simply can't afford to lie or conceal."
China has also managed to get its outbreak largely under control, with sweeping lockdowns and travel restrictions.
In contrast, the United States has the highest death toll in the world with more than 160,000 fatalities.
US President Donald Trump has been accused by critics of taking a harder stance towards China to distract from his coronavirus response as he seeks re-election in November.
New Zealand's dream run of 102 days without locally transmitted coronavirus ended Tuesday, prompting a stay-at-home lockdown order for the country's largest city.
After receiving global praise for successfully containing the virus, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said four cases had been detected in a single family in Auckland from an unknown source.
"After 102 days, we have our first cases of COVID-19 outside of managed isolation or quarantine facilities... we have also planned and prepared for it," Ardern said.
As a result of the infections, mobile phones nationwide received an emergency text that set off blaring alerts and said "if you are in Auckland STAY HOME... and SAVE LIVES".
Until Tuesday, the World Health Organization had hailed New Zealand as an example to others for having "successfully eliminated community transmission".
It has reported just 22 deaths in a population of five million and had previously held off community transmission since May 1.
Kiwis had enjoyed a near-normal lifestyle with no social distancing and spectators allowed at sports and cultural events, although borders were strictly controlled.
But health authorities had repeatedly warned people not to be complacent and said a second wave of infections was "inevitable".
Ardern said she understood the disappointment of New Zealanders who believed the virus had been quashed after a strict seven-week lockdown earlier this year.
"It was perhaps easy to feel New Zealand was out of the woods, my request is not to feel dispirited or disheartened," she said.
"Of all the countries in the world, New Zealand has gone the longest without a resurgence -- but because of that we always knew we had to plan, and we've done that."
'Tricky' virus
Auckland will be locked down for at least three days from Wednesday and some social distancing restrictions will be reintroduced in the rest of the country.
Health director-general Ashley Bloomfield was confident the measures would again contain the spread of a "tricky" disease that had thwarted authorities elsewhere.
"We cannot afford to let this virus spread," he said.
Ardern acknowledged her announcement had prompted panic buying at New Zealand supermarkets but urged shoppers to calm down.
"There's no need, they're an essential service," she said.
Ardern downplayed any impact on a national election scheduled to be held on September 19, although she said campaigning over the next few days would not take place in Auckland.
Leader of the centre-right National Party, Judith Collins, said she had suspended all campaigning engagements for Wednesday and had questions for the government.
"This will come as a shock to all New Zealanders... (we) will be seeking an explanation and clear answers about the situation we now find ourselves in," she said.
Texas' low number of tests and large percentage of positive results suggest inadequacies in the state's public health surveillance effort at a time when school reopenings are certain to increase viral spread, health experts said.
The number of Texans being tested for the coronavirus has fallen sharply in recent weeks, a trend that has worried public health experts as officials consider sending children back to school while thousands more Texans are infected each day.
In the week ending Aug. 8, an average 36,255 coronavirus tests were administered in Texaseach day — a drop of about 42% from two weeks earlier, when the average number of daily tests was 62,516.
At the same time, the percentage of tests yielding positive results has climbed, up to 20% on average in the week ending Aug. 8. Two weeks earlier, the average positivity rate was around 14%.
On Saturday, the state set a record for its positivity rate, with more than half of that day’s roughly 14,000 viral tests indicating an infection.
Taken together, the low number of tests and the large percentage of positive results suggest inadequacies in the state's public health surveillance effort at a time when school reopenings are certain to increase viral spread, health experts said.
"Opening the schools is a really complicated problem, and the best thing we can do is get the number of cases down so kids can go back to school safely," said Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at UTHealth School of Public Health in Houston. "There are so many reasons why kids need to be in school, particularly younger kids, but we’re finding out more and more they can get infected, and the concern is them bringing it home and spreading in the community and spreading to teachers.
"I think the worst thing would be for schools to open, then close," she said. "That really makes it hard on parents, that unpredictability, and there’s a lot of costs associated with opening the schools safely."
The decline in tests may be driven in at least some places by a drop in demand. In Austin, health officials say fewer people are seeking tests through the city’s online portal and at local events. Local officials had been forced in late June to limit testing only to people who were showing symptoms of the coronavirus. Now, they are opening it back up to asymptomatic people.
And at sites in Dallas, testingnumbers have been declining over the past few weeks as locals utilize less of the city’s capacity.
The number of tests performed in Texas has “never been great,” said Vivian Ho, a health economist at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine, but “it’s extremely troubling” that the numbers have dipped since last month.
