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blythewallick

Trump reversed course on hosting G-7 at his club after learning that impeachment-weary ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-829d-87b12c2f85dd_story.html

US politics history trump gop

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • President Trump was forced to abandon his decision to host next year’s Group of Seven summit at his private golf club after it became clear the move had alienated Republicans and swiftly become part of the impeachment inquiry that threatens his presidency.
  • Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney tried to defend the decision during a news conference but caused a new controversy when he was asked about Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president that sparked the impeachment inquiry. Mulvaney told reporters that Trump had held up nearly $400 million in aid to push the foreign government to investigate Democrats, comments that undercut Trump’s central defense in the inquiry. When a journalist followed up, saying that Mulvaney seemed to be describing a quid pro quo, Mulvaney said “we do that all the time with foreign policy.”
  • Trump blamed his G-7 reversal on critics, saying on Twitter that his decision to scrap plans for a summit at the Doral club was “based on both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility.”AD
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  • Trump’s decision to host next year’s G-7 meeting at his private golf club only increased the anxiety among GOP lawmakers, some of whom have grown weary of having to develop new talking points almost daily.
  • Before he took office, Trump made the unprecedented decision to keep ownership of his businesses — but he promised that he would never use his new power to help them. The Trump Organization’s lawyers promised to avoid even the appearance of “any advantage derived from the Office of the Presidency.”
  • But in practice, Trump has continued to boost his businesses — by talking them up and by visiting them repeatedly, with aides and fellow Republicans in tow.
  • Christie said Trump should not be antagonizing Republicans at a time when he will need their votes to protect him in the impeachment process.
  • “It’s true that he really just thinks his properties are the best,” said a longtime adviser to the president. “He does not understand in his mind why he would have something at someone else’s property.”
  • “Could we have put on an excellent G-7 at Doral? Absolutely,” he said. “Will we end up putting on an excellent G-7 someplace else? Yes, we will.”
anonymous

Form of quinine pushed to fight covid-19 - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ng-similar-drug-fight-covid-19

history US trump

shared by anonymous on 21 May 20 - No Cached
  • On May 11, 1838, the Vicksburg Register in Mississippi carried an ad for a miracle drug to fight a disease ravaging the country. The potion worked safely without purging the bowels or upsetting the stomach. And it would break a fever within 48 hours.
  • Once known as the Jesuits’ Powder, and the “English remedy” after its early promoters, the drug’s key ingredient was quinine.Now President Trump is promoting a synthetic form of quinine — hydroxychloroquine — as a treatment for covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
  • The drug still is used to combat malaria and has been found to work on other ailments. But there’s scant evidence it can fight covid-19.
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  • It also was used by Nazi doctors in human malaria experiments in the Dachau concentration camp during World War II.German scientist Claus Schilling, an expert in tropical diseases, infected hundreds of patients with malaria by exposing them to parasite-carrying mosquitoes.He then treated them with quinine and other drugs to see how they reacted.“Thirty or forty died from the malaria itself,” Franz Blaha, a physician and Czech inmate at Dachau, testified after the war. “Three hundred to four hundred died later … because of the physical condition resulting from the malaria attacks. In addition there were deaths resulting from poisoning due to overdoses.”
  • At that time, malaria was mostly treated with the quinine-like synthetic Atabrine, a medicine designed by German chemists in the early 1930s.
  • Other bizarre remedies hadn’t worked, Duran-Reynals, the quinine historian, reported.One ancient cure went: “Take the urine of the patient and mix it with some flour to make … seventy-seven small cakes … Proceed before sunrise to an anthill and throw the cakes therein. As soon as the insects have devoured the cakes the fever vanishes.”
  • But Atabrine, like quinine, had side effects, including gastritis, hallucinations and psychosis, Masterson wrote. Plus, it turned the skin of GIs and Marines yellow.“The most hair-raising [side effects] were rashes that … progressed grotesquely, with skin falling off in sheets, creating open sores that attracted flies,” Masterson wrote. Other side effects included “erratic mood swings, violent anger, and deep depression …[along with] the standard diarrhea, vomiting, and cramps.”Then came the rumor the drug caused impotence.During the fight for the Pacific island of Guadalcanal, Marines rejected Atabrine. Their officers had to watch them take the pills and make sure the pills were swallowed. But the Marines would later spit them out.Thousands got sick. “For every battle casualty, ten men lay sick with malaria,” Masterson wrote.
  • “A tree grows which they call ‘the fever tree’ … whose bark, of the color of cinnamon, made into powder … and given as a beverage, cures the fevers … it has produced miraculous results,” he reported.“Thus … did Father Calancha announce to the world that a cure had been found for the most widespread disease of the time,” Duran-Reynals wrote.
  • In the 1670s, despite the hidebound medical establishment, a young English pharmacist, Robert Talbor, became an expert in treating fevers. He had moved to the southeast coast of England, where fevers were “epidemical."By trial and error, he came up with a secret formula — “my particular … medicine,” he called it. He would reveal only that it was “a preparation of four vegetables,” and he warned people about using the “Jesuits’ Powder.”
  • The whole virtue of the pills consisted in the quinine alone.
anonymous

Tainted Cutter polio vaccine killed and paralyzed children in 1955 - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...paralyzed-children-coronavirus

