Cassidy Hutchinson's new book Enough, published on Tuesday, recalls a trip Donald Trump made to the Honeywell mask production facility in Phoenix, Arizona May 5, 2020, as the pandemic was spreading across the world.
Trump was going to wear an N95 mask and tried on several asking his staff to tell him which looked the best.
"He was not thrilled that staff urged him to wear a mask, believing it would make him look weak and afraid of the virus," Hutchinson writes. "He decided on a white mask and strapped it to his face before asking each staffer whether or not he should wear it in front of the press pool."
"The president pulled the mask off and asked why I thought he should not wear it," she continues. "I pointed at the straps of the N95 I was holding. When he looked at the straps of his mask, he saw that they were covered in bronzer."
“Why did no one else tell me that,” he snapped. “I’m not wearing this thing.”
Instead, Trump put on safety goggles for the tour.
"The press would criticize him for not wearing a mask, not knowing that the depth of his vanity had caused him to reject masks—and then millions of his fans followed suit," the book continues.
She writes that she was worried Trump might be angry at her for pointing it out.
"He always checks himself in a mirror his valet carries before starting any public event, so he would have probably seen the bronzer-smeared mask before stepping in front of the cameras," she confesses.
Trump's former trade advisor Peter Navarro, who was recently convicted of contempt, said on Sunday that there are "murderers" at CNN and that the network itself is guilty of "negligent homicide at a minimum."
Navarro, who also made headlines recently when he referred to several women who worked for the Trump White House as "pimp ladies," is this time targeting the news network. He's currently appealing his conviction, which was based on the finding that he didn't establish that he had executive privilege preventing him from providing testimony.
On Sunday, Navarro drew attention to an issue many thought was dead.
"From Mayo Clinic website grudging admission of glaring truth: 'Hydroxychloroquine may be used to treat coronavirus (COVID-19) in certain hospitalized patients,'" Navarro wrote. "For all you murderers at [CNN] [John Berman] who spread lies about hydroxy, this one's for u," the ally of Trump said.
In a separate post, Navarro claimed that he had "a million" of these tablets while working in Trump's administration.
"At the White House, I had a million tablets of hydroxy that could have saved thousands of lives but [CNN] crusaded against it to beat [Trump]. Negligent homicide at a minimum. [The FDA] was also implicated in hydroxy suppression."
A new Mother Jones report slammed former Trump advisor Peter Navarro’s lawyer’s remark Wednesday on the first day of his contempt of Congress hearing.
Navarro is facing two misdemeanor charges for contempt of Congress on allegations he refused to comply with a Feb. 2022 subpoena from the House Jan. 6 select committee.
Stanley Woodward, an attorney representing Navarro, assailed federal prosecutors for “failing to use Navarro’s preferred honorific,” Mother Jones reports.
“Dr. Navarro, not ‘Mr. Navarro’ as the government has referred to him, is a PhD economist with a degree from Harvard,” Woodward said, according to the report.
Federal prosecutor John Crabb during his opening statement told jurors that the Navarro subpoena “wasn’t an invitation. It’s a legal requirement.”
Dan Friedman writes for Mother Jones that “…Navarro’s wish to have his PhD recognized may be a good example of his apparently substantial self-regard. A man who advised Trump on trade, China, Covid, and how to try and retain power despite losing the 2020 election, Navarro also seems to have taken the position that his own interpretation of the Constitution excludes him from having to respond to an official congressional inquiry.”
Navarro is among two witnesses sought by the Jan. 6 select committee whose failure to comply with a subpoena prompted criminal charges. The other is Steve Bannon, who was sentenced to four months in prison last year after a jury convicted him on two counts of defying the congressional subpoena.
“Mr. Navarro ignored his subpoena,” Crabb said.
“He acted as if he’s above the law, but he’s not above the law.”
The prosecution rested after calling three witnesses on Wednesday, the report said, noting Navarro’s attorneys called none.
This article was originally published by KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF. Subscribe to KFF Health News' free Morning Briefing.
TULSA, Okla. — When Lou Ellen Horwitz first learned that a gas station company was going to open a chain of urgent care clinics, she was skeptical.
As CEO of the Urgent Care Association, Horwitz knows the industry is booming. Its market size has doubled in 10 years, as patients, particularly younger ones, are drawn to the convenience of the same-day appointments and extended hours offered by the walk-in clinics.
“Urgent care is harder than it looks,” Horwitz recalled thinking when the Tulsa-based gas station and convenience store company QuikTrip announced an urgent care venture called MedWise in late 2020. “And that’s a whole different ballgame than selling Funyuns.”
