MIAMI — There’s only one name left on the National Hurricane Center’s alphabetical list of storm names. After Wilfred, it’s time for names left untouched since 2005: the Greek alphabet.And with a good two months left in the formal hurricane season, it’s likely that Tropical Storm Alpha might make an appearance somewhere in the Atlantic before the season ends on Nov. 30. Although, as anyone around for the 2005 storm season remembers, the final storm of that season — Tropical Storm Zeta — actually petered out on Jan. 6, 2006.So far, this hurricane season has already seen 20 named storms, enough ...
Presidential hopeful Joe Biden will address how to develop and distribute an effective Covid-19 vaccine Wednesday, challenging the optimistic predictions of his rival Donald Trump, whom the Democrat accuses of lying to Americans about the pandemic threat.
Whether the Trump administration can hurry a safe vaccine into wide production has become a focal point of the 2020 election campaign, in which polls show Biden leading Trump.
Biden has stressed he supports a rapid rollout of a vaccine, but only if it is shown to be safe and effective -- and if there is "full transparency" regarding the science of the work.
The Democratic nominee, who has slowly ramped up appearances including a Florida trip Tuesday but has yet to match the campaign trail fervor of the president, delivers an afternoon speech in home state Delaware after receiving a briefing from health experts on vaccine prospects.
Experts say a coronavirus vaccine is among the best ways to halt the march of a pandemic that has already killed more than 196,000 Americans.
At a town hall Tuesday, Trump accelerated his own already optimistic predictions, saying a vaccine may be available even before the November 3 presidential election.
"We're within weeks of getting it, you know -- could be three weeks, four weeks," he told a town hall question-and-answer session with voters in Pennsylvania aired on ABC.
Only hours earlier, speaking to Fox News, Trump had said a vaccine could come in "four weeks, it could be eight weeks."
Democrats have expressed concern that Trump is putting political pressure on government health regulators and scientists to approve a rushed vaccine in time to help turn around his uphill bid for reelection.
Trump also raised eyebrows when asked why he had downplayed the gravity of the pandemic in its early months.
"I didn't downplay it," Trump replied. "I actually, in many ways, I up-played it in terms of action."
But Trump himself told journalist Bob Woodward during taped interviews that he had deliberately decided to "play it down" to avoid alarming Americans.
Trump also returned to one of his most controversial views on the virus, insisting "it is going to disappear" and that the country was "rounding the corner" in the crisis.
Challenged about how the virus would go away by itself, he said "you'll develop like a herd mentality," apparently meaning the concept of herd immunity, when enough people have developed resistance to the disease to effectively stop transmission.
The president's performance prompted criticism from Biden's campaign team.
"Donald Trump has lied to the American people throughout his presidency," communications director Kate Bedingfield said in a statement.
"Trump just confirmed tonight, yet again, that even after eight months of letting the worst public health crisis in 100 years spiral out of control that not only does he not have a plan -- he doesn't have a clue."
'Science knows'
With the crisis devastating the US economy and pushing millions of families to the financial brink, the Trump campaign has repeatedly touted a potential rapid vaccine as a savior.
Experts have expressed caution, and top US government infectious diseases doctor Anthony Fauci says vaccine approval is more likely toward year's end.
"We are all rooting for the success of these vaccine candidates," Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, wrote in The Washington Post.
"But, the recent experience of the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has shown that things can go awry quickly," he added, referring to the drug giant temporarily halting its randomized clinical trial last week after a UK volunteer developed an unexplained illness.
During his Florida trip to stump for Hispanic votes, Biden hammered Trump on his denial of the climate change threat, after the president visited wildfire-ravaged California and said "I don't think science knows" whether or not climate change is intensifying weather conditions.
Just how bad has the United States' response to the COVID-19 pandemic been?
According to Brookings Institution economics researcher Harry Holzer, the United States' current death count could have been conceivably cut in half if the country had delivered even an average performance compared with other countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
In looking at global COVID-19 data, Holzer found that "overall virus cases per capita in the U.S. are now over four times higher in the U.S. than in the average high-income OECD country, while total deaths per capita are over twice as high."
And while other OECD countries have seen surges in cases per capita so far this month, they are still not on par with the average number of per-capita cases in the United States, which has also posted per-capita deaths this month that are five times the average of other OECD countries.
