Donald Trump has repeatedly touted chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, to fight COVID-19 despite warnings that it is merely undergoing trials. “What do you have to lose? I’ll say it again: What do you have to lose? Take it. I really think they should take it. But it’s their choice and it’s their doctor’s choice, or the doctors in the hospital. But hydroxychloroquine — try it, if you’d like,” Trump said at a news briefing (4/4).
Again, the following day, he said, “They say taking it before the fact is good. ... I’m not acting as a doctor. I’m saying do what you want. ... It can help them but it’s not going to hurt them.”
Trump continued to tout the drug two weeks after a Phoenix-area couple tried a version of chloroquine, on Trump’s recommendation, to prevent COVID-19. The man died and his wife was hospitalized in critical condition. The couple used chloroquine phosphate, which was developed to treat fish diseases in an aquarium, but the wife told NBC News (3/23), “I had (the substance) in the house because I used to have koi fish … I saw it sitting on the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?’”
Within 20 minutes of ingestion, the couple, who were in their 60s, became extremely ill, requiring transport to a nearby hospital.
She said her advice would be: “Don’t take anything. Don’t believe anything. Don’t believe anything that the president says, and his people … Call your doctor.”
Nigerian officials also reported at least three Nigerians who took chloroquine after hearing Trump recommended it were hospitalized with overdoses, CNN reported (3/23). The Nigerian Center for Disease Control warned people not to engage in self-medication, which “can lead to death.”
Dr. Oreoluwa Finnih, a senior special assistant on health at the Lagos State government said hospitals in the Nigerian capital were reporting admissions from people suspected of having chloroquine poisoning, though he didn’t give exact numbers, CNN reported.
The drug has long been used to treat malaria, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. But it has major potential side effects, especially for the heart, and large studies are underway to see if it is safe and effective for treating coronavirus. Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health and member of the White House coronavirus task force, has tried to play down expectations about hydroxychloroquine being a “knockout drug” and the American Medical Association, the American Pharmacists Association and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists in a joint statement cautioned against “prophylactically prescribing medications currently identified as potential treatments for COVID-19.” That means prescribing a medicine for the purpose of warding off a disease or preventing its spread.
Novartis, a manufacturer of hydroxychloroquine, could be in line for a windfall if the drug is approved for COVID-19 use. The Swiss company has been seeking access to the White House since February 2017, when it signed a one-year $1.2 million contract with Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, for advice on how the Trump administration might approach healthcare policy matters. However the company let the contract expire when it decided Cohen was not able to provide “the services that Novartis had anticipated,” CNBC reported (5/9/18). Lately, Rudolph Giuliani, who has served as a private counsel to Trump, said he has been promoting hydroxychloroquine in talks with Trump. He told the Washington Post he was not working with any of the companies developing the treatments. Of course, he was not speaking under oath.
Studies are in progress across the globe testing other drugs, such as remdesivir, an antiviral drug that was developed to treat Ebola, as a COVID-19 treatment. Other trials range from a study of a tuberculosis vaccine being tested on health care workers to a cancer drug that could prevent the deadly fluid buildup occurring in the lungs of COVID-19 patients. So far, no drug appears to be a certain treatment for COVID-19, the Seattle Times reported (4/6).
TRUMP’S COVID LIES ARE ABOUT TO HIT THE WALL. Trump’s popularity has increased as Americans rally around the president during the pandemic crisis (his approval rate was 45.3% approval vs. 49.6% disapproval on 4/6, up from 42.3% to 53.2% on 3/13 in the FiveThirtyEight.com average of polls) but his relentless string of lies about the coronavirus — that it would go away, that it was just like the flu, that it was a media hoax, and that it was a problem that governors alone should handle — are all about to hit a wall as the death toll mounts across the country, Kerry Eleveld wrote at DailyKos (4/6).
“Americans of all stripes will have the opportunity to see with their own eyes the deadly results of a president who was too incoherent, too incompetent, and too inhumane to worry about leading an unprepared nation into an ambush blindfolded. And no region will be spared, not even those that rabidly support Trump,” Eleveld noted.
