Federal Whistleblower Rick Bright Tells Congress How Trump Officials Bungled Coronavirus Preparations

Federal whistleblower Rick Bright testified before a House subcommittee on Thursday about the Trump administration’s mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis. Speaking for almost four hours, Bright, who was ousted as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority in April, provided a stinging, detailed account of President Donald Trump and Department of Health and Human Services officials’ failures to respond to the looming pandemic in January and February

Just hours after the president smeared him on Twitter as a disgruntled employee who “should no longer be working for our government,” Bright told the members of the health subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce about numerous occasions in which higher-ups had failed to heed his urgent calls for personal protective equipment, medical supplies, and samples of the virus necessary for beginning work on vaccines and therapeutics.

Those delays cost lives, said Bright, who offered the grim warning that, without better planning, “2020 will be darkest winter in modern history.”

In a heated hearing, Bright, who filed a whistleblower complaint earlier this month, also provided new details about a planned Trump administration program that would have made an unproven coronavirus treatment available without medical supervision. On March 23, he said, he received a directive from the office of the Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to create an expanded access program that would have provided broad access to the drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.

The program would have used an app to give people access to the potentially dangerous drugs — even those without confirmed coronavirus infections, Bright testified. He said his insistence that the regimen to be scientifically evaluated before it was made widely available angered his superiors and led him to be “involuntarily transferred” to a job at the National Institutes of Health.

Bright said, “That, I believe, was the straw that broke the camel’s back and escalated my removal.”

The testimony underscored Bright’s claim that his direct boss, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec and others at Health and Human Services resisted his attempts to address the imminent shortage of N95 masks in January and February, as coronavirus infections were spreading throughout the U.S.

“We should have been doing everything possible, placing orders early, ramping up supply. It should have been a high priority.”

During that period, Bright received a series of increasingly desperate emails from Mike Bowen, co-owner of Prestige Ameritech, the country’s biggest manufacturer of the masks that are used to protect health care workers from infectious diseases.

“I’ll never forget the emails I received from Mike Bowen indicating that our N95 supply was completely decimated,” Bright testified. “He said, ‘We’re in deep shit. The world is. And we need to act.’ And I pushed that forward to the highest levels I could at HHS and got no response. From that moment, I knew that we were going to have a crisis.”

“We should have been doing everything possible, placing orders early, ramping up supply. It should have been a high priority,” Bright went on. Instead, “I was met with indifference, people saying they were either too busy, or they didn’t have a plan, or they didn’t know who was responsible.” Bright added, “There were a number of excuses but never any action.”

Bright testified that, rather than responding, his superiors told him that his urgent pleas “were causing a commotion and I was removed from those meetings.”

Azar, as well as Kadlec and Peter Navarro, a White House official who Bright said helped him call attention to the coronavirus crisis, were invited to testify at the hearing but declined.

While Bright said the inadequate supply of surgical masks has already cost lives, he warned that many more health care workers still face an increased risk of Covid-19 infection because of ongoing shortages and the resulting reliance on lower quality masks. “Our doctors and nurses in the hospital today are wearing N95 masks from other countries that are not providing the sufficient protection,” Bright said.

After Bright described the flawed supply chain that led to the N95 fiasco, Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., expressed fear that similar problems might befall other critical products.

“I’m afraid the same thing is going to happen with vaccines,” said Pallone. “Should I be concerned?”

“Absolutely, sir,” Bright responded.

Bright, who has a Ph.D. in virology and has served in disaster preparedness for decades, also alerted the lawmakers to other shortages of supplies critical for dealing with the ongoing emergency, including swabs, testing reagents, and syringes. Although Bright began raising the alarm about the lack of syringes back in January, he told lawmakers that they weren’t ordered until May 1 and that another order “was placed today.”

In his whistleblower report, Bright made the case that Kadlec had been pressuring him to award contracts to politically connected companies, including one with ties to Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner. Among the drugs that Bright said Kadlec and a pharmaceutical industry consultant were pushing BARDA to purchase was one that had not undergone safety testing in humans. Bright argued that his removal from the agency was retaliation for his resistance both to the widespread cronyism and the pressures around chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.

Democrats on the committee lavishly praised Bright for speaking out about the government ineptitude and corruption, thanking him for his courage and calling him the “finest ambassador in our country for scientists,” as subcommittee chair Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., put it.

For his part, Bright embraced the role. He said, “Americans need to be told the truth.”

Yet several Republicans dismissed Bright as politically motivated and questioned the timing of the hearing, which was held before the Office of Special Counsel completed its investigation of Bright’s complaint. Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., accused him of “undermining the administration during a national and global crisis.”

In his own testimony, Prestige Ameritech’s Bowen raised questions about why Bright and others at BARDA didn’t act years earlier to address the preventable crisis, which Bowen said his company had identified in 2006.

While Bowen confirmed that he sent the emails to Bright about the diversion of foreign-made masks from the U.S. and the immediate need to ramp up domestic production during January and February, he described the missives as “merely the latest of 13 years of emails I sent to BARDA in my effort to get HHS to understand that the U.S. mask supply was destined for failure.”

Bowen testified that he had been alerting staff at BARDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to problems with the nation’s mask supply since at least 2007. Bright, who took medical leave because of hypertension following his whistleblower complaint, has worked at BARDA since 2010 and served as its director since 2016.

According to Bowen, the production of surgical masks largely shifted abroad in 2004, leaving the domestic mask supply “subject to diversion by foreign governments.” Prestige Ameritech alerted BARDA to the problem in 2007 and, in response to the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, bought an abandoned factory and tripled its workforce so it could increase its production of N95 masks. But, after the crisis subsided, hospitals returned to buying cheaper, foreign-made masks, and the company was forced to reduce its production and lay off 150 workers, Bowen said.

In January, Bowen offered to once again use that factory to produce masks. “Reactivating these machines would be very difficult and very expensive but could be achieved in a dire situation and with government help,” he wrote to Bright on January 22, just after the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in the U.S. was announced.

“They said that they would express their concerns about the mask supply to anyone that I could get to call them – anyone except reporters.”