history US

shared by anonymous on 20 May 20 - No Cached
  • On Aug. 30, 1954, Bernice E. Eddy, a veteran scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., was checking a batch of a new polio vaccine for safety.Created by Jonas Salk, the vaccine was hailed as the miracle drug that would conquer the dreaded illness that killed and paralyzed children. Eddy’s job was to examine samples submitted by the companies planning to make it.As she checked a sample from Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, Calif., she noticed that the vaccine designed to protect against the disease had instead given polio to a test monkey. Rather than containing killed virus to create immunity, the sample from Cutter contained live, infectious virus.
  • As scientists and politicians desperately search for medicines to slow the deadly coronavirus, and as President Trump touts a malaria drug as a remedy, a look back to the 1955 polio vaccine tragedy shows how hazardous such a search can be, especially under intense public pressure.
  • Despite Eddy’s warnings, an estimated 120,000 children that year were injected with the Cutter vaccine
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  • Roughly 40,000 got “abortive” polio, with fever, sore throat, headache, vomiting and muscle pain. Fifty-one were paralyzed, and five died,
  • It was “one of the worst biological disasters in American history: a man-made polio epidemic,” Offit wrote.
  • “People weren’t sure how you got it,” he said in an interview last week. “Therefore, they were scared of everything. They didn’t want to buy a piece of fruit at the grocery store. It’s the same now. … Everybody’s walking around with gloves on, with masks on, scared to shake anybody’s hand.”
  • The worst polio outbreak in U.S. history struck in 1952, the year after Offit was born. It infected 57,000 people, paralyzed 21,000 and killed 3,145. The next year there were 35,000 infections, and 38,000 the year after that.
  • Many survivors had to wear painful metal braces on their paralyzed legs or had to be placed in so-called iron lungs, which helped them breathe
  • In 1951, Jonas Salk of the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school received a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to find a vaccine. During intense months of research, he took live polio virus and killed it with formaldehyde until it was not infectious but still provided virus-fighting antibodies.
  • On April 26, 1954, Randy Kerr, a 6-year-old second-grader from Falls Church, Va., stood in the cafeteria of the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean and became the first to be vaccinated in a massive field study.Salk’s vaccine was given to 420,000 children. A placebo was given to 200,000. And 1.2 million were given nothing.
  • She had started at NIH in 1937, had headed testing of vaccines for influenza, and in 1954 was asked to help test the Salk polio vaccine. The pressure was intense. “For weeks she and her staff worked around-the-clock, seven days a week,” O’Hern wrote.“This was a product that had never been made before, and they were going to use it right away,” Eddy had said.She began testing Cutter’s samples in August 1954 and continued through November, according to a later report in the Congressional Record. She found that three of the six samples paralyzed test monkeys.“What do you think is wrong with these monkeys?” she asked a colleague, Offit recounted.“They were given polio,” the colleague replied.“No,” Eddy said. “They were given the … vaccine.”
anonymous

Yellow Fever killed 10 percent in Philadelphia - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...n-percent-residents-still-died

history US

shared by anonymous on 21 May 20 - No Cached
  • In summer 1793, a malignant visitation spread over the nation’s capital, carrying off young and old, poor and prosperous in agonizing ways.People collapsed in the streets untended and died horrible deaths at home, their skin turning yellow, their vomit dark with blood.
  • Families were wiped out. Handshaking stopped. Citizens avoided one another and covered their faces with cloth.Half the residents fled the city, including President George Washington. Schools were closed. Some roads outside town were guarded to keep refugees away.This was Philadelphia, the U.S. capital from 1790 to 1800. Wagons arriving from the city were burned as a precaution. Letters and newspapers from Philadelphia were handled with tongs.
  • During the worst of it, a hundred people were buried a day. Historian J.H. Powell’s classic 1949 account is entitled “Bring Out Your Dead,” after the calls of the roving burial teams.What was destroying them, scientists say, was the first virus found to cause human disease.
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  • “For every death, there’s about 21 other infections,” she said modeling showed. So most of Philadelphia’s 50,000 people probably were infected. “They were either lucky that they didn’t develop disease or had mild disease compared to those that were unlucky and died.”Yellow fever is one of more than 200 known human viruses, according to the National Institutes of Health. They include those that cause HIV/AIDS, Ebola, polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, rabies, the common cold and now the novel coronavirus.
  • In the late 1800s, scientists were just starting to realize that strange microbes smaller than bacteria were causing disorders in plants and animals. Bacteria, which had been discovered in the 1670s, had been associated with human illnesses such as typhoid fever, cholera and tuberculosis.
  • U.S. Army physician Walter Reed reported in 1900 that the leading suspect bacteria was not found in the blood of fever cases he studied in Cuba.There was an alien “parasite” at work, he believed.“At the time they didn’t even call it a virus,” Staples said. “They didn’t know really what a virus was.”
  • In 1900, Reed set up what he called an “experimental sanitary station” in Cuba, where yellow fever was prevalent. He named it Camp Lazear, for Jesse W. Lazear, a medical colleague who had died of the fever that year.
  • After extensive testing on volunteer patients who were infected, Reed confirmed that mosquitoes were the carrier and eliminated bacteria as a cause.
  • The yellow fever virus was isolated in 1927, and scientists soon came up with an effective vaccine, called 17D, a weakened form of the virus itself. It’s still in use, and a recent scholarly paper called it “one of the most outstanding human vaccines ever developed.”
  • But in Philadelphia in 1793, the only remedy would be something that killed mosquitoes.
johnsonel7

Vladimir Putin asked Russians to help rewrite the constitution. It got 'crazy.' - The W... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-967b-e074d302c7d4_story.html

Russia putin politics history

shared by johnsonel7 on 25 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • MOSCOW — When President Vladimir Putin threw open the gates for Russians to propose changes to the country's constitution, the rewrite frenzy was on — particularly among nationalists, social conservatives, chauvinists and militants, who all dream of a Russia even more strident and militaristic.Russia is revamping its liberal Boris Yeltsin-era constitution, and citizens and organizations have put forward more than 700 suggested amendments — many with a distinctly anti-liberal bent
  • Vladimir Ryzhkov, a historian and opposition politician, said many of the amendments were “crazy proposals” mainly from people who opposed the liberal, humanist constitution of 1993.ADBut it’s a road map of where Russia has moved under Putin, who ordered the constitutional redo last month as part of an apparent plan to keep his grip on power after term limits force him out of the presidency in 2024
  • “There’s nothing new. Both proposals guarantee nothing. But it’s using propaganda to increase the support of these amendments,” Ryzhkov said.ADVoters will be given a yes-or-no vote on the full text of the new constitution. So if they like the state commitment to social payments, they will get every other amendment, too.
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  • “Many people around Putin and many people in this country, they hate the [1993] constitution because it’s too liberal for them,” Ryzhkov said. “Now that Putin opened this Pandora’s box of changing the constitution, all these conservative, reactionary, nationalistic, xenophobic, anti-European, anti-liberal political forces feel the possibility to kill this constitution, to kill this liberal spirit.”“That’s the reason,” he added, “so many crazy amendments are being proposed now.”
  • After 2024, Putin could take on a powerful post-presidency role such as State Council head. Vesting new powers in that body could create a vehicle for him to steer foreign and military policy and to ensure that his vision of Russia as a great world nuclear power does not unravel in some future orgy of corruption and incompetence.
  • “Putin becomes the successor of himself,” Kolesnikov said. “But institutionally this is a problem because the simultaneous existence of the president, who is still empowered, and the head of a State Council, could generate conflict between these two figures.“This has only been developed for Putin. There is no practical need for any kind of chair of the State Council,” he said. “This is all about Putin himself, not about the political structure.
Javier E