"Both U.S. employment and health outcomes during the pandemic have been worse than what we find in virtually all other high-income countries around the world," he writes. "Had we been as successful in each measure as the other OECD countries, nearly nine million more Americans would be employed and over 100,000 would still be alive."
During an ABC News townhall event moderated by George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump once again downplayed the benefits of wearing protective face masks. But when Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing Wednesday morning, he stressed that face masks are enormously helpful tools in the fight against coronavirus.
Asked about Trump’s comments, Redfield told senators, “I’m not going to comment directly about the president, but I am going to comment as the CDC director that these face masks are the most important, powerful health tool we have. And I will continue to appeal for all Americans — all individuals in our country — to embrace these face coverings. I’ve said it: if we did it for six, eight, ten, 12 weeks, we’d bring this pandemic under control.”
Holding up a blue face mask, Redfield added, “We have clear scientific evidence: they work, and they are our best defense. I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine.”
Redfield explained that when a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available in the future, “If I don’t get an immune response, the vaccine’s not going to protect me. This face mask will. So, I do want to keep asking the American public to take the responsibility — particularly the 18-25-year-olds….. We haven’t got the acceptance, the personal responsibility that we need for all Americans to embrace this face mask.”
In 1955, after a field trial involving 1.8 million Americans, the world’s first successful polio vaccine was declared “safe, effective, and potent.”
It was arguably the most significant biomedical advance of the past century. Despite the polio vaccine’s long-term success, manufacturers, government leaders and the nonprofit that funded the vaccine’s development made several missteps.
Having produced a documentary about the polio vaccine’s field trials, we believe the lessons learned during that chapter in medical history are worth considering as the race to develop COVID-19 vaccines proceeds.
Trailer from ‘The Shot Felt ‘Round the World,’ a documentary about the polio vaccine.
Sabin and Salk
Today, many competing efforts are underway to create a coronavirus vaccine, each employing different methods to generate the production of universally needed antibodies. Likewise, in the 1950s there were different approaches to making a polio vaccine.
The prevailing medical orthodoxy, led by Dr. Albert Sabin, held that only a live-virus vaccine, which involved using a weakened form of the polio virus to stimulate antibodies, could work. That theory stemmed from work by the physician Edward Jenner, who in the 1700s determined that milkmaids exposed to the cowpox virus-laden pus of cowpox-infected cattle did not catch smallpox. Smallpox was the deadly pandemic of the era, and this discovery led to a vaccine that brought about the disease’s eradication.
Jonas Salk, a doctor and scientist based at the University of Pittsburgh, on the other hand, believed a killed virus, which would completely lose its infectious qualities, could still trick the body into creating protective antibodies against the polio virus.
A nonprofit organization, the National Infantile Paralysis Foundation, funded and thus directed the polio vaccine quest. Established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former law partner, Basil O’ Connor, it raised money for polio research and treatment. As part of this fundraising effort, Americans were called upon to send dimes to the White House in what became known as the March of Dimes.
O'Connor gambled on Salk rather than Sabin.
Clinical trials
By 1953, Salk and his team had shown their experimental vaccine worked – first on monkeys in their lab, then on children who already had polio at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, and then on a small group of healthy children in Pittsburgh. One of the largest field trials in medical history soon followed.
It began on April 23, 1954. Some 650,000 children got the Salk polio vaccine or a placebo, and 1.2 million other kids received no injection but were monitored as an untreated control group.
Salk’s mentor, University of Michigan virologist Thomas Francis, independently monitored the study. After months of meticulously analyzing data, Francis revealed the results on April 12, 1955 – exactly 10 years after FDR’s death and nearly a year after the trial began.
Americans mailed dimes to the White House that funded an independent effort to combat polio.
AP Photo
A manufacturing error
When asked who owned the patent to his vaccine, Jonas Salk famously replied that it belonged to the people and that patenting it would be like “patenting the sun.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed his belief that every child should receive the polio vaccine, without indicating how that would happen. Eisenhower charged Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Ovetta Culp Hobby to work out the details in coordination with Surgeon General Leonard Scheele.
Congressional Democrats advocated for a plan that would make the polio vaccine free to everyone, which Hobby rejected as a “back door to socialized medicine.”