In 2014, his company joined with other mask manufacturers to form the Secure Mask Supply Association, which attempted to warn about the dangers of not producing enough surgical masks in the U.S. The group worked with Bright and two of his agency colleagues at the time, who, according to Bowen, offered to help get the word out about the lack of domestic N95 production capacity — with certain limitations.

“They said that they would express their concerns about the mask supply to anyone that I could get to call them — anyone except reporters,” Bowen wrote.

Bright’s future is unclear. While the Office of Special Counsel, which is investigating his complaint, recommended that he remain at BARDA, Bright said that he was in discussion with NIH about starting work there.

In a statement to The Intercept, Bright’s lawyers said, “Rather than investigating Dr. Bright’s serious allegations of wrongdoing, which the Office of Special Counsel has determined as a preliminary matter have merit, HHS leadership has decided to lodge baseless allegations against him in an effort to distract attention from the important issues that should be addressed to save American lives.”

The post Federal Whistleblower Rick Bright Tells Congress How Trump Officials Bungled Coronavirus Preparations appeared first on The Intercept.

More Americans Are Becoming Socialists

Abby Harms was laid off from their job at a Denver board-games store the same day that the city went into lockdown. Within days of filling out a petition for laid-off service workers, Harms (who identifies as nonbinary) got an unexpected call from the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Did they need food or help getting groceries? Assistance filing for unemployment? Did Harms want to participate in a rent-cancellation campaign? To the last proposal, Harms eagerly agreed, and soon they were a dues-paying member of the DSA.

“I felt like I was doing something productive out of this whole nightmare,” the 32-year-old Harms, who says their politics have always been far-left, told me. “I had a purpose and something to fight for.”

Membership in DSA chapters around the country has surged in the past eight weeks. An estimated 10,000 people have joined since March, bringing the group’s total membership to roughly 66,000, according to internal figures. Enrollment fluctuates month to month, but the DSA hasn’t seen numbers like this since the election of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, a spokesperson said.

Leaders of the DSA attribute some of this recent growth to Senator Bernie Sanders suspending his presidential campaign in early April, which sent his supporters seeking another outlet for their organizing energies. But current economic and public-health conditions have sparked anger nationwide—and the present moment seems especially ripe for socialist outrage. Millions of Americans like Harms have been fired or furloughed. Fast-food workers and grocery-store checkers are risking their lives for minimum wage, while white-collar employees are attending Zoom meetings from the safety of their homes. And governors are flouting federal guidelines in allowing businesses to reopen, risking the “needless suffering and death” of their residents, as National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci put it.

“People are really starting to just look around and say, ‘Man, capitalism isn’t working,’” said the co-chair of the Detroit DSA chapter, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions. “If the markets can’t even produce hand sanitizer or toilet paper or masks during a plague—what good is this system?”

[Read: Coronavirus class conflict is coming]

For DSA members and other leftists, the political revolution always seems to be just around the corner. With Sanders out of the presidential race, a surge in membership isn’t likely to seriously affect the politics of the broader Democratic Party—especially a Democratic Party led by the establishment-backed former Vice President Joe Biden. But the coronavirus crisis and ensuing global recession will not be resolved in the next few weeks or months. The financial toll will be felt for years—maybe decades—to come, and with Congress’s push to expand the social safety net, more and more Americans could be open to government playing a bigger role in their lives. There is, in other words, great potential for systemic change in this as-yet-unwritten future—a potential that DSA members recognize.

“There’s the sense that [this situation] is unacceptable and immoral, and that feeling is really pushing people into the meticulous work of organizing,” says Julia Shannon, who sits on the steering committee for the Los Angeles DSA; her chapter gained 300 members in April, its largest month of growth ever. “We have to try to work toward harnessing that momentum and energy to create structures that work for the majority of people.”

The DSA, founded in 1982 by the writer and activist Michael Harrington, had 5,000 members in 2015, when Sanders began his first run for president. At more than 66,000 members now, it’s still small: The Libertarian Party, by comparison, has more than 600,000 registered members. But in the past two years, the DSA has seen high-profile allies take power: Representatives Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, two freshman rabble-rousers sometimes described as the future of the Democratic Party, are card-carrying democratic socialists and have become the group’s unofficial spokeswomen. Eleven DSA members were elected to state legislatures in 2018, and more than a dozen others are seated on city councils across the U.S.

The organization’s ascendance in the past few years is “as impressive as anything that’s happened in left-wing history since the [creation of the] Socialist Party itself in 1912,” Maurice Isserman, a history professor at Hamilton College and a charter member of the DSA, told me. The past eight weeks in particular, he said, represent “a significant moment” for the group.

Right now, the DSA is emphasizing recruitment, framing their efforts as giving struggling workers “a way to fight back,” the DSA Denver labor chair, Mariah Wood, told me. Her chapter, which recruited Harms, has organized more than 200 laid-off service workers as part of a citywide campaign to urge Governor Jared Polis to cancel rent and mortgage payments. The chapter teamed up with other local groups, including the Denver Classroom Teachers Association and several trade unions, to urge the Denver City Council to help lobby the state government, which it did. (While Polis has argued that canceling rent is not within his power, he ordered a temporary ban on evictions in the state earlier this month.) Before now, such a collaboration would have been unlikely because of DSA’s radical reputation, Wood said. These days, “people are enthusiastically working with the DSA,” she said. “It’s a good time to be a socialist.”

[Read: Socialism, but in Iowa]

Midwest DSA chapters, too, have seen growing interest in their work. Membership in the Twin Cities DSA has ticked upward since late February by some 200 members, said the group’s 29-year-old co-chair Rita Allen. The chapter saw a blitz of new members with Bernie fever in the run-up to Super Tuesday. After Joe Biden regained his lead in the primary, even more people joined the chapter as a way to keep pushing for Medicare for All and other Sanders-backed legislation. Within weeks, the state shutdowns started happening.

“Anyone who lives with a little precarity in their life … could see that the overall response to the pandemic was completely insufficient,” Allen told me. “We seized on that moment.”

