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California has a $5.2bn plan to pay off unpaid rent accrued during the pandemic
California is pursuing an ambitious plan to pay off the entirety of unpaid rent from low-income tenants who fell behind during the pandemic, in what could constitute the largest ever rent relief program in the US.The state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is negotiating with legislators and said the $5.2bn plan would pay landlords all of what they are owed while giving renters a clean slate.If successful, the rent forgiveness plan would amount to an extraordinary form of aid in the largest state in the US, which has suffered from a major housing crisis and severe economic inequality long before Covid-19.An estimated 900,000 renters in California owe an average of $4,600 in back rent, according to a recent analysis. Without aggressive protections and relief, experts say the state would experience a tsunami of evictions and a dramatic worsening of its homelessness crisis. Even with restrictions on evictions in place since March 2020, vulnerable renters have continued to be pushed out of their homes while out of work and unable to pay the high costs of rent in the state.Federal eviction protections are due to expire at the end of June, as are California’s regulations which applied to more renters. Lawmakers, who are currently negotiating over the state’s roughly $260bn operating budget, are debating whether to extend the restrictions on evictions beyond June. The vast majority of people who have applied for relief have not yet received funds, according to state officials, which is why tenant groups are pushing for protections to remain in place.“The expectation for people to be up and at ’em and ready to pay rent on 1 July is wholeheartedly unfair,” said Kelli Lloyd, a 43-year-old single mother, to the Associated Press. She said she had not worked consistently since the pandemic began in March 2020.Lloyd, a member of the advocacy group Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, is supposed to pay $1,924 a month for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom rent-controlled apartment in the Crenshaw district of south Los Angeles. But she said she was $30,000 behind after not working for most of the last year to care for her two children as daycare centers closed and schools halted in-person learning.That debt will probably be covered by the government. But Lloyd said she recently lost a job at a real estate brokerage and had yet to find another one. She is worried she could be evicted if the protections expire.“Simply because the state has opened back up doesn’t mean people have access to their jobs,” she said.Meanwhile, in the wine country area of Sonoma county, property manager Keith Becker told the AP that 14 tenants are more than $100,000 behind in rent payments. It’s put financial pressure on the owners, who Becker says have “resigned themselves to it”. He argued that the eviction protections should end. The $5.2bn fund to pay off people’s rent comes from multiple federal aid packages approved by Congress. Jason Elliott, a senior counselor to Newsom on housing and homelessness, said that figure appeared to be more than enough to cover all rent debts in the state.But the state has been slow to distribute that money, and it is unlikely it can spend it all by 30 June. A report from the California department housing and community development showed that of the $490m in requests for rental assistance through 31 May, just $32m has been paid. That does not include the 12 cities and 10 counties that run their own rental assistance programs.“It’s challenging to set up a new, big program overnight,” said assemblyman David Chiu, a Democrat from San Francisco and chair of the assembly housing and community development committee. “It has been challenging to educate millions of struggling tenants and landlords on what the law is.”While employment among middle- and high-wage jobs has exceeded pre-pandemic levels, employment rates for Californians earning less than $27,000 a year are down more than 38% since January 2020, according to Opportunity Insights, an economic tracker based at Harvard University.“The stock market may be fine, we may be technically reopened, but people in low-wage jobs, which are disproportionately people of color, are not back yet,” said Madeline Howard, senior attorney for the Western Center on Law and Poverty.Some housing advocates are asking the state to keep the eviction ban in place until the unemployment rate among low-wage workers has dropped to pre-pandemic levels. It is similar to how state officials would impose restrictions on businesses in counties where Covid-19 infection rates were higher while those with lower infection rates could reopen more quickly. More
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Leader behind bleach ‘miracle cure’ claims Trump consumed his product