Why America's Floors Turned Gray - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671447

housing house design culture

shared by Javier E on 16 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • you wrote, “Can I interest you in my grand unified theory of the U.S. housing market as explained by gray vinyl plank flooring and barn doors.” Tell us your theory.
  • Amanda Mull: These types of doors and flooring (basically, fake wood with gray finishes) are particularly popular among people who are redoing homes as investments, either house flippers or landlords.
  • Gray finishes are pretty cheap, and they have a big potential upside in the rental or resale market, because that’s what people see when they enter a home. And gray floors have not been popular at any point before the past 10 or so years, so if you as a renter or buyer walk into a home and see gray floors, you’re like, “Oh, somebody has just redone this place.” It gives it that feeling of newness.
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  • Isabel: How did the feeling of newness—even in a place that’s not actually new—become such an important part of interior design?
  • Amanda: Newness is really important in American consumer life, especially in the past 15 years. We’ve seen across consumer categories this emphasis on having the latest and greatest. Most people are familiar with this in the arena of fast fashion. The things you have feel disposable, because they cost very little on a per-piece basis, and there’s a constant barrage of new stuff available that’s also very inexpensive
  • ou get to the point where it feels like having something for a long time is a chump’s game.
  • In the housing space, the opposite has happened. We as a country have really slowed down in building new housing, and that has created price issues
  • Housing is very expensive, and what you get for your money is worsening. When homes are old, and the buying or renting public is used to newness, if you can create a sense of newness inside these older homes, you can charge more
  • that ends up being surface-level stuff that does not enhance the livability of the home and doesn’t even necessarily make it a more aesthetically pleasing space.
  • Amanda: What people are trying to do when they look at a place where they might live is just to figure out if it’s functional, and that can be difficult to evaluate on the surface level. So people tend to look around and think, Okay, well, the appliances are new, the floors are new, this stuff should hold for a while.
  • Because of the precarious position that a lot of people are in with housing in the U.S., and because of how hard it can be to get your offer accepted, you have this sense of scarcity. In those situations, some gray floors and a tile backsplash, and you’re like, Okay, somebody did something to this; let’s write an offer or apply before someone else sees it.
  • Isabel: You write that “all told, nearly a third of American house sales last year went to people who had no intention of living in them.” How is the current economic moment affecting the trend of house flipping?
  • Amanda: I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that gray floors are a physical manifestation of the economic realities of American life. For a lot of people, homeownership is a path to financial stability, and it’s the path that’s most common in America. Because housing is a good investment, a lot of people are interested in it who aren’t interested in living in those homes that they buy: Especially since the United States is not building a lot more housing, it’s a really attractive asset for institutional investors, property managers, and flippers. There are a lot of people dissatisfied with their careers and wages looking for something else to do that is cash positive.
lilyrashkind

Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin describes attempts to phone gunman during school massacre -... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ayor-interview-school-shooting

US politics

shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • In an interview with The Washington Post, McLaughlin (R) said he rushed to Hillcrest Funeral Home about 15 minutes after “the first call” reporting that 18-year-old Salvador Ramos had crashed his pickup truck nearby. He found himself standing near an official he identified only as “the negotiator,” while frightened parents gathered outside the school and police waited well over an hour to storm the classroom.
  • He said he doesn’t believe the negotiator was aware there were children calling 911 and asking police to save them while the gunman was in the classroom. The mayor said he was not aware of those calls, nor did he hear shots fired from inside the school, across the street.
  • In the recent Texas primary for governor, he opted not to endorse the Republican incumbent, Gov. Greg Abbott, labeling him a “fraud” over his approach to the border and immigration. And he has appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” multiple times to lambaste the Border Patrol’s release of migrants into the streets of Uvalde and lament that he cannot get a call back from the state’s two Republican senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.
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  • McLaughlin said he has not been in touch with Pete Arredondo, the embattled head of the Uvalde school district’s police department, who served as the incident commander during the shooting and has been criticized for not sending officers in sooner.Arredondo has not spoken publicly about the incident, telling CNN on Wednesday that he would do so after more time has passed and the victims of the massacre are buried.
  • Last week, Abbott said he was “misled” by law enforcement authorities about the series of events that took place.
  • “Why should any of us be afraid of expanding background checks? There’s nothing wrong with that, I don’t have anything to hide,” said McLaughlin, who has also long pushed to build a psychiatric hospital in Uvalde.
  • During the interview on Wednesday, however, McLaughlin took a much more conciliatory tone, urging compromise between Republicans and Democrats to find a set of laws that “work for everyone.”
  • “The briefing that the governor and the lieutenant governor and everybody else in that room [had] ... was given by the DPS, not local law enforcement,” McLaughlin said.“They’ve had three press conferences,” he added. “In all three press conferences, something has changed.”
  • In his letter to Patrick, who presides over the Senate, and House Speaker Dade Phelan (R), Abbott asked that both chambers form committees to explore five issues: school safety; mental health; social media; police training; and firearm safety.“As leaders, we must come together at this time to provide solutions to protect all Texans,” Abbott said in his letter.
  • Abbott also announced new instructions for the Texas School Safety Center, a research center focused on campus safety and security that is statutorily responsible for auditing schools for safety processes and establishing best practices.
  • According to a letter Abbott sent to education officials, the governor said the San Marcos-based safety center should start conducting “random intruder detection audits,” designed to find weaknesses in campus security systems.
  • McLaughlin said he could not imagine the school returning to normal operations.“I hope we tear it down to the ground,” he said. “I would never expect a teacher, a student, anyone to go walk back in that building.”
malonema1

