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      in US Politics

      Biden says up to 90% of adults will be eligible for Covid vaccine by 19 April

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      Up to 90% of US adults will be eligible for a Covid-19 shot by 19 April, Joe Biden said on Monday as he announced a major expansion of the nation’s vaccination program.Hours after Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned of “impending doom” in the race against the resurgence of infections, the US president delivered the counter measure.Talking from the White House after a briefing from his coronavirus team, Biden promised that 90% of US residents would be living within five miles of a vaccination site within three weeks.“We’re going to send more aid to states to expand the opening of more community vaccination sites, more vaccines, more sites, more vaccinators, all designed to speed our critical work,” he said.But, chiming with Walensky, he also warned: “We still are in a war with this deadly virus, and we’re bolstering our defense, but this war is far from won.”Biden said the vaccination figures – 75% of Americans over 65 inoculated in his first 10 weeks in office, and the new target of 200m shots in his first 100 days – gave him optimism.But he said the country was in danger of giving back “hard fought gains” if it let up on preventative measures such as mask wearing and social distancing.“I’m reiterating my call for every governor, mayor and local leader to maintain and reinstate the mask mandate,” he said, adding that he thought states should also pause reopening efforts because of the recent rise in cases.“Please, this is not politics. A failure to take this virus seriously is what got us into this mess in the first place,” Biden said.His plea, however, is likely to fall on deaf ears in states such as Texas, where the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, controversially lifted the state’s mask mandate this month, and in Florida, where Ron DeSantis, a staunch ally of the former president Donald Trump, refuse to implement one in the first place, and has clashed with the White House over vaccination policy.The president also had harsh words for those openly defying Covid-19 precautions, such as young spring breakers who caused chaos in Miami Beach this month.“We’re in a life and death race with a virus that is spreading quickly, with cases rising again, new variants are spreading, and sadly some of the reckless behavior we’ve seen on television over the past few weeks means that more new cases are to come in the weeks ahead,” he said.“These people are letting up on precautions, which is a very bad thing. Cases have fallen two thirds since I took office … now cases are going back up. In some states deaths are as well. We’re giving back our hard fought, hard won gains.”With 90% of Americans now eligible to receive the vaccine by 19 April, Biden noted the final 10% would be included by 1 May, as he previously announced. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘He’s riding a crest’: Ron DeSantis positions himself as keeper of Trump’s legacy