But Horwitz said the more she thought about it, the more she saw an overlap between the business models of QuikTrip and of successful urgent care clinics: setting up in easy-to-find locations, catering to walk-ins, and accepting multiple payment methods, for example. QuikTrip opening health clinics might just make sense, she thought, provided they could deliver quality medical care.
In fact, QuikTrip had been providing primary care services to its own employees for years, through third parties and eventually at its own clinics. Five years ago, longtime “QuikTripper” Brice Habeck was tasked with leading a team to figure out how the company could offer such medical services to the general public, too. His team quickly realized that urgent care had a lot in common with their retail spaces.
“It’s about access. It’s about convenience,” said Habeck, who started his career as a clerk at a QT, as the stores are often branded, and is now the executive director of MedWise.
MedWise has opened 12 clinics so far, all in the Tulsa area, and now belongs to Horwitz’s trade group. The company is owned by QuikTrip, but the two businesses don’t share buildings or a name. As much as people love the gas station, Habeck said, company leaders didn’t want patients to think the person checking their vitals had just wiped down a gas pump.
QuikTrip is not the first company to see potential in the urgent care industry. Private equity firms have been investing in urgent care’s consumer-friendly niche for over a decade. And nearly half of urgent cares are affiliated with hospital systems — which often see urgent care as a front door for bringing in new patients while also taking some burden off their busy emergency rooms.
Other retailers have also seen opportunities in expanding into patient care. Walmart, Target, CVS, and Walgreens have all opened what are called “retail clinics” in recent years, often in their existing stores and often partnering with local health systems to provide the actual medical care. Generally, the scope of services available at urgent care centers, such as MedWise clinics, is more robust than what’s offered at those retail clinics, according to Horwitz.
But urgent care and retail clinics may not be a panacea for rising health care costs. A study co-authored by Harvard Medical School health policy professor Ateev Mehrotra shows urgent care clinics reduce less serious visits to the emergency room, yet 37 urgent care visits are needed to prevent a single trip to the ER, increasing total health care spending with all those trips.
And ongoing research by Vanderbilt University assistant professor Kevin Griffith suggests that newly constructed urgent care or retail clinics can decrease wait times at nearby private and public sector health centers initially. Eventually, however, the increased access provided by the new clinics increases demand as well, he is finding, and wait times creep back up.
“It’s kind of like the ‘build it and they will come’ of health care,” said Griffith, adding that even though the clinics may not decrease wait times long-term or reduce costs, they are getting patients seen. “There is a huge problem with unmet care in the United States. And so ostensibly, these clinics are making a dent into that problem as well.”
The experience of some retail clinics is a cautionary tale for companies like MedWise, according to Mehrotra: Disrupting the health care industry is easier said than done, even for businesses with a successful track record of good customer service in a low-margin business such as gas stations.
“Generally people have been happy with the convenience,” Mehrotra said, but the clinics have not been very profitable, promptingmanyclosures over the years.
Gas stations are accustomed to competing over customers by offering something special. QuikTrip, for example, was recently ranked ninth on a list of best gas station brands in America that noted QT’s “beloved” made-to-order food, such as breakfast tacos. Habeck said he thinks patients today are open to a more transactional approach in health care as well.
That doesn’t mean offering roller-grill hot dogs and taquitos in urgent care waiting rooms, although Habeck joked that MedWise might have tried that if it hadn’t launched during the pandemic. Rather, he said, the chain is banking on winning customer loyalty by offering patients consistent service without necessarily offering a consistent clinician.
And, Habeck said, even though MedWise and QTs are not in the same buildings, the parent company’s experience finding prominent locations for gas stations is useful for placing urgent cares as well.
On a recent Friday afternoon, Billy Rohling and Amy Shaver stood waiting for their ride home in the mostly empty parking lot of a MedWise at the same exit as a QT off Interstate Highway 244 in Tulsa. Rohling, 56, remembers when this corner of Admiral Place and Sheridan Road was a shopping center with tenants like J.C. Penney Co. and a five-and-dime called TG&Y.
Those stores are long gone now, though. The couple came to MedWise because Shaver, 37, was having breathing problems. It was her second time visiting the clinic.
“They aren’t busy at all,” Rohling said. “It took 15 minutes to get an EKG.”
Indeed, MedWise’s patient visits have slowed since the unexpected “windfall volume” that came as a result of opening during the pandemic, Habeck said. At one point, MedWise clinics administered curbside covid-19 tests to hundreds of patients a day, many of whom paid cash. The momentum from all those visits helped propel the clinics through abnormally low flu seasons in 2020 and 2021 — typically urgent care’s bread and butter.
