Killer Clown Attacks American’s Freedoms…and Dr. Fauci

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Rep. Jim “Begged Witness Not to Squeal” Jordan went off on Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during the first round of questioning of Friday’s House Select Committee on COVID Oversight hearing.

The point of the hearing was to address the lack of a national strategy to contain COVID-19.

Jordan, as usual, derailed the hearing’s focus to score political points with Trump.

Fauci can’t say that any crowd is better than another at this point, not just because he’s supposed to provide ideology-free advice as a medical professional — not to mention Fauci can’t advocate shutting down an exercise of the First Amendment when Jordan asks “Should we limit the protesting?”

The doctor can’t say anything which would encourage activity in groups even with masks because it’s just too risky right now.

But Jordan, being the circus clown he is, continues to harangue Fauci in pursuit of usable digital content to help Trump’s agenda. Content later used like this idiotic context-sanitized bullshit:

Take a look around the internet; the right-wing horde seized on Jordan’s clown show with ALL CAPS and wrestling-action verbs like EXPOSES, HAMMERS, PRESSES, CRUSHES to describe Jordan’s antics. (Sadly, C-SPAN used “grills” which isn’t neutral.)

Fauci was too nice and too cautious on this point; he could have pointed to Trump’s misbegotten Tulsa campaign rally and Herman Cain’s subsequent death from COVID-19 but he didn’t.

Nor did Fauci refer to the study later submitted to the record which analyzed COVID-19 case counts after anti-racism protests.

The study found the protests did not result in increased COVID-19 cases.

Source:

Dave, Dhaval and Friedson, Andrew and Matsuzawa, Kyutaro and Sabia, Joseph and Safford, Samuel, Black Lives Matter Protests, Social Distancing, and COVID-19 (June 2020). NBER Working Paper No. w27408, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3632635

So no, Killer Clown Jordan, protests in the streets against systemic racism in policing by mask-wearing participants do not increase COVID-19 cases or deaths.

If you want to be technical about it, there have been too many anecdotes of events indoors like church choir practices which have resulted in clusters of COVID-19 cases and deaths. These kinds of meetings needed to be outdoors with participants wearing masks, even if socially distanced and washing hands as appropriate. Being indoors was the key problem along with not wearing masks.

But there’s one more problem with the clown show Jordan put on.

What Jordan did with his usual ignorant and loud routine was not to educate the public, not to encourage an improvement in services from NIAID or CDC or Dr. Fauci.

What Jordan did with his typical filibuster is to continue to obstruct development of a national response to COVID-19.

What Jordan did was to continue the political genocide and ethnic cleansing of Americans by ensuring federal services are withheld under a national response to the pandemic.

Jordan denied Americans, particularly those in blue cities and minority communities, honest goods and services to which they are entitled. He’ll get away with it, though, because his circus act will fall under Speech or Debate.

Jim Jordan, killer clown, in name and in fact.

 

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June Bug Goes to Ireland

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June Bug the Terrorist FosterEx Dog and I moved to Ireland today.

We followed Mr. EW by about three weeks, enough time for us to close out the house and for him to get through Ireland’s mandatory two-week quarantine. We intend to stay in Ireland for the indefinite future.

We moved for personal reasons, the two most important having to do with Mr. EW (who has family in Ireland). Those reasons got us 95% of the way to deciding to move.

But that was shortly before armed insurgents streamed into Lansing MI, incited, in part, by the President, trying to undermine sound public health guidelines. It was before a series of increasingly brazen moves on the part of the Administration to undermine rule of law. It was before the Administration and allied governors took affirmative steps to make the coronavirus worse. It was before the President deliberately stoked racism in an effort to divide the country.

We’re not leaving to get away from America. But having made the decision to move, it offers some distance to realize all the things that have become part of an increasingly dysfunctional America — of which Trump is as much symptom as cause — that we’ll leave behind.

Having made the decision, the last few weeks have felt like a rush to get out before a great wave overcame us and submerged us before we moved, most notably European travel restrictions on anyone from the United States, but also the resurgence of COVID itself. Recently, the EU agreed to open travel, but specifically exclude those states — like the US — that have failed to control the spread of COVID, and Ireland is expected to pass new guidelines in coming days that may make flights from the US less frequent. I felt flying on a flight with 40 passengers was an acceptable risk, but such a flight might be too dangerous in the days ahead.

I will be quarantining for 14 days, spending my time between a bedroom and office while Mr. EW shows June Bug the new neighborhood (he took the above picture). Under EU rules, June Bug no longer has a month-long quarantine, she just has paperwork to prove that she’s not bringing diseases that are prevalent in the US but not Ireland. Just us humans have to quarantine now. June Bug’s paperwork — and not the process of getting June Bug into a crate for the trip — proved to be the biggest recent hurdle.

As the fog of the move clears during the quarantine, I hope to catch up on things I’ve noted in passing (though still have a bunch of family things and move-related work to focus on). I don’t expect things at emptywheel to change significantly, but will let you know of administrative details that may change slightly.

Parts of my family, mostly of Irish descent, have been in the US since the famine, arriving in the US between 180 and 117 years ago. Today, during another natural disaster exacerbated by misgovernment, I moved back.

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Jim Jordan, Killer Clown

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You’ll want to read Marcy’s post about Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on politicization of the Department of Justice.

One thing that continues to bother the hell out of me: Republican Rep. Jim Jordan’s clown-y assholishness. It’s now his brand. He’s the GOP caucus’s id — the Goofus-looking, tantrum-throwing, jacket-avoiding persona happily adopted by the right-wing as a model for their party.