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      “Covid’s over, baby!” So proclaims a bare-chested man, wearing face paint like the Joker, nemesis of Batman, as he stands atop a car and waves the American national flag.This was the scene last weekend in Miami, Florida, a state that moved quickly to lift lockdowns, reopen schools, shelve mask mandates and become, in the words of its governor, Ron DeSantis, an “an oasis of freedom” during the coronavirus pandemic.This approach has dismayed health experts but delighted Republicans and cemented DeSantis’s reputation as perhaps the most high-profile keeper of Donald Trump’s legacy as a swath of party figures jostle to become his political heir. Last month the governor proposed a raft of new election laws that would make it harder to vote. He relishes sparring with the media and is now claiming victory over his pandemic critics.“Floridians have been flouting the rules since the beginning of the pandemic,” said Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York. “That said, they seem to be fairly happy with DeSantis’s performance overall and he certainly thinks he’s the heir apparent to Donald Trump at this point. He’s very proud of himself and he’s touting himself as being the next great wunderkind of the Republican party.”While Trump and Joe Biden hogged the limelight, the coronavirus has done much to shape the fortunes of state governors across America. Democrats Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California went from heroes to zeroes after a series of missteps. DeSantis – at 42 the nation’s youngest governor – and fellow Republican Kristi Noem of South Dakota both worked hard to create a perception of success despite their uneasy relationship with science.[DeSantis] certainly thinks he’s the heir apparent to Donald Trump at this pointFlorida has hardly escaped unscathed: its death toll of more than 32,000 is the fourth highest in the country after California, New York and Texas. A year ago DeSantis reluctantly bowed to pressure by issuing a stay-at-home order and requiring non-essential businesses to close. But like Trump, he was eager to restart the economy and moved more swiftly than many states to reopen schools.DeSantis faced widespread opprobrium even as Cuomo was publishing a book lauding his own pandemic response. But now the tables have turned.John Zogby, a pollster and author, said: “Bluntly, he was the village idiot at the beginning of all this and it was hard to understand what he was doing in a state like Florida. He’s riding a crest now because it appears to be working. We don’t know what happens next but, providing this crest continues, he’s positioning himself as the non-Trump to Trump’s base.”In a piece of political theatre last week, DeSantis hosted a handpicked panel of health experts at the state capitol in Tallahassee to publicly vindicate his opposition on lockdowns and mandates. Among them was Scott Atlas, a radiologist who had no formal experience infectious diseases when Trump hired him last summer as a coronavirus adviser.DeSantis boasted: “The data could not be clearer that our state has fared far better than many others, particularly those that imposed harsh lockdowns on their residents.”His supporters point out that, despite California’s more cautious approach, its Covid-19 case rate is similar to that of Florida according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A survey by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy last month found DeSantis with a 53% approval rating.Although the 2024 presidential election is a political aeon away, there is early chatter that the Ivy League-educated lawyer, Iraq war veteran and former member of Congress, who emulates Trump’s in-yer-face style, could become the torch bearer for the “Make America Great Again” movement.Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said: “He benefits from the same model that Trump benefited from, which is a lot of media criticism. The media castigated him day and night for his handling of coronavirus versus California but then, when he can point that he has better numbers than California, he can say ‘Ah ha!’ That is something that Trump voters love to hear when it’s at the media’s expense.“He is starting to check off boxes that will be important to Trump voters in 2024. One of those is obviously your handling of the pandemic; he doesn’t pray at the altar of Dr Fauci.”Like Ronald Reagan and George W Bush before him, DeSantis would be running for the Republican nomination with executive experience as a state governor and could pitch himself as a Washington outsider.Whalen added: “So he could say, just as Trump did, ‘I’m not part of the problem, I’m part of the solution’. It’s just so fundamentally awkward if you’re Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or even Josh Hawley or Ben Sasse – the legions of senators all looking to run – to divorce yourself from Washington and Congress.”DeSantis is also in a strong position because Florida, the third most populous state, carries huge electoral clout and appears to have shifted decisively to the right. Trump is now based at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach while his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have set up home in Miami.Meanwhile Florida’s two Republicans senators, Rubio and Rick Scott, are seen as potential contenders for 2024. And the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz is one of Trump’s most combative champions and imitators.Roger Stone, a Florida-based political consultant pardoned by Trump on seven criminal counts in the Russia investigation, said: “Florida remains the last bastion and it is definitely the centre of action in terms of conservative Republican ‘America first’ politics. We could have as many as three candidates here.We are the blue-collar party now, we’re the working-class party“Or four: if the president runs, I think he clears the field. The nomination is his if he wants it. This is his party now. We’re never going to go back to being the country club party of the Bushes. We are the blue-collar party now, we’re the working-class party.”But for now, DeSantis appears to have the edge in what the Politico website dubbed the “if-Trump-doesn’t-run” primary as it noted that several candidates are already networking in Iowa, traditionally the first state to have a say.At last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, the governor finished runner-up to Trump in one straw poll for the 2024 Republican nomination and first in another that excluded the 45th president.And on Monday, in a podcast interview with Lisa Boothe, Trump mentioned DeSantis first when listing Republicans he believes have a bright future. “Ron DeSantis is doing a really good job in Florida,” Trump said, going on to cite Senators Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and the Arkansas gubernatorial candidate Sarah Sanders.Trump also praised Noem, the South Dakota governor who has vied with DeSantis in the anti-shutdown stakes, infamously allowing the Sturgis biker rally to take place. She has been travelling widely to address state Republican parties and chalking up appearances on Fox News. Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, are also potential candidates for 2024. If Trump decides to play kingmaker, his endorsement could be decisive.His 2018 endorsement played a crucial part in DeSantis’s unlikely victory in the Republican primary for governor. Stone observed: “DeSantis’s rise on Fox television as a defender of Trump is really what won him the gubernatorial nomination in the primary. He’s been very loyal to the president since he’s been president and their governing style is very similar.“So in that sense, I think policy-wise, he would be solid. I just wonder whether he has the showmanship that Trump has, that Matt Gaetz has, that Josh Hawley has, for example. We are in the television age, still. Charisma matters and I think to a certain extent the governor doesn’t have the kind of connection with voters that the president has, just in terms of his personal gravitas.”First, however, DeSantis must win re-election as governor of Florida next year. His handling of the pandemic will be a key issue. Critics argue that his vaccine distribution programme favours rich donors and blame his laissez-faire approach for chaos in Miami Beach last weekend that saw fighting in the streets, restaurant property destroyed and more than 1,000 arrests made.Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former Democratic congresswoman from Florida who is among leaders of a Ron Be Gone campaign, told NBC News: “His arrogance and complete detachment from the pain and suffering of our communities is very telling of someone that is in this position to advance his political ambitions, and it’s obvious because they’re already discussing 2024.” More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on China, Xinjiang and sanctions: the gloves are off | Editorial