The Twin Cities DSA began calling for an eviction moratorium, for the cancellation of rents and mortgages, and for the state health-insurance provider to extend its open-enrollment period. At the onset of the pandemic, the group began organizing neighborhood grocery runs and created a “solidarity fund” to raise and distribute cash—nearly $25,000—to needy community members.

The DSA is interested in recruiting higher-income workers on the front lines of the crisis, too. Through word of mouth, the Twin Cities chapter has reached out to health-care employees who feel like their workplace conditions are unsafe. Bridget Gavin, a 38-year-old Minneapolis nurse, told me that she was alarmed and frustrated by the lack of N95 masks and other personal protective equipment at the hospital where she works. A Sanders supporter in the primary, Gavin was approached in mid-April by a handful of other nurses recruiting for the DSA, and she agreed to join the organization. “I feel supported and heard and challenged in a good way,” Gavin told me.

If the DSA is smart, it will channel members’ energy and outrage into electing political candidates and campaigning for its pet legislative reforms, including the Green New Deal, high-quality affordable child care, and universal health-care coverage, says David Meyer, a sociology professor at UC Irvine who studies social movements and public policy. The U.S. government is “going to be spending shitloads of money” to get the country going again, Meyer told me. The next few weeks and months offer a chance for leftist reform groups like the DSA “to get in and decide where that goes and to make claims.”

[Read: What do progressives do now?]

The DSA has faced and will continue to face obstacles in pushing for reforms, given the organization’s tiny size—it’s way smaller than the major political parties—and the anti-socialist attitudes that are still prevalent in America. But the group has been propagating these ideas for decades, “making it well positioned to capitalize” on the societal upheaval happening now, Meyer said.

Since joining DSA in late March, Harms has been making 40 calls a week to other laid-off or essential workers, encouraging them to sign petitions, attend DSA meetings, and join Denver’s rent-cancellation campaign. Harms is heading back to work at the board-game shop this week, now that Colorado is reopening. But when I asked whether their DSA work will continue, Harms answered with an immediate and definitive yes.

“We’re going to see real change after this,” Harms said. “People won’t forget what this was like—to not have income and not have a job and still be expected to pay all these different bills.”

A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of commencement addresses commissioned by The Atlantic for students who will not be able to attend their graduations because of the pandemic.

Y

ou bastards stood me up!

  You invited me to give this commencement address months ago. You never told me it was canceled. So I drove across the country, got up early this morning, put this scratchy graduation gown over my Ramones T-shirt, and now I find myself standing in an empty stadium with a Very Important Speech in my hands!

The speech I was intending to give fully lives up to the extremely mediocre norms of this genre. You invited me because I’m a person who has achieved some career success, and so you wanted me to give a speech about why career success doesn’t matter. You wanted me to open with some heartwarming jokes I stole from Ellen, and to drop the names of some obscure bands to prove that I’m hip to youth culture. Then you wanted me to conclude with inspiring stories about how moments of failure taught me valuable life lessons—especially about the need to give generously to your college’s alumni association.

I was going to do all that—and in 10 minutes!

But since you didn’t show up, I’m going to give a different talk. I’m going to take advantage of the fact that the parents aren’t here to say something I could never say in front of the parents. I’m going to take advantage of the fact that the faculty and administrators aren’t here to say something I could never say in front of the faculty and administrators. And I’m going to take advantage of the fact that you students aren’t here to say something I could never say in front of you yourselves.

First, here’s what I can’t say to you in front of your parents.

Your parents are proud of you, and a little surprised that you’ve made it to graduation. They are eager for you to launch yourself off into a successful life. Screw that. The next few years are going to be a terrible time to start a career. So don’t do it. Put off launching your career until 2023.

You happened to have graduated into a global emergency that has interrupted everything. That whole career-track thing you’ve been worrying about? Fundamentally interrupted. Don’t see this as a void; see it as a permission slip.

See it as a permission slip to think differently about time. Usually, time flows continually, like a river, and one thing leads to another. But sometimes time comes in a discrete box. The next two years are going to be a discrete box. Think only about this unusual two-year box right now. You’ll probably have 60 more years after this box is over and they’ll probably be more normal. You can worry about them later.

Use this hiatus to do something you would never have done if this emergency hadn’t hit. When the lockdown lifts, move to another state or country. Take some job that never would have made sense if you were worrying about building a career—bartender, handyman, AmeriCorps volunteer.

Don’t worry about where the job you take puts you on any status hierarchy. Our society’s career status hierarchy is in the midst of changing anyway. Instead, try to do something that people will ask you about for the rest of your life. What was it like to work on a fishing boat off of Maine? What was it like to teach at a nursery school for the children of Mexican farmworkers? You’re graduating into an extremely uncertain time. You might as well get a master’s degree in handling uncertainty. If you use the next two years as a random hiatus, you may not wind up richer, but you’ll wind up more interesting.

Now let me tell you what I can’t tell you in front of the faculty and administrators.

Graduation day is a good day to step back and reflect on all the things you’ve learned during college. It’s also a good day to step back and reflect on all the ways your college failed you, on the pieces of your education this place should have given you but didn’t. You’re going to have to learn these things on your own.

The biggest way most colleges fail is this: They don’t plant the intellectual and moral seeds students are going to need later, when they get hit by the vicissitudes of life. If you didn’t study Jane Austen while you were here, you probably lack the capacity to think clearly about making a marriage decision. If you didn’t read George Eliot, then you missed a master class on how to judge people’s character. If you didn’t read Nietzsche, you are probably unprepared to handle the complexities of atheism—and if you didn’t read Augustine and Kierkegaard, you’re probably unprepared to handle the complexities of faith.

The list goes on. If you didn’t read de Tocqueville, you probably don’t understand your own country. If you didn’t study Gibbon, you probably lack the vocabulary to describe the rise and fall of cultures and nations.

The wisdom of the ages is your inheritance; it can make your life easier. These resources often fail to get shared because universities are too careerist, or because faculty members are more interested in their academic specialties or politics than in teaching undergraduates, or because of a host of other reasons. But to get through life, you’re going to want to draw on that accumulated wisdom. Today is a good day to figure out where your college left gaps, and to start filling them.