In fact, many of the rural and southern regions of the country that make up some of Trump’s strongholds stand to get pummeled, and Trump and a host of GOP governors will bear specific responsibility for sowing confusion over the seriousness of the epidemic and the dire need for social distancing to slow its spread. “There is no city anywhere in the world that can withstand the outbreak that would occur if there isn’t rigorous social distancing,” Tom Frieden, a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, told Politico.
Emerging hot spots, according to modeling done by Columbia University epidemiologists, include St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana, rural Tennessee just north of Nashville, and parts of southwest Georgia near Albany. Most of these rural areas are already desperately low on the resources and medical personnel necessary to handle an influx of COVID-19 cases.
Trump has spent a lot of time pointing fingers at everyone but himself for the carnage that is coming—the media, Democratic governors, regions that are making “inflated requests” for equipment (i.e. New York, though Trump didn’t name the state, at least in his 4/4 tweet).
“It is critical that certain media outlets stop spreading false rumors and creating fear and panic with the public,” Trump said, failing to single out any specific stories that were supposedly over the top.
“His finger pointing will ramp up as the death count rises. But never forget that Trump and Senate Republicans pissed away the entire month of February and about half of March without doing virtually anything (other than dumping some stocks) to prepare the nation for what lay ahead,” Eleveld wrote.
RURAL AMERICANS FEAR VIRUS AFTER LOSING HOSPITALS. As the coronavirus spread across the US, workers at the lone hospital in Pickens County, Ala., turned off beeping monitors for good and padlocked the doors, making it one of the latest in a string of nearly 200 rural hospitals to close nationwide, Jay Reeves of the Associated Press reported (4/1).
Now Joe Cunningham is more worried than ever about getting care for his wife, Polly, a dialysis patient whose health is fragile. The nearest hospital is about 30 miles away, he said, and that’s too far since COVID-19 already has been confirmed in sparsely populated Pickens County, on the Mississippi state line.
Cunningham is trusting God, but he’s also worried the virus will worsen in his community, endangering his wife without a hospital nearby.
“It can still find its way here,” said Cunningham, 73.
The pandemic erupted at an awful time for communities trying to fill health care gaps following the closure of 170 rural hospitals across the nation in the last 15 years. And 2019 was the worst year yet, with 19 closures, and eight more have shut down since Jan. 1, according to the Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina.
While the nation’s coronavirus hot spots so far have been big cities like New York and New Orleans, officials fear inadequate testing and the lack of medical resources linked to hospital failures will catch up with smaller population centers.
The reasons for the closures vary, but experts and administrators cite factors including declining rural populations, rising medical costs, insufficient Medicare reimbursements, large numbers of uninsured patients, state decisions against Medicaid expansion and mismanagement. About 60% of the counties and towns that have lost hospitals are in the South, an analysis by the Sheps Center showed.
Other communities are trying to keep hundreds of endangered hospitals afloat as resources are stretched thinner than ever and moneymaking services like elective surgeries are curtailed during the outbreak.
About 15% of the US population, or more than 46 million people, lives in rural areas, according to the Census Bureau. They are more likely than urban dwellers to die from chronic respiratory illnesses, heart disease and other problems that put people more at risk for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
NEW POLLS RAISE HOPES OF DEMS FLIPPING SENATE. The topsy-turvy Democratic primary for president dominated political news for the first two-and-a-half months of 2020, Nathaniel Rakich noted at FiveThirtyEight.com (3/30), but now that it’s settled down, it’s time to check in on the other major political battle of 2020: the fight for the US Senate.
Democrats have reason for optimism of late. New polls have shown Democratic challengers ahead of GOP incumbents, the party is recruiting strong candidates, and, perhaps most importantly given the tight correlation between presidential and Senate voting, former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrat who has polled the best against President Trump, has become the party’s likely presidential nominee.
The most likely outcome is still that Republicans maintain control of the Senate, though perhaps with a reduced majority: The status quo favors them, and most of the states where the Senate will be decided lean red. (As a refresher, Republicans currently have 53 Senate seats to Democrats’ 47, meaning Democrats need to flip four seats, on net, to take control — or three if they also win the vice presidency.) But Democrats have expanded the map to the point where they have a lot more pick-up opportunities than Republicans do, so they have a lot of upside.