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      China’s response to criticisms of horrifying human rights violations in Xinjiang is clear and calculated. Its aims are threefold. First, the sanctions imposed upon individuals and institutions in the EU and UK are direct retaliation for those imposed upon China over its treatment of Uighurs. That does not mean they are like-for-like: the EU and UK measures targeted officials responsible for human rights abuses, while these target non-state actors – elected politicians, thinktanks, lawyers and academics – simply for criticising those abuses.Second, they seek more broadly to deter any criticism over Xinjiang, where Beijing denies any rights violations. Third, they appear to be intended to send a message to the EU, UK and others not to fall in line with the harsher US approach towards China generally. Beijing sees human rights concerns as a pretext for defending western hegemony, pointing to historic and current abuses committed by its critics. But mostly it believes it no longer needs to tolerate challenges.Alongside the sanctions, not coincidentally, has come a social media storm and consumer boycott targeting the Swedish clothing chain H&M and other fashion firms over concerns they voiced about reports of forced labour in cotton production in Xinjiang. Nationalism is a real and potent force in China (though not universal), but this outburst does not appear spontaneous: it began when the Communist Youth League picked up on an eight-month-old statement, and is being egged on by state media.China has used its economic might to punish critics before – Norway’s salmon exports slumped after dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel peace prize – and often with the desired results. But this time, it is acting far more overtly, and it is fighting on multiple fronts. Some clothing companies are already falling into line. Overall, the results are more complex. The sanctions have drastically lowered the odds of the European parliament approving the investment deal which China and the EU agreed in December, to US annoyance. Beijing may think the agreement less useful to China than it is to the EU (though many in Europe disagree). But the measures have done more to push Europe towards alignment with the US than anything Joe Biden could have offered, at a time when China is also alienating other players, notably Australia. Foreigners – who in many cases have offered more nuanced voices to counter outright China hawks – are already becoming wary of travelling there, following the detention and trial of two Canadians, essentially taken hostage following their country’s arrest (on a US extradition request) of a top Huawei executive. The sanctioning of scholars and thinktanks is likely to make them more so. Businesses, though still counting on the vast Chinese market, are very belatedly realising the risks attached to it. Those include not only the difficulty of reconciling their positions for consumers inside and outside China, but the challenges they face as the US seeks to pass legislation cracking down on goods made with forced labour, and the potential to be caught up in political skirmishes by virtue of nationality. For those beginning to have second thoughts, rethinking investments or disentangling supply chains will be the work of years or decades. But while we will continue to live in a globalised economy, there is likely to be more decoupling than people foresaw.The pandemic has solidified a growing Chinese confidence that the west is in decline, but has also shown how closely our fates are tied. There can be no solutions on the climate emergency without Beijing, and cooperation on other issues will be both possible and necessary – but extraordinarily difficult.Beijing’s delayed response to the UK sanctions suggests it did not anticipate them, perhaps unsurprising when the integrated review suggested we should somehow court trade and investment while also taking a tougher line. But the prime minister and foreign secretary have, rightly, made their support for sanctioned individuals and their concerns about gross human rights violations in Xinjiang clear. Academics and politicians, universities and other institutions, should follow their lead in backing targeted colleagues and bodies. China has made its position plain. So should democratic societies. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden holds first press conference and pledges 200m vaccine shots in 100 days

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      In his first press conference as president, Joe Biden announced he had doubled his administration’s vaccination goal to 200m shots during his first 100 days as president.

      “I know it’s ambitious, twice our original goal, but no other country in the world has even come close to what we are doing,” Biden said of his new goal.
      Biden’s decision to make the announcement at the beginning of his press conference represented a clear attempt to at least insulate one piece of news his administration hoped would not fall through the cracks at a briefing where a host of contentious issues were expected – particularly on immigration and the filibuster.
      On immigration, Biden stressed that the situation at the southern border was not a crisis. The president recently appointed vice-president Kamala Harris as the point-person to try to tackle problems there.
      An ABC News reporter, however, noted that one border facility was currently holding unaccompanied migrant children at 1,556% capacity. She asked Biden if he considered that to be acceptable.
      “That’s a serious question, right? Is it acceptable to me? Come on,” Biden said. “That’s why we’re going to be moving 1,000 of those kids out quickly.”
      The president expressed sympathy with parents who felt their best option was to send children on the treacherous journey to the US. And when a Univision reporter noted that Customs and Border Protection has not been notifying migrant children’s family members about their arrival to the US in a timely manner, Biden said it would take time to improve communications and processes in the immigration system.
      But he also reiterated that his administration would not relax laws to increase the number of people coming in across the border, other than minors.
      “They should all be going back. All be going back,” Biden said. “The only people we are not going to leave sitting there on the other side of the Rio Grande with no help are children.”
      Biden was also asked multiple times about his position on the filibuster. He agreed with the critique of Democratic senators that it is a relic of the Jim Crow era of American history designed to defend slavery.
      But rather than offering full-throated endorsement of ending the filibuster, he instead argued that there should only be a “talking filibuster”, where a senator could block legislation as long as they kept talking on the floor of the chamber.
      “I strongly support moving in that direction,” Biden said.
      Biden has increasingly had to take a go-it-alone approach to executing his agenda, despite efforts to win over Republican support. That has helped fuel pressure among rank-and-file lawmakers to try and gut the filibuster or create workarounds for Democratic legislation that faces staunch opposition from Republicans.
      When Biden became president, he had hoped his longstanding relationship with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican in that chamber, would help create bipartisan support. But Biden shrugged off that opposition, nottng that he and McConnell know each other well.
      He added: “I have electoral support from Republican voters. Republican voters agree with what I’m doing.”
      The president also noted that despite the gains the country has experienced on the vaccine effort, the impact of the pandemic is still being felt. He reiterated a theme he and his closest aides have been trying to drill into Americans’ heads since Biden signed into law his American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
      “There are still too many Americans out of work, too many families hurting,” Biden said. “But I can say to you, the American people, help is here and hope is on the way.”
      Biden also said he was likely to run for re-election in 2024, which he had not previously addressed. Asked if Harris would be his running mate, the president said: “I fully expect that to be the case. She’s doing a great job.”
      On the war in Afghanistan Biden did not offer a precise timetable for withdrawal but did say that he did not troops to be there by the end of next year.
      “I can’t picture that being the case,” Biden said.
      Mostly absent from the conference were questions about the coronavirus pandemic and the topic of gun control, after two mass shootings in the past two weeks. Biden promised to expand on his gun control actions in the coming weeks. More

