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      Contempt for the unvaccinated is a temptation to be resisted | Dan Brooks

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      OpinionCoronavirusContempt for the unvaccinated is a temptation to be resistedDan BrooksThe narrative of a dangerously ignorant minority may appeal, but it is not good for democracy Mon 2 Aug 2021 11.50 EDTLast modified on Mon 2 Aug 2021 13.38 EDTThe Covid-19 pandemic was the perfect disaster for our cultural moment, because it made other people being wrong on the internet a matter of life and death.My use of the past tense here is aspirational. The emergence of the more contagious Delta variant threatens to undo a lot of progress – particularly here in the US, where active cases of coronavirus infection are up 149% from two weeks ago. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that fully vaccinated people return to wearing masks indoors in public spaces. The hope that this summer would mark our return to normal is curdling fast, and the enlightened majority – the fact-based, Facebook-sceptical, and fully vaccinated – are looking for someone to blame.A moralist might argue that the Delta variant is poetic justice in light of the US government’s reluctance to provide free vaccines to places such as India, where it first emerged. The notion that doses should be saved for Americans or exported at profit was selfish and shortsighted, and now the chickens (germs) have come home to roost (sickened millions). But this sort of pitiless self-recrimination is so old-fashioned. The modern person prefers to lay blame where it rests more comfortably: on other, dumber people. Take this tweet from a sportswriter, which implied that the people of Alabama – where the vaccination rate lingers at about 34% – would get the jab if the alternative meant no American football. Such remarks often play on the association between the American south and a certain type of person: culturally conservative, frequently undereducated, more interested in sports on TV than pandemics in the newspaper. This person, a kind of back-formation from various statistical trends, has become a familiar scapegoat during the coronavirus pandemic. They represent the obstinate minority – 30% of adults in the US – whose refusal to get vaccinated threatens to mess up the recovery for the rest of us.This narrative, which has become especially popular among American liberals, excoriates imaginary dummies instead of confronting the problems that have discouraged people from getting the jab. These problems include an employer-based healthcare system that favours professionals with permanent jobs and makes it difficult for many Americans to form trusting relationships with doctors. According to Kaiser Health News, the demographic with the lowest vaccination rate in the United States is uninsured people under the age of 65. The difficulty of reaching this group has been compounded by a world-historical explosion of misinformation and a political culture bent on pandering to it.The insistence, among the Republican leadership in the spring of 2020, that Covid-19 was a glorified version of the flu guaranteed that responses to the pandemic would shake out along political and, therefore, cultural lines. In places such as Alabama, not getting the vaccine has more to do with socio-economic identity than with scientific literacy. This is a fatal flaw in the reasoning of unvaccinated people, who are absolutely wrong in a way that endangers not only themselves but also others. But given the haughty reaction of many liberals, can you blame them? Even as the cost of their obstinacy has become grimly clear, the cost of admitting they were wrong has risen; to get the vaccine now would be to kowtow to a class that holds them in contempt. The notion that a vocal minority of our fellow citizens threaten to undo us with their ignorance has become something of a master narrative in anglophone democracies over the past five years. Trump did it for a lot of American Democrats in 2016, and Brexit – which, unlike Trump, won popular support at the polls but, like Trump, was overwhelmingly opposed by the urban and higher-educated – had a similar effect in the UK. The current Republican mania for making voting more difficult seems to be a product of Trump’s loss in November. Last week, a Pew Research Center poll found that 42% of respondents agreed with the statement: “Voting is a privilege that comes with responsibilities and can be limited.” This attitude is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.Don’t blame young people for vaccine hesitancy. The vast majority of us want to get jabbed | Lara SpiritRead moreThe belief that the masses are fundamentally decent and capable of governing themselves – or at least qualified to select leaders capable of governing for them – has been badly dented by social media, which confronts us with the ignorance of strangers at high volume every day. Basic forms of empathy, emerging from real-life communication, are fading from modern democracy, washed out of our assessment of the average stranger by a high-pressure spray of anonymous idiots on the internet.I think we should resist the urge to hold the unvaccinated in contempt. Their premises are wrong, but they are doing what we want citizens in a democracy to do: thinking for themselves, questioning authority, refusing to submit to a class they perceive as bent on ruling them by fiat. The fact that they are doing these things in the service of dangerous misinformation is a terrible irony, and it threatens the stability of 21st-century democracy.Covid-19 might be the most convincing counterargument to the western liberal tradition we see in our lifetimes. It offers a counterexample to two foundational ideas: that ordinary people can recognise their own best interests, and that the minority who do not can be afforded their freedom without endangering the rest of us. A plague is one of those classic exceptions that appears in the literature of political science again and again. I don’t know if existing systems can withstand it. I do know that, like a marriage, a democracy can survive anything but contempt.
      Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Montana
      TopicsCoronavirusOpinionInfectious diseasesUS politicsVaccines and immunisationHealthcommentReuse this content More