Finally, students, let me say the thing I can’t say to you in front of yourselves.

It’s about your diet. No, I don’t mean your physical diet. Our culture spends an awful lot of time talking about food, celebrity chefs, craft beers, and so on, so I suspect you’re covered when it comes to thinking about your physical diet. Gluttony is the shallowest of the vices and being a gourmet is the most bourgeois of the virtues, and I’m just not that interested.

I’m talking about your mental diet. What are you putting into your mind? Our culture spends a lot less time worrying about this, and when it does, it goes about it all wrong.

When people do worry about your mental diet, they tend to fret about the junk you’re pouring into your brain—the trashy videos, the cheap horror movies, the degrading reality TV, and all the hours of Tiger King and Love Is Blind you binge-watched when this pandemic started.

I’m not so worried about the dangers of mental junk food. That’s because I’ve found that many of the true intellectuals I’ve met take pleasure in mental junk food too. Having a taste for trashy rom-coms hasn’t rotted their brain or made them incapable of writing great history or doing deep physics.

No, my worry is that, especially now that you’re out of college, you won’t put enough really excellent stuff into your brain. I’m talking about what you might call the “theory of maximum taste.” This theory is based on the idea that exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness. If you spend a lot of time with genius, your mind will end up bigger and broader than if you spend your time only with run-of-the-mill stuff.

The theory of maximum taste says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit—the best that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming.

A few years ago, I was teaching students at a highly competitive college. Simultaneously, I was leading seminars for 30- and 40-somethings, many of whom had gone to that same college. I assigned the same essay to both groups, an essay on Tolstoy by the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. The college students found it easy to read; it’s not that hard of an essay to grasp. The 30- and 40-somethings really struggled. Their reading-comprehension ability had declined in the decades since college, and so had their ability to play with ideas. The upper limit of their mind was lower than it used to be.

In college, you get assigned hard things. You’re taught to look at paintings and think about science in challenging ways. After college, most of us resolve to keep doing this kind of thing, but we’re busy and our brains are tired at the end of the day. Months and years go by. We get caught up in stuff, settle for consuming Twitter and, frankly, journalism. Our maximum taste shrinks. Have you ever noticed that 70 percent of the people you know are more boring at 30 than they were at 20?

But then a pandemic hits, and suddenly you have time to read Henry James and Marilynne Robinson, to really look at Rembrandt and Rothko. Suddenly you feel your consciousness expanding once again. The old intellectual muscles come back.

Here’s what I can’t say to you in front of your face: I’m worried about the future of your maximum taste. People in my and earlier generations, at least those lucky enough to get a college education, got some exposure to the classics, which lit a fire that gets rekindled every time we sit down to read something really excellent. I worry that it’s possible to grow up now not even aware that those upper registers of human feeling and thought exist.

I wonder if you will sense what many of your elders do—that the whole culture is eroding the skill the UCLA scholar Maryanne Wolf calls “deep literacy,” the ability to deeply engage in a dialectical way with a text or piece of philosophy, literature, or art. Or as Adam Garfinkle put it in The American Interest, “To the extent that you cannot perceive the world in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape.”

I can’t say that to you, because it sounds fussy and elitist and OK Boomer. And if you were in front of me, you’d roll your eyes.

But hey! You’re not here to listen! I’m just alone in this stadium, free to speak my piece.

And now I’m going to run to the end zone and pretend to be Aaron Rodgers.

Two Female Reporters Refused to Let Trump Bully Them Into Silence, So He Ran Away

When an actual press conference threatened to break out in the Rose Garden on Monday, as two White House correspondents refused to let Donald Trump silence them, and a third declined his request to change the subject by asking a new question, the president abruptly turned and walked away.

The final minute of Trump's news conference this evening pic.twitter.com/m6oGh1q9VF

— Axios (@axios) May 11, 2020

It was a sudden ending to what Trump had clearly expected to be a largely self-promotional event — during which he told Americans, on the day that the coronavirus death toll passed 80,000, “We have met the moment, and we have prevailed.”

What prompted the president’s retreat was a rare moment of cooperation among members of the White House press corps who, for once, refused to play Trump’s game of ending an exchange with a reporter whenever he is under pressure by calling on someone else. That dodge usually works because correspondents from rival networks are so eager for their turn in the spotlight that they let the president decide who speaks and when.

But when his signature move suddenly failed on Monday, as the CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang pressed him on the racist undertone of his comment to her, and Kaitlan Collins of CNN and Yamiche Alcindor of PBS both refused to bail him out, Trump simply called time on the proceedings and fled.

The president’s meltdown came after Jiang put him on the spot by asking him why he was boasting about the United States having now performed more coronavirus tests than any other nation. “Why does that matter?” she asked. “Why is this global competition to you if every day Americans are still losing their lives and we’re still seeing more cases every day?”

The president responded by lashing out at the Chinese-American reporter from West Virginia, telling her, nonsensically, that she should “ask China” her question about his obsession with testing statistics. Trump then tried to end the exchange by calling on Collins for a new question, but the CNN reporter waited for her colleague from CBS to follow up.

Jiang — who was the target of a racist joke by a White House official in March — pressed Trump on the thinly veiled racism of his reply. “Sir, why are you saying that to me, specifically, that I should ask China?” she asked. After Trump replied by claiming that he would say the same “to anybody that asks a nasty question like that,” he pointed at Collins and said, “Please go ahead.”

Collins, however, again waited for Jiang to finish, which she did, by saying, “That’s not a nasty question. Why does it matter?”

Trump then tried to punish Collins by skipping her and calling on Alcindor to ask the next question instead. When Collins objected, “but you called on me,” Trump said, “I did and you didn’t respond, and now I’m calling on the young lady in the back.”

Alcindor wrote later on Twitter that instead of jumping in, she gestured at Collins to proceed. When she tried to, Trump threw up his hands in frustration, declared the event over and turned on his heels.

Likely aware of how petty he looked, Trump later cast the collegial behavior of the three correspondents as evidence of some sort of plot against him, tweeting video of the exchange with the comment: “The Lamestream Media is truly out of control. Look how they work (conspire!) together.”

