Seabass wrote:

Secrecy and spin: How Florida’s governor misled the public on the COVID-19 pandemic


Throughout the COVID-19 crisis in Florida, Gov. Ron DeathSantis’ administration engaged in a pattern of spin and concealment that misled the public on the gravest health threat the state has ever faced, a South Florida Sun Sentinel investigation has found.

DeathSantis, who owes his job to early support from President Donald Trump, imposed an approach in line with the views of the president and his powerful base of supporters. The administration suppressed unfavorable facts, dispensed dangerous misinformation, dismissed public health professionals, and promoted the views of scientific dissenters who supported the governor’s approach to the disease.

The DeathSantis administration’s approach to managing COVID-19 information carries costs. It supports a climate in which people proudly disdain masks, engage in dangerous group activities that could spread the disease, and brush aside information that conflicts with their political views. With partygoers packing Florida bars and holiday travelers filling hotels and guest rooms, the state faces a few difficult months before the possible relief of vaccines.

These findings are based on interviews with more than 50 people, including scientists, doctors, political leaders, employees of the state health department, and other state officials, as well as more than 4,000 pages of documents:

• The Florida Department of Health’s county-level spokespeople were ordered in September to stop issuing public statements about COVID-19 until after the Nov. 3 election.
• The DeathSantis administration refused to reveal details about the first suspected cases in Florida, then denied the virus was spreading from person to person — despite mounting evidence that it was.
• State officials withheld information about infections in schools, prisons, hospitals and nursing homes, relenting only under pressure or legal action from family members, advocacy groups and journalists.
• The DeathSantis administration brushed aside scientists and doctors who advocated conventional approaches to fighting the virus, preferring scientists on the fringes who backed the governor’s positions.
• The governor’s spokesman regularly takes to Twitter to spread misinformation about the disease, including the false claim that COVID was less deadly than the flu.
• The governor highlighted statistics that would paint the rosiest picture possible and attempted to cast doubt on the validity of Florida’s rising death toll.

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https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-coronavirus-florida-desantis-spin-ss-prem-20201203-tyjmgkos6bd7vo7vnripqliany-htmlstory.html

‘We want them infected’: Trump appointee demanded ‘herd immunity’ strategy, emails reveal

A top Trump appointee repeatedly urged top health officials to adopt a "herd immunity" approach to Covid-19 and allow millions of Americans to be infected by the virus, according to internal emails obtained by a House watchdog and shared with POLITICO.

“There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD," then-science adviser Paul Alexander wrote on July 4 to his boss, Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, and six other senior officials.

"Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected…" Alexander added.

"[I]t may be that it will be best if we open up and flood the zone and let the kids and young folk get infected" in order to get "natural immunity…natural exposure," Alexander wrote on July 24 to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, Caputo and eight other senior officials. Caputo subsequently asked Alexander to research the idea, according to emails obtained by the House Oversight Committee's select subcommittee on coronavirus.

Alexander also argued that colleges should stay open to allow Covid-19 infections to spread, lamenting in a July 27 email to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield that “we essentially took off the battlefield the most potent weapon we had...younger healthy people, children, teens, young people who we needed to fastly [sic] infect themselves, spread it around, develop immunity, and help stop the spread.”

If COVID-19 Vaccines Bring An End To The Pandemic, America Has Immigrants To Thank


Hungarian-born scientist Katalin Karikó believed in the potential of messenger RNA — the genetic molecule at the heart of two new COVID-19 vaccines — even when almost no one else did.

Karikó began working with RNA as a student in Hungary. When funding for her job there ran out, Kariko immigrated to Philadelphia in 1985. Over the years, she's been rejected for grant after grant, threatened with deportation and demoted from her faculty job by a university that saw her research as a dead end.

Through it all, Karikó just kept working.

If new COVID-19 vaccines help life in the U.S. get back to normal next year, the nation will have many immigrants such as Karikó to thank. Scientists and investors born outside the U.S. played crucial roles in the development of vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. It's a remarkable vindication for the argument — often made by the biotech industry — that innovation depends on the free movement of people and ideas.