He’s a creepy bad clown whose running gags and interstitial bits aren’t funny or amusing; they’re meant to harass, ridicule, and obstruct Congress’s little-d democratic processes.

While he was repeatedly offered other GOP members’ time during the hearing to question the witnesses called before the committee, he made a point of not wearing his mask and yelling at the same time.

(Aside: there’s a paper waiting to be written about clowns who refuse to wear masks.)

He attended the rally in Tulsa this past weekend and like nearly everyone else in that venue in attendance, didn’t wear a mask and is now potentially an asymptomatic carrier of COVID-19.

With this routine Jordan didn’t respect the well being of his fellow members of Congress. He showed he’s willing to hurt other members of Congress for his personal and partisan political aims.

Just scroll through the hearing video beginning with his opening remarks at 9:26 —

Perhaps Jordan was chosen as HJC ranking member to do all the heavy lifting for the GOP side of the committee exactly because he yells during his tantrums, attracting media’s attention thereby starving Democrats of oxygen for their side.

While his outbursts have been annoying in the past, this time Jordan forcefully pushed aerosolized exhalation through the hearing room Wednesday after being in proximity with others exposed to COVID-19 with Team Trump in Tulsa. He may have deliberately blown biological material around the hearing room, like so:

And perhaps he was chosen because his district OH-4 isn’t likely to give him a lot of crap since a good-sized chunk is rural.

OH-4 is also not as heavily impacted by COVID-19 as other more urban congressional districts in Ohio.

The counties in his district are Allen, Auglaize, Champaign, Crawford, Logan, Sandusky, Seneca, Shelby and Union counties and parts of Erie, Huron, Lorain, Marion, and Mercer counties. Check them against the most recent COVID-19 data for the state of Ohio:

County Confirmed Deaths Cases per 1M people Recovered
Ohio – total 47651 2772 4127 No data
Adams County 20 1 703 No data
Allen County† 261 38 2460 No data
Ashland County 46 0 865 No data
Ashtabula County 413 42 4075 No data
Athens County 29 1 448 No data
Auglaize County† 93 3 2029 No data
Belmont County 516 21 7356 No data
Brown County 50 1 1119 No data
Butler County 1301 41 3516 No data
Carroll County 46 3 1598 No data
Champaign County† 37 1 930 No data
Clark County 703 8 5106 No data
Clermont County 300 6 1506 No data
Clinton County 55 0 1312 No data
Columbiana County 1033 59 9603 No data
Coshocton County 64 0 1732 No data
Crawford County† 126 5 2904 No data
Cuyahoga County 6111 346 4811 No data
Darke County 230 25 4355 No data
Defiance County 43 3 1106 No data
Delaware County 449 15 2518 No data
Erie County* 221 22 2879 No data
Fairfield County 438 15 2978 No data
Fayette County 45 0 1553 No data
Franklin County 8310 378 6311 No data
Fulton County 54 0 1270 No data
Gallia County 9 1 291 No data
Geauga County 372 41 3990 No data
Greene County 187 9 1148 No data
Guernsey County 49 3 1227 No data
Hamilton County 4337 191 5419 No data
Hancock County 68 1 906 No data
Hardin County 108 11 3373 No data
Harrison County 12 1 757 No data
Henry County 23 0 820 No data
Highland County 39 1 898 No data
Hocking County 75 7 2552 No data
Holmes County 169 3 3954 No data
Huron County‡ 144 1 2420 No data
Jackson County 17 0 512 No data
Jefferson County 75 2 1090 No data
Knox County 36 1 588 No data
Lake County 390 17 1697 No data
Lawrence County 55 0 880 No data
Licking County 351 11 2099 No data
Logan County† 51 0 1116 No data
Lorain County 889 67 2947 No data
Lucas County 2534 299 5759 No data
Madison County 179 8 4124 No data
Mahoning County 1682 227 7089 No data
Marion County‡ 2717 36 41035 No data
Medina County 441 31 2545 No data
Meigs County 10 0 422 No data
Mercer County‡ 259 8 6342 No data
Miami County 413 30 4015 No data
Monroe County 83 16 5691 No data
Montgomery County 1465 22 2725 No data
Morgan County 6 0 399 No data
Morrow County 111 1 3185 No data
Muskingum County 71 1 823 No data
Noble County 6 0 408 No data
Ottawa County 124 23 2995 No data
Paulding County 22 0 1133 No data
Perry County 26 1 716 No data
Pickaway County 2150 41 38400 No data
Pike County 19 0 664 No data
Portage County 382 58 2364 No data
Preble County 55 1 1307 No data
Putnam County 107 15 3120 No data
Richland County 296 4 2397 No data
Ross County 89 2 1137 No data
Sandusky County* 112 13 1844 No data
Scioto County 28 0 353 No data
Seneca County† 31 2 549 No data
Shelby County† 55 4 1115 No data
Stark County 977 107 2605 No data
Summit County 1839 202 3407 No data
Trumbull County 771 57 3684 No data
Tuscarawas County 454 10 4908 No data
Union County† 73 1 1384 No data
Van Wert County 20 0 699 No data
Vinton County 22 2 1646 No data
Warren County 649 20 3020 No data
Washington County 120 20 1943 No data
Wayne County 343 52 2993 No data
Williams County 60 1 1596 No data
Wood County 345 51 2730 No data
Wyandot County 55 4 2424 No data
Key:
† = District OH-11
‡ = County split with OH-11
* = Pivot county

Based on the data above provided by The New York Times updated yesterday, there have been only 134 deaths in the counties which make up the Ohio 4th Congressional District, even with the hot spot at the prison in Marion, Ohio.