The president’s fit did little to inspire confidence in his handling of the crisis but it reminded many critics of how particularly irked Trump seems to be by tough questions from women. “Pretty pathetic,” Sen. Bernie Sanders tweeted in response to video of the meltdown. “Mr. Trump is a coward who tears down others to make himself feel powerful.”

Trump’s inability to answer Jiang’s question was also revealing because it cut to the heart of his constant attempts to distract Americans from his obvious inability to handle the crisis with a blizzard of irrelevant or misleading statistics.

That’s why, during every one of his recent meetings with governors in the Oval Office, the leaders of those states have been forced to sit in front of placards detailing exactly how many pieces of medical equipment the federal government has provided to them since the start of the crisis.

At an Oval Office meeting last week, Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa was forced to sit in front of a tally of medical equipment her state had received from the federal government.

Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana heard Donald Trump tell reporters how much the federal government had done for his state in the Oval Office in April 29.

Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Missing from those tallies has been any indication of how many of those items the governors requested or how many of their residents have become infected or died in that same period from the pandemic virus the president claimed in February would simply “disappear.”

During Monday’s Rose Garden event, Trump also returned to perhaps his most brazen lie about the Covid-19 death toll — the entirely false claim he has been making since mid-April that the United States is, with Germany, one of the two countries with the least number of deaths per capita from the disease. As I reported last weekend, this is not even close to true.

Trump repeats the massive lie that the U.S. and Germany "are the two best in deaths per 100,000" from Covid-19. As I reported the U.S. mortality rate is 132nd; Germany's rate is so much lower that 50,000 Americans would still be alive if we matched it https://t.co/Ch1hqm3RRN pic.twitter.com/ZfikBopIC5

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) May 11, 2020

When Trump claimed on Monday, while looking down at his notes, that “Germany and the United States are the two best in deaths per 100,000,” he appeared to be referring to the latest statistics on deaths in only the eight countries with the most confirmed cases of Covid-19. In that ranking, if all of the other countries on Earth are ignored, it is true that the U.S. mortality rate is the seventh-worst and the German one the eight-worst.

A chart posted online by researchers at Johns Hopkins showed mortality rates as of May 10 for the 10 countries most affected by Covid-19.

Photo: Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center

But while six Western European countries do have more deaths per capita from Covid-19 than the U.S., there are more than 130 countries with lower mortality rates than America, including Germany, which is far lower. As of May 10, according to statistics compiled by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the U.S. had 24.31 deaths per 100,000 citizens, compared to 9.13 in Germany.

What this means is that if the federal government in Washington had been as successful at keeping its citizens alive as the one in Berlin, the death toll in the U.S. would not be, as it is today 80,682, but 30,077 instead.

In other words, Trump is engaged in a kind of statistical sleight-of-hand, one that seems designed to distract attention from the fact that more than 50,000 Americans who have died of Covid-19 would still be alive today had he managed the crisis as well as Angela Merkel.

The post Two Female Reporters Refused to Let Trump Bully Them Into Silence, So He Ran Away appeared first on The Intercept.

Kim Olson, Texas Congressional Candidate, Clashed With Teachers During Polarizing Tenure at Dallas School District

Kim Olson, a Democratic candidate in the runoff for a suburban Texas district that includes the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and surrounding affluent suburbs, is most commonly known for her past career in the Air Force. “Retired colonel” is the epithet she uses on her social media accounts, her military service is prominently featured on her campaign website, and Democrats and the media have been debating how much of a liability an early 2000s contracting scandal in Iraq, where she was accused of war profiteering, would be in a general election. (Olson denies the charge, but she did plead guilty to two lesser offenses relating to conflicts of interest and obtaining outside employment without permission.)

Another line on Olson’s resume, following her retirement from the Air Force in 2005, gets much less attention. From August 2007 to June 2009, Olson was the human resources director for the Dallas Independent School District, the second-largest district in the state. Beyond a reference at the bottom of Olson’s campaign website that as HR director, she “oversaw $1 Billion dollar budget and 22,000 employees,” she rarely mentions this job on the campaign trail.

There may be good reason for that. Her tenure in a seemingly anodyne school administrator role was contentious, from budget issues and teacher layoffs to getting reprimanded by the school board. When she abruptly tendered her resignation in 2009, providing no reason why, a Dallas Observer columnist noted that it “seems an awfully quiet way for one of the school year’s most controversial figures to go.”

Some of the controversy stemmed from her close ties to the education reform movement. Olson was trained at the Broad Superintendents Academy, a bootcamp for reform-minded education administrators. As HR director, she helped lead the push to bring Teach for America, which recruits recent college graduates to teach for two-year stints, into Dallas public schools. 

“She helped facilitate that [TFA] contract and most traditional educators were highly opposed because Teach for America teachers had only six weeks of training,” said Rena Honea, the president of the Dallas teachers union, who was in union leadership during Olson’s tenure. “There was a big push from the business world and the education reformers, but Kim was the one who helped foster that contract and relationship.”

Olson declined to comment on these aspects of her record. Instead, she provided a comment on how her campaign has responded to coronavirus.

Her rhetoric toward teachers also exacerbated tensions. In an interview with D Magazine, a monthly publication covering Dallas-Fort Worth, Olson once quipped, “Most educators don’t understand leadership because that’s really not what is practiced.” She went on to add, “Just because you’ve been the head of a classroom or a school doesn’t mean you have leadership.” 

Olson’s tenure as HR director also overlapped with the most severe budget crisis in the Dallas school district’s history. A bombshell Dallas Morning News investigation from November 2008 detailed the district’s fiscal woes and shoddy accounting practices: The district had overspent its previous budget by $64 million and was on track to run up an $84 million deficit that year. The report led to new audits and the swift installment of a new CFO.