“It’s troubling because we can guess at some of the reasons, but we’re not sure,” she said.
She suggested that some people may have been discouraged by long wait times for test results, or less concerned about the virus’ toll in Texas after a frightening peak in July began to flatten out.
A declining number of tests is a particularly thorny issue for schools, Ho said. "No public school has the resources to do testing under the current circumstances. There are huge class sizes and crowded hallways,” she said.
Researchers estimate that the true number of coronavirus cases could be more than 10 times the number of positive tests. As many as half of the people who contract the virus may never experience symptoms.
State data shows coronavirus hospitalizations declining in Texas, with some 7,500 coronavirus patients reported in Texas hospitals on Sunday. That’s down from a late July peak of about 11,000 — but remains well above Texas’ levels in the spring, when daily hospitalizations plateaued below 2,000.
In San Antonio, health officials last week said that a return to school would lead to new viral transmission and a growing body of evidence shows racial disparities in children’s susceptibility to severe illness from the virus.
“We know that children are less likely to be sick, but not immune,” said Dr. Junda Woo, medical director for San Antonio’s Metropolitan Health District, who said that on Wednesday there were about 80 children with coronavirus in local hospitals.
The role of children as disease vectors is less clear, Woo said. Studies show that children are less likely than adults to have infections severe enough to require hospitalization, but a recent report published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Hispanic and Black children were much more likely to be hospitalized.
Hispanic children were about eight times as likely as white children to be hospitalized, while Black children were five times as likely, researchers found. In Texas, about 53% of public school students are Hispanic, and about 13% are Black.
“Outbreaks will happen” in schools, Woo said. She likened schools to other group settings that have seen significant clusters of infection, such as nursing homes and daycares. “It’s going to seep in from the community as a whole.”
Gov. Greg Abbott said on July 31 that local health officials could not issue blanket orders that preemptively blocked schools in their jurisdictions from opening their classrooms for in-person instruction. That statement, which followed similar guidance from Attorney General Ken Paxton, came after about 18 local health authorities had issued such orders.
Abbott has said that local health officials could shut down schools that have COVID-19 outbreaks after they reopen.
Abbott also said school districts could ask for more time to limit the number of students learning in classrooms, on a case-by-case basis, beyond the current eight-week maximum set by the Texas Education Agency. And he told school officials that they could move their start dates later in the year with a school board vote, as long as they make up the time.
The Texas Education Agency has not yet released any specifics on which districts will be able to receive waivers to limit in-person instruction beyond eight weeks or under what circumstances. But it said it will penalize school districts for unlawful school closures, worrying superintendents who want more certainty of state support while handling an unpredictable pandemic.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters last week that communities with high levels of viral spread may be better off not reopening schools for in-person instruction.
“There are some areas, like we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks … of very significant viral activity,” Fauci said during an Aug. 6 briefing with journalists hosted by the Alliance for Health Policy. “Under those circumstances, you’ve got to use common sense … It may not be prudent to get the children back to school in those areas. So, you got to say, ‘Try as best as you can to get the children back to school, but one size does not fit all.’”
Disclosure: Rice University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Local officials and business leaders in some of Texas' college towns are bracing themselves for the possible cancellation of football — a move that could further injure local economies that are still limping from pandemic-related closures and are reliant on game day tourism.
This week, decisions are expected to be made about whether the Power 5 conferences will go forward as scheduled with college football, despite early outbreaks across the nation — including at the University of Texas at Austin — that have already infected student athletes and coaches with COVID-19.
Texas’ five major conference football teams – Baylor University, Texas Christian University, Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University and the University of Texas at Austin — are massive economic drivers for their cities of Waco, Fort Worth, College Station, Lubbock and Austin, respectively, generating a flood of seasonal business for hotels, restaurants and bars in a typical year.
Economists and city leaders said canceling football would be devastating to local businesses that rely on the huge influxes of cash from home games.
“Forgoing even a single game costs the economy millions. Dealing with the health crisis is essential and must be given paramount priority, but the economic costs of restricting or eliminating college sports are very high,” said Ray Perryman, a Waco economist and CEO of The Perryman Group.
Across Texas, university leaders have supported allowing football to move forward if conference division leaders allow it. Student athletes are already training on many campuses and school officials are laying plans to space out fans in their stadiums. At the same time, many faculty and students have expressed trepidation about returning to campus as Texas remains a hot spot in the nation and hospitalizations and deaths related to the virus remain high.
“We want to play football in the fall,” said Texas A&M System John Sharp in a statement to The Texas Tribune on Monday. Gov. Greg Abbott has also given his blessing, permitting up to 50% of capacity in college stadiums.