The leader of a spurious church which peddled industrial bleach as a “miracle cure” for Covid-19 is claiming that he provided Donald Trump with the product in the White House shortly before the former president made his notorious remarks about using “disinfectant” to treat the disease.Mark Grenon, the self-styled “archbishop” of the Genesis II “church”, has given an interview from his prison cell in Colombia as he awaits extradition to the US to face criminal charges that he fraudulently sold bleach as a Covid cure. In the 90-minute interview he effectively presents himself as the source of Trump’s fixation with the healing powers of disinfectant.“We were able to give through a contact with Trump’s family – a family member – the bottles in my book,” Grenon says. “And he mentioned it on TV: ‘I found this disinfectant’.”Grenon had previously revealed that he had written to Trump in the White House in the days leading up to the disinfectant episode, urging him to promote the healing powers of chlorine dioxide. But in the new interview Grenon goes considerably further, claiming that the bleach, which carries serious health warnings from federal agencies, was actually put into the hands of the then president who consumed it.Trump’s comments about disinfectant, made at the White House on 23 April 2020 as coronavirus was tearing through the US, reverberated around the world. They caused astonishment in scientific circles, attracted widespread ridicule, and have come to symbolize the maverick response of the Trump administration towards the pandemic.At the press conference Trump hailed disinfectant as a potential cure for Covid, saying it “knocks it out in a minute, one minute”. He went on to muse whether “we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning”.Why Trump suddenly embraced bleach as a possible Covid treatment has remained one of the mysteries of his presidency. Now Grenon claims that it was his product, marketed as Miracle Mineral Solution or “MMS”, that lay behind it.The Guardian asked Trump’s office to clarify whether he had received and drank “MMS” bleach while in the White House, but received no immediate response.Grenon made his claim that he supplied Trump with bleach solution to Zakariya Adeel, a London-based astrologer and psychic. The interview was conducted apparently over a prison telephone line.Grenon and his son Joseph are both being held in Colombia as they await extradition. In April a federal grand jury sitting in Miami indicted them, along with two other sons, Jonathan and Jordan who are also in jail in Miami.The four Grenon family members face charges of fraudulently marketing and selling industrial bleach as a cure for Covid, cancer, malaria and a host of other serious medical conditions. A criminal trial is expected in Miami later this year.The US Food and Drug Administration has made it clear that drinking MMS is the same as drinking bleach. It warns that consumption can cause severe vomiting, diarrhea and low-blood pressure that can be life-threatening.The FDA describes MMS as a “powerful bleach typically used for industrial water treatment or bleaching textiles, pulp and paper”.In the video, Grenon repeats false claims that chlorine dioxide solution cures Covid. “We tried it with Covid – six drops every two hours for the first and second day. Boom! Gone, negative. You’re feeling great from feeling like you’re going to die – it works great,” he says.Use of bleach as a miracle cure has proliferated across Latin America during the pandemic. Fiona O’Leary, a campaigner against pseudoscience, told the Guardian that MMS peddlers were using Trump’s comments on disinfectant as a marketing tool.“You have the president of the United States telling people they can ingest bleach to treat Covid – so the response is hardly surprising. There’s been a dramatic increase in the use of the product in several Latin American countries after he made those comments,” she said. More
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US Covid deaths dip below 300 a day for first time since March last year
US deaths from Covid-19 have dipped below 300 a day for the first time since March last year during the first wave of the pandemic.Data from federal sources also showed the drive to put shots in arms at home approaching an encouraging milestone: 150 million Americans fully vaccinated.Joe Biden was however expected to fall short of his commitment to shipping 80m Covid-19 vaccine doses abroad by the end of June, because of regulatory and other hurdles.Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters getting the shots shipped was proving to be “a Herculean logistical challenge” – which the administration has been unable to meet.The US death toll from Covid-19 stands at more than 601,000. The worldwide count is close to 3.9m. The real figures in both cases are believed to be markedly higher.About 45% of the US population has been fully vaccinated, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 53% of Americans have received at least one dose, the CDC also said on Monday.New cases are at about 11,400 a day, down from more than 250,000 in early January during the most recent US surge of coronavirus. US deaths per day are down to 293, according to Johns Hopkins University, after topping out at more than 3,400 in mid-January.The coronavirus was the third-leading cause of death in the US in 2020, behind