Note, too, that Jordan’s district OH-4 is more than 90% white, unlike nearby OH-9 (Rep. Marcy Kaptur) or OH-11 (Rep. Marcia Fudge), with a higher per capita income.

Compare to Cuyahoga County which makes up part of OH-9 — it’s had at least 346 COVID-19 deaths.

All of which means that Jordan’s career is relatively unaffected by COVID-19. He can be casually racist by ignoring the number of Black and other non-white deaths in Marion’s prison facility because the rest of his district won’t feel the pain of their loss — the mostly-minority incarcerated are disposable to white rural conservatives.

He can be deliberately threatening to Democrats in Congress because it’s encouraged by the White House.

Jordan won’t worry about anybody else getting COVID-19 because he can continue to be nothing more complicated than a loud, irritating clown and still earn his party’s support.

He’ll even get backup from other clowns in his party like Louis Gohmert banging on the desk during the course of the hearing to obstruct witness testimony — neither being sly Harlequins but an evil clown with a village idiot sidekick.

Not merely an evil clown, either, if Jordan intended to threaten and hurt other members of Congress.

Jim Jordan, killer clown — an existential threat to members of Congress who have to put up with him while they represent the rest of us.

 

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Three Things: Numbers, Hearings and Racist Code

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There’s always more than three things to address but here’s three we should look at more closely.

~ 3 ~
This is what we’re up against.

823 Americans have died of COVID-19 since yesterday. In contrast, South Korea, which learned of its first case of COVID-19 the same day the U.S. learned of its own, has only lost 281 of its citizens.

We lost not one American to an attempted shoe bombing in 2001 and yet an immediate program was developed and implemented to detect future shoe bombing attempts, requiring air travelers to take off their damned shoes and go through multiple screenings.

But Trump can’t be arsed to shut up and let the professionals handle stopping an ongoing daily stream of deaths from COVID-19.

This administration is killing Americans. Trump’s not even hiding the fact he’s willing to ignore deaths to manipulate numbers by insisting testing for the virus should be suppressed. He has the temerity to brag about his performance which has resulted in the unnecessary deaths of more than 120,000 Americans.

Yesterday the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing on oversight of the Trump Administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Called to testify before the committee:

Robert R. Redfield, M.D., Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (statement at 27:39)

Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., Director, National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes o Health (at 33:40)

Admiral Brett P. Giroir, M.D., Assistant Secretary for Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (at 38:25)

Stephen M. Hahn, M.D., Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (at 43:54)

 

Some of the GOP’s efforts are useless, wasteful filibustering — like Rep. Bob Latta’s (OH-5) question about how the human body makes antibodies. This is something he should have been briefed on let alone read on his own long before this hearing. He should have read this basic biology question MONTHS AGO when the pandemic began. So was his question about how the vaccine would be distributed WHEN WE’RE 6-18 MONTHS OUT AT BEST from having a viable, effective, safe vaccine through Phase III trials.

Rep. Diana DeGette asked Fauci about vaccine development (at about 1:28:00); I think he was extremely optimistic saying he thought there would be one by early 2021. But the question wasn’t as specific as it should have been; there are clinical trials in progress for a couple of candidates, but it’s not clear what phase they are in.

Reported last week by StatNews:

There are more than 100 projects around the world centered on the development of a vaccine for the coronavirus. As of May 11, eight candidate vaccines were being tested in clinical trials in people.

An official at the National Institutes of Health said in mid-May that large-scale testing could begin in July with a vaccine potentially available by January.

Other experts say the more likely timeline is summer or fall of 2021.

The other factor beyond the capabilities of the vaccines and developers which will predict the time to public distribution is Congress and the White House.

If we still have that malicious narcissist in the Oval Office without a veto-proof Democratic majority in the Senate, nationwide roll-out of a vaccine by the U.S. government may not happen even if an efficacious vaccine is found.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 don’t care…

Just like Trump.

~ 2 ~
The Mary Sue presented a nice overview of what happened in Tulsa this past weekend.

In short, Team Trump fucked themselves hard.

What happened this weekend was supposed to be a point where Trump turned the narrative back in his favor and moved the attention away from the activists and change that have controlled the news cycle for months. But what really happened was instead of taking the attention away from the K-Pop teens for his failures, those things all combined to add one more line to an endless line of failures that we can only hope will keep going until November.

It wasn’t just a loss of narrative and momentum but the complete trashing of campaign data harvesting.

We don’t know exactly what the data accumulated by Trump’s re-election campaign looks like after receiving ~800,000 registrations for the Tulsa rally. Some were valid, some were valid but no-shows, some were legitimate addresses of people who had zero intention of attending — likely sent by TikTok accounts.

And a mess of them must have been K-pop fans who are still feeling their oats after they DDoS’d police video monitoring during anti-racism protests as well as spamming right-wing hashtags.

Parscale’s operation better have had a good backup before the Tulsa registrations began, though I have suspicions somebody’s ass wasn’t well covered.

I mean, who is foolish enough to brag about more than 1,000,000 registrations like that, without a hint of skepticism about the data’s integrity?

Somebody prone to hubris, that’s who.

And somebody else isn’t going to pay Team Trump for data gleaned through Tulsa.