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      Nightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national trauma

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      BooksNightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national trauma Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta of the Washington Post show how bad things got – and how they could have been worseLloyd GreenSat 3 Jul 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 3 Jul 2021 02.21 EDTAs the world wakes from its pandemic-induced coma, Bloomberg rates the US as the best place to be. More than 150 million Americans have been vaccinated; little more than 4,100 have been hospitalized or have died as a result of breakthrough infection.Trump contempt for White House Covid taskforce revealed in new bookRead moreThe vaccines worked – but too late to save more than 600,000 Americans who have died. More than 500,000 were on Donald Trump’s watch.“This would have been hard regardless of who was president,” a senior administration official confided to Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta. “With Donald Trump, it was impossible.”Abutaleb is a health policy writer for the Washington Post. Paletta is its economics editor. Together, they supply a bird’s-eye narrative of a chaotic and combative response to a pandemic that has subsided but not disappeared in the west. Elsewhere, it still rages.At almost 500 pages, Nightmare Scenario depicts an administration riven by turf wars, terrified of losing re-election and more concerned about the demands of Trump and his base than broader constituencies and realities. It was always “them” v “us”. Sadly, this is what we expected.Under the subtitle “Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic that Changed History”, Abutaleb and Paletta confirm that life in the Trump White House was Stygian bleak. Trump was the star. Pain and insecurity were the coins of the realm.Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, laboured in constant fear of Trump and competitors inside the government. After taking a hard line against flavoured e-cigarettes early on, to Trump’s dismay, Azar never recovered. The pandemic simply deepened his personal nightmare.When Covid struck, he was all but a dead man walking. Then the White House Covid taskforce, headed by Mike Pence, neutered his authority. Think of it as a one-two punch. True to form, Trump told a taskforce member Azar was “in trouble” and that he, Trump, had “saved him”.Azar was forced to take on Michael Caputo, an acolyte of Roger Stone, as spokesman. Eventually, Caputo posted a Facebook video in which he claimed “hit squads [were] being trained all over this country”, ready to mount an armed insurrection to stop a second Trump term. Caputo embarked on a two-month medical leave. His “mental health … definitely failed”.Not surprisingly, Trump lost patience with Pence’s taskforce. It failed to deliver a magic bullet and he dismissed it as “that fucking council that Mike has”. For the record, in April 2020 Pence remarked: “Maybe I’m a glass half-full kind of guy, but I think the country is ready to reopen.” For all of his obsequiousness, Pence could never make Trump happy.Instead, Peter Navarro, Scott Atlas and Stephen Moore emerged as Trump’s go-to guys. Predictably, mayhem ensued.Navarro suggested his PhD in economics made him an expert in medicine as well. He jousted with Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease since 1984 – seemingly for giggles.Atlas was a radiologist whose understanding of infectious diseases was tangential. As for Moore, he played emissary for a libertarian donor base distraught by shutdowns and mask mandates.“Fauci is the villain here,” Moore intoned. “He has the Napoleon complex, and he thinks he is the dictator who could decide how to run the country.” Trump’s own authoritarian streak seems to have escaped him.Moore also referred to Fauci as “Fucky”, and advised state-based “liberation” movements against public health measures that served as precursors and incubators to the invasion of the US Capitol on 6 January this year.Going back to 2019, Moore was forced to withdraw from consideration for the board of the Federal Reserve after the Guardian reported on his bouts of alimony-dodging, contempt of court and tax delinquency.With one major exception – financing and developing a vaccine – the Trump administration left Covid to the states. Hydroxychloroquine never saved the day, though Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, ordered a bunch of it from India to sate Trump’s ego. Six days after the 2020 election, the National Institutes of Health issued a statement that insisted: “Hydroxychloroquine does not benefit adults hospitalized with Covid-19.” Trump was callous and mendacious before the pandemic. Yet even as he embraced medical quackery, bleach injections and self-pity, he presided over unprecedented vaccine development, the medical equivalent of winning the space race and the cold war at once.Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all tooRead moreWhen Trump signed off on Operation Warp Speed in May 2020, “he thought vaccines were too pie in the sky”, Abutaleb and Paletta report. When Trump learned the first contract executed under the program was with AstraZeneca, from the UK, he growled: “This is terrible news. I’m going to get killed.”Boris Johnson would “have a field day”, he said. Things didn’t work out that way.Right now, countries that relied on Chinese vaccines are experiencing a death spike in the face of the Delta variant. In the Seychelles, almost seven in 10 are fully vaccinated – yet deaths per capita are currently running at the highest rate in the world.Added to Chinese opacity surrounding its role in the outbreak, the limits of vaccine diplomacy and technology are apparent. From the looks of things, Trump has left multiple legacies, some more complex and alloyed than others. But things could have been worse.TopicsBooksCoronavirusInfectious diseasesPolitics booksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationreviewsReuse this content More