heart disease and cancer, according to the CDC. Now CDC data suggests more Americans are dying every day from accidents, chronic lower respiratory diseases, strokes or Alzheimer’s disease than from Covid-19.In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Monday the state had 10 new deaths. At the height of the outbreak there, in spring 2020, nearly 800 a day were dying.In Washington, the White House announced the final allocations for the vaccine doses for export, with 60m shots going to the global Covax vaccine-sharing alliance and 20m directed to specific partners.But fewer than 10m doses have been shipped so far, including 2.5m delivered to Taiwan over the weekend and about 1m to Mexico, Canada and South Korea earlier this month.At a briefing, Psaki, said: “What we have found to be the biggest challenge is not actually the supply, we have plenty of doses to share with the world, but this is a Herculean logistical challenge.”On 17 May, Biden announced that “over the next six weeks, the United States of America will send 80m doses overseas”, adding: “This will be more vaccines than any country has actually shared to date – five times more than any other country – more than Russia and China, which have donated 15m doses.”Earlier this month, he announced that on top of the 80m, the US was purchasing 500m doses from Pfizer to donate globally, with first deliveries expected in August.Biden committed to providing other nations with all 60m US-produced doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is not approved for use in the US. The doses have been held up by a safety review by the Food and Drug Administration.Biden was expected to be able to meet the 80m commitment without AstraZeneca. The White House unveiled plans earlier this month for the first 25m doses for export from stockpiles of Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. Some have begun shipping.Through Covax, the latest batch of doses will include about 14m for Latin America and the Caribbean; approximately 16m for Asia; and about 10m for Africa. About 14m doses will be shared directly with other countries.Meanwhile, US demand for shots has slumped.Ana Diez Roux, dean of Drexel University’s school of public health, said the dropping rates of infections and deaths are cause for celebration.But she cautioned that the virus still has a chance to spread and mutate given the low vaccination rates in some states, including Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Wyoming and Idaho.“So far it looks like the vaccines we have are effective against the variants that are circulating,” Diez Roux said. “But the more time the virus is jumping from person to person, the more time there is for variants to develop, and some of those could be more dangerous.” More
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Trump proposed sending Americans with Covid to Guantánamo, book claims
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump advocated shipping Americans who contracted Covid-19 abroad to Guantánamo Bay.The stunning revelation is contained in a new book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History, by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, two Washington Post reporters. The Post published excerpts on Monday.According to the paper, at a meeting in the White House Situation Room in February last year, before the onset of the pandemic in which more than 600,000 have now died in the US, Trump asked aides: “Don’t we have an island that we own? What about Guantánamo?”Trump also reportedly said: “We import goods. We are not going to import a virus.”The reporters write that aides blocked the idea when Trump brought it up again.The US holds Guantánamo Bay on a disputed long lease from Cuba. The prison there is used to house terrorism suspects without trial and in extremely harsh conditions and since the 9/11 attacks has been a magnet for condemnation from human rights groups.In 2019, the book A Warning by Anonymous – later revealed to be Miles Taylor, a former homeland security official – reported that Trump suggested sending immigrants to the base in Cuba.According to Taylor, Trump proposed designating all migrants entering the US without permission as “enemy combatants”, then shipping them to Guantánamo.Books about Trump’s rise to power and four years in the White House have proved extremely lucrative. On Monday the news site Axios reported that Trump has spoken to numerous authors working on books about his time in the Oval Office.According to the Post, among scenes reported by Abutaleb and Paletta, Trump is depicted in March 2020 shouting at his health secretary, Alex Azar: “Testing is killing me!”Cases of Covid-19 were mounting at the time, with states entering lockdowns amid public confusion and fear.“I’m going to lose the election because of testing!” Trump reportedly yelled. “What idiot had the federal government do testing?”“Uh, do you mean Jared?” Azar is reported to have answered, referring to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser who was in charge of testing.Trump also reportedly said it was “gross incompetence to let [federal health agency] CDC develop a test”.Kushner is reported to have called a staffer who oversaw a March plan to purchase 600m masks a “fucking moron”, because the masks would not be delivered till June.By then, Kushner reportedly said: “We’ll all be dead.”Detailing such infighting and failures of leadership, the authors reportedly write: “That was what the response had turned into: a toxic environment in which no matter where you turned, someone was ready to rip your head off or threatening to fire you.” More