A black market arose. Price gouging jacked up the cost of a dose of the vaccine, which was supposed to be US$2, to $20. As a result, the well-to-do got special access to a vaccine the public had funded.
The hands-off approach changed once reports surfaced that children who had received Salk’s vaccine were in the hospital, with polio symptoms. At first, Scheele, the surgeon general, reacted with skepticism. He suggested that those kids might have been infected before vaccination.
But once six vaccinated children died, inoculations halted until more information about their safety could be gathered. In all, 10 kids who were vaccinated early on died after becoming infected with polio, and some 200 experienced some degree of paralysis.
The government soon determined that the cases in which children became sick or died could be traced back to one of the six companies: Cutter Labs. It had not followed Salk’s detailed protocol to manufacture the vaccine, failing to kill the virus. As a result, children were incorrectly injected with the live virus.
Inoculation resumed in mid-June with tighter government controls and a more nervous public. In July, Hobby stepped down, citing personal reasons.
Years after the vaccine’s development, Jonas Salk would recount that sometimes he would meet people who would not even know what polio was – which he found tremendously gratifying. But the events of this past year, with all the ups and downs of coronavirus vaccine research, have proved that the history of polio’s defeat is worth remembering.
Nine companies developing a coronavirus vaccine recently joined forces to jointly promise that they would not rush anything to market until and unless the clearly delineated standards for safety and efficacy are met.
But should a modern-day Cutter incident happen again with a coronavirus vaccine, the public’s already shaky faith in vaccines could easily crumble further, impeding the effort to get as many people quickly immunized against COVID-19 as possible.
Bringing this pandemic to an end will require more than the government’s approval of one or more coronavirus vaccines that work. Coordinating a widespread vaccination campaign will also demand the navigation of logistics, economics and politics amid an equitable approach to the distribution of these new vaccines and the public’s willingness to be inoculated.
This final push will, in addition, require the often uneasy partnership among the government, the private sector and – as is true today with massive contributions from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other charitable sources – philanthropy.
The Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a remarkably different view of when Americans can expect a coronavirus vaccine to be ready for the general public than what President Donald Trump has been telling them.
As recently as Tuesday night Trump claimed "we’re within weeks of getting it. You know, could be three weeks, four weeks, but we think we have it."
Dr. Robert Redfield Wednesday told a Senate committee a coronavirus vaccine would not be "generally available to the American public" until "probably" the "late second quarter, third quarter 2021," meaning around late spring or the summer of next year.
He did say a coronavirus vaccine would be initially available in "very limited supply" in November or December, still farther out than what Trump has been touting. It would "have to be prioritized," Redfield added, for "first responders and those at greater risk for death."
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Redfield also said there are about 80 million Americans with "significant comorbidities that put themselves at risk." It's unclear if he was blaming those people for their diseases.
Some Florida Republicans have already lost their seats thank to the things President Donald Trump has done and said.
The president's attacks on mail-in voting, women and the island of Puerto Rico are being cited as factors in GOP election losses already this year in the state, which Trump must win to secure re-election, reported Politico.
“There’s a lot of nervousness from Republicans over the new wave of Democrats, their ability to turn out voters and their coordination," said former GOP state Rep. Mike Miller, who lost a county commission race in Orange County. "It should be an eye-opener for Republicans."
Miller said the state's GOP has long held an advantage in absentee ballots, but the president's conspiracy theories about mail-in voting has led to a sharp drop-off for Republicans and much stronger returns for Democrats, who have promoted the practice during the pandemic.
“The primary was a dry run for what we’re going to do in November,” said one Biden campaign official. “What Orange [County] has is a new and emerging Democratic population — Latinos, progressive whites, working-class voters — that we could not turn out before. We can now. We have more tools in the toolbox.”
Fast-growing county has backed the Democrat in each of the last five presidential elections, but voter turnout has traditionally been low there and other Democratic-leaning counties -- until this year.
“If you told me four years ago that Seminole [County] would go blue, I would’ve laughed in your face, but it’s changing,” said GOP operative Anthony Pedicini. “It’s spreading from Orlando [in Orange County] into the surrounding areas. Just look at the highway system, it’s like a heart pumping blue blood in every direction from Orlando."
It's not just Puerto Ricans and other Hispanic voters, who are helping to fuel population growth in the Orlando area.