“I support the players. This impacts the players as much as anybody else, and what I am seeing in the Big 12 conference, as well as elsewhere, is that the players really want to play,” Abbott said during a televised interview with KWTX on Monday.
College towns
Doug Berg, an economics professor at Sam Houston State University, said towns like Lubbock and College Station would feel the impact of lost game day revenue more than larger cities like Austin with its more diversified business base.
Still, UT-Austin reported in 2015 it had a local economic impact of more than $63 million per home game.
A bigger proportion of municipal budgets in smaller towns is derived from sales and hotel occupancy taxes – both of which typically experience significant hikes during football season. For college towns, “it’s like losing Christmas,” Berg said.
The toll of losing football is “larger than we care to fathom,” said Eddie McBride, president of the Lubbock Chamber of Commerce.
One typical home game at Texas Tech, with an average attendance of about 60,000 people, pours “millions of dollars” back into the city of Lubbock, McBride said.
“We do count a lot on football,” McBride said. “It isn’t just sold seats…it’s going to people’s houses and buying food and drinks from the local grocery store and the beer store, and then going to the bars and the restaurants to watch the game.”
Many business owners who are living paycheck to paycheck, already hammered by the pandemic, may go out of business without the cash influx they were expecting from football season, McBride said. Lubbock, which has a population of nearly 266,000, is already grappling with a 6.9% unemployment rate — more than twice what it was in January.
Steve Massengale, owner of The Matador in Lubbock, holds the exclusive merchandising rights for Texas Tech’s athletic gear. Massengale, a city councilman, said some home games can generate revenue in the six figures.
The store typically hires up to 35 seasonal workers to work game days, many of them students.
“It would be devastating,” Massengale said. “There's just so many things that depend on vibrant activity on campus and on game day Saturdays. The negative impact is insurmountable.”
In College Station, Mayor Karl Mooney points to a symbiotic relationship between the city of 116,000 and Texas A&M University. By Mooney’s estimates, nearly every household has one member who is affiliated with the university. In the 2008 recession, the university was a steady source of employment that kept the town’s economy afloat.
And according to a 2011 estimate from the College Station Chamber of Commerce, Texas A&M home games generate $20 million in direct consumer revenue. With a typical run of seven home games, the city’s businesses sees upward of $140 million every football season.
“We are impacted dramatically by the university,” Mooney said. “We’re not an Austin, a Houston, a Waco.”
Officials in Waco said they could weather the blow if Baylor’s season was canceled.
According to a 2013 study, Baylor Athletics had a $373.3 million impact on Waco’s economy. Yet while the food and hospitality industries would be hit hard, their losses wouldn’t devastate Waco’s $14 billion economy, City Manager Bradley Ford said.
“If we weren't gonna have football this year or had significantly lower attendance, certainly, you'll see some of that ripple through the local economy and tourism and restaurants and things of that nature,” he said. “But it won't be what I would deem a ‘substantial hit’ to the local economy.”
Perryman, who helped conduct the 2013 study, said visitor spending leads to “in excess of $25 million in gross product each year in the Waco area and over 337 full-time equivalent jobs when multiplier effects are considered.”
Patrick Svitek contributed to this report.
Disclosure: Baylor University, Sam Houston State University, Texas A&M University, Texas Christian University, Texas Tech University and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Appearing on CNBC, Gottlieb warned that Russia's process for developing the purported vaccine is highly questionable, and he expressed skepticism that it's as effective as Russian President Vladimir Putin claims.
"I wouldn't take it, certainly not outside a clinical trial right now," he said. "It appears that it's only been tested in several hundred patients at most... it's not a true-blue vaccine, in terms of the technical complexity that goes into manufacturing a vaccine."
After the interview, Gottlieb also posted on Twitter that he's skeptical of Russia's motives for announcing the vaccine due to its efforts to spread misinformation about the disease over the last several months.
" Russia was reported to be behind disinformation campaigns to sow doubts in U.S. about our Covid vaccines; and today’s news that they 'approved' a vaccine on the equivalent of phase-1 data may be another effort to stoke doubts or goad U.S. into forcing early action on our vaccines," he wrote.
The deaths of 18 residents of a New York nursing home highlight the continuing controversy over the Cuomo administration’s decision not to count deaths in hospitals as nursing home deaths. The home denies the allegations.
The nurse with the Columbia County Health Department recorded the COVID-19 deaths at nearby hospitals — two at Albany Medical Center on May 4, another at the same hospital two days later; one at Columbia Memorial Hospital on May 17, and another there two days later — and, along with her boss, concluded there was a pattern.