Competitive Senate seats up for election in 2020, as rated by three major election handicappers, include three Democrats up for re-election: Tina Smith (D-MN), Jeanne Shaheed (D-NH) and Gary Peters (D-MI), as well as an open seat in New Mexico, where Tom Udall (D) is retiring. Minnesota, New Hampshire and New Mexico are rated likely Democrat, while Michigan is rated as leaning Democrat. Republican incumbents rated as tossups include Martha McSally in Arizona, Cory Gardner in Colorado, Thom Tillis in North Carolina and Susan Collins in Maine. Doug Jones (D-AL) faces an uphill fight, while Kelly Loeffler (R-AZ), Joni Ernst (R-IA), an open seat in Kansas and Steve Daines (R-MT) are in states that lean Republican. David Perdue (R-GA), Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and John Cornyn (R-TX) are in races rated likely Republican, but they’re still vulnerable.
MASKS, OTHER PROTECTIVE GEAR ARE BEING STOLEN FROM STATES AND NATIONS, BUT BY WHOM? On a runway in China, French officials were preparing to load pallets of much-needed masks and other protective gear, but minutes later those masks took off for the US after unnamed Americans pulled out wads of cash on the tarmac to buy the supplies away from the French. One day later, a shipment of 200,000 masks and other gear on its way to Germany was “confiscated” as it passed through Bangkok, Thailand. The German government called the actions “modern piracy.” And in the port of New York, 3 million masks purchased for the state of Massachusetts were taken away by an unnamed federal agency. In seizing the supplies, the government employed what state officials described as “force majeure” to breach existing contracts and carry off the goods.
But in Washington D.C., Mark Sumner noted at DailyKos (4/4), Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that the federal government is not a “shipping clerk” for the states, and both he and son-in-law Jared Kushner have made it clear that the federal stockpile of masks, ventilators, and other gear is just that—a federal stockpile. States be damned.
Who is buying these supplies? And what are they doing with them?
The astounding statement that the contents of the national stockpile don’t belong to the states, seems exactly like the sort of statement that would have raised a thousand conservative conspiracy theories had it been voiced by Barack Obama, Sumner noted. But it’s not as if there aren’t some items being dispersed. As the Washington Post made clear earlier in the week, some red states are actually getting more supplies than they are requesting. In the meantime, what Trump has for the blue states currently at the heart of the storm is … disdain, sneers and absolutely no promise to meet their needs.
But it seems unlikely that all the purloined protective gear is going to the national stockpile in the first place. The Boston Globe reported that Massachusetts officials managed to smuggle in vital supplies by hiding them in the New England Patriots team plane, but what happened in New York harbor goes beyond the already incredible spectacle of the federal government outbidding states for protective fear. They confiscated equipment that had already been purchased by the state. And all of this seems to have happened without explanation of the authority under which it was taking place, or the reason why those masks were more necessary … wherever they went.
In the German case, it seems the masks had been manufactured by an American company, 3M, which produces masks in Singapore and Mexico for markets outside the US. Trump has recently been pointing at that company as a bad actor and used emergency authority to order it to stop shipping equipment overseas—even though Trump hasn’t implemented any general provisions that would prevent companies for fulfilling contracts for protective gear overseas. In fact, there has been a large and active market of US equipment being shipped out of the country since the coronavirus crisis began. Also, the FDA has pointedly not used emergency authority to approve import of masks directly from the companies who actually make them for 3M. All of which seems like perfect chaos.
Where did the masks, which were intended for Germany’s police force, actually go? The BBC says they were “presumably diverted to the US.” Trump may have been discussing this same shipment when he said that the US had “taken custody of nearly 200,000 N95 respirators, 130,000 surgical masks and 600,000 gloves.” However, Trump didn’t say where this occurred, and the list doesn’t match what Germany says was taken.
To make sure they can get masks without interference, French officials have also had to go to alternate routes and move materials in secret. Who is buying up their supplies before they can be loaded on a plane? Are the “Americans” with piles of money spending government dollars, or are they private actors feeding the burgeoning market for pandemic profiteers? It’s all completely unclear.
The French masks were being sought for caregivers at a nursing home, so they were especially vital. According to a French official, “Masks are becoming scarce, and Americans buy them everywhere they find them, no matter what the price, it was confirmed, on condition of anonymity, in one of the regions victims of the process. They pay double the cash before they even see the goods.”