Now Karikó is a senior vice president at BioNTech, the company that partnered with Pfizer to make the first COVID-19 vaccine to get emergency authorization in the United States. BioNTech is a company based in Germany and led by immigrants from Turkey.

Immigrants are playing key roles in nearly every aspect of the vaccine effort in the United States. Even the chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's vaccine distribution program, is an immigrant — Moncef Slaoui, the former head of GlaxoSmithKline's vaccines department.

President Trump often takes credit for the record-breaking speed of vaccine development — and for "unleashing America's scientific genius," as he puts it.

But people in the biotech industry say that American genius depends on a pool of global talent.

"We are an intellectual magnet for the best of the best from around the world," said Jeremy Levin, CEO of Ovid Therapeutics and chairman of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the U.S. industry trade group.

Levin, who was born in South Africa, said high-skilled immigrants are attracted to the U.S. for its great educational institutions — and for its biotech industry that's willing to take big risks.

"We in America are willing to take a chance," Levin said. "It is the willingness to fail in the endeavor to find a medicine that could make the difference to millions of people around the world. And that characteristic is what's drawn so many from abroad ... who are just going to have a go at it."

Levin said nearly one-third of the biotech workforce here was born outside the United States. If you also count the children of immigrants, he said, it's roughly half. But Levin worries it's gotten harder in recent years for those people to get here.

The Trump administration has placed more restrictions on immigrants who want to study and work in this country. Immigration hardliners accuse pharmaceutical companies and other tech-driven industries of using foreign workers to hold down wages.

The president says he wants to protect American jobs and often talks about immigrants as a threat and a burden. That's how he talks about the coronavirus as well, referring to it as the "China virus."

"It's a very racist comment," said Dr. Victor Dzau, president of the National Academy of Medicine, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. He's an expert on global health who was born in China.

Seabass wrote:
Meanwhile, all the xenophobic nationalist assholes are refusing to wear masks and sending death threats to government officials who order lockdowns...

A group of armed extremists reportedly clashed with law enforcement officers at the Oregon State Capitol on Monday.

The incident occurred during a so-called "Stop the Steal" rally outside the Capitol building that was taking place as Oregon lawmakers held a special legislative session to consider measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Those of Us Who Don’t Die Are Going to Quit”: A Crush of Patients, Dwindling Supplies and the Nurse Who Lost Hope

Almost a year into the pandemic, supply shortages remain so severe that nurse Kristen Cline reuses her N95 for several shifts while her hospital buckles, patients suffer and folks nearby socialize maskless as if the pandemic were already over.


Nurse Kristen Cline was working a 12-hour shift in October at the Royal C. Johnson Veterans Memorial Hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, when a code blue rang through the halls. A patient in an isolation room was dying of a coronavirus that had raged for eight months across the country before it made the state the brightest red dot in a nation of hot spots.

Cline knew she needed to protect herself before entering the room, where a second COVID-19 patient was trembling under the covers, sobbing. She reached for the crinkled and dirty N95 mask she had reused for days.

In her post-death report, Cline described how the patient fell victim to a hospital in chaos. The crash cart and breathing bag that should have been in the room were missing. The patient wasn’t tethered to monitors that could have alerted nurses sooner. He had cried out for help, but the duty nurse was busy with other patients, packed two to a room meant for one.

“He died scared and alone. It didn’t have to be that way. We failed him — not the staff, we did everything we could,” she said. “The system failed him.”

The system also failed her. Since the pandemic’s early weeks, Cline had complained that the Department of Veterans Affairs, which runs the nation’s largest hospital system, wasn’t doing enough to protect its front-line health care workers. She had filed complaints about inadequate personal protective equipment with the agency’s inspector general and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but they had done nothing. Many months into a pandemic, they were still having to ration masks and being asked to reuse them for as many as five shifts.