But Habeck said MedWise is still on track to expand. Four more locations are slated to open in northeastern Oklahoma this year, and the future should bring even more MedWise locations in QuikTrip’s 17-state, 1,000-location footprint, in places such as Kansas City, Missouri, and Wichita, Kansas.
State health care rules, public insurance payment rates, and existing health system locations will all factor into where the new clinics are located, Habeck said, although expansion out of state is probably a couple of years away.
Horwitz said scaling up in the industry requires a degree of standardization — everything from clinic layouts to staffing levels, and even where various supplies are stored — that can be hard to attain. But she said it’s a trend, with more urgent care chains having a triple-digit number of locations than ever before.
“Nobody’s at 1,000, but some are closing in on it,” Horwitz said.
CNN's John King came away stunned after an Iowa supporter of former President Donald Trump argued that Western support for Ukraine in defending itself against Russia is part of an elaborate plot to cover up President Joe Biden's corruption.
While talking with Iowa Trump fans, King asked them if any of them supported aiding Ukraine against Russian aggression — and none of them raised their hands.
One of the Trump supporters then outlined how he believed the entire war was an effort to cover up crimes committed by the Biden family.
"You don't have to be that smart to connect the dots, right?" he said. "And so is the war to cover up sins committed to cover your tracks? There is too much money that has been thrown over there!"
King appeared skeptical of this and asked the man if he really believed every NATO country would spend massive amounts of money and send over huge troves of military equipment to Ukraine just to help keep Hunter Biden out of prison.
(Reuters) - The World Health Organization is currently tracking several coronavirus variants, including the EG.5 variant that is spreading in the U.S. and U.K., Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday.
"The risk remains of a more dangerous variant emerging that could cause a sudden increase in cases and deaths," Tedros said, adding that the agency is publishing a risk evaluation report on it today.
Kennedy in the aftermath of Aaron’s death in January tweeted that the Hall of Famer’s death was “part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly closely following administration of COVID vaccines,” noting that Aaron had “received the Moderna vaccine on Jan. 5 to inspire other Black Americans to get the vaccine.”
Jordan said he was “just pointing out facts” as he expressed support for Kennedy’s conspiracy theory during the longshot Democratic party presidential candidate’s appearance before a House subcommittee on weaponization of the federal government to testify about censorship.
Jordan complained that the White House falsely flagged Kennedy’s tweet as misinformation.
“Misinformation is when you don’t have the facts right,” Jordan said Thursday.
“But when you look at Mr. Kennedy’s tweet, there was nothing in there that was factually inaccurate. Hank Aaron, real person, great American, passed away after he got the vaccine. Pointing out, just pointing out facts.”
Aaron in the weeks before his death joined civil rights leaders including former U.N. Ambassador and civil rights leader Andrew Young and former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan in an initiative to promote COVID-19 vaccines.
The Beast report notes that Aaron died at the age of 86 of natural causes.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. if he should be worried about his genetics to highlight a rant connecting Covid-19 to race.
At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, Goldman presented a recently-unearthed video of Kennedy talking about Covid-19's impacts on Black and Jewish people.
Goldman, an Ashkenazi Jew, asked Kennedy if he should be concerned because he contracted the virus early in the pandemic.
"And my question to you is whether you think I should be worried about my genetics as an Ashkenazi Jew because I did contract Covid?" Goldman wondered.
"No, not at all," Kennedy replied.
"And that statement that you saw there is a truncated version of a larger statement," the witness protested. "I was describing a study."
A sister and nephew of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have condemned their relative after he reportedly shared a conspiracy theory that certain Jewish people were immune to Covid-19.
Kerry Kennedy rebuked her brother in a statement released by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group, where she serves as president.
"I strongly condemn my brother's deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting," Kerry Kennedy said. "His statements do not represent what I believe or what Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights stand for, with our 50+-year track record of protecting rights and standing against racism and all forms of discrimination."
Nephew Joe Kennedy III also rebuked his uncle.
"My uncle's comments were hurtful and wrong. I unequivocally condemn what he said," he wrote on Twitter.
In a video recording published by the New York Post, the presidential candidate appeared to claim that "Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately."
"Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese," he said in the recording. "We don't know whether it was deliberately targeted like that or not."
In newly revealed recordings shared by MSNBC's Ari Melber, Trump also told Woodward what he was telling his youngest son behind closed doors.
"So you told Barron, you said, 'It's bad, it's bad.' And then —" Woodward said.
"No, I said, it's a very bad thing, but we're going to straighten it out," Trump claimed.
"Did he have any other questions about, like, how are you going to..." Woodward said.
"He said, how did it happen? I said, it came out of China, Barron. Pure and simple. It came out of China. And it should've been stopped," Trump relayed.
