Coronavirus

Subterms

    More stories

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all too

      by

      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

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      US Covid deaths hit 600,000 as ex-Biden adviser says high toll was avoidable

      by

      The US death toll in the coronavirus pandemic passed 600,000 on Tuesday. As it did so, a former White House Covid adviser, Andy Slavitt, was under fire from the right for saying Americans could have avoided such severe losses if they had been prepared to “sacrifice a little bit for one another”.Throughout the pandemic, Republicans have been less likely to wear masks and observe other public health measures meant to mitigate virus transmission. Donald Trump eschewed social distancing guidelines to hold rallies or events. His supporters are now more likely to say they will “definitely not” get vaccinated than Democrats or independents.Slavitt left the Biden administration this month. His remarks on CBS on Monday echoed past comments about the importance of wearing masks and social distancing to protect essential workers.“We would have had a pandemic here in the US no matter what, but we can count the mistakes,” he said. “We obviously had a set of technical mistakes with the testing and the PPE that we know about.”He added: “We all need to look at one another, and ask ourselves what do we need to do better next time, and in many respects being able to to sacrifice a little bit for one another to get through this and save more lives … I think that’s something we could have all done a little better on.”Most counts on Tuesday put the US past 600,000 deaths – the widely trusted and cited count by Johns Hopkins University passed the milestone at lunchtime. Cases are down but the US still has among the worst death rates per capita, eclipsed only by Peru, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Those nations had later access to Covid-19 vaccines and have vaccinated fewer people.Slavitt is promoting a book, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics and Selfishness Doomed the US Coronavirus Response.Critics on the right argued that Americans had sacrificed enough.“The government screwed up testing, slow-rolled vaccine approval, discouraged masks in the early days, told people to wash their groceries and closed parks and beaches,” said an editor of the libertarian magazine Reason on Twitter, referring to the early days of the pandemic under the Trump administration, in spring 2020. “But [according to Slavitt] it is you, the citizen, who did it wrong.”Public health leaders including Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, defended Slavitt, saying criticism “does not reflect what we know about who has been at greatest risk of infection”.On Tuesday, Slavitt spoke to CNN.“We as a country could have put the lives of people higher on the list versus our own individual liberties,” he said.“We as a country decided that we were going to get many, many more people exposed without pay, without healthcare insurance, without support. And so we decided that the creature comforts – keeping the meatpacking plants open when they were unsafe – were more important than making sure we protected each other.”Although the US had several lockdowns, most were far less severe than in other countries, leading to increased spread of Covid-19. The issue quickly became political. Michigan, for example, saw sustained anti-lockdown sentiment and also suffered some of the worst outbreaks in the pandemic. Experts have argued that the US still does not have enough testing to tamp down future outbreaks.Just over half of the US population has received one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, with vaccination rates inching upward. But vaccination rates in Republican- and Democratic-leaning states have diverged.States across the south and west, most likely to be led by Republicans, have the lowest vaccination rates. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Wyoming, Louisiana and Tennessee all have less than 35% of their populations fully vaccinated.The predominantly Democratic north-east is leading in vaccination rates, with Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire all having more than 50% fully vaccinated.Republicans, rural residents and white evangelical Christians are most likely to say they will “definitely not” get vaccinated. All three groups are disproportionately likely to identify as Republican and support Trump.On CNN on Tuesday, Slavitt was asked about the danger of Covid variants.“If you’re vaccinated,” he said, “… the vaccines are proving to be quite effective even against the Delta variant, so you’ve very little to worry about. If you’re not vaccinated, the Delta variant will spread in your community more quickly. It will take less exposure to get Covid-19.”Slavitt also warned: “If you have more than roughly half the population vaccinated, it’s not as if half the people you know are vaccinated and half aren’t. Either just about everybody you know is vaccinated or everybody you know isn’t.”New outbreaks would probably not have “quite the wildfire spread as we saw in 2020”, he said. “But they’re still going to impact [less vaccinated] communities pretty strongly.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Vermont drops all Covid restrictions as first state to reach 80% vaccination