The Pritzker Prize, Architecture's Most Prestigious Award, Gets Political | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...e-prizes-political-crazy-world

us

shared by malonema1 on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Even Architecture Prizes Are Political In This Crazy World Related Galleries Stunning Images Show the Earth's Imperiled Water Even Architecture Prizes Are Political In This Crazy World The FCC Graciously Sets Internet Providers Free to Sell Your Data Keeping Fentanyl Out of the US Will Take More Than a Wall Range Rover's New Baby SUV Will Swaddle You for $50,000
  • “Each building can only be in the place that it is located,”
  • “That place involves the climate, the topography, the history, the culture, and the landscape, including the sky and the stars. Yet you don’t have to be from that place to experience it, to feel uplifted, or feel at peace, or feel emotional, or feel good.” Put differently, RCR Arquitectes stands in as a metaphor for appreciating otherness in the world.
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  • Consider RCR Arquitectes’ choice to run its shop in a town of 30,000 people, instead of the nearby metropolis Barcelona. It’s quaint in that way—practically mom-and-pop. Yet, the firm’s three architects work collaboratively, building open structures that anyone can enjoy, the jury says. It’s a much lighter declaration than choosing, say, a woman like Jeanne Gang or an Iranian practice like Admun Studio.
  • RCR Arquitectes’s buildings evoke the same sentiment, by letting light and greenery inside.
delgadool

Senate impeachment trial of Trump begins with rancor over witnesses and new evidence ab... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-9541-9107303481a4_story.html

shared by delgadool on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Republican lawmakers appeared unswayed by the new information, focusing on attacking the Democratic-led investigation in the House for not uncovering the evidence before sending the impeachment articles to the Senate.
  • Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said it is the responsibility of the House, not the Senate, to gather evidence and present a case for impeachment.
  • The chorus of Republicans unwilling to consider additional evidence served as an indication that Democrats will face an uphill climb in their attempts to further build a case against Trump as the Senate trial plays out. The impeachment charges center on the allegation that the president withheld military aid and a White House meeting to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, including former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
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  • Parnas — who has been trying to get House impeachment investigators’ attention for weeks — alleged in an interview with NBC News on Wednesday evening that Trump personally blessed his covert effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political adversaries. He also admitted to conveying to the Ukrainians a “quid pro quo” message that aid would flow only when the nation publicly committed to such a probe.
  • “President Trump thus warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States,” Schiff said as he finished reading from the articles.
  • “In America, trials have evidence, and coverups do not,” said Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.).
  • “My view on it is, I want to wait and start by hearing from both sides and then ask the questions and then be informed by that,” Cramer said. “You know, I think at this point we’re all in jury mode, and that’s the best way to proceed. It’s really up to the House managers to make the case for these things. I’m certainly open to it. And we’ll see what they say.”
anonymous

Swine flu vaccine: Like coronavirus, the government sought 'warp speed' inoculation - T... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...vaccine-swine-flu-coronavirus

history US trump

shared by anonymous on 22 May 20 - No Cached
  • The federal government has launched “Operation Warp Speed” to deliver a covid-19 vaccine by January, months ahead of standard vaccine timelines.The last time the government tried that, it was a total fiasco.
  • Gerald Ford was president. It was 1976.
  • Ford raced to come up with a response, consulting with Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, the scientists behind the polio vaccine, and in late March he announced an audacious plan for the federal government to produce the vaccine and organize its distribution.
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  • “They were well aware of the ravages of the 1918 flu, and this virus appeared to be closely related,”
  • Every American, Ford said, would be vaccinated.The government had never attempted such an endeavor — both in its breadth and speed.Almost immediately, there was chaos.
  • One manufacturer produced 2 million doses with the wrong strain. As tests progressed, more scientific problems emerged — even as there were few, if any, signs that a pandemic was materializing. In June, tests showed the vaccine was not effective in children, prompting a public squabble between Salk and Sabin over who should be vaccinated.
  • And then more problems emerged. There were reports of sporadic deaths possibly connected to the vaccine. Cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome also emerged, and are still cited today by the anti-vaccine movement. Panic emerged, with dozens of states pausing vaccinations.
  • By December, following 94 reports of paralysis, the entire program was shut down.
  • Almost immediately, in grand Washington fashion, fingers were pointed. Scientists and government officials turned on each other, with allegations that Ford acted recklessly for political gain without knowing for sure whether a pandemic would emerge — an impossible predictive game, his defenders argued.The recriminations were fueled by the fact that the swine flu pandemic hadn’t materialized.
  • The program “appears clearly to have been based on concern for the public good,” Skidmore wrote, “not to achieve political advantage.”
redavistinnell

Judge Declares Mistrial of Baltimore Cop in Freddie Gray Case - NBC News - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...-cop-freddie-gray-case-n481296

judge baltimore cop freddie gray nbc case

shared by redavistinnell on 17 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Judge Declares Mistrial of Baltimore Cop in Freddie Gray Case
  • In what is a perceived legal blow for prosecutors, the jury was hung and the judge declared a mistrial in the trial of Baltimore police Officer William Porter in connection with Freddie Gray's death after he sustained injuries while in custody. Maryland circuit Judge Barry G. Williams indicated that he expected prosecutors to retry Porter.
  • Prosecutors considered Porter's case key to strengthening the case against Caesar Goodson Jr., who was driving the van. It was also seen as a signal of how the trials of the five other officers could go.
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  • The judge scheduled conferences Thursday to "discuss a new trial date," indicating that he expects prosecutors to try Porter again. Williams gave Porter the option to appear Thursday, but he declined.
  • During arguments, prosecutors focused on what they said was Porter's failure to take care of Gray while he was in custody by not getting him medical care or buckling his seatbelt.
  • "In the coming days, if some choose to demonstrate peacefully to express their opinion, that is their constitutional right," Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said. "In the case of any disturbance in the city, we are prepared to respond. We will protect our neighborhoods, our businesses and the people of our city."
  • Porter, who took the stand in his defense, said that Gray was "unable to give me a reason for a medical emergency" and that it was not his duty to fasten the seatbelts of people who have been arrested in the van.
  • And in the meantime, Baltimore worked to rebuild and remember.
  • "With the eyes of the world on Baltimore City, we must ensure that any protests that take place are peaceful, and we must ensure that the process of healing our community continues. We must continue to channel our emotions into strong, positive change, so that, as a city, we truly see our young men of color before it is too late," Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, said in a statement. "This is the road to more equal justice in our community."
  • "I think it went botched, I don't feel as if the prosecution was at tight as it needed to be by virtue of the fact that the jury still had a whole lot of unanswered questions," he said. "To be clear that they were deadlocked on all four charges and got no clarity or consensus on any of them. So I hope that in this retrial they'll be more clear about how it is they present the case."
  • ers should remain calm. He described the mistrial as "a bump on the road to justice."
saberal