The people dying at the hospitals had been residents of a local nursing home, the Grand Rehabilitation and Nursing at Barnwell in the tiny town of Valatie, New York. In all, the nurse counted 18 deaths of residents over five weeks. She didn’t have detailed medical records for the patients, but she noted that all had arrived at the hospital with orders saying no extraordinary measures were to be taken to keep them alive. As a result, she and the Columbia County health director developed a theory: “For me,” said Jack Mabb, the health director, “it appeared they were sending people to the hospital so they wouldn’t die in the facility.”
A change in the way New York tabulated nursing home deaths could have incentivized such behavior, he said, making homes’ records on COVID-19 containment appear better than they were.
In the early weeks of the pandemic, the state had counted these deaths by attributing them to the nursing home regardless of where they physically occurred. But in April — as the death toll related to nursing homes mushroomed, hitting as many as 250 deaths a day — that changed: The administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo decided not to count residents who died of COVID-19 in hospitals as nursing home deaths, saying it feared that their deaths would be double-counted if they were recorded that way.
The administration insisted the move wasn’t meant to suppress the numbers at nursing homes, facilities Cuomo had reassured the public were his top priority for protecting from the pandemic. In public testimony this month, Howard Zucker, the state’s health commissioner, defended the decision and argued that New York had been as transparent about nursing home casualties as any state in the nation.
Today, more than 6,500 nursing home residents are known to have perished in New York facilities, some 6% of the state’s nursing home population. The state declined to say how many additional residents died in hospitals after being sickened in nursing homes.
Mabb said that his department’s nurse had sent reports about the deaths of Barnwell residents at local hospitals to state authorities, and that he had asked for an investigation. Some of the residents died soon after arriving at the hospitals, Mabb said, while others took longer to pass away. But the fact that all 18 had do-not-resuscitate orders or similar directives suggested to him that they had been sent to the hospitals with little hope of ever returning to the home. The department, Mabb said, shared its documenting of the deaths with the state.
“There are very few legitimate reasons for a nursing home to send seriously ill residents with do-not-resuscitate orders to a hospital unless there is a real chance that their conditions could be improved,” Mabb said. “We flagged it for the state. We told the Department of Health we thought something big was going on.”
Mabb said the state Health Department, which regulates nursing homes, has yet to tell him if it’s investigating what happened to the Barnwell residents.
Bruce Gendron, a vice president of the company that operates the Barnwell nursing home and 15 others, rejected Mabb’s claims that the home had sought to dump dying residents at local hospitals. He said that residents only would have been sent if they needed care beyond what the home could provide, and that those residents deserved every chance to survive.
Gendron said any scheme to inappropriately send residents to die elsewhere would have involved the home’s medical director and several of its nurses, all of whom are licensed by the state and would have been putting their careers at risk.
Twice in May, state Health Department investigators conducted “complaint surveys” at the Barnwell home after scores of staff members and residents at the home tested positive for COVID-19.
The Department of Health website shows that inspectors found problems with the facility’s ability to contain the virus: Uninfected residents were living alongside infected residents; residents suspected of having COVID-19 also were not separated. Some Barnwell staffers told the Health Department that they were confused about when they were supposed to wear masks and gloves or change out of old equipment and under what circumstances. The inspectors cited the facility and ordered a halt to additional admissions. Dozens of residents were eventually relocated.
Gendron first told ProPublica that the allegations of dumping dying residents at hospitals had been investigated by the state Health Department and found to be unsubstantiated. Asked to produce such a finding, Gendron referred to the inspections done in May, saying the absence of any findings related to hospital transfers proved the home had been cleared. Barnwell’s quality of care related to COVID-19 had become a public controversy in May, prompting coverage in the local media, and Gendron said he assumed the state would have been alert to any other problems at the home, including signs of dumping residents.
The state’s inspection reports make no mention of investigating hospital transfers. The Health Department did not respond to questions from ProPublica about whether it had investigated Mabb’s allegations. ProPublica shared Gendron’s version of events with the state, but again, the Health Department did not respond. Jill Montag, a department spokeswoman, appeared to be unaware of the allegations involving the home’s dying residents, asking ProPublica to send along a record of them.
There is little doubt that Barnwell, a 236-bed facility in the Hudson Valley, was overwhelmed by the virus this spring. From March 30 through the first week of June, according to county statistics, scores of staff members and residents tested positive for the virus.