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      Lifting of all restrictions on 19 July ‘possibly too early’, government told

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      The lifting of all restrictions on 19 July is “possibly too early”, the government has been warned, with public health experts calling for more caution in the weeks ahead amid the continuing spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant.The rapid emergence of Delta forced Downing Street to delay the full reopening of society on 21 June by four weeks, and some scientists are concerned that the UK will remain vulnerable to a significant surge in cases, hospitalisations and deaths once all measures are removed later next month.A total of 101,676 cases were reported last week up to Saturday, a 43 per cent increase on the previous week, while a further 514 people were hospitalised in England with Covid-19 in the seven days up to 21 June. Of these, 304 were unvaccinated. Rising hospital pressures have also been compounded by a recent spike in A&E patients due to non-Covid issues; last week, The Independent revealed that a number of trusts had declared “black alerts” due to sudden surges in admissions.Some have nonetheless called for restrictions to be lifted on 5 July. But Linda Bauld, a professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh, said that such a move “is not supported by current evidence”.“We’ve seen rising numbers of cases in the UK over the past few weeks and although hospital admissions remain low, they are also rising, as are deaths from a very low base,” she said. “We know that although 88 per cent of adults have had a single dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, this provides partial protection and we need time to deliver more second doses, particularly to the over-40s.”Prof Bauld said three more weeks at the current level of easing would put the UK “in a more sustainable position” while providing the government with a “better idea” of the state of the UK’s epidemic. However, she warned, 19 July is still “very ambitious and possibly too early”.Agreeing that all Covid metrics were moving in the wrong direction, Professor Stephen Reicher, a member of Sage’s subgroup advising on behavioural science, said: “The question isn’t whether we should reopen on 5 July, it is what we can do to control the pandemic so we can reopen on 19 July.”Professor Sir Peter Horby, chairman of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), said he would not bring the restrictions easing date forward, adding that it had been “very sensible” to delay it by four weeks.“I don’t think we should rush into anything, we really want to make sure that we can release all restrictions and not have to backtrack at all,” he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday.Announcing a delay to the original so-called “freedom day” on 21 June, Mr Johnson told the public the government will “monitor the position every day and if after two weeks we have concluded that the risk has diminished then we reserve the possibility of proceeding to Step 4 and full opening sooner”.In a Commons statement on Monday, however, it is widely expected the government will not sanction an early reopening on 5 July – despite calls from some Tory backbenchers – and rather insist the relaxation of all remaining Covid restrictions remains on track for 19 July.Just last week, the business minister Kwasi Kwarteng also claimed the government would “always err on the side of caution”, as he suggested it was “unlikely” measures would be lifted ahead of what the prime minister has described as the “terminus” date of 19 July.It was not immediately clear whether Sajid Javid, who replaced Matt Hancock as health secretary at the weekend following his dramatic resignation, will return to the despatch box tomorrow tasked with the job of updating MPs on the government’s plans.Speaking on Sunday for the first time since his return to the cabinet, Mr Javid said his “most immediate priority” will be ending the Covid-19 pandemic as soon as possible, as he stressed he wanted to “see that we return to normal as soon and as quickly as possible”.Asked whether Labour would support the direction indicated by Mr Javid, Sir Keir Starmer told reporters: “What we’ve seen today already I’m afraid is confusion, because the incoming health secretary said he wants to open up as quickly as possible. The government’s now rowed back on that.“I don’t think it’s inspired confidence that already on day one, there’s been the health secretary saying his position this morning and then the government rowing back on it.”Prof Horby, who is also professor of emerging infectious diseases in the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, said the government and its scientific advisers were watching the data “very carefully”.He added: “There will be a lot of analysis of the data coming up to that date, to make sure we’re comfortable with that release.”Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at the University of Warwick, said that cases were continuing to rise as a result of the more transmissible Delta variant, but insisted that the link between infections, severe disease and hospitalisations has “been significantly weakened” as a result of the UK’s vaccine rollout.Even so, he added, “it does make sense to hold our nerve for a few more weeks [in easing restrictions] to get more people doubled jabbed and be sure that we have the Delta variant under control”.Some breakthrough infections are still to be expected, where a vaccinated individual falls ill from Covid, Prof Horby added. Those who have refused to receive a vaccine also remain particularly vulnerable. “But at this stage, we’re able to make sure that the health system isn’t overwhelmed and vaccination is really key to that.”He warned that the route out of the pandemic would be “a bumpy road out and that there will be twists and turns that we’re not wishing to see”. More