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      in World Politics

      Wealth Inequality Breeds Health Inequality

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      In an AP article last December, Maria Cheng and Aniruddha Ghosal noted that, despite official optimism concerning the capacity of emerging vaccines to provoke the definitive decline of the COVID-19 pandemic, “the chances that coronavirus shots will be shared fairly between rich nations and the rest are fading fast.” Their fears have been confirmed.

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      Natasha Frost at The New York Times reports on how wealth inequality has led to vaccine inequality, with the potentially disastrous effect of prolonging an already year-old global pandemic. She blames the various political establishments that have allowed this to happen. “It didn’t have to be like this,” she writes. “Western governments have resisted the call from global health officials to use rarely employed aggressive powers that could have forced companies to publish vaccine recipes, share their knowledge and ramp up manufacturing, in turn leading to broader vaccine access.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Aggressive powers:

      Special tools of government designed to address real, serious and urgent problems, sometimes mobilized to prosecute wars, but never employed to modify practices that might compromise the prospect of profit by private companies

      Contextual Note

      Military aggression (invasion, war, bombing campaigns) and economic aggression (sanctions, embargoes, boycotts) are the two policy instruments contemporary governments privilege to defend what they deem to be their “national interest.” Democratic nations continue to claim, against all evidence, that aggressive and fundamentally destructive actions taken against other peoples or nations — to kill, maim or simply create economic deprivation — are efficient means designed to protect their own people’s interest. Since commercial media never question this logic, discussion of what “national interest” implies never even enters the public’s field of awareness. War and sanctions sound virile and so must be good. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Whereas the English language has easily accepted “military aggression” and “economic aggression” as useful descriptive terms, the idea of “health aggression” has no place in anyone’s vocabulary. Health is not something the political infrastructure believes it can or should do anything “aggressive” about. It is both too personal and too profitable. In the US in particular, health is not considered to be something to strive for, but simply as a marketplace in which, as Cole Porter once said, anything goes (to make a profit).

      In an AP article by Cheng and Lori Hinnant that appeared earlier this month, the authors explain that the marketing policies of pharmaceutical companies are the source of what is quickly becoming a desperate situation for the majority of humankind. Companies “that took taxpayer money from the U.S. or Europe to develop inoculations at unprecedented speed say they are negotiating contracts and exclusive licensing deals with producers on a case-by-case basis because they need to protect their intellectual property and ensure safety.”

      Any rational human being with a basic understanding of language should be shocked by two words in the concluding phrase of that sentence. The first is “their.” The companies believe they exclusively own what a community built and paid for. Analyzing the logic of a supply chain and production line makes it clear that the areas they have invested in turn out to be testing, redesign, packaging and delivery. These are important features of any product. But they do not justify the claim of exclusive ownership.

      The second shocking term is “safety.” The firms deem themselves protectors of their customers’ “safety.” Their role in the process of combating the virus consists of refining the product and testing it to meet public safety standards. But the marketing attitude that guides their actions continues to privilege the idea of hoarding, seeking monopolistic advantage and exploiting scarcity in a marketplace. This poses a serious risk of undermining public safety and preventing the coordinated action that alone could lead to the elimination of a global pandemic.

      Historical Note

      During the discussions to fund the vaccines, the private companies selected for the honor of producing the vaccines destined to save the world in all probability declined to take on the burden without the assurance that the research would be fully funded and the intellectual property (IP) would be assigned to them as a guarantee of future profit. The politicians who accepted those terms were undoubtedly guided by the wisdom of the economics 101 course they attended decades ago in their youth that taught them how the focus on profit is the key to economic efficiency. The higher the profit, the greater the efficiency, they were told.

      In the past four decades, this logic has even been applied to the universities that offered those courses. They have become profit-focused institutions, dedicated to supporting the bloated salaries of the administration that “ensures” efficiency rather than the educational vocation of the institution.

      Today’s drama could stand as a model lesson for a future economics 101 course, though few would imagine that profit-driven universities will be very keen on the update. If the universities refuse, it should be taught in every high-school civics class on earth. Economics 101.1 would emphasize the perversity of an economic system that forces ordinary citizens in wealthy countries to finance through taxes the research that their government will then donate to private companies that, in turn, will inevitably claim the IP without ever investing a penny of their own money.