A tally of COVID-19 cases as of early June shared by the Columbia County Health Department shows the scale of the outbreak at Barnwell. (Columbia County Health Department)
But trying to unpack what exactly unfolded at Barnwell lays bare the confusing and often conflicting available information about COVID-19’s deadly path through the state’s elderly population.
The county Health Department is responsible for identifying cases of COVID-19, and nursing homes are obligated to report such cases to it. But nursing homes are regulated by the state, and the county has a limited ability to make sure such facilities are responsibly reporting and managing outbreaks.
Mabb said he had only received notifications from the Barnwell home on two deaths inside the facility. The state Health Department says online that the death toll from the home is 12. Mabb said he thought the first infection at Barnwell had involved a staff member; the state has said the first case of COVID-19 at the facility involved a resident, but it can’t say with certainty what role if any the resident played in the eventual outbreak.
Mabb said he has ultimately come to mistrust any information coming from either the state or officials with Barnwell. He said he counts the 18 deaths of Barnwell residents at the hospitals as nursing home deaths.
ProPublica contacted the three hospitals where Barnwell residents died, but none would talk about the deaths or the county’s allegation that residents had been sent to them to avoid being recorded as nursing home fatalities.
As Gendron pointed out, decisions to send nursing home residents to the hospital for additional care are supposed to be approved by a home’s medical director. He would not provide copies of such approvals involving the 18 residents who later died at hospitals, however, saying he didn’t have the staff to do such work, and noted that some of the residents had been taken to the hospital after 911 calls, when a medical director’s approval would not have been required.
Sorting out the events at Barnwell, it turns out, also involves another disputed state policy: the order from the Health Department that nursing homes accept medically stable COVID-19 patients being discharged from hospitals. The policy also barred patients from being tested to see if they were still positive for the virus.
The policy, enacted March 25, alarmed and angered many — nursing home operators, families of residents, elected officials worried about an already vulnerable population being subjected to additional possible harm. The state, after a blizzard of criticism, abandoned the order some seven weeks after implementing it.
Last month, the Health Department issued a report asserting that the policy had not significantly contributed to deaths of nursing home residents.
A nursing home in Troy, New York, followed the governor’s order to accept patients being treated for COVID-19. Six weeks later, 18 residents were dead of the disease.
The report was met with open skepticism among nursing home personnel, epidemiologists, and Republican and Democratic officials in New York and Washington. Those lawmakers repeated their calls for a truly independent investigation of the state’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis at its more than 600 nursing homes.
In the Health Department’s report, which said more than 6,400 COVID-19 patients had been sent from hospitals to nursing homes under the policy, the state said the vast majority of the roughly 310 homes that accepted those patients had already had a case of COVID-19 among their staff members or residents. The report said the spread of the virus in the homes had been driven by infected staff members.
But the report made clear that dozens of homes had experienced no cases of COVID-19 before receiving a coronavirus patient from a nearby hospital. ProPublica asked the state to produce the data involving 58 homes that had not been affected prior to taking in a COVID-19 patient.
Days later, the state Health Department said the data in its report had been inaccurate. And several days after that, the department said updated information indicated that just six homes, not 58, had been free of COVID-19 prior to the arrival of a patient from a hospital.
The department would not answer an array of questions about how and why it had changed the data in its report, one it had used to defend its controversial policy. It would not say how what it had called a peer-reviewed study had relied on erroneous or incomplete data; it would not say how the new information had come to light.
It did say, though, that the Barnwell home was one of the facilities that did not have a case of COVID-19 among its staff or residents prior to the first arrival of a COVID-19 patient from a hospital. The state, however, would not say when that transfer occurred or if it had studied what role, if any, it had played in the eventual outbreak that overran the facility. The county recorded Barnwell’s first COVID-19 case on March 30, two weeks before the surge in cases among both staff and residents.
Ron Kim, a Democratic state legislator from Queens, said he has no faith that the state has been honest about what happened as a result of its policy.
Kim, a member of the State Assembly’s Health Committee, said he had taken an intense interest in the state’s efforts to protect nursing home residents. One ZIP code in his Queens district had more nursing home deaths than any other in the state, he said. One of those deaths was a member of his family. Kim said he had filed Freedom of Information requests seeking all administration communications about nursing homes during the pandemic.
“The theme of the report was to shift the blame and scapegoat the workers and the families over the decision that the executive office had made,” Kim said of the Health Department report made public last month. “It’s clear that the executive office is directing and ordering up the report and data collection in a way that will give them what they want out of the report.
“They are trying their best to use government resources and the Department of Health to exonerate the executive office of any wrongdoing,” Kim added.
Kim said given the state’s lack of transparency, it was impossible to say whether what’s alleged to have happened at the Barnwell facility may have been more widespread.