      by

      Vermont has become the first US state to reach its 80% Covid-19 vaccination goal and is shedding all statewide restrictions on dealing with the pandemic, including letting a state of emergency expire by Tuesday night.Governor Phil Scott made the announcement on Monday and said he would drop physical distancing, crowd size restrictions and masking requirements.“There are no longer any state Covid-19 restriction,” the Republican announced. “None.”But Scott said he would allow municipalities and businesses to continue practices if they choose to do so.On Tuesday the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, announced that his state would lift “virtually all” Covid-19 restrictions, after clearing 70% of adult residents with at least one vaccine dose.“What does 70% mean? It means we can now return to life as we know it,” Cuomo said to a standing ovation in One World Trade Center, in Manhattan. “We’re going to make a New York that’s better than it’s ever been before. We rise as New Yorkers, ever upwards, aspirational – that’s what New Yorkers are.”In Vermont, emergency medical service providers will continue to wear masks for the foreseeable future, regardless of vaccination status. Public transportation and long-term care workers will also practice safeguards since they fall under federal guidelines.State officials had planned to lift all remaining restrictions by the Fourth of July.“The ingenuity, creativity and dedication of all Vermonters to their friends and families, to their neighbours and to their communities, has been incredible and we should all be very proud,” Scott said.“Through it all, we’ve shown the nation and much of the world how to respond when there is no playbook, and how to do it with civility and respect.”Vermont’s health commissioner, Mark Levine, said in May some people would probably continue to wear masks.“It takes time to transition,” he said. “I think it’s just a way of people saying that they need to arrive at their own comfort level and on their own timeline, and I’m all for that.”On Monday, Scott offered a brief reflection on the 15-month pandemic.“Never did I think I’d be the governor ordering businesses to close, sending kids home from school or telling people to ‘Stay home, stay safe’,” he said. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden meeting marks rare trip out of ‘bunker’ for Covid-cautious Putin

      by

      For more than a year, people who have wanted to get within breathing distance of Vladimir Putin have performed a ritual, two-week quarantine in Russian hotels and sanatoriums to protect the 68-year-old president from falling ill with coronavirus.Since March 2020, powerful business people, regional governors, his pilots and medical staff, volunteers at an economic conference, and even second world war veterans have shut themselves away to meet the Kremlin leader or even stand in his general vicinity.So it will be a rare sit-down when Putin jets into Geneva to meet Joe Biden, who has been on a whirlwind tour through Europe, attending the G7 summit in Cornwall and then flying to Brussels for meetings with EU and Nato leaders before travelling to Switzerland. Putin has not publicly travelled abroad since the outbreak of coronavirus in early 2020, hosting foreign leaders in Moscow or Sochi and holding most of his meetings with government ministers and regional governors over videoconference.Critics have chided Putin for sheltering in a “bunker” during the coronavirus outbreak, reportedly protected by medical tunnels of dubious efficacy that sprayed visitors with a cloud of disinfectant.The Proekt investigative website later claimed the Kremlin had built an identical windowless office in Sochi, a resort city on the Black Sea, where Putin was reportedly holding meetings while he was believed to be in Moscow.All that was expected to end after Putin was given his first Sputnik vaccine dose in March, a procedure that was not documented on camera but that the Kremlin said the media would “have to take our word for it”.But the two-week quarantine period has remained for many visitors, including the US television crew who met Putin for an interview before the summit.“Appreciate the extra time, Mr President,” said Keir Simmons, an NBC correspondent. “The team has been in quarantine for almost two weeks, so this interview is very important to us.” Russian state television journalists have faced similar quarantine measures.The international coronavirus response will probably take a back seat in Wednesday’s discussions to pressing issues of strategic stability, as the US and Russia try to regulate their strained, hostile relationship.But they come as coronavirus has in effect halted normal business and tourism travel between Russia and the US, a result of Russia’s coronavirus travel restrictions and forced staff reductions at US embassies that make it difficult for Russians to get visas to the US.Vaccines administered in the two countries also remain mutually unrecognised by medical authorities, portending a political battle for their approval.Slow vaccination rates in Russia have led to “explosive growth in cases”, according to the Moscow mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, leading him to declare a week-long business holiday.Before the trip for the summit, Putin’s spokesperson Dmitri Peskov told journalists he was not vaccinated because he still had a high antibody count from when he had coronavirus last year.“All safety precautions have been taken extremely seriously,” said Yuri Ushakov, a Putin aide. “From the standpoint of the presidents’ health, both the Americans and we have taken a very serious approach toward this. There have been not that many in-person contacts lately, and so the special attention attached to these issues is natural.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Marjorie Taylor Greene apologises for comparing Covid-19 masks to Holocaust – video

      by

      Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene apologised for comparing Covid-19 mask requirements and vaccinations to the Nazi Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews. ‘I have made a mistake and it’s really bothered me for a couple of weeks now, and so I definitely want to own it,’ Taylor Greene said. Her apology on Monday came amid calls from some Democrats to censure her for the Holocaust remarks. Her comments had also been denounced by Republican congressional leaders

      Marjorie Taylor Greene apologizes for comparing House mask rule to the Holocaust
      Fury as Marjorie Taylor Greene likens Covid rules to Nazi treatment of Jews More