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    Scott Atlas resigns as Trump pandemic adviser after controversial tenure

    Scott Atlas has resigned as special adviser to Donald Trump, a White House official said on Monday, after a controversial four months during which he attacked science-based public health measures and clashed repeatedly with other members of the coronavirus taskforce.“I am writing to resign from my position as Special Advisor to the President of the United States,” Atlas said in a letter to Trump dated 1 December, according to Fox News, which first reported his resignation. Atlas later confirmed his resignation in a tweet.Atlas is a neuroradiologist and fellow at Stanford’s rightwing Hoover Institution, where he works on healthcare policy. He has no expertise or experience in infectious diseases or epidemiology, yet was nevertheless selected by Trump to advise the president on the pandemic.Atlas joined the White House this summer, where he clashed with top government scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr Deborah Birx, as he resisted stronger efforts to contain the pandemic.Atlas attacked public health measures such as masks, stay-at-home orders and social distancing. He called on residents of Michigan to “rise up” against restrictions put in place by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who had been the target of a kidnapping plot, leading to calls for his firing.Atlas repeatedly downplayed the threat of the virus, which has killed more than 265,000 Americans.He also promoted the idea that the US should aim to achieve “herd immunity”, a so-called strategy that would probably result in millions of deaths, and was repeatedly rebuked by public health and infectious disease experts, in addition to Stanford University and the Stanford faculty senate.His views also prompted Stanford to issue a statement distancing itself from the faculty member, saying Atlas “has expressed views that are inconsistent with the university’s approach in response to the pandemic”.“We support using masks, social distancing, and conducting surveillance and diagnostic testing,” the university said on 16 November. “We also believe in the importance of strictly following the guidance of local and state health authorities.”Atlas has been sharply criticized by public health experts, including Fauci, the leading US infectious disease expert, for providing Trump with misleading or incorrect information on the virus pandemic. He has downplayed the importance of face masks and this month said lockdowns had been “an epic failure” in stopping the virus’s spread.Atlas defended his role in his resignation letter, saying, “I cannot think of a time where safeguarding science and the scientific debate is more urgent.”The resignation comes as the country faces a deadly surge in coronavirus cases and record-high hospitalisations. The US is currently reporting more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day.Dr Celine Grounder, a member of Biden’s advisory panel on the crisis, greeted the news of the resignation with relief.“I’m relieved that in the future, people who are qualified, people who are infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists like me will be helping to lead this effort,” she told CNBC.“You wouldn’t go to a podiatrist for a heart attack and that was essentially what was happening.”Atlas was hired as a “special government employee”, which limited his service to government to 130 days in a calendar year, a deadline he reached this week. More

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    Congress races to avoid government shutdown amid pandemic as funding expires