Kim and other lawmakers have said they know of no other state that counts nursing home deaths the way New York currently does.
Informed of Kim’s specific claims, the state Health Department referred ProPublica to public statements made by Zucker, the department’s commissioner.
On Aug. 3, Zucker testified before a joint hearing held by state legislators. He was grilled repeatedly about the state’s seeming inability or unwillingness to answer basic questions about how many nursing home residents might have died to date in the pandemic.
The policy of not counting deaths in hospitals was revisited again and again.
Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner, testifies at a joint hearing held virtually on Aug. 3. (Screenshot via New York State Assembly)
Addressing Zucker in one exchange, State Senate Investigations Committee Chair James Skoufis, a Democrat from the Hudson Valley where Barnwell is located, said: “It’s my opinion that your administration’s definition truly misrepresents the scale of this crisis as a result. So let’s try and get the full picture here and now: How many of New York’s nursing home residents died in hospitals?”
Zucker insisted the state couldn’t say because it didn’t yet have a fully accurate count.
“You don’t have a ballpark that you can give? So the total official number is about 6,500. Are we talking with the hospital deaths: 8,000? 10,000? 15,000? What are we looking at?” Skoufis countered.
“I’m not prepared to give you a specific number. We are in the middle of a pandemic obviously, we always forget about that sometimes,” Zucker said. “We are looking at all the numbers, we are looking at the data, when the data comes in and I have an opportunity to piece through that, then I will be happy to provide that data to you and to the other members of the committee.”
State Senate Health Committee Chairman Gustavo Rivera, a Democrat from the Bronx, suggested a final count wasn’t needed to see what the administration was doing.
“It seems, sir, that in this case you are choosing to define it differently so you can look better,” he said. “That is a problem, bro.”
ProPublica asked the state Health Department if it had ever excluded fatalities of residents transferred to hospitals in counting deaths of nursing homes residents during outbreaks of the flu or other infectious diseases.
The state did not directly respond but said in a statement, “This is a global pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen before. There is no precedent.”
Elaine Healy, acting president of the New York Medical Directors Association, said it shouldn’t be hard for the state to have an accurate count of how many nursing home residents died of COVID-19 in hospitals. They’d counted these deaths in the nursing home totals early on, she said, and “the numbers would be quite easy to get from the hospitals.”
The outbreak at Barnwell was one of two involving local nursing homes in Columbia County.
When the outbreak at Barnwell became public in early May, Patsy Leader, the town supervisor in nearby Kinderhook, called for the state to intervene, accusing Barnwell of trying to cover up the dumping of dying residents. Leader repeated the allegation in a brief interview with ProPublica.
Gendron, the Barnwell executive, eventually traveled to Barnwell to personally handle the crisis.
In a series of interviews and exchanges with ProPublica, Gendron said he was not aware of the state’s claim that Barnwell’s first case of COVID-19 involved a hospital transfer. He said the company had been alarmed by the Cuomo administration’s policy requiring nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients being discharged from hospitals. The chance that such patients could trigger or worsen an outbreak in nursing facilities was real, he said.
“We were very concerned,” Gendron said. “It’s a very contagious virus. And nursing homes provide very hands on care.”
The challenge, he said, was only worsened by the fact that the state’s policy prohibited homes from testing arriving hospital transfers to see if they were still positive and thus possibly contagious. Gendron said he was not even sure if the hospitals were obligated to notify the home that the arriving patient had been treated for COVID-19.
“One would think they should have disclosed that,” Gendron said. “We always believed the best practice was to isolate any COVID residents. But we didn’t even know who was or wasn’t.”
President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia had become the first country to approve a vaccine offering "sustainable immunity" against the coronavirus and that one of his daughters has been inoculated.
The announcement came after scientists in the West raised concerns about the speed of development of Russian vaccines, suggesting that researchers might be cutting corners after coming under pressure from authorities to deliver.
"This morning, for the first time in the world, a vaccine against the new coronavirus was registered" in Russia, he said during a televised video conference call with government ministers.
"I know that it is quite effective, that it gives sustainable immunity," he said.
He said one of his daughters had been inoculated with the vaccine, developed by the Gamaleya research institute in coordination with the Russian defense ministry.
"In this sense she took part in the experiment," Putin said, adding that she had a slight temperature after a second injection and "that's all".
"What counts most is for us to be able to ensure the unconditional safety of the use of this vaccine and its efficiency in the future. I hope that this will be accomplished," Putin said.
Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said that clinical trials involving several thousand participants would continue.