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‘Two Americas’ may emerge as Delta variant spreads and vaccination rates drop
With Covid vaccination penetration in the US likely to fall short of Joe Biden’s 70% by Fourth of July target, pandemic analysts are warning that vaccine incentives are losing traction and that “two Americas” may emerge as the aggressive Delta variant becomes the dominant US strain.Efforts to boost vaccination rates have come through a variety of incentives, from free hamburgers to free beer, college scholarships and even million-dollar lottery prizes. But of the efforts to entice people to get their shots have lost their initial impact, or failed to land effectively at all.“It’s just not working,” Irwin Redlener at the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University, told Politico. “People aren’t buying it. The incentives don’t seem to be working – whether it’s a doughnut, a car or a million dollars.”In Ohio, a program offering five adults the chance to win $1m boosted vaccination rates 40% for over a week. A month later, the rate had dropped to below what it had been before the incentive was introduced, Politico found.Oregon followed Ohio’s cash-prize lead but saw a less dramatic uptick. Preliminary data from a similar lottery in North Carolina, launched last week, suggests the incentive is also not boosting vaccination rates there.Public officials are sounding alarms that the window between improving vaccination penetration and the threat from the more severe Delta variant, which accounts for around 10% of US cases, is beginning to close. The Delta variant appears to be much more contagious than the original strain of Covid-19 and has wreaked havoc in countries like India and the United Kingdom.“I certainly don’t see things getting any better if we don’t increase our vaccination rate,” Scott Allen of the county health unit in Webster, Missouri, told Politico. The state has seen daily infections and hospitalizations to nearly double over the last two weeks.Overall, new US Covid cases have plateaued to a daily average of around 15,000 for after falling off as the nation’s vaccination program ramped up. But the number of first dose vaccinations has dropped to 360,000 from 2m in mid-April. A quarter of those are newly eligible 12- to 15-year-olds.Separately, pandemic researchers are warning that a picture of “two Americas” is emerging – the vaccinated and unvaccinated – that in many ways might reflect red state and blue state political divides.Only 52% of Republicans said they were partially or fully vaccinated, and 29% said they have no intention of getting a vaccine, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll. 77% of Democrats said they were already vaccinated, with just 5% responding that were resisting the vaccine.“I call it two Covid nations,” Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told BuzzFeed News.Bette Korber, a computational biologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said she expected variant Delta to become the most common variant in the US within weeks. “It’s really moving quickly,” Korber told Buzzfeed.On Friday, President Biden issued a plea to Americans who have not yet received a vaccine to do so as soon as possible.“Even while we’re making incredible progress, it remains a serious and deadly threat,” Biden said in remarks from the White House, saying that the Delta variant leaves unvaccinated people “even more vulnerable than they were a month ago”.“We’re heading into, God willing, the summer of joy, the summer of freedom,” Biden said. “On July 4, we are going to celebrate our independence from the virus as we celebrate our independence of our nation. We want everyone to be able to do that.” More
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Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all too
Andy Slavitt’s Preventable is a 336-page indictment of Donald Trump, Trumpworld, America’s lack of social cohesion, greed and big pharma. He laments needless deaths, hyper-partisanship and populist disdain of experts and expertise. The word “evil” appears. So does “privilege”.Slavitt, recently departed as a senior adviser to Joe Biden on Covid response, is himself a product of the Ivy League: the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard business school. He also did stints in the Obama administration and at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and United Healthcare.His book reads like Covid-porn for blue America. Unfortunately, he does not reflect on how the US reached this place.The saga of Albion’s Seed – English Protestants who slaughtered each other in the old country, overthrew the crown in a