~ 1 ~
The ACLU filed suit this morning against the Detroit Police Department for its wrongful arrest of Robert Williams based on racist facial recognition technology.

The Washington Post published an op-ed by Williams explaining what happened to him and why facial recognition software should be banned.

The next morning, two officers asked if I’d ever been to a Shinola watch store in Detroit. I said once, many years ago. They showed me a blurry surveillance camera photo of a black man and asked if it was me. I chuckled a bit. “No, that is not me.” He showed me another photo and said, “So I guess this isn’t you either?” I picked up the piece of paper, put it next to my face and said, “I hope you guys don’t think that all black men look alike.”

The cops looked at each other. I heard one say that “the computer must have gotten it wrong.” I asked if I was free to go now, and they said no. I was released from detention later that evening, after nearly 30 hours in holding. …

It’s not just the software at fault, though. DPD made absolutely no attempt to confirm Williams’ identity against images they had before they took him into custody, processed him, and detained him overnight in holding.

They literally can’t be bothered or they are racist as hell in a minority majority city.

The ACLU is calling for a ban on facial recognition in Detroit, Williams being a perfect example of how flawed and racist the technology is as well as an assault on innocent citizens’ privacy.

 

Boston’s city council banned facial recognition technology this morning, setting an example for Detroit.

What’s your municipality doing about facial recognition technology?

Are you blowing off this issue because you’re white and you couldn’t possibly be misidentified?

Sure.

~ 0 ~
The House Judiciary Committee hearing on politicization at the Justice Department is still under way as hit Publish. If you haven’t been following along and want to catch up, here are four Twitter threads covering the hearing.

Marcy https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1275821690170335237

Jennifer Taub https://twitter.com/jentaub/status/1275825424405323776

Courthouse News https://twitter.com/ByTimRyan/status/1275821746923417603

CNN https://twitter.com/jeremyherb/status/1275820657289428994

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The Tussle in Tulsa: A Retrospective

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I had been worried about the risk of violence in Tulsa this weekend given Trump’s tweet bordering on incitement ahead of his rally.

Fortunately my concern was for naught. Didn’t see a single Hawaiian shirt cross my Twitter feed while watching the lead up to and after the event, not a one in the approximately 6,600 attendees.

But the event itself didn’t live up to other expectations.

I have to believe Brad Parscale will be looking for new contracts. Or perhaps he’ll be retained just to keep him from mucking things up further somewhere else in the election cycle food chain.

He’d claimed 800,000 had reserved for the event, a number which seemed wholly unrealistic considering the population within a four-hour drive of Tulsa and the advertisements placed for non-white attendees. We know now a confluence of activist engagement via social media platform TikTok, K-pop fans, and mounting concerns about COVID-19 contagion as well as risk of violence may have artificially boosted reservations and kept attendance down.

Parscale’s claimed this morning that protesters blocked access to the venue, pointing to an AFP photo of a gate with a couple handfuls of protesters and what looks like an equal amount of media.

Unfortunately for Parscale, AFP took a photo of another gate with red-hatted, pale-skinned, maskless attendees streaming through the gate.

And other media outlets took photos outside the venue showing an awful lot of pavement.

The speech intended for outdoor overflow audience was cancelled. Wouldn’t even need a sound system to speak to this few people.

The big feat of the day: one-handed drinking.

Attendees were subjected to a 20-minute ramble about the “fake news” from his Westpoint speech last weekend after which he had difficulty walking down a ramp.

What a perfect example of the cobra effect — trying to defuse a problem but only making it worse. But Trump is too much of a narcissist to allow criticism of his person to go unanswered.

The lowest point in Trump’s speech yesterday was his remarks about COVID-19 testing.

He’s made comments before about the number of tests correlating to the number of cases. Comic Sarah Cooper has famously riffed on this.

But this time he’s expressed an intent to withhold health care from the public for personal aims — to keep the reported number of cases artificially low, without regard to the effect this would have on actual reduction of COVID-19 cases.

Aside from revealing again he’s so utterly toxic, this statement needs investigation. It’s impeachable if he both demanded a reduction or slow-down in tests, especially if he did so for the purposes of improving his polling numbers.

None of his efforts skewing reality have paid off as he’d like. We can see the tangerine emperor’s ass.

And nothing he’s done will make this grim number go away.


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Despite Rapid Growth In Civil Rights Tourism, Montgomery Remains Firmly In The Grip Of Racist White Men

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In a tragic vote yesterday, the City Council in Montgomery, Alabama failed to pass an ordinance that would have required the use of face masks in public. This vote came after an impassioned plea from local doctors:

Jackson Hospital pulmonologist William Saliski cleared his throat as he started describing the dire situation created by the coronavirus pandemic in Montgomery to its City Council before they voted on a mandatory mask ordinance. “It’s been a long day, I apologize,” he said.

“The units are full with critically-ill COVID patients,” Saliski said. About 90% of them are Black. He said hospitals are able to manage for now, but it’s not sustainable. “This mask slows that down, 95% protection from something as easy as cloth. … If this continues the way it’s going, we will be overrun.”

More doctors followed him to the microphone, describing the dead being carried out within 30 minutes of each other, and doctors being disturbed when people on the street ask them if the media is lying about the pandemic as part of a political ploy.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Note that Salisky said that units at the hospital are full with critically ill patients. But also note especially that the newspaper adds that he said 90% of the patients are black. Finally, he said that without intervention, the hospital certainly will be overrun.