    The US Congress on Monday began a two-week sprint to rescue the federal government from a possible shutdown amid the coronavirus pandemic, the first major test since the election of whether Republicans and Democrats intend to cooperate.Government funding for nearly all federal agencies expires on Saturday 11 December.Congressional negotiators have made progress on how to divvy up around $1.4tn to be spent by 30 September 2021, the end of the current fiscal year, according to a House of Representatives Democratic aide.But more granular details are still unresolved and votes by the full House and Senate on a huge funding bill may come close to bumping up against that 11 December deadline.Still unclear is whether Donald Trump, who was defeated in the 3 November election, will cooperate with the effort.If the post-election “lame duck” session of Congress fails to produce a budget deal, the new Congress convening in January would have to clean up the mess just weeks before the inauguration of Joe Biden.Trump has already warned that he would veto a wide-ranging defense authorization bill Congress aims to pass if a provision is included stripping Confederate leaders’ names from military bases.Failure by the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate to pass a spending bill could have dire consequences. Some healthcare operations could be short-staffed or otherwise interrupted at a time when Covid-19 cases in the US have been surging. Nearly 267,000 people have died in the US as a result of the virus.The spending bill could be the vehicle for providing billions of dollars to state and local governments to help them handle coronavirus vaccines on track to be available in coming weeks and months.Beyond pandemic worries, if government funds were allowed to run out next month, airport operations could slow, national parks would close, some medical research would be put on hold and thousands of other programs would be jeopardized as government workers are furloughed, further hurting the struggling US economy.Washington suffered record-long partial shutdowns between 22 December 2018 and 25 January 2019, the result of a standoff between Democrats and Trump over funding the US-Mexico border wall that was a centerpiece of his presidency.This time around, Republicans are seeking $2bn for the southern barrier that most Democrats and some Republican lawmakers claim is an ineffective remedy to halting illegal immigration.Negotiators also have been battling over the amount of money Republicans want for immigrant detention beds.Disagreements over abortion and family planning, education and environment programs also have been simmering. If they cannot be resolved by 11 December, agency shutdowns could be avoided only by Congress passing a stopgap funding bill.Also hovering over the budget debate will be warnings that emergency funds must be allocated in separate coronavirus aid legislation following months of deadlock.Democrats’ most recent offer was a wide-ranging $2.2tn bill to help state and local governments deal with the health and economic crisis, expand Covid-19 testing and supplies, and renew federal direct payments to individuals and families during the pandemic.Their goal is to provide a significant shot of stimulus to an economy that many experts fear could take a second dive in coming months if the pandemic shuts down more businesses.Republicans have deemed that proposal exorbitant and have been sticking with calls for a scaled-down $500bn menu of initiatives.So far there have been no signs of serious negotiations, leaving many to believe a stimulus bill will be the first order of business in Biden’s presidency, which begins on 20 January. More

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    It's only fake-believe: how to deal with a conspiracy theorist

    Unless you’ve been on a silent retreat for the past year, you will have almost certainly heard the rumours – that the pandemic is an elaborate hoax, or that the virus was created as a Chinese weapon, or that dangerous elites are trying to kill off the elderly and to establish a new world order, or that the symptoms are caused by 5G.It is troubling enough to see these ideas on social media. But when you are hearing them from your family, your friends, or a casual acquaintance, it is even harder to know how to respond. You are going to struggle to convince the most committed believers, of course, but what about people who are only flirting with the ideas?These difficult conversations are only set to increase now that a new vaccine is on the horizon. Certain niches of internet are already rife with the “plandemic” theory, which alleges that the spread of the virus has been designed to create big bucks for pharmaceutical companies and the philanthropist Bill Gates (whose charity is funding many of the efforts). The idea has been debunked numerous times, whereas there is good evidence that conspiracy theorists such as David Icke are themselves reaping huge profits from spreading misinformation. The danger, of course, is that their ideas will discourage people from taking the vaccine, leaving them vulnerable to the actual disease. More

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    US Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths rise amid Thanksgiving rush