Tatyana Golikova, a deputy prime minister in charge of health issues, said officials hoped that vaccinations of medical staff could begin soon.
"We really hope that the vaccine can be produced in September, or even at the end of August or beginning of September, and the first category to be vaccinated will be medical personnel," she said, quoted by Russian news agencies.
- Viral vector vaccine -
Russia has been pushing hard to quickly develop a coronavirus vaccine and said earlier this month it hoped to launch mass production within weeks and turn out "several million" doses per month by next year.
The World Health Organization last week urged Russia to follow established guidelines and go "through all the stages" necessary to develop a safe vaccine.
Spokesman Christian Lindmeier told reporters at the time that the WHO had not been officially notified of any Russian vaccine on the verge of being deployed.
The pandemic has seen an unprecedented mobilization of funding and research to rush through a vaccine that can protect billions of people worldwide.
The vaccine developed by Russia is a so-called viral vector vaccine, meaning it employs another virus to carry the DNA encoding of the needed immune response into cells.
Gamaleya's vaccine is based on the adenovirus, a similar technology to the coronavirus vaccine prototype developed by China's CanSino.
The state-run Gamaleya institute came under fire after researchers and its director injected themselves with the prototype several months ago, with specialists criticizing the move as an unorthodox and rushed way of starting human trials.
Moscow has dismissed allegations from Britain, the United States and Canada that a hacking group linked to Russian intelligence services tried to steal information about a coronavirus vaccine from labs in the West.
With more than 897,000 confirmed infections, Russia's coronavirus caseload is currently fourth in the world after the United States, Brazil and India.
President Donald Trump on Monday told reporters that children are "virtually immune," don't transport or transfer the coronavirus, and just a "tiny fraction" of those who become infected die. Most of that is false, and dangerously so.
"They get better very quickly," Trump continued. "But, as you know, the seriousness of it and what it leads to is extraordinarily small."
Asked if he still believes children are essentially immune, as he falsely stated just five days ago, the President replied, "Yeah. I think that for the most part they do very well. They don't get very sick, they don't catch it easily, and according to the people that I've spoken to they don't transport or transfer it to other people, or certainly not very easily."
That's false.
97,000 children across a two-week period tested positive for the coronavirus at the end of July. And while the fatality rate is lower among children, there are other diseases they (and adults) can get. Among children, "a rare but severe condition that has been reported approximately 2–4 weeks after the onset of COVID-19 in children and adolescents," Associated Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (AMIS), has been reported, the CDC said on its website last week.
Indonesia on Tuesday launched human trials of a Chinese-made coronavirus vaccine with some 1,600 volunteers slated to take part in the six-month study.
The vaccine candidate, produced by Sinovac Biotech, is among just a few in the world to enter Phase 3 clinical trials, or large-scale testing on humans -- the last step before regulatory approval.
The treatment, known as CoronaVac, is already being tested on 9,000 health workers in Brazil, the second-hardest-hit country in the coronavirus pandemic after the United States.
Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country, has been struggling to contain its mounting virus cases, with more than 127,000 confirmed infections and over 5,700 deaths.
But the true scale of the public health crisis is believed to be much bigger, given the Southeast Asian nation's low testing rates.
The governor of Indonesia's most populous province, West Java, was among 1,620 volunteers slated to take part in clinical testing, which was set to wrap up in February.
If the vaccine proves safe and effective, Indonesian officials said, there were plans to produce up to 250 million doses for the sprawling archipelago of nearly 270 million, although they gave few details of the tentative roll-out.
On Tuesday, Indonesia's President Joko Widodo toured a factory in Bandung city, operated by state-owned pharmaceutical firm Bio Farma, where production would begin.
"Once again I want to highlight that the COVID-19 threat will not end until all people in Indonesia are vaccinated," Widodo said ahead of the tour.
The coronavirus pandemic chalked up another horrific milestone Monday as the world surpassed 20 million recorded cases of infection from the tiny killer that has upended life just about everywhere.
The number as of 2215 GMT was 20,002,577 cases, with 733,842 deaths recorded, according to an AFP tally of official sources.
In yet another staggering landmark, the death toll is expected to surpass 750,000 in a matter of days as the global health crisis that began late last year in China rages on.
“Behind these statistics is a great deal of pain and suffering... But I want to be clear: there are green shoots of hope,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“It’s never too late to turn the outbreak around,” he said.
He gave examples of countries that had successfully clamped down on Covid-19, such as Rwanda and New Zealand, which said Monday it plans to open a virus-free “travel bubble” with the Cook Islands.