"And to be honest with you, Barron, they should've let it be known it was a problem two months earlier. And we wouldn't — the world would not — we would have 141 countries have it now. And I said, the world wouldn't have a problem. We could've stopped it easily."
In a later tape with Woodward from July 2020, Trump told him that he knew about the disaster as early as Jan. 2020. He continued to downplay it until the election in November.
Among new recordings that reporter Bob Woodward is revealing is a tape in which Donald Trump complained he couldn't hold rallies – and that the COVID crisis wasn't measured in deaths but in rallies he was missing out on.
"What is the first person who made you see how serious this was going to be?" asked Woodward in the tape, played on MSNBC's The Beat.
Trump explained: "China, when I saw how many people were dying."
Woodward asked about the conversation Trump had with Xi Jinping Feb. 2020, but Trump corrected him.
"No! No! It was earlier," Trump said. "Look, I did the stop I think in January some time, toward the later part of January, Bob."
"Yeah, I suspect if you say, sir, first mobilization, we're at Manhattan Project level here," said Woodward. Trump said, "No matter what I do, they'll always tell you bad."
Okay, but you know what?" Woodward asked. "I don't care," Trump replied. "I think people want — even people who don't like you, people who are opposed to you — want this country to succeed on this," said Woodward. Trump disagreed, saying people want him to fail and want more people to die so he'd lose the election.
"But there's a lot of really fake news out there, Bob," Trump explained.
By July, when hundreds of thousands of Americans had died, Trump was telling Woodward, "It's flaring up. It's flaring up all over the world, Bob. By the way, all over the world. That was one thing I noticed last week. You know, they talk about this country. All over the world, it's flaring up. But we have it under control."
Woodward later told Ari Melber that he felt like the president was "in denial."
"If we didn't have the virus, I was 10, 12, points up. I was cruising to election," Trump complained.
"Yeah, well, people are worried about the virus," Woodward explained.
"I know that, Bob. But the virus has nothing to do with me," Trump complained. "With COVID, you really can't do rallies — probably airport rallies — but you can't do stadium rallies, you can't do the indoor arena rallies."
"You're running against the virus. Not Joe Biden," Woodward tried to explain.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) suggested "penguins" were to blame for convincing some scientists that Covid-19 was created in nature.
At a House Oversight Committee hearing on Tuesday, Malliotakis asked two professors why scientists initially discounted a theory that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a lab.
"All of a sudden, you did a 180, and [said] it couldn't possibly come from a lab or maybe, but you're all saying that you know, this was by sure from nature," Malliotakis said. "What happened in those three days?"
Tulane University School of Medicine Professor Robert Garry explained that researchers were following the science.
"Where did that data come from?" Malliotakis pressed.
"The scientific literature, you know, the publication of the pangolin genomic sequence showed that there was a receptor binding domain," Garry said. "And it was a very important piece of data because it showed that a lot of the theories about, you know, the virus having been engineered or put together in a laboratory were not true because here was a virus in nature that had a receptor binding domain with exactly the same structure."
Malliotakis confused the research on pangolins, which resembles an anteater, with penguins.
"I just find it all interesting based on what my other colleague here, the chairman of the committee, said in reply to the issue of the penguins," she said.
In 2020, researchers found a portion of a pangolin's genomic sequence was a 99% match for Covid-19. Scientists speculated that pangolins may have been an intermediary host passing the virus to humans.
Former President Donald Trump's one-time ambassador Gordon Sondland is in hot water, as a hotel he owns faces tens of thousands of dollars in fines, reported The Daily Beast on Friday.
"The Federal Election Commission slapped a $28,000 fine on the hotel company belonging to Trump’s former ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, for illegal corporate reimbursements totaling more than $100,000, according to documents released Friday," reported Roger Sollenberger. "In sworn testimony, the president of Provenance Hotels said he was 'acting under the directions' of Sondland personally, according to the FEC general counsel’s report, a claim the former ambassador disputed in his own affidavit."
The FEC first became aware of this arrangement, which took place between 2018 and 2019, on a tipoff from the company itself, said the report: "About $21,000 of the illicit donations went to Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who downplayed the scandal and later asked President Donald Trump not to remove Sondland from his post, The New York Times previously reported; Trump fired him anyway," the article states.
Sondland became a household name for a short time during former President Donald Trump's first impeachment, brought over allegations that he obstructed aid to Ukraine as part of a bid to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce and "investigation" into the family of now-President Joe Biden.
Trump called Sondland as a witness in his own defense, but legal experts argued that his testimony actually incriminated him further.
After that affair, Sondland sued former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for $1.8 million, alleging that Pompeo backed out of a promise to compensate him for his legal fees.