      This pattern of socializing private companies and endowing them with product lines that ensure massive future profits through monopolistic exploitation is not limited to the pharmaceutical sector. The giants of Silicon Valley have grown into mastodons who control not just their highly-profitable marketplace, but also people’s lives (their behavior) and minds (their thoughts), thanks to the same process.

      How did we get to this point? To answer that question would require an encyclopedia delving into questions of finance, technology, politics and culture. One obvious factor is the triumph of the idea of globalization that became an article of faith for all “serious thinkers” and most politicians in recent decades. Thomas Friedman famously summed it up with the idea that “the world is flat.” It turns out that when the only recognized motivator of any kind of action concerning human health and safety — or indeed anything else — is money and profit, any other of the needs we expect the economy to address become secondary. In classic economics, a situation of needs not being met will create the demand that a new enterprise will seek to fulfil.

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      Our pundits and economic thinkers imagine that, in a global economy, the process will be even more efficient because competition can come from any direction and supply chains can be easily reconfigured. In no time at all, the needs will be effectively and efficiently addressed. But the conditions for any new competitor to realize such a scenario require three largely unattainable conditions: extravagant funding to attain a scale of credible performance, recognition by public authorities (which often requires prior contributions to their political campaigns), and the belief in the possibility of a monopolistic position. 

      Guaranteed monopoly is the hardest to achieve for a newcomer, which is why over the past two decades, pundits have highlighted the necessity of disruptive innovation. This generally means focusing on a specific market opportunity rather than addressing a fundamental need. It also means that if the need is global, there is absolutely no chance of a newcomer having an impact. The major players are safe from new competition. Disruptive innovation is a wonderful way to spawn new gadgets or convenience products. Unfortunately, global societal needs require global societal reflection, research, coordination and concerted action.

      During the wars of the 20th century, democratic nations mobilized the “aggressive powers” provided by their laws to respond to the emergency of global conflict. This posed no challenge to the principles of democracy, where all shared the idea that such measures were required for the safety of the national population. War profiteering existed, since any intense effort creates new areas of economic opportunity, but governments were guided by the collective needs of the nation. They refused to allow policy to be dictated by the profiteers.

      With the first of what may become a series of pandemics converging with an impending global climate crisis, it might just be time for politicians to show their aggression by putting public safety ahead of private profit, even if it means revising the syllabus of economics 101.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Former Covid official Deborah Birx joins company behind hazardous air-cleaners banned in California