The intervention measure proposed is simple and direct. Salisky claimed 95% reduction in transmission with a mask. I’m not so sure on that number, but it is becoming increasingly clear that masks, especially when coupled with social distancing, make a huge difference in reducing transmission.

We need to set the stage properly before getting to the details of the council’s vote in order to fully appreciate it.

Montgomery has a truly sordid past. As the Equal Justice Initiative has noted, Montgomery was Alabama’s center for the slave trade. EJI erected this plaque on Commerce Street in downtown Montgomery:

That’s right. Humans were literally warehoused between auction dates in Montgomery. In a bit of rare social justice, that building, 122 Commerce Street, is now one of several Equal Justice Initiative facilities in Montgomery:

I have these photos because, as I mentioned previously, I had the opportunity in February to travel to Montgomery with a busload of people from here in the Gainesville area. We visited two EJI facilities, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (seen in the featured image for this post) and the Legacy Museum. We also made the approximately one hour bus trip to Selma, where we experienced the Footprints to Freedom Tour which included stops at the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute, the Slavery and Civil Rights Museum and a walk across the Edmund Pettis Bridge.

It turns out we were far from alone in making this trip. In November of 2018, the Montgomery Advertiser noted a significant uptick in visits to Montgomery and traced them directly to the opening of the National Memorial and Legacy Museum that April:

Over 250,000 people have visited the Equal Justice Initiative’s downtown museum and memorial to lynching victims since the sites opened in April. More than that, the burst of international attention that came with those sites has turned the city into a destination, instead of a stop on the way to something else. That’s led more people to discover the city’s other historic sites and attractions, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s church, to the site where Rosa Parks boarded the bus.

/snip/

“EJI has put Montgomery on the world’s radar,” he said. “I think Montgomery is in the best position for tourism appeal than it has ever been.”

Now, they’re voting with dollars.

Hotel room stays in Montgomery inched up by about 5,500 in 2017, according to state figures. This year they’re up 97,579 through October, according to the Montgomery Area Chamber of Commerce’s Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Note the mention of Rosa Parks as another part of Montgomery’s role in civil rights history.  The Montgomery Bus Boycott, from December, 1955 to December, 1956 marked Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s rise to national attention. This adds significantly to the historic legacy of Montgomery and civil rights.

It should also be noted that Montgomery’s demographics are 61% black and only 33% white.

So with this rich history of civil rights activism, burgeoning civil rights tourism and a population 61% black, surely Montgomery’s City Council would vote for an ordinance that would slow down a disease where one doctor characterized those hospitalized as 90% black, wouldn’t they?

Not so fast. This is, after all, still Alabama. Here’s a link to the current Montgomery City Council. In a city that has 61% black citizens and only 33% white, the City Council has five white men, three black men and one black woman. Hardly representative.

Returning to the Advertiser story on last night’s vote:

After they spoke, and before the council voted on a proposal by Councilman C.C. Calhoun to mandate mask-wearing in public in Montgomery, Councilman Brantley Lyons questioned whether masks and six-foot distancing really helps. They do, the doctors replied. Lyons was unmoved. “At the end of the day, if an illness or a pandemic comes through we do not throw our constitutional rights out the window,” Lyons said.

From the crowd, doctors called for him to visit the hospital sometime.

Instead, the council killed the ordinance after it failed to pass in a 4-4 tie, mostly along racial lines, with Councilman Tracy Larkin absent. Councilman Clay McInnis voted with three Black council members — Calhoun, Oronde Mitchell and Audrey Graham — in favor of the ordinance. Lyons, Charles Jinright, Richard Bollinger and Glen Pruitt voted against it.

Only one white man voted for the ordinance. Sadly, one of the black men on the council was absent. I haven’t seen anywhere whether there might be an attempt at a new vote with all members present, since if no members change their vote, it would have a good chance at passage.

But note especially the behavior of Brantley Lyons. He asked the doctors whether it is true the masks and distancing would help prevent spread of the disease. Even though the doctors assured him it was true, Lyons trotted out the trope that the frothy right has been spewing all through the pandemic. Trying to claim that an ordinance mandating masks somehow would “throw our constitutional rights out the window” is the same sort of stupid rhetoric that racist conservative white people have spewed for generations whenever blacks sought equal protection under the law. And that circles back perfectly on the first quote from this article, where the doctors described being upset when the public approaches them to ask if the media is lying about the pandemic as part of a political ploy.

We know exactly where the real political ploy is coming from. Donald Trump is saying the quiet part out loud to fan the flames of racism in our country and he is directly responsible for these ideas spreading rapidly through people who listen to OAN and Fox News creating the narrative that the pandemic is fake. There also is no doubt that there is a huge component of racism in this entire process. Trump doesn’t hide his, but two-bit worthless politicans like Brantley Lyons happily spew this bunk without regard to the real and ongoing danger to the black citizens of Montgomery. You can rest assured that if this disease primarily attacked old white men, those not wearing masks would risk being shot on sight.

 

 

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COVID-19 Exposes Migrant Worker Conditions Amounting To Modern Day Slavery In Florida Agriculture

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My home county, Alachua County in Florida, has been rocked by news that came out just after noon yesterday, that, as of that time, 76 agricultural workers in the county had tested positive for COVID-19. Today, that number appears to have grown even more, as the Florida COVID-19 dashboard shows 91 new cases of the disease being added on June 10 and 11, bringing the total to only 506. That means that this outbreak in only two days has grown the total for the county by about 20%.