“It’s suburban whites," Pedicini said. "We’re losing too many suburban women.”
Betsy VanderLey, who lost her re-election bid for the Orange County commission, said new arrivals were turning the area increasingly Democratic, and they're motivated to vote.
“Four years ago, when I ran, my district was the last Republican stronghold of Orange County and there was only one Democrat on the [seven-member] board of county commissioners," VanderLey said. "Now there will be just one [Republican] left. The Democrats are clearly energized. If the Republican turnout in November mirrors what we saw in the primary, it doesn’t bode well for Trump in this county.”
This Tuesday, lawyer and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz filed a $300 million lawsuit against CNN for what he says is a quote taken out of context by the network during the impeachment trial of President Trump, Variety reports.
Dershowitz was defending Trump from the charge that he had abused his power by allegedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Bidens in a "quid pro quo" scheme.
“The only thing that would make a quid pro quo unlawful is if the quo were in some way illegal,” Dershowitz argued. “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
Dershowitz's lawsuit accuses CNN of misrepresenting his remarks by playing only the latter portion of the quote, ignoring his stipulation that the president cannot break the law, thus falsely painting a picture of an “intellectual who had lost his mind.”
"The suit acknowledges that CNN hosts Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper did play the entire quote," Variety reports. "But it also says three other CNN commentators — Joe Lockhart, John Berman and Paul Begala — misrepresented Dershowitz’s position, making it seem as though he was arguing that the president could do literally anything to get re-elected."
A 73-year-old woman who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016 now says she won't consider voting for him again this year -- and comedian Stephen Colbert gets partial credit for changing her mind.
In an interview with Slate, lifelong Colorado Republican Helen Lyon said that she used to feel annoyed when her Democratic husband would watch Colbert, who has made mockery of the president a staple of his show on CBS.
"I would kind of get ticked off because he was making fun of my president," she said.
However, over time she found that Colbert would recite shocking things that the president had said that were not being covered by conservative media outlets.
"Did [Trump] really say that?" she said she found herself asking. "Did he really tweet that? Did he really do that?"
She did some research to discover that Trump actually did say the things Colbert claimed -- and she began to question whether she could support him again.
But what really pushed her over the edge, she explained to Slate, was his response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"When COVID came, and the way that he handled it and just said it was going to go away, I guess that was finally the minute that I was able to step out of that cognitive dissonance and say, ‘I cannot -- I cannot -- vote for this man,'" she said.
In May 2019, President Donald Trump made an emergency declaration in order to complete the sale of more than $8 million worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan — a declaration made despite vehement objections from Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. House Democrats have continued to speak out about the sale, including House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel, who, this week, stated that the U.S. State Department, under the Trump Administration, tried to “hide the truth” about the civilian casualties from Congress last year.
Engel, in his statement, was highly critical of R. Clarke Cooper, who serves as assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs and reports to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Cooper is scheduled to appear before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in a hearing on Wednesday, September 16.
“The records we received today show just how hard the State Department wanted to hide the truth about last year’s phony emergency declaration,” Engel stated. “The picture is starting to come into focus: a top priority at Mike Pompeo’s State Department was to go around Congress to sell weapons, and his senior aides worked hard after the fact to obscure their indifference to civilian casualties.”
On July 10, according to Newsweek, Cooper sent a memo to the Office of the State Department Inspector General — and in that memo, Cooper recommended that the Office “consider removing” an annex on civilian casualties from a report. Cooper told Sandra Lewis, assistant inspector general for inspections at the State Department OIG, that following that recommendation would “allow that report to be finalized, briefed to Congress and released to the public.”
Cooper and Joshua Dorosin, deputy legal adviser for the State Department, recommended that parts of that report be redacted because of “potential executive privilege concerns.” But the State Department OIG, in response to that request, said that “citing ‘potential executive privilege concerns’ does not properly invoke a claim of privilege that would justify the withholding of information that is otherwise appropriately released to the Congress and/or the public.”
As Covid-19 relief for jobless and hungry Americans, collapsing small businesses, and state and local governments languishes in the Senate GOP's legislative graveyard, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday further advanced his years-long project of dragging U.S. federal courts to the right by ramming through three more of President Donald Trump's lifetime judicial nominees and teed up votes on several others.
Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, noted on Twitter that the latest confirmations came four months to the day after the Democrat-controlled House passed the Heroes Act, a $3 trillion coronavirus relief package that McConnell dismissed as an "unserious liberal wish list" and blocked from receiving a vote in the Senate.
"Everyone in America should be outraged that this is how Mitch McConnell is spending the Senate's time amid a pandemic," tweeted Gupta.
In a separate tweet Wednesday morning, Gupta urged the U.S. public to "pay attention" as McConnell and Trump's court takeover proceeds apace amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis and resulting economic collapse—to which Senate Republicans have responded by putting forth legislation decried as piecemeal and wholly inadequate.
"As McConnell blocks the Heroes Act, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, election funding, and dozens of civil rights bills, his priority today (amid the pandemic) will be confirming three more Trump judges after confirming three yesterday," said Gupta. "It's an outrage."
While Senate Democrats don't have the numbers to block Trump's judicial nominees, few even bothered to object Wednesday to the confirmations of John Holcomb, Stanley Blumenfeld, and Mark Scarsi to lifetime positions on the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Just 12 Democratic senators voted against Holcomb and Scarsi, and only four voted against Blumenfeld.
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The confirmations came days after major court decisions laid bare the real-world consequences of Trump and McConnell's takeover of the U.S. judiciary, which will impact key areas of American society—from climate policy to voting rights—for decades to come.
Last Friday, as Common Dreamsreported, the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a Florida requirement that state residents with past felony convictions pay off all court fines and fees before they are allowed to register to vote—a ruling made possible by Trump's appointees.
"The only reason it was upheld was because Donald Trump flipped the 11th Circuit with five Trump judges," Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman toldDemocracy Now! on Tuesday. "And this is why Mitch McConnell in the Republican Senate is so intent on confirming judges and doing nothing else. This week, McConnell is going to confirm eight more judges to the federal bench, but they’re not doing anything else to help the American people."
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Late Sunday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit—which Trump also flipped with right-wing judges—upheld the White House's push to end "temporary protected status" (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan.
"Without Congressional action, this will lead to devastating moral and economic consequences not just for TPS holders but for their families, communities, and for the entire country," Peniel Ibe, policy engagement coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee, warned in response to the ruling.
This Wednesday morning, President Trumpfired off a tweet thanking people for the "great reviews" regarding his appearance at an ABC News town hall on Tuesday, where he faced tough questions and gave sometimes incoherent and misleading answers.
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According to The Washington Post, Trump "retreated to false or misleading talking points that he offers in his usual venues" at least 24 times during the broadcast. Unsurprisingly, Trump's critics on Twitter didn't think his performance was as stellar as he thinks it was.
A staggering 35% of adults 18 to 39 wrongly believe the Holocaust is a myth or has been exaggerated, or say they don't think they've even heard about it, according to a new study. The level of ignorance is being called "shocking and saddening."
More than one in 10 (11%) falsely believe the Jews caused the Holocaust, and almost two thirds do not know that 6 million jews were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
"Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust," The Guardian reports.
The prevalence of Nazi symbols and Holocaust denialism is quite strong.
"More than half (56%) said they had seen Nazi symbols on their social media platforms and/or in their communities, and almost half (49%) had seen Holocaust denial or distortion posts on social media or elsewhere online."
The study was commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which says it is "the first-ever 50-state survey on Holocaust knowledge among Millennials and Gen Z."
In New York "an astounding 19 percent of respondents felt Jews caused the Holocaust; followed by 16 percent in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Montana and 15 percent in Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Nevada and New Mexico."
The organization says the "surprising state-by-state results highlight a worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge, a growing problem as fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors – eyewitnesses to a state-sponsored genocide – are alive to share the lessons of the Holocaust."
Wisconsin was rated the highest in Holocaust awareness among the 18 to 39 year-olds, and Arkansas the lowest.
“The results are both shocking and saddening and they underscore why we must act now while Holocaust survivors are still with us to voice their stories,” Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference says. “We need to understand why we aren’t doing better in educating a younger generation about the Holocaust and the lessons of the past. This needs to serve as a wake-up call to us all, and as a road map of where government officials need to act.”
The group says 11,000 people across all 50 states were surveyed.