With much of the world caught in a cycle of dispiriting outbreaks and economically crushing lockdowns, all eyes are on the race for a vaccine.
A WHO overview said 165 candidate vaccines are being worked on around the world, with six reaching Phase 3 of clinical evaluation.
But the WHO’s emergencies director Michael Ryan warned that a vaccine was “only part of the answer,” pointing to polio and measles as diseases with vaccines that have not been fully eradicated.
“You’ve got to be able to deliver that vaccine to a population that want and demand to have that vaccine,” he said.
Europe feels the heat
Infections have been rising ominously in Western Europe, which has also been sweltering through a heatwave, with temperatures soaring above 35 degrees Celsius (95 F).
The blistering heat sent crowds flocking to beaches at the weekend despite health warnings about the risk of infection.
In the Paris region, people aged 11 and over are now required to wear masks in crowded areas and tourist hotspots.
These include the banks of the Seine River and more than 100 streets in the French capital.
Marion, a 24-year-old in central Paris, said the masks are “restrictive” but necessary “if we want to avoid a second wave.”
“Anything except a second lockdown,” she added.
Several French towns and cities have already introduced similar measures, as well as parts of Belgium, the Netherlands, Romania and Spain.
In Berlin, thousands of children returned to school on Monday after the summer break, sporting masks, which are compulsory in common areas like school courtyards.
Greece meanwhile announced a night curfew for restaurants and bars in some of its top tourist destinations after its number of new cases increased.
In Italy, the coronavirus spikes of its neighbors caused alarm.
“France, Spain and the Balkans... Italy is surrounded by contagions,” Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza lamented.
It was a different story in Pakistan, which allowed all restaurants and parks to reopen on Monday, after the country saw a drop in new cases over several weeks.
Grim US, Brazil milestones
As of Monday evening, the United States — the world’s worst-hit country — had recorded 163,370 deaths and 5,085,821 cases of infection, according to the tracker at Johns Hopkins University.
The package — announced by Trump on Saturday after talks between Republican and Democrat lawmakers hit a wall — was “absurdly unconstitutional,” senior Democrat Nancy Pelosi told CNN.
But with the world’s largest economy still struggling to dig itself out of an enormous hole, Democrats appeared skittish about any legal challenge to a relief package they see as seriously inadequate.
President Jair Bolsonaro has downplayed the coronavirus threat, and after Brazil’s latest milestone, the country’s most widely viewed TV network Globo asked: “Has the president of the republic done his duty?”
Video posted online purports to show a man being carried out of a store in Tucson, Arizona after a loud rant against wearing masks.
"People won't learn, these people won't learn," a man in a blue shirt, shorts and sunglasses is heard saying, to nobody in particular.
"You're a bunch of idiots wearing masks, you know it's not real," he shouted.
"Look at you fools, you got a f*cking doily on your face. You ret*rd, you look like you f*cking got it off your mom's countertop," he continued.
At that point, a much larger man with a mask over his beard approached the anti-mask activist.
"What's going on?" he asked.
"You're a dork, look at you, you giant f*cking dork," the anti-mask activist said as his son restrained him. "Come outside and show me how tough you are."
"I'll beat that f*cking mask off your face," he threatened, as his son physically picked him up and removed him from the store. "F*cking p*ssies, you're all a bunch of p*ssies wearing masks!"
"Goodbye," a woman can be heard shouting off-camera.
Politico on Monday reported on how Donald Trump may have imperiled his 2020 presidential campaign by failing to reach a deal with Congress on the next round of stimulus.
"After a spring and summer bolstered by cash infusions from the federal government of more than $3 trillion, the U.S. economy may have to sink or swim this fall with a relative trickle of support — presenting a significant threat to President Donald Trump’s standing as he heads into a compressed reelection campaign already trailing in the polls," Politico's Ben White reported.
"Negotiations on another large fiscal aid package remained stalled on Monday, and people close to the talks held no hope of any movement this week — perhaps even for the rest of the month. And economists mostly say Trump’s executive actions announced on Saturday would have limited impact, even if they manage to survive potential legal and operational challenges," the report explained.
Politico noted that households, small businesses and local governments are all running out of money.
"All of this means that absent a fresh breakthrough on another stimulus bill, an economy that cratered by historic proportions in the first half of the year amid the Covid-19 epidemic will have to continue to snap back without much federal help, at least beyond the easy-money policies put in place by the Federal Reserve," Politico explained. "If no deal is reached and with questions looming over Trump’s executive actions, the economy may wind up without more fiscal support just as the recovery from the depths of the Covid-19 collapse appears to be flagging."