Here is the report from one of the local television stations:

Although the particular farm where the outbreak occurred is not identified, this report appears to confirm my first suspicion, which is that due to the time of year, this outbreak almost certainly had to be among migrant workers harvesting watermelons, which are at the height of their season now locally.

The problem of migrant agricultural workers living and working under conditions conducive to an outbreak of the virus is not localized to Alachua County, of course, as we have been aware for some time of a severe outbreak in Immokalee. As AP reported today:

Immokalee is among several immigrant communities in Florida — and numerous rural areas across the U.S. — that have recently experienced outbreaks of the coronavirus. Once thought likely to be spared because of their remote locations and small populations, such communities have seen spikes in infections while having fewer resources to deal with them.

/snip/

The secluded town of 25,000 north of the Everglades has reported more than 1,000 cases, outpacing in recent weeks the rate of infection in Orlando, which has a population 10 times bigger and is home to a busy international airport. The number of total cases in Immokalee has surpassed those in Miami Beach, with more than 900, and St. Petersburg, which has more than 800, according to state health department statistics.

Meanwhile, the percentage of tests that have come back positive in Collier County, home to Immokalee, is the highest in the state among counties that have tested more than 5,000 people.

Because they initially couldn’t get the attention of state officials in Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers enlisted Doctors Without Borders to help them with testing and treatment. But that is not enough.  See their website for their very simple demands and how you can lend your name to their call for help. Here is Greg Asbed of the Coalition in a New York Times Op-Ed published back in April:

Picture yourself waking up in a decrepit, single-wide trailer packed with a dozen strangers, four of you to every room, all using the same cramped bathroom and kitchen before heading to work. You ride to and from the fields in the back of a hot, repurposed school bus, shoulder-to-shoulder with 40 more strangers, and when the workday is done, you wait for your turn to shower and cook before you can lay your head down to sleep. That is life for far too many farmworkers in our country today.

Those conditions, the result of generations of grinding poverty and neglect, will act like a superconductor for the transmission of the coronavirus. And if something isn’t done — now — to address their unique vulnerability, the men and women who plant, cultivate and harvest our food will face a decimating wave of contagion and misery in a matter of weeks, if not days.

Yes, Greg told us so. The conditions under which migrant agricultural workers are forced to work in the US are horrific and incredibly conducive to disease outbreaks.

Returning to the story here in Alachua County, I want to share information I received today from the farmer who runs the CSA from which our family gets its produce for much of the year (today was coincidentally our final pickup for a while, as production pauses during the hottest part of the summer). It turns out that some of the footage (but not the watermelon harvest footage) in the TV story above was shot, without permission, at his farm, presumably because his farm is very close to town and media outlets tend to contact him about any agricultural story. He shared with us his response to the media organizations that contacted him regarding the outbreak:

Our produce has always been safe. We have always practiced good hygiene and field work is by nature socially distanced work.

The problem is when people work and live and travel in groups. The American system of farming depends on mobile low wage workers who are are powerless to poor conditions. I’ve seen 15 people living in a single wide mobile home that another local farm pays for. The workers don’t make enough to live elsewhere and their work is transient because our American model of production is based on the efficiency of monoculture.

People will get sick when they live in crappy conditions. You should do a story that brings modern day slavery to light in Alachua county. Don’t put our farm in with all the rest. We have a safe normal job with benefits for our workers. We pay a living wage and retain employees for years. That is not the norm for agriculture in the United States. People demand cheap produce and people in the shadows pay the price. That should be the theme of your story.

And don’t call it a community. A community is when people live stably together. These people travel up and down the east coast. Their children miss school or they are separated from their parents. They have no home and their families are split up for economic reasons. Calling it community is just more ignorance for the general public who have no idea where food comes from.

Wow. That is just so damning in how our country goes about producing food. These migrant workers really are trapped in a modern version of slavery with virtually no chance of escape. They are forced into cramped living and working conditions that put them much more at risk than those affluent citizens whom they feed. And our media mostly misses the true impact of those conditions and the fact that it doesn’t have to be that way. My CSA costs are a bit higher than buying the same items at the local grocery store, but the difference is very small. When you factor in the cruelty of the modern slavery system and the cost to society when outbreaks like this hit workers, our current system can be characterized as nothing less than heartless evil.

Oh, and one last note in parting. The Gainesville Sun article on the outbreak opened with this gem:

One farm worker who traveled to Alachua County from Miami-Dade County unknowingly infected at least 76 additional workers with COVID-19.

A total of 98 people traced back to the worker were tested for the virus Saturday evening, said Paul Myers, administrator for the Department of Health in Alachua County. Eight tested negative, and 14 tests are still pending.

Hmmm.  So one person coming here from South Florida managed to infect over 70 (and likely now around 90) people with COVID-19. And yet, our esteemed governor is hell-bent on “opening” the University of Florida this fall. Yes, there are plans to “screen” students before they’re allowed on campus. And students don’t live with 15 or so people in a single wide trailer. But student living groups like fraternities, sororities and dorms do wind up with many students in close quarters. And does anyone really think that student parties or even student bars downtown will follow social distancing guidelines?

This will not end well.

 

 

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Is COVID-19 Why Florida Has About 1300 More Pneumonia Deaths This Season Than Average Over Previous Five?