“Trump may say that he’s “not a shipping clerk” for the states, but he certainly seems to be collecting a lot of masks for … someone,” Sumner noted. “Are they going to Galt’s Gulch? David Geffen’s yacht? Mar-a-Lago? Is Donald Trump taking the profit off those ads for protective gear that are probably bracketing your screen right this moment?”
COVID-19 SHUTDOWN MAY HAVE LEFT 3.5M WORKERS WITHOUT INSURANCE. A new analysis estimates that 3.5 million US workers may have lost their job-tied health insurance in the last two weeks of March.
“The COVID-19 pandemic lays bare the cruelty of tying health insurance coverage to employment,” wrote Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), on Twitter (4/2), CommonDreams reported.
The analysis from Zipperer and EPI director of research Josh Bivens came the same day data from the US Department of Labor revealed that 6.6 million Americans filed jobless claims the previous week—more than double the previous record of 3.28 million claims filed the week before—as economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic continues to batter workers.
The analysis also provides fresh evidence for Medicare for All advocates’ longstanding argument that the current healthcare system, in which roughly half of Americans rely on their employer for healthcare coverage, must be abandoned in favor of a system that guarantees coverage to everyone regardless of employment.
“It is especially terrifying for workers to lose their health insurance as a result of, and during, an ongoing pandemic,” wrote Zipperer and Bivens.
While the 3.5 million estimated figure of newly-uninsured people is bleak, the number may be even higher, the analysis finds, (Andrea Germanos, CommonDreams (4/2)
SCRAMBLE FOR RAPID COVID-19 TEST EVERYBODY WANTS. As Abbott Laboratories began shipping its new rapid-response tests across the country (4/1), a new flash point emerged in the nation’s handling of the pandemic: where to deploy the COVID-19 diagnostics that could be one of the most effective tools in combating the outbreak, the Washington Post reported.
Some White House officials want to ship many of the tests, which were approved (3/27) and can deliver results in five to 13 minutes, to areas where there are fewer cases, such as rural states and parts of the South. But officials in hard-hit areas and some public health experts favor directing them to the outbreak’s current hotspots, arguing that delays in test readings have sidelined many first responders and health-care workers and made it harder to isolate the most contagious patients.
During a (3/31) meeting of the White House coronavirus task force in the Situation Room, Vice President Pence and other officials discussed diverting new tests to areas where there are relatively few cases, according to two individuals familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
Meanwhile, in Detroit, 525 officers in Detroit’s more than 2,500-person police force are quarantined, according to Sgt. Nicole Kirkwood, a spokeswoman. Eighty-five members are expected to return to work by the end of this week, she said, and 91 have tested positive.
And in Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said in an interview that his state needs at least 100,000 more tests than it has right now. “We’ve talked to Abbott. They’re shortly supposed to have a small amount of testing machines out to the states. No governor in America has received any yet,” Hogan said. “They’ve said they are available. They are not yet available. They say, ‘Get on the phone, governors can get all these things.’ I just got off the phone with all the governors, no governors have these things.”
Charles Pierce noted at Esquire (4/3), “This is enough to make anyone want to Elvis their TV the next time Mike (Extreme Unction) Pence comes on to praise the president* for his masterful job of controlling the situation through his brilliant public-private partnership. Almost a quarter of the Detroit P.D. is under quarantine. Meanwhile, tests are being sent to states that had to be dragged kicking and screaming into enacting statewide lockdowns, or to places that refuse to accept even now the FREE MONEY! available under the Affordable Care Act, which was passed a mere decade ago. This includes places like Nebraska, where Pete Ricketts won’t take the FREE MONEY!, but Ricketts is making sure that one of his primary constituents, a Canadian energy corporation, is being taken care of. From Courthouse News Service:
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) praised the project for its potential to “bring great-paying jobs to our state.” At a press conference, Ricketts spoke of a measure he enacted that asks every person who enters Nebraska to self-quarantine for two weeks to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19. Truckers and pipeline workers are exempt from this directive, however.
Pierce concluded: “Grift never sleeps.”
From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2020
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