Opinion | Service, patriotism and the promise of Black liberation - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...otism-promise-black-liberation

US politics

shared by saberal on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • When the signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged to each other “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” they were describing precisely why we set aside Memorial Day to honor all who have died in service to our nation.
  • Black military service had a direct relationship to “the achievement of the rights of citizenship,” Gates told me. “In Lincoln’s final speech, he tentatively floated the idea of Black male suffrage for the men who had played such a decisive role in the Union’s victory and for a small group of ‘very intelligent’ Black men. Some scholars argue that this statement led to Lincoln’s assassination, since John Wilkes Booth was in the audience and essentially said that this was the last straw.”
  • “A lot of people talk about patriotism these days,” Parker told me. “But what is patriotism? It’s a commitment to a set of founding values so complete that one is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.”
urickni

Impeachment hearings will test the news media - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-8501-2a7123a38c58_story.html

shared by urickni on 11 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • The national media’s shortcomings have been all too obvious in recent years as Donald Trump has gleefully thrown the norms of traditional journalism into a tizzy.
    • urickni
      urickni on 11 Nov 19
       
      Trump's effects on modern journalism have been especially affluent, and have shaped the face of the media.
  • Journalists have done a lot right — they have pointed out lies, dug out what’s really happening, skillfully explained and analyzed.
    • urickni
      urickni on 11 Nov 19
       
      I wonder what the consequences of this have been
  • But on Wednesday — as televised impeachment hearings begin in the House of Representatives — journalists need to be on their game. The stakes don’t get much higher when it comes to fulfilling their core mission: informing citizens of what they really need to know.
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  • Stress substance, not speculation. Journalists and pundits love to ponder about how the public is reacting to news, though they aren’t much good at it.
  • Don’t let stunts hijack the coverage. If we know anything about Trump’s reaction when things get tough, it’s that he and his allies will haul out some attention-grabbing performance art and its distractions.Trump will act out — because that’s what he does.
  • Avoid Barr-Letter Syndrome.
  • “Effective propaganda,” as O’Brien characterized it. “It’s meant to delude.”Propaganda brought to you in part by the insistent gullibility of the media.
  • Beware mealy-mouthed and misleading language. Punditry will be running even more amok than usual once the hearings begin. And we’ll be hearing a lot about what a divided nation we have and how ugly politics has become. We’ll be hearing the term “quid pro quo” endlessly.
  • When journalists opt for safe language, when they pointlessly speculate, or succumb to Trump’s sideshow, they flunk the test.Time to study up and ace it.
anonymous

Congress affirms Biden's presidential win following riot at U.S. Capitol - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-b96e-0e54447b23a1_story.html

shared by anonymous on 07 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Members of Congress, shaken and angry following a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of President Trump’s supporters, put a final stamp on President-elect Joe Biden’s victory early Thursday morning
  • Republicans had at one point planned to object to the electoral college votes in a series of states won by Biden, but after the storming of the Capitol, several GOP senators changed course, disputing only Arizona and Pennsylvania. Both challenges failed.
  • Shortly after Congress affirmed Biden’s win, Trump pledged an “an orderly transition.”
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  • The lawmakers convened Wednesday evening, after hours of delay, in a show of defiance. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she had consulted with fellow congressional leaders, the Pentagon, the Justice Department and Vice President Pence before concluding that Congress should move ahead with the ceremony interrupted earlier in the day by rioters provoked to action by Trump at a morning rally.
  • As lawmakers returned to work following the riot, the tone of the debate turned more somber and impassioned than before the interruption, with a number of Republicans who had planned to slow the proceedings with objections announcing they would stand aside.
  • That sparked an exchange of words between Republicans and Democrats sitting behind Lamb that nearly led to blows before aides intervened.
  • Both chambers picked up Wednesday night where they had left off before the evacuation, considering a challenge to Biden’s 11 electoral votes in Arizona. The Senate rejected the challenge by 93 to 6 and the House by 303 to 121.
  • Lawmakers then moved to reconvene the joint session and complete the counting of the remaining states, setting up a final confirmation of Biden’s victory at 3:45 a.m. — nearly 21 hours after the proceedings began.
  • Earlier in the day, the ceremonial reading of the electoral votes had just begun when pro-Trump rioters rushed the building at around 2 p.m., forcing the evacuation of both chambers of Congress. For hours, rioters rampaged through the Capitol complex. One woman was fatally shot in the building.
  • Still, the outcome of the congressional proceedings had been clear from the start, particularly after Pence announced he would reject pleas from the president to use his role as the session’s presiding officer to hand a win to Trump.
  • While lawmakers huddled in an undisclosed location during the siege, Republican leaders pressed their members to abandon their plans to challenge the electoral vote. Several senators said they would no longer object, notably Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), who had embraced the challenge as part of the hard-fought Senate election she lost Tuesday.
  • The congressional process was supposed to be a mere procedural checkpoint on the way to Biden’s oath-taking later this month. Biden won the popular vote on Nov. 3 and, last month, the electoral college met in each state capital, as stipulated in the U.S. Constitution. Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.
  • According to an 1887 law that governs the process, any member of the House of Representatives, joined by a senator, can object to an individual state’s electoral tally, prompting a two-hour debate, followed by a vote in each chamber
Javier E