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      The former top White House coronavirus adviser under President Donald Trump, Dr Deborah Birx, has joined an air-cleaning company that built its business, in part, on technology that is now banned in California due to health hazards.The company is one of many in a footrace to capture some of the $193bn in federal funding to schools.Birx is now chief medical and science adviser of ActivePure Technology, a company that counts 50 million customers since its 1924 start as the Electrolux vacuum company and does nearly $500m annually in sales. Its marketing includes photos of outer space, a nod to a 1990s breakthrough with technology to remove a gas from Nasa spaceships.The company’s own studies show that, in its effort to create the “healthiest indoor environments in North America”, it leveraged something less impressive: the disinfecting power of ozone – a molecule considered hazardous and linked to the onset and worsening of asthma.In an interview with KHN, CEO Joe Urso acknowledged that its air cleaners that emit ozone account for 5% of sales, even though its marketing repeatedly claims “no chemicals or ozone”.Conflicts between the science and marketing claims of an air purification company are nothing new to academic air quality experts. They warn that the industry – which sells to dental offices, businesses and gyms – is laser-focused on school officials, who are desperate to convince parents and teachers their buildings are safe. Children can be particularly susceptible to the chemical exposure some of these devices potentially create, experts say.“The concerns you have raised are legitimate” when it comes to other companies’ products, Birx said, noting that as a grandmother she shared concerns about health. But she added that she had full confidence in ActivePure after reviewing records for the Food and Drug Administration’s clearance of a company device.Schools are getting an infusion of roughly $180bn in federal money to spend on personal protective equipment, physical barriers, air-cleaning systems and other infrastructure improvements. Previously, they could have used $13bn of Cares Act funding. Democrats are pushing for $100bn more that could also be used for school improvements, including air cleaners.Putting unregulated devices in classrooms is “a giant uncontrolled experiment”, said Jeffrey Siegel, a civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto and a member of its Building Engineering Research Group.Researchers and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) say the broader industry advertises products that alter molecules in the air to kill germs, without noting that the reactions can form other harmful substances, such as the carcinogen formaldehyde.Marwa Zaatari, an indoor air quality consultant and a member of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers’ epidemic taskforce, said she has counted more than 125 schools or districts that have already bought air cleaner models the EPA has linked to “potentially harmful byproducts” such as ozone or formaldehyde. She estimated at least $60m was spent.Instead, air quality experts say, the best solutions come down to basics: adding more outdoor air, buying portable HEPA filters and installing MERV 13 filters within heating systems. But school boards are often lured by aggressive claims of 99.9% efficiency – based on a test of a filter inside a small cabinet and not a classroom. “Every dollar you use for this equipment is a dollar you remove from doing the right solution,” Zaatari said.Urso, of ActivePure Technology, said “other companies that I think are making wrongful claims” have brought scrutiny to the industry. But he said his firm’s technology has steadily improved and now emits “gaseous hydrogen peroxide” and other molecules that seek out and destroy viruses, mold and bacteria. He described the technology as active – in contrast to the more passive technology of air filters. A company website says it makes the “safest, fastest and most powerful surface and air-purification technology available”.Urso added: “I have a great technology that is truthful and it does what I say it does.”The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns specifically against technologies that release hydrogen peroxide that are “being heavily marketed”. The agency says the technology is “emerging” and “consumers are encouraged to exercise caution”.During a Zoom interview, Birx deferred to ActivePure Medical’s president, Daniel Marsh, and Urso on the science. She focused instead on the need for products that will increase people’s confidence about going maskless indoors.“Imagine decreasing the number of sick days of your workforce because your air is less contaminated,” Birx said. “There are uses of this technology that transcend the current pandemic.”Birx was a controversial figure on Trump’s Covid response team. She was criticized for standing by quietly as Trump suggested that people could ingest disinfectant to rid themselves of the virus. She has recently spoken out about her discomfort with such statements – while endorsing ActivePure Technology.Birx said she was attracted to ActivePure because of its commitment to “hard science” in getting its Medical Guardian cleared by the FDA. The process required the company to prove the device was substantially equivalent to an existing device. Records the company submitted to the FDA describe the Medical Guardian as an “ion generator” and “photocatalytic oxidizer” that showed “a high efficacy against … a broad range of viable bioaerosol”.Birx said she uses a hospital-grade HEPA filter in her home but noted that was only because she wasn’t aware of the ActivePure technology when she bought it.When ActivePure Technology, formerly known as Aerus, tells its story, it’s one of seamless progress. Yet its 2009 purchase of the air cleaner company EcoQuest saddled the company with two problematic technologies: one that intentionally generated ozone to clean the air and another that did so incidentally, studies from the subsidiary company show.The ActivePure companies and subsidiaries made the best of it, though, marketing the technology’s purification powers on the basis of a Kansas State University study of how well the devices disinfected the surface of meat compared with chlorine, which is widely used by meatpackers to kill bacteria.Meanwhile, California lawmakers were outlawing consumer use of air cleaners that emit more than 50 parts per billion of ozone. They got momentum to regulate the industry with a survey that showed that a small percentage of state residents who used such devices at home had children – considered particularly sensitive to ozone. According to the California legislation, ozone can “permanently damage lung tissue and reduce a person’s breathing ability”.The CDC also reviewed the ActivePure technology in 2009. At the time, Birx, who served in the agency under three presidents, was directing its global Aids response.Agency scientists were evaluating the potential of air cleaners to help clear formaldehyde from Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) trailers deployed after Hurricane Katrina. They knew the devices could potentially swap one hazard – ozone formed by some air cleaners – for the one they were trying to eliminate. So they tested and found that a device from ActiveTek – an Aerus subsidiary – with ActivePure technology emitted 116 parts per billion of ozone. The scientists deemed that level too high for cleaning the trailers.Birx said the older ozone-emitting devices were first-generation devices. The newer ActivePure devices are third-generation and one is now validated by FDA clearance. That is not the same as FDA approval, which requires proof the device is safe and effective.Urso said the company’s devices that emit ozone are mostly for commercial use. Although marketing for ActivePure says “no chemicals or ozone”, Urso acknowledged that it still sells a Pure & Clean Plus device that emits ozone and cannot be sold in California.“It is very confusing,” Urso said, “and it’s confusing because we also match it with [the] ActivePure” logo. The company did not answer questions about five other devices listed for sale on its website, which says they can’t be sold in California.While current ActivePure marketing also says the technology produces no byproducts, Urso said that reflects results from lab studies, not studies from the environment where they might be used. That includes hundreds of schools that have trusted their technology, the company’s website says. There, experts say, chemicals that could react with air cleaner technology include car exhaust, spray cleaners, paint and glue.The company markets to preschools as well. Brent Stephens, an indoor air quality expert who leads the civil, architectural and environmental engineering department at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was asked by the director of his own children’s preschool about the Aerus Hydroxyl Blaster.Aerus had sent the director a sample to test in her home. But Stephens advised against buying one for the preschool, saying that, while the claims of similar machines may sound good, the studies to back them up often were not.“It’s wild out there,” he wrote in an email. “Consumers need to know how these things perform and if they are subject to unforeseen consequences like generating byproducts from use.”Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a non-profit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente More

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      in World Politics

      The Sports Pages of Death

      by

      Here’s one of the things I now do every morning. I go to the online Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and check out the figures there — global coronavirus cases and deaths, US coronavirus cases and deaths. And I do so the way that, not so long ago, I would have opened the sports pages and checked out the latest scores of whatever New York team I was rooting for.