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Earlier today, I saw this tweet that suggests a huge excess of pneumonia deaths in Florida this year compared to previous years. The data in the tweet suggested that Florida has around 4000 more pneumonia deaths this year than the average for the previous five years. That sounded a little high to me, as I have spent a lot of time over the past few months poring through the data at this CDC site on weekly numbers for pneumonia and influenza deaths. Looking deeper into the tweet, it appeared to depend on a reddit post and it had a low number for Florida reported COVID-19 deaths, so it was necessary to go back to original sources.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent several hours downloading data from the CDC national database you can access at the link above and picking out just the Florida data to paste into another spreadsheet. I chose a poor strategy that day, as I only looked at the total pneumonia and influenza deaths even though the data are broken down into both categories. I few days later, I realized that I needed to go back into the data and look only at pneumonia deaths, as it seems likely that there could be quite a few deaths attributed to pneumonia in patients who were never tested for COVID-19. Also, flu deaths vary widely from year to year depending on the severity of the outbreaks and the effectiveness of that year’s vaccine, so that total number has a lot of noise year to year. Seeing the tweet today prompted me to go back and download the data again so that the 2019-2020 data would be more up to date.

As downloaded today, there are data in the spreadsheet through week number 20 for each state. For Florida, the week 20 numbers appear to be only partial totals, so for this analysis, I only went through week 19 of 2020. Each season in the data begins with week 40 of the year (so this year’s data starts at week 40 of 2019). However, since the COVID-19 outbreak is generally considered to have started in earnest in mid- to late November of 2019, I included only the last four weeks of 2019 with the first 19 weeks of 2020. I then found the totals for the same time period in each of the five previous seasons.

The totals for pneumonia deaths are:

2014-2015                 5510

2015-2016                 5214

2016-2017                 5540

2017-2018                 5792

2018-2019                 5374

2019-2020                 6772

One of these things is not like the others. The average total for the previous five years is 5486 pneumonia deaths for weeks 49 through week 19 of each season. That means that 2019-2020 has 1286 more deaths from pneumonia than the average for that period in the previous five seasons. The Florida COVID-19 dashboard right now is showing 2319 deaths from the virus. I would suggest that number is more like 3605 when the excess pneumonia deaths are included. Note also that there may well be other deaths due to the virus in patients who were not tested but died due to the other types of pathology seen by the virus that don’t manifest directly as pneumonia.

Last week, I asked how many COVID-19 deaths Ron DeSantis is hiding. We can now account for about 1300 and it seems likely there may well be more.

 

 

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How to (Not) Hydroxychloroquine COVID-19

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The medical journal The Lancet published a study Friday which showed anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) — the same drug repeatedly pushed by Trump — does not work as intended against the virus which causes COVID-19.

Hydroxychloroquine’s precursor drug, chloroquine, has shown mild antiviral action in vitro against the Borna disease virus (an orthobornavirus), the minute virus of mice MVMp (a parvovirus), and the avian leukosis virus (a retrovirus) as well as the coronavirus which causes SARS. It has also shown promise against Hepatitis A (a hepatovirus).

But both hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine posed inherent risks to patients as they increased the risk of heart arrhythmia.

Ideally, HCQ’s antiviral effect would prevent the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 from replicating, allowing the body to attack and remove the virus before it could attack human cells and spread through the body, resulting in earlier recovery from the infection.

Patients who received both HCQ, or its precursor chloroquine, with or without an additional antibiotic, did not recover faster than the cohort which didn’t receive chloroquine.

Further, the patients receiving the drug therapies were more likely to die than those who didn’t.

This study is the latest showing HCQ or chloroquine both didn’t work and increased patient mortality. Previous negative studies included:

Effect of High vs Low Doses of Chloroquine Diphosphate as Adjunctive Therapy for Patients Hospitalized With Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Infection – A Randomized Clinical Trial
Mayla Gabriela Silva Borba, MD; Fernando Fonseca Almeida Val, PhD; Vanderson Souza Sampaio, PhD; et al
JAMA Network Open. 2020;3(4):e208857. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.8857
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2765499

Of particular note:

Findings In this phase IIb randomized clinical trial of 81 patients with COVID-19, an unplanned interim analysis recommended by an independent data safety and monitoring board found that a higher dosage of chloroquine diphosphate for 10 days was associated with more toxic effects and lethality, particularly affecting QTc interval prolongation. The limited sample size did not allow the study to show any benefit overall regarding treatment efficacy.

Outcomes of hydroxychloroquine usage in United States veterans hospitalized with Covid-19
Joseph Magagnoli, Siddharth Narendran, et al
Pre-print; posted April 23, 2020. medRxiv 2020.04.16.20065920; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920v2

Of particular note:

CONCLUSIONS: In this study, we found no evidence that use of hydroxychloroquine, either with or without azithromycin, reduced the risk of mechanical ventilation in patients hospitalized with Covid-19. An association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone. These findings highlight the importance of awaiting the results of ongoing prospective, randomized, controlled studies before widespread adoption of these drugs.

We still don’t know why Trump is pushing this drug. It’s no longer under a patent and now a generic medication; it’s cheap to produce. If there’s money to be made by promotion of this medication it’s not clear how Trump profits.

We still can’t be certain he’s taking it himself though he claims he is; the letter from his doctor does not clearly state that Trump has been prescribed HCQ and at what dosage for what period of time nor has there been any information provided with regard to the nature of monitoring Trump receives while taking HCQ.

We don’t know why Trump would claim to take HCQ on the advice of some unknown person alleging to be a doctor. We’ve no further information about the letter, the letter’s author, whether a letter even existed since Trump has a proven propensity for making up shit.