China's Xi faces crisis of confidence as threat mount - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-8733-48c87235f396_story.html

china crisis foreign policy paranoia fear west

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Chinese scholars and Communist Party cadres have a succinct way of describing the tectonic shifts taking place here: Deng Xiaoping made us rich, now Xi Jinping is making us strong.
  • Xi has devoted his seven years in power to strengthening the ruling Communist Party, and by extension the country. He has relentlessly quashed dissent, sidelined rivals and demanded absolute loyalty.After pledging to make the party “north, south, east and west,” he has ensured that it is paramount not just in policymaking but in the military, business, education and the law. 
  • Now, Xi is facing challenges on multiple fronts, and the Communist Party, riven with paranoia at the best of times, is seeing threats at every turn.ADHe has to contend not just with a slowing economy but also a protracted trade war with the United States that has entered a new confrontational phase with President Trump’s decision to impose more tariffs next month.
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  • He is facing escalating Western criticism of Chinese policies toward ethnic Uighurs in Xin­jiang, where as many as 3 million people have been put into reeducation camps. He is dealing with an increasingly assertive Taiwan at the same time a pro-democracy movement swells in Hong Kong.
  • Xi is trying to harden the party’s internal resolve to fend off these threats — most acutely, a United States that many observers say seems intent on containing China.“Xi has a legion of internal critics, including over his handling of relations with Washington,” McGregor said. “One way to bring them to heel is by demanding fealty and loyalty to the party, and by extension, to himself.”
  • Since taking power, Xi has rewritten the party’s rules — including ending term limits, setting himself up to be leader indefinitely — and launched huge study campaigns to instill his personal ideology across society, starting with toddlers, through schools and universities and through the Central Committee Party School in Beijing. The party has developed an app through which Chinese can study “Xi Jinping Thought.”
  • China’s leaders have intensively studied the collapse of the Soviet Union — Xi even had top officials watch a four-part documentary about it soon after he came into office — and concluded that Mikhail Gorbachev made a strategic error by opting to liberalize rather than tighten political controls.
  • Meanwhile, the party’s increasingly repressive actions inside China, such as the crackdown in the Xinjiang region and the growing use of surveillance technology, “reflect heightened fear and insecurity, not a self-confident China aspiring to enhanced leadership in global and regional affairs,”
  • Because of this sense of insecurity, party leaders view the Trump administration’s declaration of a trade war not as a purely economic matter but as a broader, strategic effort to contain China
  • This theory got a boost from none other than John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, late last year. “This is not just an economic issue,” he told Fox Business. “This is not just talking about tariffs and the terms of trade. This is a question of power.”
  • As the trade negotiations rumble on, more people in China are subscribing to the view that the dispute is about geopolitics rather than economics, scholars say. That it’s all about keeping China down.
  • The perception gap between China and the United States is huge, the academic said, searching around for the appropriate English analogy before arriving at “women are from Venus, men are from Mars.” 
  • This is because the United States looks at the development and wealth in Chinese cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, and at Chinese technology companies like Alibaba and Huawei, and sees an increasingly powerful economic player.
  • But Beijing doesn’t look at the situation only through the lens of the past few decades, the academic said. It looks at it from the perspective of the past few centuries. 
  • China can’t back down anymore. If you read the editorials, you see that China is determined,
  • “I think some would even compare it with the unequal treaties of 100 years ago,” he continued, harking back to the British victory in the Opium Wars of the 19th century and the occupations of the early 20th century.
  • With these old humiliations still raw, party leaders are trying to fuel an inner resolve
carolinehayter

1st Patients To Get CRISPR Gene-Editing Treatment Continue To Thrive : Shots - Health N... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...g-treatment-continue-to-thrive

us Science CRISPR

shared by carolinehayter on 17 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • "It is a big deal because we we able to prove that we can edit human cells and we can infuse them safely into patients and it totally changed their life,"
    • carolinehayter
      carolinehayter on 17 Dec 20
       
      Keep in mind that this was a trial with only 10 patients. Yes, the results are promising, but there's still a long way to go. It's also imperative to remember how harmful CRISPR Cas 9 technology can be when used incorrectly and without regulation.
  • About a year after getting the treatment, it was working so well that Gray felt comfortable flying for the first time.
  • NPR has had exclusive access to follow Gray through her experience since she underwent the landmark treatment on July 2, 2019. Since the last time NPR checked in with Gray in June, she has continued to improve. Researchers have become increasingly confident that the approach is safe, working for her and will continue to work. Moreover, they are becoming far more encouraged that her case is far from a fluke.
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  • Gray is the first person in the United States to be successfully treated for a genetic disorder with the help of CRISPR, a revolutionary gene-editing technique that makes it much easier to make very precise changes in DNA.
  • All the patients appear to have responded well. The only side effects have been from the intense chemotherapy they've had to undergo before getting the billions of edited cells infused into their bodies.
  • The New England Journal of Medicine published online this month the first peer-reviewed research paper from the study, focusing on Gray and the first beta thalassemia patient who was treated.
  • "I'm very excited to see these results," says Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, who shared the Nobel Prize this year for her role in the development of CRISPR
  • But the results from the first 10 patients "represent an important scientific and medical milestone," says Dr. David Altshuler, Vertex's chief scientific officer.
  • The treatment boosted levels of a protein in the study subjects' blood known as fetal hemoglobin. The scientists believe that protein is compensating for defective adult hemoglobin that their bodies produce because of a genetic defect they were born with.
  • showed the gene-edited cells had persisted the full year — a promising indication that the approach has permanently altered her DNA and could last a lifetime.
  • "This gives us great confidence that this can be a one-time therapy that can be a cure for life," says Samarth Kulkarni, the CEO of CRISPR Therapeutics.
  • Gray has also been able to wean off the powerful pain medications she'd needed most of her life.
  • haven't needed the regular blood transfusions that had been required to keep them alive.
  • For the treatment, doctors remove stem cells from the patients' bone marrow and use CRISPR to edit a gene in the cells, activating the production of fetal hemoglobin. That protein is produced by fetuses in the womb but usually shuts off shortly after birth. The patients then undergo a grueling round of chemotherapy to destroy most of their bone marrow to make room for the gene-edited cells, billions of which are then infused into their bodies.
  • Doctors have already started trying to use CRISPR to treat cancer and to restore vision to people blinded by a genetic disease. They hope to try it for many other diseases as well, including heart disease and AIDS.
  • "This is really a life-changer for me," she says. "It's magnificent."
Javier E