      Where it was once a matter of the Knicks winning 109-92 or the Mets losing 4-2, it’s now those other, always rising, ever grimmer figures — say, 29,980,628 and 544,724. Those are the ever-updated numbers of reported American cases and deaths in what, until the arrival of the Biden administration, was a pathetically chaotic, horrifically mismanaged and politically depth-charged struggle with COVID-19.

      Wealth Inequality Breeds Health Inequality

      READ MORE

      In certain Republican-run states now rushing to unmask and open anything and everything to the limit, in places where crowds gather as if nothing had truly happened in the past year (as at Florida beaches this spring), we may face yet another future “wave” of disease — the fourth wave, if it happens — in a country at least parts of which seem eternally eager to teeter at the edge of a health cliff. That it wouldn’t have had to be this way we know from the success of the city of Seattle, which faced the first major coronavirus outbreak in the US a year ago and now has, as The New York Times reports, “the lowest death rate of the 20 largest metropolitan regions in the country.”

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      Think of COVID-19-watching as the sport from hell. And when you look at those ever-changing figures — even knowing that vaccinations are now swiftly on the rise in this country (but not everywhere on this beleaguered planet of ours) — they should remind you daily that we live in a deeply wounded land on a deeply wounded planet and that, no matter the fate of COVID-19, it’s only likely to get worse.

      Here, for instance, is another figure to attend to, even though there’s no equivalent to that Johns Hopkins page when it comes to this subject: 40%. That’s the percentage of the human population living in tropical lands where, as this planet continues to heat toward or even past the 1.5-degree Celsius mark set by the 2015 Paris climate accord, temperatures are going to soar beyond the limits of what a body (not carefully ensconced in air-conditioned surroundings) can actually tolerate. Climate change will, in other words, prove to be another kind of pandemic, even if, unlike COVID-19, it’s not potentially traceable to bats or pangolins, but to us humans and specifically to the oil, gas and coal companies that have over all these years powered what still passes for civilization.

      In other words, just to take the American version of climate change, from raging wildfires to mega-droughts, increasing numbers of ever-more-powerful hurricanes to greater flooding, rising sea levels (and disappearing coastlines) to devastating heat waves (and even, as in Texas recently, climate-influenced freezes), not to speak of future migration surges guaranteed to make border crossing an even more fraught political issue, ahead lies a world that could someday make our present pandemic planet seem like a dreamscape. And here’s the problem: At least with COVID-19, in a miracle of modern scientific research, vaccines galore have been developed to deal with that devastating virus, but sadly there will be no vaccines for climate change.

      The Wounding of Planet Earth

      Keep in mind as well that our country, the United States, is not only an especially wounded one when it comes to the pandemic; it’s also a wounding one, both at home and abroad. The sports pages of death could easily be extended, for instance, to this country’s distant wars, something Brown University’s Costs of War Project has long tried to do. (That site is, in a sense, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center for America’s grim, never-ending conflicts of the 21st century.)

      Choose whatever post-9/11 figures you care to when it comes to our forever wars and they’re all staggering: invasions and occupations of distant lands; global drone assassination campaigns; or the release of American airpower across the greater Middle East and parts of Africa (most recently, the strike President Joe Biden ordered in Syria that killed a mere “handful” of militants — 22, claim some sources — a supposedly “proportionate” number that did not include any women or children, though it was a close call until the president canceled a second strike). And don’t forget Washington’s endless arming of, and support for, countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates engaged in their own orgies of death and destruction in Yemen. Pick whatever figures you want, but the wounding of this planet in this century by this country has been all too real and ongoing.

      The numbers, in fact, remain staggering. As has been pointed out many times at TomDispatch, the money this country puts into its “defense” budget tops that of the next 10 countries (China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and Brazil) combined. And when it comes to selling weaponry of the most advanced and destructive kind globally, the US leaves every other country in the dust. It’s the arms dealer of all arms dealers on planet Earth.

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      And if you happen to be in the mood to count up US military bases, which are on every continent except Antarctica, this country garrisons the planet in a way no previous power, not even imperial Britain, did. It has an estimated 800 such bases, while, just for the sake of comparison, China, that other fearsome rising power the US military is now so focused on, has… hmmm, at least one such base, in Djibouti, Africa (remarkably close — you won’t be surprised to learn — to an American military base there). None of this really has much of anything to do with “national security,” but it certainly adds up to a global geography of wounding in a rather literal fashion. In this sense, on this planet in this century, the United States has truly — to use a word American politicians have long loved to apply to this country — proved “exceptional.”

      America Unmasked

      At home, too, until recently, American political leadership has been wounding indeed. Keep in mind that this was in a country in which one political party is now a vortex of conspiracy theories, bizarre beliefs, wild convictions and truths that are obvious lies, a party nearly a third of whose members view the QAnon conspiracy theory favorably, 75% of whose members believe that Biden lost the 2020 election and 49% of whose male members have no intention of being vaccinated for COVID-19 (potentially denying the country “herd immunity”).