The budget problems began well before Olson arrived at the school district, but when she was blamed for the crisis unfolding under her watch, she denied all responsibility. When she was blamed for authorizing the hiring of new teachers the district couldn’t afford and criticized for laying off hundreds of them later on to balance the budget, she insisted that it wasn’t her department’s fault, that her staff had merely executed personnel decisions approved elsewhere by budget officials. When a school trustee pressed Olson on what her department would do if the budget office was wrong or made a mistake, she said her team did not attempt to reconcile its figures with its own data and did not even have the staffing allocation to do so. (A spokesperson for Olson’s campaign said the $1 billion budget reference on her website refers to overseeing compensation and benefits — not the personnel budget she distanced herself from years ago.)

While Olson maintained her department’s innocence in the district’s fiscal crisis, she was simultaneously taking contentious steps to boost its public image. In November 2008, three school district employees took the unusual step of attending a school board meeting to offer praise for the HR department. One after another, the principals offered testimony about how great it was to start their school year with highly qualified staff already in place at their schools.

The Dallas school trustees could sense something fishy was going on, as it was hardly the beginning of the school year. One trustee said it was “very suspicious” the administrators had shown up to speak. “I feel a setup,” he added.

At the end of the meeting, Olson admitted that she had asked the three principals to come to the meeting and recognize her department’s work. Trustee Lew Blackburn said he was “very angry” that the principals were asked to leave their jobs to come and praise HR, and he told the school superintendent that “if this happens again, I will be highly pissed.”

In March, Olson emerged from her seven-way primary in Texas’s 24th Congressional District,  with 41 percent of the vote. Because no candidate got 50 percent, she will be facing off in a July runoff against Candace Valenzuela, a school board member for the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District who earned 30 percent of the vote. 

The district, which is currently represented by Republican Rep. Kenny Marchant, is one of seven Texas House seats the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee aims to flip in November. In August 2019 Marchant announced he would not seek reelection. The winner of the runoff will face off against Republican Beth Van Duyne, a former mayor in the district.

The post Kim Olson, Texas Congressional Candidate, Clashed With Teachers During Polarizing Tenure at Dallas School District appeared first on The Intercept.

Coronavírus: como Samy Dana promoveu um estudo desastrado usado para defender o fim do isolamento

Ilustração: The Intercept Brasil

No momento em que o país bate recorde de mortos por dia, os ricos parecem ter decidido dar um basta nas medidas de isolamento social. Em todo o país, eles estão se mobilizando para pressionar as autoridades a afrouxar o isolamento social para o bem da economia. Carreatas com carros de luxo protestando contra a quarentena e depoimentos angustiados de empresários se intensificaram nas últimas semanas. Em Belém, no auge do pico de infecção na cidade, o prefeito anunciou que o serviço das empregadas domésticas será considerado essencial durante a pandemia. A casa grande não aguenta ficar tanto tempo sem uma boa faxina.

Mesmo havendo um consenso científico indicando que o afrouxamento das medidas de isolamento resultará em mais mortes, os ricos estão dispostos a pagar pra ver. Afinal de contas, como afirmou o presidente da XP nesta semana, o país está indo bem no controle do coronavírus e o pico da doença nas classes altas já foi atingido. Apesar da ciência continuar fazendo previsões catastróficas para o Brasil, o mercado financeiro já não vê mais motivo para alarmismo.

Quinta-feira em Brasília, um dia após o país ter batido o número de mortos por dia, Bolsonaro assinou um decreto que amplia o rol de atividades essenciais. O presidente juntou uma penca de empresários sedentos pela volta das atividades econômicas e foi até o STF sem avisar ninguém. Como se fosse o chefe do tribunal, passou a transmitir a reunião ao vivo na internet sem o aval do presidente da casa.

Apesar do gesto autoritário, o ministro Dias Toffoli recebeu a todos com cordialidade e afirmou que o governo Bolsonaro e as instituições estão trabalhando muito bem no combate à pandemia, “apesar do que sai na imprensa”. Até porque o pior para as elites já passou, não é mesmo, Toffoli?

Sem o respaldo da ciência para justificar o afrouxamento do isolamento social, as elites decidiram contratar o seu próprio estudo científico. De repente, um estudo encomendado pela corretora de investimentos Easynvest passou a circular nas redes sociais e na mídia com grande credibilidade. Quem está a frente desse estudo é o economista Samy Dana, que ficou famoso dando dicas de investimento em jornais da Rede Globo e hoje é mais conhecido por ser um dos comentaristas do Pânico da Jovem Pan. Apesar de ser um contratado da Easynvest, empresa que encomendou o estudo, Samy garante que sua equipe não recebeu nenhum centavo pelo trabalho.

Além do economista, participam do estudo um matemático e outros quatro médicos. Eles defendem que o modelo de análise criado para prever o número de mortes é muito mais robusto que todos os que já foram apresentados. Segundo eles, vai morrer muito menos gente do que prevê o consenso científico atual. Os estudos da Imperial College of London, por exemplo, que têm sido a principal referência para praticamente todos os governantes do mundo, estariam redondamente errados em suas previsões alarmistas. “Fiquem leves!”, diria Samy para os cientistas do Imperial College, parafraseando Regina Duarte.

O problema é que os fatos apontam exatamente na direção contrária do que diz o economista do Pânico. A universidade londrina previu que o sistema de saúde brasileiro iria começar a colapsar a partir do dia 21 de abril. No dia 23, cinco capitais brasileiras já estavam com seus sistemas à beira do colapso. Na semana passada, a mesma universidade previu que o Brasil atingiria 10 mil mortos até o dia de hoje. Na quinta-feira, o país já havia atingido o número de 9.146 mortos. Já o estudo de Samy previu que Manaus atingiria o pico de mortes entre os dias 21 e 30 de abril. Mas, em 4 de maio, a cidade continuava batendo novos recordes de mortos diários. A título de curiosidade: Samy também criou um modelo para prever resultados dos paredões do BBB que se mostrou bastante falível.

Ou seja, agora temos na praça um estudo capitaneado por um contratado da Easyinvest que refuta os epidemiologistas de uma das melhores universidades do mundo. Não precisa ser alguém familiarizado com os meandros da ciência para confirmar que o modelo de Samy ainda não tem valor científico. Basta ser familiarizado com a lógica básica.