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      Leader behind bleach ‘miracle cure’ claims Trump consumed his product

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      The leader of a spurious church which peddled industrial bleach as a “miracle cure” for Covid-19 is claiming that he provided Donald Trump with the product in the White House shortly before the former president made his notorious remarks about using “disinfectant” to treat the disease.Mark Grenon, the self-styled “archbishop” of the Genesis II “church”, has given an interview from his prison cell in Colombia as he awaits extradition to the US to face criminal charges that he fraudulently sold bleach as a Covid cure. In the 90-minute interview he effectively presents himself as the source of Trump’s fixation with the healing powers of disinfectant.“We were able to give through a contact with Trump’s family – a family member – the bottles in my book,” Grenon says. “And he mentioned it on TV: ‘I found this disinfectant’.”Grenon had previously revealed that he had written to Trump in the White House in the days leading up to the disinfectant episode, urging him to promote the healing powers of chlorine dioxide. But in the new interview Grenon goes considerably further, claiming that the bleach, which carries serious health warnings from federal agencies, was actually put into the hands of the then president who consumed it.Trump’s comments about disinfectant, made at the White House on 23 April 2020 as coronavirus was tearing through the US, reverberated around the world. They caused astonishment in scientific circles, attracted widespread ridicule, and have come to symbolize the maverick response of the Trump administration towards the pandemic.At the press conference Trump hailed disinfectant as a potential cure for Covid, saying it “knocks it out in a minute, one minute”. He went on to muse whether “we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning”.Why Trump suddenly embraced bleach as a possible Covid treatment has remained one of the mysteries of his presidency. Now Grenon claims that it was his product, marketed as Miracle Mineral Solution or “MMS”, that lay behind it.The Guardian asked Trump’s office to clarify whether he had received and drank “MMS” bleach while in the White House, but received no immediate response.Grenon made his claim that he supplied Trump with bleach solution to Zakariya Adeel, a London-based astrologer and psychic. The interview was conducted apparently over a prison telephone line.Grenon and his son Joseph are both being held in Colombia as they await extradition. In April a federal grand jury sitting in Miami indicted them, along with two other sons, Jonathan and Jordan who are also in jail in Miami.The four Grenon family members face charges of fraudulently marketing and selling industrial bleach as a cure for Covid, cancer, malaria and a host of other serious medical conditions. A criminal trial is expected in Miami later this year.The US Food and Drug Administration has made it clear that drinking MMS is the same as drinking bleach. It warns that consumption can cause severe vomiting, diarrhea and low-blood pressure that can be life-threatening.The FDA describes MMS as a “powerful bleach typically used for industrial water treatment or bleaching textiles, pulp and paper”.In the video, Grenon repeats false claims that chlorine dioxide solution cures Covid. “We tried it with Covid – six drops every two hours for the first and second day. Boom! Gone, negative. You’re feeling great from feeling like you’re going to die – it works great,” he says.Use of bleach as a miracle cure has proliferated across Latin America during the pandemic. Fiona O’Leary, a campaigner against pseudoscience, told the Guardian that MMS peddlers were using Trump’s comments on disinfectant as a marketing tool.“You have the president of the United States telling people they can ingest bleach to treat Covid – so the response is hardly surprising. There’s been a dramatic increase in the use of the product in several Latin American countries after he made those comments,” she said. More

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      ‘Two Americas’ may emerge as Delta variant spreads and vaccination rates drop

