Tuesday, May 5, 2020
'Kind of Like Large Scale Negligent Homicide': As Trump Urges Reopenings, CDC Report Warns of Surge in Covid-19 Deaths
Internal CDC document projects U.S. coronavirus deaths could reach 3,000 per day by June 1—nearly double the current daily death toll.
by
Jake Johnson, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/04/kind-large-scale-negligent-homicide-trump-urges-reopenings-cdc-report-warns-surge
As President Donald Trump publicly encourages states to reopen their economies against the advice of public health experts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is privately projecting that U.S. Covid-19 deaths could reach a staggering 3,000 per day by June 1—nearly double the current daily death toll of more than 1,700.
The New York Times on Monday obtained an internal CDC document (pdf) predicting around 200,000 new coronavirus cases each day by the end May, up from around 25,000 new cases per day at present.
"The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation right back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways with cases rising so rapidly that the health care system is overloaded," the Times reported.
The CDC projection came to light just hours after Trump claimed during a Fox News town hall that the U.S. has been "successful" in limiting the death toll from the virus. More than 1.1 million people have contracted Covid-19 in the U.S. and nearly 68,000 have died. The virus has killed at least 1,000 people across the nation every day since April 2.
"The administration should be tried for crimes against humanity," Mairav Zonszein wrote in response to the CDC data.
Mother Jones reporter Dan Friedman ripped Trump for publicly urging states to reopen their economies even as his administration predicts a massive surge in coronavirus deaths behind closed doors. Georgia, Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, and other states have begun to lifting social distancing restrictions in recent days despite their lack of adequate testing equipment.
"Keeping dire internal projections private while publicly pushing states to 'reopen' due to electoral considerations is kind of like large scale negligent homicide," Friedman tweeted.
While a number of states have initiated the reopening of their economies, a new analysis published Monday by the Center for American Progress found that none of the nation's fifty states has reached the crucial kind of thresholds public health experts say would be needed to safely do so.
"Based on evidence-based thresholds for incidence and testing, no state is ready to substantially relax its stay-at-home order," wrote Topher Spiro and Emily Gee, the authors of the analysis.
Trump White House steps up return to work drive
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/04/covi-m04.html
By Bryan Dyne
4 May 2020
President Donald Trump’s virtual town hall meeting last night marked a new stage in his administration’s drive to force the American population back to work amidst the spreading coronavirus pandemic. That it was held at the Lincoln Memorial, which honors the fight for equality which the 16th president embodied, gave the event an even more politically obscene character.
The primary purpose of the event, titled “America Together: Returning to Work” and moderated by Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, was to justify forcing workers back to work without any real protection against the deadly virus. It was held after a weekend of meetings at Camp David with Trump’s top advisors, reportedly including Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, to map out the administration’s pivot from the public health disaster to the resumption of corporate profit-making.
While announcing no measures to combat the pandemic, which continues to spread across the country, Trump opened by claiming, “I think we’ll have a vaccine by the end of the year,” implying that it was now safe for people to be exposed to the virus. Neither Trump nor the moderators made any mention of the warnings by medical experts internationally that a vaccine would likely take at least 18 months to develop.
He then proceeded to demand that schools, colleges and universities reopen by September, and boasted of his executive order to keep meat packing plants open even as the pandemic infects and kills large numbers of workers. When asked about employees worried about getting infected, he said, “The employees have to want to work. If they don't want to work, that's one thing. But they are working and they need the money.”
Trump tied any possibility of federal support to states and municipalities facing economic collapse to a payroll tax cut, calling it “essential” to any piece of legislation he would sign. A payroll tax cut would simultaneously provide a further windfall to corporations and the rich and slash revenues that support Social Security and Medicare. The gutting of these core social programs has long been a goal of the financial oligarchy and the Republican right.
There was no suggestion by the president, the moderators or the video-taped and carefully vetted questioners that social distancing measures should be kept in place and non-essential businesses remain closed until the disease was contained.
The continued rise in confirmed coronavirus cases across the country, however, underscores the fact that there is no scientific or medical basis for Trump’s drive to force people back to work. The number of new cases in states, including Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas and Wyoming, is trending upwards even as they are reopening, while the number of new cases in Alabama, Florida, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia has stayed relatively constant.
No state has seen a consistent reduction in the number of new COVID-19 cases over the past 14 days, ostensibly the criterion to reopen under Trump’s official guidelines.
Just as the number of cases has continued to rise in the United States, currently standing at just under 1.2 million, the number of deaths has also continued to climb, currently at more than 68,500. This includes more than 3,000 over the weekend. Internationally, there are more than 3.5 million officially confirmed cases and nearly 250,000 recorded deaths.