O estudo sequer foi analisado por seus pares, até porque até agora não foi publicado por nenhuma revista científica — um requisito básico para atestar a validade de um estudo científico. Nenhum dos pesquisadores envolvidos tem qualquer trabalho publicado na área de epidemiologia, o que seria fundamental para quem tem a pretensão de refutar o consenso científico elaborado pelos grandes epidemiologistas do mundo. Qualquer pessoa séria e razoável entende que um estudo revisado por outros cientistas e publicado em revistas científicas tem muito mais credibilidade que um encomendado à toque de caixa por uma corretora de investimentos e feito por não especialistas em epidemiologia.

Por mais bizarro que isso possa parecer, a Imperial College chegou a apontar os erros do modelo da Easynvest em seu último relatório sobre o Brasil. Segundo a análise da universidade londrina,  as evidências são consistentes em apontar a necessidade de um lockdown no país. A conclusão é a de que, se não houver endurecimento nas medidas de isolamento, as infecções continuarão a se espalhar exponencialmente.

Report 21 do Imperial College, específico sobre o Brasil. Ele menciona o que está muito errado no modelo que um economista tem promovido: ele usa parâmetros ordens de grandeza fora da realidade para fazer a situação parecer tranquila. Não está.https://t.co/NdeaPptxDF

— Leandro R. Tessler (@leandrotessler) May 8, 2020

Mesmo com todas suas limitações, o estudo da Easynvest tem sido exaustivamente explorado por quem deseja o fim do isolamento social. Samy tem feito um marketing agressivo em torno dessa pesquisa, algo típico da turma do mercado financeiro. Ele conseguiu emplacar na mídia a ideia de que o seu modelo é o mais robusto de todos que já apareceram no mundo. Na CNN, o debatedor bolsonarista Caio Coppolla apresenta quase que diariamente o estudo de Samy como sendo verdade absoluta. O governador do Amazonas, que é bolsonarista e quer o fim do isolamento, tem se baseado no estudo para tomar decisões. Com base no modelo de Samy Dana, o governador anunciou um plano para flexibilizar o isolamento a partir do dia 14 de maio. Uma curiosidade: Samy Dana já teve negócios com o atual secretário da Fazenda do Amazonas. Eles foram sócios de uma empresa que presta consultoria em gestão empresarial.

O governador do Paraná, o bolsonarista Ratinho Jr., também quis ouvir Samy para tomar as decisões no enfrentamento à pandemia no estado. A Câmara dos Deputados o convidou para apresentar o estudo numa comissão especial sobre a covid-19. De repente, um comentarista do Pânico virou a grande referência brasileira sobre estudos epidemiológicos. Esqueçam o virologista Átila Iamarino. Um “PhD em Business” — é assim que Samy gosta de se apresentar — virou para os defensores do fim da quarentena o grande especialista em covid-19 do país.

Apesar de não possuir valor científico, o estudo de Samy Dana não é de todo ruim. Há pessoas sérias envolvidas nele, comprometidas com a ciência. A questão é que ele é ainda um estudo prévio, feito às pressas por não especialistas em epidemiologia, e que jamais poderia ter ganhado a importância que ganhou no debate público sobre a pandemia. O modelo de Samy virou o queridinho entre os que querem a reabertura da economia, porque os picos de infecção aparecem nele muito antes do que prevê o consenso científico. Isso justificaria antecipação do fim da quarentena.

Como de costume, os ricos não estão dispostos a pagar pela crise econômica e preferem empurrar os pobres para o sacrifício.

Alexandre Simas, um respeitado matemático que participou do estudo, criticou publicamente aqueles que estão recomendando o fim do isolamento social com base na pesquisa da Easynvest: “Soube que existem pessoas utilizando o nosso modelo para justificar o fim da quarentena. Isso não faz nenhum sentido. Até o momento nosso modelo assume a quarentena sob TODO o período do estudo. Estamos estudando o efeito de sair da quarentena, mas, sob qualquer simulação que tenho feito, as consequências são feias. Não temos nenhuma evidência que forneça o mínimo de segurança para uma eventual saída da quarentena.”

Apesar do estudo não recomendar o fim da quarentena, o marketing feito em torno dele o transformou no principal argumento dos que o desejam. Enquanto a ciência de verdade recomenda que os governantes brasileiros cogitem o lockdown, a ciência do mercado financeiro forneceu um alívio de consciência para os ricos que defendem o fim do isolamento social em nome da salvação da economia. Agora, graças a uma empresa do mercado financeiro, aqueles que negavam o consenso científico já tem uma pesquisa científica para chamar de sua.

Diferentemente do colega matemático que reconhece as limitações do estudo, Samy Dana tem tratado as críticas com uma empáfia que não combina com um pesquisador. Depois que passou a ser questionado no Twitter por tudo o que já foi exposto aqui, o economista bloqueou os críticos, mesmo aqueles que propuseram um debate respeitoso. Também acusou jornalistas e cientistas de boicotar a sua pesquisa e chamou de “militante” quem defende o consenso científico.

Engraçado: alguns cientistas e jornalistas citam estudos e recitam o mantra da ciência, porém, quando mostramos que não funcoinam e entregamos um estudo mais robusto (paper https://t.co/H7ycHivO2y ), simplesmente ignoram. Depois, reclamam quando chamamados de militância

— Samy Dana (@samydana) April 30, 2020

Esse tweet revela que a preocupação central de Samy está em descredibilizar o consenso científico. O seu objetivo não é a busca pela verdade, mas estabelecer uma falsa disputa de narrativas entre pesquisas. Se irritar com perguntas e críticas sobre o estudo não me parece ser uma postura adequada de um pesquisador. Parece mais adequada a um militante do mercado financeiro sedento para que atividade econômica volte ao normal. Agora, Samy e a Easynvest viraram referência e estão na vitrine do mercado de consultorias e palestras. Eles podem ser ruins de ciência, mas são gênios do marketing!

Mês passado, o Papa Francisco apontou para o risco da humanidade ser golpeada “por um vírus ainda pior: o do egoísmo e o da indiferença”. Quanta inocência. A fala do presidente da XP Investimentos e a exploração marqueteira em cima de um estudo encomendado pelo mercado financeiro mostram que as elites estão mais preocupadas com os lucros do que com os cadáveres das classes mais vulneráveis à contaminação.