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      With Covid vaccination penetration in the US likely to fall short of Joe Biden’s 70% by Fourth of July target, pandemic analysts are warning that vaccine incentives are losing traction and that “two Americas” may emerge as the aggressive Delta variant becomes the dominant US strain.Efforts to boost vaccination rates have come through a variety of incentives, from free hamburgers to free beer, college scholarships and even million-dollar lottery prizes. But of the efforts to entice people to get their shots have lost their initial impact, or failed to land effectively at all.“It’s just not working,” Irwin Redlener at the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University, told Politico. “People aren’t buying it. The incentives don’t seem to be working – whether it’s a doughnut, a car or a million dollars.”In Ohio, a program offering five adults the chance to win $1m boosted vaccination rates 40% for over a week. A month later, the rate had dropped to below what it had been before the incentive was introduced, Politico found.Oregon followed Ohio’s cash-prize lead but saw a less dramatic uptick. Preliminary data from a similar lottery in North Carolina, launched last week, suggests the incentive is also not boosting vaccination rates there.Public officials are sounding alarms that the window between improving vaccination penetration and the threat from the more severe Delta variant, which accounts for around 10% of US cases, is beginning to close. The Delta variant appears to be much more contagious than the original strain of Covid-19 and has wreaked havoc in countries like India and the United Kingdom.“I certainly don’t see things getting any better if we don’t increase our vaccination rate,” Scott Allen of the county health unit in Webster, Missouri, told Politico. The state has seen daily infections and hospitalizations to nearly double over the last two weeks.Overall, new US Covid cases have plateaued to a daily average of around 15,000 for after falling off as the nation’s vaccination program ramped up. But the number of first dose vaccinations has dropped to 360,000 from 2m in mid-April. A quarter of those are newly eligible 12- to 15-year-olds.Separately, pandemic researchers are warning that a picture of “two Americas” is emerging – the vaccinated and unvaccinated – that in many ways might reflect red state and blue state political divides.Only 52% of Republicans said they were partially or fully vaccinated, and 29% said they have no intention of getting a vaccine, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll. 77% of Democrats said they were already vaccinated, with just 5% responding that were resisting the vaccine.“I call it two Covid nations,” Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told BuzzFeed News.Bette Korber, a computational biologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said she expected variant Delta to become the most common variant in the US within weeks. “It’s really moving quickly,” Korber told Buzzfeed.On Friday, President Biden issued a plea to Americans who have not yet received a vaccine to do so as soon as possible.“Even while we’re making incredible progress, it remains a serious and deadly threat,” Biden said in remarks from the White House, saying that the Delta variant leaves unvaccinated people “even more vulnerable than they were a month ago”.“We’re heading into, God willing, the summer of joy, the summer of freedom,” Biden said. “On July 4, we are going to celebrate our independence from the virus as we celebrate our independence of our nation. We want everyone to be able to do that.” More

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

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      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

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      Divisive 2016 US election linked to higher risk of heart trouble

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      How stressful can an election campaign really be? Potentially life-threatening, researchers say, at least in the case of the 2016 US presidential election. The divisive campaign may have raised the risk of abnormal heart rhythms and worsened high blood pressure in people with underlying cardiovascular disease, two studies suggest.One study focused on nearly 2,500 people (mostly white, with an average age of about 71) with implanted cardiac devices in North Carolina, a swing state in the 2016 election that was subjected to fiercely negative political commercials and campaign events.Researchers examined the incidence of cardiac arrhythmias (too fast or too slow heartbeats or irregular heart rhythms) in a six-week period spanning before and after the election, and compared it with two six-week control periods June/July 2016 and October/November 2015.There was a 77% rise in the risk of cardiac arrhythmias during the election phase versus the control periods, even after accounting for factors including age and underlying medical conditions, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.In particular there was an 82% rise in the incidence of atrial arrhythmias, an abnormal heart rhythm that begins in the heart’s upper chambers and can lead to blood clots, stroke and other complications. There was a 60% jump in the rate of ventricular arrhythmias, an abnormal heart rhythm involving the heart’s lower chambers that can lead to cardiac arrest.The study’s lead author, Dr Lindsey Rosman, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina, said previous research had indicated that acute cardiovascular events tend to rise in the aftermath of events such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks. “But the direct link between a stressful political election and an increase in cardiac events hasn’t been established – until now.”The researchers also assessed whether the risk of arrhythmia differed by political party affiliation. Surprisingly, people who voted for the losing candidate, Hillary Clinton, did not experience a higher rate of arrhythmias compared with those who voted for the winner, Donald Trump.A separate study investigated changes in blood pressure among different ethnic groups. Readings from about 2,000 non-Hispanic white people, non-Hispanic people of colour, and Mexican Americans in the pre-election period (May to October 2016) were compared against 1,700 randomly selected participants from the three groups a year into the new presidency (November 2017 to April 2018.)The researchers found significant increases in blood pressure among black and Mexican American participants with hypertension, but no significant rises in people who did not already have hypertension (regardless of their ethnic background.The lead author, Dr Andrew Hwang, an assistant professor of clinical science at High Point University, North Carolina, said it was possible that the passage of time may have played a role in worsening blood pressure measures. “However, given that the 2016 US election was a major national event, we may be able to suspect that the election may have contributed, in part, to changes in blood pressure.” More