CNN's Leana Wen: 'Public health is now under attack in a way that it has not been befor... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-a452-4da5fe48582d_story.html

public health crisis policy politics Culture pandemic

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • You write movingly in your book about your family relying on the social safety net, about difficult things you saw as a child — and how those influences shaped your path.We came to the U.S. with $40. My parents were both professionals in China who had difficulty finding employment here. They worked multiple jobs, but we still really struggled
  • We went through substantial periods of being dependent on some type of government service, whether food stamps, WIC, Medicaid, children’s health insurance. And I had an acute awareness as a child of what happens when people go without access to health care. I also had an acute awareness that people’s lives were not valued the same.
  • Do you remember when that understanding hit you?I saw a neighbor’s child die in front of me as a child. And watching someone die from an illness that I knew was preventable — because I had asthma — left an imprint on me. And he died not because of lack of medical care, but because his family — his grandmother — was too afraid for what would happen to their family, that they could be deported, if they called for help. And so that’s what motivated me to go into medicine. I felt very strongly about caring for the most vulnerable, who otherwise would have nowhere else to go for their care.
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  • It’s the height of American exceptionalism that we are where we are. I have family in other parts of the world where health-care workers and vulnerable elderly people are begging to get the vaccine. And here, we’re sitting on stockpiles and begging people to take the vaccine.
  • Do you think verification and mandates could work in the U.S. with our notions of freedom, individual liberty?
  • I think we need to reframe freedom here, right? I don’t agree with the statement that some people have been putting out about vaccines, that this is just about personal choice. You can say that maybe eating unhealthy food is your personal choice. But in this case, nobody should have the right to carry an infectious disease that is able to endanger others and potentially kill them. I mean, I’ve got two little kids. I’m very upset thinking about how there are other people who are choosing not to be vaccinated. And as a result, they are choosing to endanger our children. I’m sure they’re not trying to do this intentionally, but that is the end result.
  • I hope that people see that by not being vaccinated, they’re actually impeding societal progress too. They’re making it harder for kids to get back in school. They’re making it harder for the economy to come back. And why are we allowed to make that kind of personal choice when we do not allow people to make the personal choice to go drunk driving?
  • How much do you worry about hesitancy, not just around the vaccine, but mistrust of science and mistrust of public health even?
  • I worry about this a lot. You’ve seen what happened in Tennessee with the vaccine director being fired for trying to promote covid vaccines to adolescents. And even more disturbing, I think is that now, Tennessee health officials are being prohibited from promoting vaccines to children. Not just covid vaccines, but all other childhood immunizations. I mean, public health is now under attack in a way that it has not been before.
Javier E

North Dakota coal sector sees opportunity in electric vehicles - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...dakota-ev-coal

fossil fuel denial interest economic dependence Culture politics history

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil.
  • “True wealth is created by a partnership between man and earth,” said Bohrer. If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, “it’s opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite industry a way to survive.”
  • His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital. It has been an uphill struggle so far, but the idea is that the electricity needed to charge cars and trucks can’t all come from unreliable wind or solar, and this will give coal a way to stay in the mix and help keep the grid in fine tune. “The more demand we have in North Dakota,” Bohrer said, “the easier it is to soak up our domestically produced electricity.”
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  • Not only is the process still prohibitively expensive, research has shown that so far it hasn’t been very effective. A 2019 study at Stanford University found that current carbon capture projects miss well more than half of the carbon dioxide in emissions.
  • Project Tundra’s managers hope they can achieve a significant breakthrough, aiming to capture 90 percent of the CO2 once they have the project in operation. Essentially, the carbon dioxide would be absorbed out of the “flue gas,” or exhaust, by amine-based solvents, which would be pumped to a regeneration unit that would heat the solvents and free the CO2 again, in a pure form. Then it would be condensed and pumped to natural caverns deep underground.
  • For now the project is still in the design and engineering phase, together with financial analysis. Equipment at the site has been used to test the process; now the results are being analyzed. If the pieces fall into place and the project gets a green light from regulators and company officials, construction could get started as early as next year.
  • “This carbon sequestration project really gets us excited,” he said. “It gives coal a role in stabilizing the grid.” He added: “If there are better solutions than coal out there, so be it. We just believe those solutions don’t exist.”
  • There are warning signs, nonetheless. Even though the price of oil has bounced back after the disastrous months when the pandemic struck last year, and production at existing wells is humming along, there’s little new drilling in the Bakken. The number of rigs has fallen from 55 in early 2020 to 23 today.
  • Her attitude about the coal-powered electricity she uses in her car is that it’s not great, it’s probably on the way out, it’s better than using gasoline.“Gas is a continuous circle of energy wastage,” she said. “You have to use energy to extract it, you have to use energy to transport it, you have to use energy to refine it, you have to use energy to transport it back.
  • Kathy Neset moved to the Bakken with a degree in geology from Brown University in 1979 and built a successful oil-field consulting company on the vast, windswept jumble of low hills and ridges, once good only for cattle raising. She understands perfectly well that electric cars are coming, yet she has faith that new uses for petroleum will keep the oil sector in business.
  • “Do we blow away like tumbleweeds? Or do we evolve?” she said in an interview at her gleaming office building in Tioga, N.D. “This is an industry that has a history of adopting, evolving and changing with the nation. I don’t see oil going away in any of our lifetimes. It’s our way of life. Where we lose out on transportation we will gain on new technologies.”
  • Destiny Wolf, 39, an upbeat advocate for electric vehicles, also feels the stigma of driving a Tesla — in her case a Model 3.Oil workers, Wolf said, see electric vehicles as an attack on their livelihoods. “You know, sitting there at a red light, they drive up, roll down their windows, they start yelling and cursing at me,” she said. “If that’s your existence, it’s really sad.”
  • Neset said she believes that investment firms, especially those that have signed on to corporate governance protocols that embrace environmental and social goals, “just don’t want to put their capital into new drilling until we figure out a way to handle this in a clean way.”
  • “In rural America there is very little you can do without that [oil],” Ness said. “We just don’t have opportunities here. It enables us to build schools, rather than close schools.”
  • Charles Gorecki, CEO of an incubator at the University of North Dakota called the Energy and Environmental Research Center, is promoting a plan similar to the coal industry’s Project Tundra. But it would go further — he envisions the injection of carbon dioxide into deep caverns as a way of enhancing the extraction of more oil. More carbon would go into the ground than would come out of it as petroleum, he said. North Dakota could even import carbon dioxide from other states.
  • “There is an enormous amount of space to store CO2,” he said. “What we need to do is make it an economically attractive option. The goal is to reduce carbon emissions. It should be by any and all means.”
  • A new state body called the Clean Sustainable Energy Authority is charged with promoting clean-energy technologies — with the understanding that the energy being talked about is from coal, oil or natural gas. Carbon capture is one idea; another is hydrogen-powered vehicles, using “blue” hydrogen from natural gas.
  • “Even if we transition to all electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles, North Dakota will have a part to play,” said Joel Brown, a member of the CSEA. “I think of it as a moonshot for the state of North Dakota.”
  • In the history of the Bakken, 3 billion barrels of oil have been pumped out. Brown said 30 billion to 40 billion more barrels is still in the ground and recoverable.
  • “We have to make that Bakken barrel just a little bit cleaner than every other barrel in the world,” said Ron Ness, head of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, a trade group. “You look at the standard American family and the affordability of the combustion engine, and I think gasoline is going to be around for a long time.”
  • North Dakota went from being the 10th-largest oil-producing state in 2005 to the second in 2015.
  • Watford City is in McKenzie County, which between 2010 and 2019 was the fastest-growing county in the United States, according to census figures. In the late 1990s, said Steve Holen, the school superintendent, people thought the county would soon have nothing but bison and nursing homes. Oil changed all that, and residents are reluctant to let that go.
  • So the oil sector, too, is putting its chips on carbon capture.
  • Consequently, there’s a widespread conviction in the Bakken that electric vehicles will never amount to much. “It’s a cultural challenge,” said Neset. “I’m not sure how many of these cowboys and cowgirls are going to want to jump in an electric car.”
  • A question about EVs that was put to a Bakken Facebook group elicited scathing, vulgar responses. “Let the retirees living in Florida, Arizona and California buy them. I am from North Dakota, give me a gas guzzling ‘truck,’” wrote one.
  • “Anyone that supports electric over gas and works in the Bakken is a hypocrite. Your job revolves around oil. No oil = No job for most. Easiest math I have ever done,” wrote another.
  • “Never, ever, ever,” wrote a third.But there are signs this hostility to electric is cracking.
Javier E