These figures are why Dr. Mike Ryan of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday insisted that to safely loosen social distancing measures and reopen businesses, there had to be in place the capacity for comprehensive testing, contact-tracing and quarantining, something that exists nowhere in the United States. Ryan also said that exiting from “public health and social measures… requires a very careful, well-planned process that’s based on, number one, understanding the exact epidemiology of the disease in your country or at subnational level; so do you understand the problem, do you understand where the virus is?”
This is the basic question that is still largely unknown across the world and especially in the United States. One fact rarely mentioned by the media is that as testing has been expanded, the percentage of positive cases to the number of tests has stayed constant. This indicates both that the pandemic is still spreading and that the current level of testing does not capture the full extent of the pandemic in the country.
This has not stopped every section of the American political and media establishment from supporting the reopening drive. The Wall Street Journal on Friday published an editorial titled, “Testing Isn’t Everything,” with the tag line, “It won’t banish the coronavirus, and it’s not an excuse for not reopening,” directly contradicting the advice the WHO has been giving for months.
The Democratic-aligned Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, published an editorial on Sunday under the headline, “Managing the reopening.”
At a recent news conference, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, lashed out at a reporter who asked whether or not the state had enough testing to reopen. He retorted, “You’re still obsessed with testing.” He then demanded that people focus on “the need to wear masks, the social distancing and protecting our most vulnerable,” in order to cover up the fact that the pandemic is still spreading in the state.
The position of the Trump administration itself was spelled out very explicitly by the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner last Wednesday, when he asserted on Fox that, “We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this and I think we’ve achieved all the different milestones that are needed. So the federal government rose to the challenge, and this is a great success story and I think that that’s really what needs to be told.”
What success story? Yesterday, in a discussion with Fox’s Chris Wallace, White House Coronavirus Task Force Response Coordinator Deborah Birx backtracked from the administration’s previous statement that there would only be 60,000 fatalities from the pandemic, claiming that “our projections have always been between 100,000 and 240,000 American lives lost.” She added that the estimate applies only “with full mitigation.”
Neither Birx nor Wallace batted an eye at the staggering figure, which is more than the number of American deaths in World War I and about half those in World War II. And, as Birx openly admits, this projection holds only if physical distancing is maintained.
The policies being advocated by Birx, Polis, Kushner and Trump amount to developing some form of “herd immunity.” By not testing and contact-tracing to know where the virus is, while simultaneously ordering everyone back into the factories, offices and workplaces, they are setting up the majority of the population to be exposed to the deadly contagion.
Even under the most optimistic scenarios, millions will likely die. The most conservative estimates of the infectiousness of the virus state that half of the population will need to become infected and successfully fight off the virus before it will be unable to spread. At a death rate of just 1 percent, about 1.65 million people would die, double the number of soldiers killed in the Civil War.
This at the same time assumes that everyone gets adequate health care. While the medical infrastructure in the most hard-hit places in the US—New York and New Jersey—has not yet totally collapsed, it no doubt would if the number of cases suddenly increased two-, five- or ten-fold. At that point, data from Italy and Wuhan suggests that up to five percent of people die because there are not enough ventilators and other critical supplies to go around. In this scenario, 8.25 million would die.
Moreover, whether or not a recovered patient remains immune to the coronavirus is still an open question. Immunity from the SARS pandemic in 2002–2004 lasted on average two years, which means the only reason that virus did not become seasonal is that it was contained. There is concern among epidemiologists that the current coronavirus pandemic will become seasonal, and because there is no immunity or vaccine, it will kill some percentage of the population every year.
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'Time for the Agency to Come Clean': FCC Ordered to Release Detailed Data From Fake Net Neutrality Comments
Judge Lorna Schofield of the Southern District Court of New York has ordered the Federal Communications Commission to turn over server logs and other records pertaining to the fake comments that poured into the agency's system in 2017 as it moved to repeal net neutrality protections.
The New York Times sued the FCC in 2018 demanding that the agency release data logs that could shed light on who was behind the fake comments. The newspaper filed the lawsuit after the FCC refused to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the records on the grounds that revealing IP addresses from the fake comments would be an "unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."
But Schofield ruled (pdf) last Thursday that the FCC, headed by former Verizon attorney Ajit Pai, failed to make a "persuasive" case for withholding the information from the public and said the records could help determine whether the agency's comment process is "vulnerable to corruption."