All we can be sure of at this point is that more patients with COVID-19 may have died, potentially because of HCQ’s promotion by Trump, than may have died had he refrained from practicing medicine without a license by pushing HCQ.

In the case of the study of HCQ at Veterans Health Administration medical centers, former service persons who’ve already paid a price for our freedoms have been used in human experimentation in what might have been an attempt to validate Trump’s claims about HCQ — and some of them died for it.

It seems odd VA doctors used it out of the clear blue when the Food and Drug Administration hadn’t formally approved this drug for COVID-19 patients. (It’s probably just a coincidence the Center for Disease Control lifted its guidance on off-label use of HCQ two weeks before the VA study was published, right?)

It’d be nice to know if Trump’s three golf buddies at Mar-a-Lago — one of then a doctor — had anything to do with the use of HCQ and chloroquine at VA hospitals on COVID-19 patients.

There’s simply no good reason for Trump’s plugging this particular drug therapy except to harm and kill Americans.

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How Many COVID-19 Deaths Is Ron DeSantis Hiding?

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I had been told a couple of days ago, either here in comments or on Twitter, that Ron DeSantis had put his cronies in charge of the Florida database for COVID-19 cases and deaths. I hadn’t followed up on that, but then on Twitter last night i learned that the scientist who had been in charge of the site was fired back on May 1.  She spoke last night with a West Palm Beach TV station which broke the blockbuster story of why she was fired:

Rebekah Jones said in an email to CBS12 News that her removal was “not voluntary” and that she was removed from her position because she was ordered to censor some data, but refused to “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.”

Jones made the announcement May 5 in a farewell email to researchers and other members of the public who had signed up to receive updates on the data portal, according to Florida Today. She said that for “reasons beyond my division’s control,” her office is no longer managing the dashboard, involved in its publication, fixing errors or answering any questions.

Wow. Note that DeSantis “reopened” Florida on May 4. So the timing here, coupled with Jones saying she was ordered to change or censor data, shows a clear intent by DeSantis to game the numbers and create the false impression that the reopening would be a success. Just how stupid can a governor be?

Well, in his case, pretty stupid. He can’t even figure out how to wear a mask:

So who would trust this clown, compared to the scientist he fired? Here she is in a photo she supplied to Florida Today:

Near the end of the story filed last night, Jones notes that the Florida database still hasn’t been repaired. Here’s what I got when I checked at 1:40 this afternoon (refreshing 15 minutes later gave a plot for cases but not deaths, so there may be some “repair” work underway as I write this; and both plots were visible at 2:50):

There are big holes where the plots of new cases by day and deaths by date of death for the last 30 days would show up. Back on May 5, when Jones talked to Florida Today about her firing (but without mentioning the orders to censor data), Jones noted that near the end of her time in the job, the database suddenly started to malfunction:

Late last Friday, the architect and manager of Florida’s COVID-19 dashboard — praised by White House officials for its accessibility — announced that she had been removed from her post, causing outcry from independent researchers now worried about government censorship.

The dashboard has been a one-stop shop for researchers, the media and the public to access and download tables of COVID-19 cases, testing and death data to analyze freely. It had been widely hailed as a shining example of transparency and accessibility.

But over the last few weeks it had “crashed” and gone offline; data has gone missing without explanation and access to the underlying data sheets has become increasingly difficult.

The site was created by a team of Florida Department of Health data scientists and public health officers headed by Rebekah Jones. She announced last week her removal as of May 5 in a heartfelt farewell note emailed to researchers and other members of the public who had signed up to receive updates on the data portal.

Citing “reasons beyond my division’s control,” Jones said her office is no longer managing the dashboard, is no longer involved in publication, fixing errors or answering questions “in any shape or form.”

Note that the story from the West Palm Beach TV station says Jones announced her firing on May 5, but this Florida Today story makes it clear she informed people on May 1 that she was being removed May 5. Since she speaks of the database malfunctioning at the time of her firing, for the purposes of discussion here I consider May 1 the firing date and the time when fuckstickery of the database began.  With today being May 19, it’s clear that the database has been malfunctioning for nearly three weeks at a minimum.

The big problem, though, is that the plot for deaths magically starts dropping right after Jones was fired. I captured this version of the death plot around 9 this morning and noted the date Jones was fired (did she insert a parting shot of a bit more reality on her last day of May 4?):

There should be one partial note of caution here even though it’s really hard not to get the impression death numbers are being artificially reduced. There is a note on the death graph that I’m pretty sure popped up fairly recently and may well have been added around the time of Jones’ departure. The note says that deaths are now counted on the day of death rather than on the day the report is entered into the database. Since it can take a while for deaths to be reported depending on the county involved, the last few days in the plot can be expected to show increases as more death reports get entered into the system. But it has been long enough now since Jones was removed for it to be clear that there is a discontinuity in the plot that coincides precisely with her removal.

I haven’t included a plot of cases by day, but I also find the current data there (site is here) not believable. With the partial reopening of the state on May 4, it’s simply incomprehensible that the number of new cases per day is holding steady rather than increasing.

Will DeSantis ever face consequences for this egregious breach of public trust? Odds aren’t good. The Republican Party in Florida has a long tradition of doing whatever it pleases, rules and laws be damned. Just look at how they over-ruled the will of the people on the initiative overwhelmingly passed in 2018 to restore voting rights to felons who have served their sentences. It would seem that firing a scientist because she refused to censor data and mislead the public on a life or death matter would be the end of a normal political career. But in Florida, there is no limit to how criminal Republican officeholders can be.

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