    The US reported 181,490 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, a third daily rise in a row, as hospitalisations hit a record for a 16th day in succession, at 89,959.
    There were 2,297 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University, the largest single-day rise since May, bringing the pandemic toll to 262,065 out of nearly 12.8m cases. The death rate is still lower than in the spring.
    The alarming numbers were reported as millions of Americans defied official advice against travel and gatherings for Thanksgiving.
    In an address to the nation on Wednesday, Joe Biden appealed for resilience and sympathised with those contemplating a holiday without loved ones.
    “I know this time of year can be especially difficult,” said the president-elect, whose wife and daughter were killed in a car crash in December 1972. “Believe me, I know. I remember that first Thanksgiving. The empty chair, silence that takes your breath away. It’s really hard to care. It’s hard to give thanks … It’s so hard to hope, to understand.
    “I’ll be thinking and praying for each and every one of you this Thanksgiving.”
    Biden’s transition team were unable to coordinate with federal authorities for two weeks after the election was called, as Donald Trump refused to concede. The president still has not taken that step, but has allowed transition funds to be released.
    Biden heralded the approach of apparently effective vaccines. The US was “on track for the first immunisations to begin by late December, early January”, he said.
    “We’ll need to put in place a distribution plan to get the entire country immunised as soon as possible, which we will do. It’s going to take time. And hopefully the news of the vaccine will serve as incentive to every American to take simple steps to get control of the virus.”
    Biden listed such steps, including wearing a mask, social distancing and more, which the Trump administration has been loath to seek to enforce, even at its own events. Trump, members of his family, aides and senior Republicans have fallen sick.
    “There’s real hope,” Biden insisted. “Tangible hope.”
    Later, in Washington, the newly 6-3 conservative supreme court sided with religious communities who sued to block New York state Covid restrictions on attendance at houses of worship. Amy Coney Barrett, the devout Catholic justice who replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg last month, sided with other conservatives on the ruling.
    Avi Schick, an attorney for Agudath Israel of America, told the Associated Press: “This is an historic victory. This landmark decision will ensure that religious practices and religious institutions will be protected from government edicts that do not treat religion with the respect demanded by the constitution.”
    On Wednesday, New York saw more than 6,000 daily Covid cases for the first time since late April. Pennsylvania recorded more than 7,000 cases, its second-highest total since the pandemic began. Massachusetts and Nevada saw record case numbers.
    In Wyoming, the Republican governor, Mark Gordon, has opposed a mask mandate. On Wednesday, it was announced that he had tested positive.
    US airports saw around 900,000 to 1 million people a day pass through checkpoints from Friday to Tuesday, down around 60% from last year but some of the biggest crowds seen since the pandemic took hold. Typically, more Americans drive for Thanksgiving than fly.
    Officials – among them New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo – have been forced to cancel their own Thanksgiving plans in order to set an example. One who did not, Denver’s mayor, Michael Hancock, issued an apology on Wednesday.
    Having asked city staff and residents to avoid holiday travel, Hancock flew to Mississippi to spend the holiday with his wife and youngest daughter.
    “I made my decision as a husband and father,” he said, “and for those who are angry and disappointed, I humbly ask you to forgive decisions that are born of my heart and not my head.” More

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    'Our democracy was tested this year': Joe Biden's Thanksgiving address – video

    Joe Biden urged Americans to put aside their political differences as he called for unity in his Thanksgiving address to the nation.
    ‘We need to remember, we are at war with the virus, not one another,’ said the president-elect. ‘Our democracy was tested this year, and what we learned was this: the people of this nation were up to the task.’
    Joe Biden says ‘Let’s be thankful for democracy’ in message of unity – live More

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    The Dazzling Shallowness of Bernard-Henri Levy

    One of the attractions, or oddities, of France is its reverence of those who are regarded as philosophers, or at least philosophical thinkers. In the age of fast information, we also have fast philosophy — soundbite philosophy. Not that this has no value, but this value has to be abstracted from the veneers that accompany not just instant thought but instant thought that seems intellectually attractive: exciting, provocative, perhaps outrageous, but plausible.

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    It is in this category that Bernard-Henri Levy now finds a home. It is the task of the reader to distinguish content from veneer. But since many readers seem no longer to try, Levy has a ready audience for instant diagnosis of serious situations, rendered “philosophical” by the constant dropping of names, recognized as the serious thinkers of the past, and constant references to his own earlier work.

    Sense of Exaggeration

    That earlier work is not inconsiderable. Although always controversial because of his willingness to eviscerate sacred cows, his condemnation of Stalinism was a bold challenge to the European left to make a new start that banished socialism achieved by tyranny. His intellectual histories of French thought, such as in “Adventures on the Freedom Road,” although even then striving for effect, were vibrant and made thought seem integral to the French project of a national self. He wanted that national self to be humane and humanitarian.

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    Levy’s championing of refugees was staunchly within the moral need for a nation to be compassionate. His defense of freedom elsewhere, as in his taking of sides with Ahmad Shah Massoud against the Taliban and his more recent advocacy of the Kurdish Peshmerga in their fight against the Islamic State, were evidence of a cosmopolitanism that he saw first evidenced in the life and adventures of his hero, the writer Andre Malraux. Malraux had fought in China (with the Communists), Spain (with the Republicans) and France (with the Resistance), and wrote great novels and art histories as well as somewhat exaggerated memoirs.