"In this case, the public interest in disclosure is great because the importance of the comment process to agency rulemaking is great," Schofield wrote. "If genuine public comment is drowned out by a fraudulent facsimile, then the notice-and-comment process has failed."
As of this writing, Pai has yet to comment publicly on the court's ruling.
In a tweet on Friday, Democratic FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said "it's time for the agency to come clean." Rosenworcel was the only FCC commissioner to dissent from the agency's refusal in 2018 to comply with the FOIA request for public comment records.
"Something here is rotten," Rosenworcel said at the time.
The FCC's widely unpopular plan to repeal net neutrality protections, which took effect in 2018, garnered more than 22 million public comments. According to the New York attorney general's office, more than 9 million of the comments may have been submitted with stolen identities.
Gizmodo reported last year that "in May 2017, dozens of Americans came forward with claims that their identities had been used, without their consent, in a campaign to inundate the Federal Communications Commission with public comments critical of [net neutrality]."
"What was most curious, however, is that each of these people had supposedly submitted the very same comment; a veritable word salad of telecom industry talking points," Gizmodo reported. "In particular, the comment was a rebuke of the Obama administration's exercise of 'unprecedented regulatory power' in pursuit of net neutrality, a policy which it accused of 'smothering innovation, damaging the American economy, and obstructing job creation.'"
Trump and Pompeo’s “big lie”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/04/pers-m04.html
4 May 2020
In a modern-day version of the “big lie,” the Trump administration is claiming that the COVID-19 pandemic is the product of the deliberate actions of the Chinese government.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump, in a “town hall” with Fox News, accused China of taking actions specifically intended to infect millions of Europeans and Americans.
After repeating the false claim that the novel coronavirus originated in a research laboratory in Wuhan, which he said China tried to cover up, Trump declared: “They didn’t stop people going into the USA and all over the world... They said, hey look, this is going to have a huge impact on China, and we might as well let the rest of the world” become infected.
“They allowed this to go into our country, they allowed it to go into other countries,” Trump said.
Such claims have been asserted repeatedly in recent days by top administration officials. On Sunday morning, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that there is “enormous evidence” that the virus originated in a Wuhan laboratory, adding, “Remember, China has a history of infecting the world.”
In a separate interview Sunday, White House advisor Peter Navarro declared that China “seeded the world with what became the pandemic.” He added, “I did write a book in 2006 called The Coming China Wars. On page 150, I predicted that the Chinese Communist Party would create a viral pandemic that would kill millions of people worldwide. It is now beyond my wildest nightmare what China has inflicted on the world.”
These are brazen and unsubstantiated lies. Neither Trump, Pompeo, Navarro or anyone else has provided a shred of evidence to substantiate their claims.
The method recalls that of Nazi Germany, which collapsed 75 years ago this month. Hitler, who committed suicide on April 30, 1945, amid the rubble of the Third Reich, used it to justify the invasions of Poland and Czechoslovakia and other crimes.
The aim of the “big lie” is to intimidate through its sheer brazenness. According to Wikipedia, it “is a propaganda technique and logical fallacy. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so ‘colossal’ that no one would believe that someone ‘could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.’”
Trump’s utilization of this method comes at the very point where the American government is abandoning any systematic effort to slow the spread of the pandemic, effectively allowing large sections of the population to become infected.
The Trump administration is seeking to provide itself with an escape hatch. Whatever happens, it is China’s fault. Knowing that its program will lead to a rapid and substantial growth of fatalities, the White House is hoping that when the butcher’s bill of its disastrous policies comes due, it will be able to direct social tensions outward against China.
These allegations have a definite logic. If the Chinese government deliberately allowed and encouraged the coronavirus to infect the United States and Europe, this would be an act of biological warfare that goes far beyond the terrorist attacks of September 11. It would mean that China had carried out an act of war against the United States.
With unbridled recklessness, in order to justify its own criminal indifference to the lives of millions of people, the Trump administration is setting up a situation that can make military confrontation with China unavoidable.
These claims are undermined even by the findings of Trump’s own intelligence agencies. The New York Times noted in an article published April 30, “Most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found, and scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting, as was the case with H.I.V., Ebola and SARS.”
The administration’s lies, however, are facilitated by the media and the political establishment as a whole, which do not expose them as fabrications but rather present them as legitimate positions. Whatever differences they may have, the anti-China campaign serves definite geo-strategic interests and domestic political imperatives supported by the entire ruling class.