new land then waged a second civil war – does not figure in Slavitt’s calculus. Said differently, if kin can repeatedly raise arms against kin, the social fabric can never be taken for granted – especially not as demographics convulse. E pluribus unum has limitations.Slavitt sees Trump’s cruelty at the southern border but fails to acknowledge the grievances of those in flyover country. Brexit and Trump were not one-offs. They were inextricably related. Displacement exacts a price.Slavitt’s book is subtitled “The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the US Coronavirus Response”. He lauds pandemic responses in Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand and criticizes Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, governors of Texas and Florida.But he ignores the fact that cases and mortality rates in those two states were lower than in New York and New Jersey – states called home by coastal elites.To his credit, Slavitt does take to task Bill de Blasio, that hapless and tin-eared mayor, for urging New Yorkers to “go out and enjoy themselves at restaurants” as the pandemic took root.“The impact of New York’s delay was significant,” Slavitt writes.Similarly, Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s performative Republican governor, is derided for her “freedom-first” strategy. But unlike De Blasio she remains popular in her state and her party. A DeSantis-Noem Republican ticket in 2024 is not out of the question. In the eyes of voters, Noem did something right – much like Andrew Cuomo in New York, now beset by allegations of sexual misconduct but apparently on the verge of dodging a political bullet.On the other hand, the New York Times reports that even in east Asia and the south Pacific, supposed world leaders in containing the coronavirus, the fight is not yet won. Variants and their dangers loom. Vaccinations lag.To quote the Times, “people are fed up” and asking: “Why are we behind and when, for the love of all things good and great, will the pandemic routine finally come to an end?”Patience is never in limitless supply. Not in the US, not elsewhere. Slavitt makes insufficient allowance for this very human quirk.Trump was callous and mendacious but he grasped what made folks tick. Despite Slavitt’s vilification of big pharma, in those countries that possessed sufficient capital and foresight, vaccine manufacturers came through. Markets can work, even if they result in asymmetries.As expected, Preventable catalogs Trump’s failings in granular detail: his false promises of Covid quickly disappearing, his embrace of medical quackery, his rejection of testing as a crucial weapon. Slavitt also reminds readers that Trump chucked his predecessor’s pandemic response playbook and gutted the supply of personal protective equipment, just for the sake of blotting out the past.Politicians are self-centered. Trump more so than others. According to Slavitt, he saw himself as the smartest person in the room and expected to be flattered accordingly. One way to win his attention was to compliment his parenting skills. But being the owner of a debt-laden company forced to pay for golf course upkeep with no one on the greens may have injected additional anxiety. The public was expected to feel Trump’s pain.Slavitt also describes Trump’s difficulty in coming to grips with the possibility of the pandemic costing him the election, and his decision to offload to the states the mission of combating Covid. The White House became the backdrop for a reality show while the Confederate flag emerged as a symbol of pro-Trump, “liberate the state” sentiment.Jared Kushner told Slavitt: “We’re going to put testing back to the states.” The White House “can’t be responsible”, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser explained. “Some [governors] don’t want to succeed. Bad incentives to keep blaming us.”As an administration insider told the Guardian in April 2020, Trump was “killing his own supporters”.And yet, not surprisingly, Slavitt struggles with the reality that Democratic nay-saying almost lost Biden the White House and Nancy Pelosi the speaker’s gavel. Voters yearned for hope and wanted to know their sacrifice mattered.Being told “we are in this together” when “we” are manifestly not is more than a problem with messaging. For example, Slavitt omits mention of Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, and his infamous dinner at a Napa Valley restaurant in November as Covid cases mounted. On being found out, Newsom acknowledged: “We’re all human. We all fall short sometimes.” Whatever.Slavitt does upbraid the Fox News host Tucker Carlson for downplaying the dangers of Covid and recounts the inane pronouncements of Richard Epstein, a libertarian-minded New York University law school professor, to a similar end. Slavitt calls Epstein “disconnected from reality and remarkably self-assured”.This week, the US death toll passed 600,000. The vaccine works only on the living. The world has experienced more deaths halfway through 2021 than in all of 2020.Slavitt ends his book wondering whether “the lessons of the past year might be forgotten”. Don’t rule that out. More