    That sense of exaggeration has always been with Levy. Every adventure has been a photo opportunity, including in Bosnia during the Siege of Sarajevo or wandering the ruins of what had been Muammar Gaddafi’s headquarters in Tripoli. That, of course, comes with kickback. Levy was indeed a frequent visitor to besieged Sarajevo, but those visits tended to be fleeting, leading the entrapped citizens of Sarajevo to nickname him not BHL, as he is widely known in France, but DHL — Deux Heures Levy, in and out (safely on a United Nations plane) within two hours.

    That he then compared himself with Susan Sontag, who stayed in the city for a lengthy period, accepting the same risks as all others without UN protection, was always rich. And his perhaps seminal influence on the French and, through the French, on NATO to intervene in Libya had the unforeseen consequence of war without end in the “liberated” country.

    His latter-day championing of Jewish identity and culture, echoing in some ways Levinas, but without his philosophical gravitas and genuine luminosity, leaves open questions as to Levy’s stance on any Israeli settlement with the Palestinians that they themselves might find just. This is a shame as, in some ways, he might be a reasonable interlocutor between the two peoples making, one would hope, the proviso that human rights must deploy equality of political rights — and, of course, that there is no humanitarian settlement without human rights.

    Gadfly of Thought

    Because he’s rich, given to Dior suits and Charvet shirts, lean enough and with sufficient hair to appear dashing in his late middle age, Levy crafts an image that all the same now seems that of the jet-setting gadfly of the international — and of thought.

    That sense of the gadfly of thought comes through in his latest (short) book, “The Virus in the Age of Madness,” on the COVID-19 pandemic. It is full of references to (highly excerpted) thought from great philosophers alongside references to his earlier writing. But there is a difference stylistically to his previous work. Levy was once the pioneer of an evocative methodology that married philosophy with fiction that all the same was evocative and sometimes illuminating. That was within the construction of an imaginary conversation between himself, or himself in disguise, and one of the great thinkers.

    The great thinker explains himself, but always within the terms posed by Levy as an interviewer. Of course, this made Levy the commander of explication and interpretation of another’s thought. But the technique drew in the reader and did provoke thought among the audience.

    This time, Levy seems merely to be interviewing himself, inviting himself to make declaratory and pontifical statements to do with his (seemingly erudite) outrage that COVID-19 has rendered all other catastrophes in the world second-rate as face masks and respirators subvert and overwhelm our awareness of hunger, war, (other) pestilence and political repression. This is a fair point but made with a dazzling shallowness that proposes no means of balancing concerns over the pandemic and for other worlds. It gestures toward the sacrifice of medical frontline workers but almost dismisses them toward the end in a frenzy of concern for the “out there.”

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    The short treatise is a polemic that has a theme but no purpose. It pales beside Susan Sontag’s own short book, “Illness as Metaphor,” which discusses the use of metaphor in the ways we refer to serious illnesses — just as Levy announces his intention to dissect the uses of metaphor but winds up proposing grand vistas of image after image for the sake of effect. And, of course, he does compare himself to Sontag in their quite different Sarajevo involvements. He also progresses the use of Benny Levy, once the controversial aide to the elderly Jean-Paul Sartre, from one side of Bernard-Henri’s interview-as-philosophical-insight technique to the status of good friend. No aggrandizement is spared.

    Levy’s book does not even interrogate the disease itself. One would have expected Levy to interview the coronavirus, but, in fact, he dismisses its personification even in medical discourse without offering any epidemiological or biochemical investigation as to why the virus has been so easy to personify as an almost thinking antagonist. He offers no way forward except, fatalities and medical staff casualties notwithstanding, that we should diminish our concerns over COVID-19 and elevate our consciousness once again to countenance commitment against the great crimes of the world.

    But we never abandoned our commitment against the great crimes. Levy’s evidence that we did so relies only on the plenitude of newspaper headlines about COVID-19, as if that alone were enough to obscure ongoing and heroic struggles. He points out, of course, that he himself never ceased his war on the world’s great crimes.

    But this proposal of singularity ignores the fact that in every case of his activism, he had to cooperate with others and bear witness to the work of others. Levy never took up arms alongside the Peshmerga. He did, however, pose for a lot of photos with them. Perhaps one day he will publish a 1,000-page pictorial history entitled “How I Alone Tried to Save the World,” in hope that the world will forget that he once wrote meaningful books.

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