Como de costume, os ricos não estão dispostos a pagar pela crise econômica e preferem empurrar os pobres para o sacrifício. Eles decidiram que está na hora de colocar a massa trabalhadora para se aglomerar no transporte público e fazer a máquina da economia voltar a girar. O número de mortes diárias segue batendo recordes, mas para as elites “o pior já passou”. Isso é o que eu chamo de consciência de classe.

The post Coronavírus: como Samy Dana promoveu um estudo desastrado usado para defender o fim do isolamento appeared first on The Intercept.

The "Coup" Attempt in Venezuela Seems Ridiculous. But Don't Forget — Regime Change Is the U.S. Goal.

This photo released by the Venezuelan Miraflores presidential press office shows President Nicolás Maduro speaking over military equipment that he says was seized during an incursion into Venezuela, during his televised address from Miraflores in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 4, 2020.

Photo: Miraflores press office via AP

Picture the following scene: Two former Venezuelan special forces soldiers are captured while trying to land on a beach in the United States. They confess on camera to being part of a wider plot to capture and kidnap the American president.

That same day, back in Venezuela, another ex-special forces soldier with connections to the longtime bodyguard of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, releases a video announcing the two men were working for his private security company, on a mission to detain and extract President Donald Trump and bring down the government in Washington, D.C.

Two days later, the Venezuelan foreign minister, who also happens to be the former head of the country’s feared intelligence agency, gives a press conference at which he chooses to deny only “direct” involvement in the operation. “If we had been involved, it would have gone differently,” he added, with a smirk.

What do you think the reaction would be here in the United States? Among political and media elites? In national security circles? Wouldn’t the U.S. press be running endless pieces denouncing and berating Maduro? Wouldn’t cable news be rolling on it? Does anyone doubt that the U.S. military would be preparing to attack targets across Venezuela in retaliation?

Yet that is exactly what we have witnessed over the past week — but in reverse, and without any sense of shock or outrage in the United States.

In this photo released by Venezuela’s Ministry of Communication, Jorge Rodriguez shows a video of American Airan Berry, a former U.S. special forces soldier associated with the Florida-based private security firm Silvercorp USA, during a televised statement in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 7, 2020.

On Monday, it was Venezuela that captured two former U.S. special forces soldiers, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, after what authorities described as their “botched beach landing in the fishing village of Chuao.” A video was released of Denman telling his interrogators that he had been tasked with capturing the Venezuelan president. Meanwhile, Florida-based ex-Green Beret Jordan Goudreau, head of the private security firm Silvercorp USA, appeared in a video alongside a former Venezuelan military officer in combat fatigues, in which he confirmed that Denman and Berry were working for him. (Press reports have since revealed that Goudreau had meetings with former longtime Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller, had signed a multimillion-dollar contract with the U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition, and also claims to have been in contact with the office of Vice President Mike Pence.)

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former director of the CIA, spoke at a press conference where he issued his very carefully worded denial: “There was no U.S. government direct involvement in this.” He also couldn’t help but brag to reporters about how it “would have gone differently” if the United States had been behind it. (Memo to Pompeo: Google “Bay of Pigs.”)

Who knows? Perhaps Washington wasn’t involved this time. Perhaps Trump is correct to say that this particular fiasco, which sounds like the plot of a bad Hollywood movie, “has nothing to do with our government.”

Then again, this is an administration of liars, fabulists, and grifters. Dishonesty is the hallmark of the Trump White House. Their denials, therefore, are pretty worthless.

Plus, there is the recent history to consider: the demonization and strangulation of Venezuela has been a bipartisan project in Washington, D.C., since the rise of Hugo Chavez and the socialist “pink tide” in the late 1990s. In 2002, the Bush administration encouraged and supported a (failed) coup against Chavez. (As I later reminded former Bush official Otto Reich — who was accused of meeting with the plotters beforehand — the CIA had warned him and his colleagues that a coup attempt would be made five days before it occurred!).

In 2015, the Obama administration made the absurd decision to formally declare Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. At the time, the United States was 11 times bigger in terms of population, 600 times richer in terms of GDP, and with a military budget 1,800 times the size of Venezuela’s.

In 2019, the Trump administration called Maduro “illegitimate” and recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela. So far this year, Washington has indicted Maduro on charges of narco-terrorism; refused to suspend crippling sanctions on Caracas despite the spread of Covid-19; and deployed U.S. warships near Venezuela in what has been described as “one of the largest U.S. military operations in the region since the 1989 invasion of Panama to remove Gen. Manuel Noriega from power.”

Regime change is the explicit policy of the U.S. government.

To be clear: The regime in Caracas is brutal, autocratic, and corrupt. More than four million Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years; the president’s approval ratings hover around 10 percent.

But anyone who claims that U.S. opposition to Maduro is based on a concern for democracy or human rights in Venezuela is either dishonest or deluded. The United States has a long history of supporting strongmen around the world — and especially in Latin America. Think Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala. Or Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Or Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina. The list goes on and on.

No, the real reason the United States is obsessed with toppling the government in Caracas is, of course, because Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves — but leaders opposed to both the United States and capitalism. In fact, Trump and his cronies have a habit of saying the quiet part loud. As former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe revealed in his book, “The Threat,” at a briefing with intelligence officials in 2017, Trump asked why the U.S. wasn’t at war with Venezuela, pointing out how “they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”

In January 2019, Trump’s national security adviser at the time, John Bolton, told Fox Business: “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”

We do not know whether Trump and Co. were involved in the Goudreau-inspired attempted attack on Maduro. What we do know, though, is that they continue to try and starve and bully Venezuela into submission. If the Trump administration gave a damn about the people of that country, it would heed calls from everyone from the pope, to the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, to a group of congressional Democrats, to suspend sanctions and help Caracas fight the spread of the novel coronavirus.

But it won’t — because it doesn’t.

The post The “Coup” Attempt in Venezuela Seems Ridiculous. But Don’t Forget — Regime Change Is the U.S. Goal. appeared first on The Intercept.