In a Sunday editorial, the Democratic Party-aligned Washington Post condemned “China’s effort to avoid accountability for the novel coronavirus pandemic through a global propaganda campaign.” It declared, “The response to such belligerence cannot be appeasement.” Last month, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden released an ad attacking Trump for “rolling over” to the Chinese government in relation to the coronavirus.
All variants of the anti-China narrative—the theory that China deliberately created the virus as a bio-weapon, the claim that the virus escaped from a laboratory and the allegations that China concealed knowledge of the disease from the world—are contradicted by publicly available information.
The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission publicly reported a cluster of pneumonia cases on December 31, 2019. China identified the virus that causes COVID-19 on January 7, 2020, and Chinese scientists warned that the disease could be capable of human-to-human transmission.
But it was not until nearly eight weeks after the first public statements by Chinese health officials that any systematic testing for COVID-19 began in the United States. The US had conducted only 1,000 COVID-19 tests by March 4, two months after the first warnings by Chinese officials. China, South Korea and other Asian countries had carried out millions of tests by early February.
Even as the virus was ripping through the United States, Trump, the media and Congress systematically downplayed the significance of the disease. As late as February 28, Trump was still claiming that the coronavirus “is going to disappear” like “a miracle.” He condemned those saying that COVID-19 was rapidly spreading throughout the country, declaring, “This is their new hoax.”
The Trump administration, acting as the representative of the financial oligarchy, did nothing to protect the population from the pandemic. After utilizing the crisis to orchestrate a massive handout to Wall Street, the ruling class has launched a back-to-work campaign that will cost tens or hundreds of thousands of lives.
The “big lie” against China is both an excuse for its own criminal negligence and an attempt to cover for the criminal policies it is now implementing.
Andre Damon
Trump Says He Won't Approve Covid-19 Package Without Tax Cut That Offers Zero Relief for 30 Million Newly Unemployed
"'Payroll tax cut' is code for 'gut Social Security and Medicare's dedicated funding, then demand benefit cuts.' Democrats must stand strong and continue blocking Trump's terrible idea."
by
Jake Johnson, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/04/trump-says-he-wont-approve-covid-19-package-without-tax-cut-offers-zero-relief-30
President Donald Trump on Sunday said he will not approve another badly needed Covid-19 stimulus package if it doesn't include a payroll tax cut, a policy that would strike a blow to Social Security and Medicare funding while offering no relief for the more than 30 million people who have lost their jobs over the past six weeks.
"I told Steve just today, we're not doing anything unless we get a payroll tax cut," Trump said during a Fox News town hall Sunday night, referring to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. "That is so important to the success of our country."
The town hall was the second time in less than a week that the president has proposed a payroll tax cut as a centerpiece of the next relief legislation, which is being negotiated by the White House and congressional leaders as the U.S. barrels toward an unemployment rate not seen since the Great Depression.
An NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist survey released last week found that half of all Americans said they or someone in their household has lost a job or seen their hours slashed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Economists have noted that a payroll tax cut—unlike additional direct payments, which Trump has opposed—would do nothing for those who have been thrown out of work by the coronavirus crisis.
University of Michigan economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers wrote in a New York Times op-ed in March that a payroll tax cut would give "the biggest breaks to those with the biggest paychecks, and delivers nothing to those who have lost their pay."
"And it's a slow infusion of cash," Stevenson and Wolfers added, "dripping out paycheck by paycheck."
Additionally, advocacy groups have warned that a payroll tax cut represents a threat to Social Security and Medicare.
"'Payroll tax cut' is code for 'gut Social Security and Medicare's dedicated funding, then demand benefit cuts,'" Social Security Works tweeted Sunday night. "Democrats must stand strong and continue blocking Trump's terrible idea."
Trump's comments came in the early stages of talks over a "Phase Four" coronavirus stimulus package that advocates and experts say is urgently needed to stem mass layoffs, forestall a looming nationwide housing crisis, and avert a second Great Depression.
On top of a payroll tax cut, Republican congressional leaders and the Trump White House are demanding that any future stimulus measure include legal immunity for corporations whose workers contract Covid-19 on the job.
Progressives, meanwhile, are calling for a relief package that addresses the needs of frontline workers, distributes direct $2,000 monthly payments to all U.S. households, provides emergency funding for the U.S. Postal Service, expands Medicare to cover the unemployed and uninsured, cancels rent and mortgage payments, and more.
Indivisible, a progressive advocacy organization, is pressuring members of Congress to vote against any stimulus bill that doesn't provide sufficient relief to the vulnerable.
"If the bill doesn't put people first, they should vote no," the group tweeted Saturday.
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