      And just to put all this in perspective, not a single Republican “statesman” offered a vote of support when Biden’s congressional radicals passed a (temporary) $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, parts of which were aimed at alleviating this country’s historic levels of inequality. After all, in the pandemic moment, while so many Americans found themselves jobless, homeless and hungry, the country’s billionaires made an extra $1.3 trillion (a figure that should certainly fit somewhere on the sports pages of death). Never, not even in the Gilded Age, has inequality been quite so extreme or wounding in the country that still passes for the greatest on the planet.

      For the first time in its history, in 2017, a self-proclaimed billionaire became president of the United States and, with the help of a Republican Congress, passed a tax cut that left the rich and corporations flooded with yet more money. Admittedly, he was a billionaire who had repeatedly bankrupted his own businesses, always jumping ship just in time with other people’s money in hand (exactly as he would do after helping to pandemicize this country, once again with oodles of his followers’ money in his pocket).

      As for me, shocking as the assault on the Capitol was on January 6, I never thought that the Senate should have convicted Donald Trump for that alone. My feeling was that the House should have impeached him and the Senate convicted him for the far more serious and direct crime of murder. After all, he was the one who played a crucial role in turning the pandemic into our very own set of mask wars (even as he called on his followers, long before January 6, to “liberate” a state capitol building).

      The half-baked, dismissive way he would deal with the coronavirus, its importance and what should be done to protect us from it — even before he got a serious case of it, was hospitalized and returned to the White House, still infectious, to tear off his mask in full public view — would functionally represent acts of murder. In effect, he unmasked himself as the killer he was. (A study in the International Journal of Health Services suggests that by July 2020, his personal decision to turn masks into a political issue had already resulted in between 4,000 and 12,000 deaths.)

      Now, throw in other Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and Tate Reeves of Mississippi, who knowingly refused to declare mask mandates or canceled them early, and you have a whole crew of killers to add to those Johns Hopkins figures in a moment when the all-American sport is surely death.

      A Genuinely Green Planet?

      Admittedly, I don’t myself have any friends who have died of COVID-19, although I have at least two, even more ancient than I am, one 91 in fact, who have been hospitalized for it, devastated by it, and then have slowly and at least partially recovered from it. As for myself, since I had the foresight to be 75 when COVID-19 first hit and am now heading for 77, I’ve had my two vaccine shots in a world in which, thanks again at least in part to Trump and to a social-media universe filled with conspiracy theories and misinformation, far too many Americans — one-third of mostly young military personnel, for instance — are shying away from or refusing what could save us all.

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      So, we’ve been plunged into a nightmare comparable to those that have, in the past, been visited on humanity, including the Black Death and the Spanish Flu, made worse by leaders evidently intent on shuffling us directly into the graveyard. And yet, that could, in the end, prove the least of our problems. We could, as President Biden has only recently more or less promised, be heading for a future in which COVID-19 will be truly under control or becomes, at worst, the equivalent of the yearly flu.

      Let’s hope that’s the case. Now, consider this: The one favor COVID-19 seemed to be doing for humanity by shutting so many of us in, keeping airlines passengers on the ground, taking vehicles off the road and even, for a while, ships off the high seas was cutting down on the use of oil, coal and natural gas and so greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere. In the year of COVID-19, carbon emissions dropped significantly. In December 2020, however, as various global economies like China’s began to rev back up, those emissions were already reportedly a shocking 2% higher than they had been in December 2019 before the pandemic swept across the world.

      In short, most of what might make it onto the sports pages of death these days may turn out to be the least of humanity’s problems. After all, according to a new report, thanks in significant part to human activities, even the Amazon rainforest, once one of the great carbon sinks on the planet, is now releasing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than it’s absorbing. And that should be a shock.

      If you want to be further depressed, try this: On our planet, there are now two great greenhouse gas emitters, the United States (historically at the top of the charts) and China (number one at this moment). Given what lies ahead, here’s a simple enough formula: If China and the US can’t cooperate in a truly meaningful way when it comes to climate change, we’re in trouble deep. And yet the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, remains remarkably focused on hostility to China and a military response to that country, an approach that someday is guaranteed to seem so out of touch as to be unbelievable.

      Climate change will, over the coming decades, prove increasingly devastating to our lives. It could, in a sense, prove to be the pandemic of all the ages. And yet, here’s the sad and obvious thing: The world doesn’t have to be this way. It’s true that there are no vaccinations against climate change, but we humans already know perfectly well what has to be done. We know that we need to create a genuinely green and green-powered planet to bring this version of a pandemic under control and we know as well that, over the next decades, it’s a perfectly doable task if only humanity truly sets its mind to it.

      Otherwise, we’re going to find ourselves on an increasingly extreme planet, while the sports pages of death will only grow. If we’re not careful, human history could, in the end, turn out to be the ultimate ghost story.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More