Covid hospital bills arrive for patients as insurers restore deductibles and copays - T... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...tal-bills-insurance-deductible

hospital costs Covid-19 health care insurance

shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Nationally, covid hospitalizations under insurance contracts on average cost $29,000, or $156,000 for a patient with oxygen levels so low that they require a ventilator and ICU treatment,
  • The calculus in place in 2020 changed with the advent of vaccines, which now makes most hospitalizations preventable,
  • Hospitals along the Connecticut River, the border between Vermont and New Hampshire, draw patients from both states. Vermont health plans are waiving deductibles and co-pays into 2022. In New Hampshire, where Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield has a dominant presence, insurance companies have reinstated cost-sharing.
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  • Marvin Mallek, a doctor who treats covid patients from both sides of the river at Springfield Hospital in Vermont, said New Hampshire covid patients are now facing business as usual from insurers, suffering the same sort of financial stress that routinely affects patients with cancer, heart disease and other serious ailments.
  • “The inhumanity of our health-care system and the tragedies it creates will now resume and will now cover this one group that was exempted,'' he said. “The U.S. health-care system is sort of like a game of musical chairs where there are not enough chairs, and some people are going to get hurt and devastated financially.”
  • Hospitals also are in the position of having to resume billings and collections for individuals who may have been laid off because of the pandemic or been too sick to work, experts said.
  • “These waivers ended in January as we all had gained a better understanding of the virus, and people and communities became more familiar with best practices and protocols for limiting COVID-19 exposure and spread,” the company said in a statement. “Also, at this time vaccines, which are proven to be the safest and most effective way to protect oneself from COVID-19, were starting to become readily available.”Anthem took in $4.6 billion in profits in 2020, compared to $4.8 billion in 2019.
  • The reintroduction of cost-sharing mainly affects people with private or employer-based insurance. Patients with no insurance can have 100 percent of their expenses covered by the federal government, under a special program set up by the government for the pandemic, with hospitals reimbursed for care at Medicare rates.
  • Covid patients with Medicaid, the government plan for lower-income people that is paid for by states and the federal government, continue to be protected from cost-sharing, insurance specialists said
  • Patients on Medicare, the federal plan for the elderly, could face out-of-pocket costs if they do not have supplemental insurance.
  • Last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 88 percent of people covered by private insurance had their co-pays and deductibles for covid treatment waived. By August 2021, only 28 percent of the two largest plans in each state and D.C. still had the waivers in place, and another 10 percent planned to phase them out by the end of October,
  • general, a person with Azar’s type of plan would have an in-network deductible of $1,500 and an in-network out-of-pocket maximum of $4,000,
  • “We still don’t know where the numbers will land because the system makes the family wait for the bills,” s
  • Bills related to her stay at the out-of-network rehab hospital in Tennessee could climb as high as $10,000 more, her relatives have estimated, but they acknowledged they were uncertain this month what exactly to expect, even after asking UnitedHealthcare and the providers.
  • In 2020, as the pandemic took hold, U.S. health insurance companies declared they would cover 100 percent of the costs for covid treatment, waiving co-pays and expensive deductibles for hospital stays that frequently range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.But this year, most insurers have reinstated co-pays and deductibles for covid patients, in many cases even before vaccines became widely available.
lilyrashkind

Biden says he heard late about baby formula shortage - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...biden-formula-heard-late

baby formula US

shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Biden’s comments came after he met with executives of companies that manufacture infant formula, who told the president they knew the shortage would be severe in February after the closure of an Abbott plant in Michigan. Biden suggested he was not informed until April.
  • The disconnect between the industry’s alertness to the looming crisis and the administration’s lack of awareness was hinted at during the panel discussion itself. Biden asked one panelist directly if his company had been surprised by the “profound effect immediately” of the Abbott closure.“No, sir, we were aware of the general impact that this would have,” said Robert Cleveland, a senior vice president at Reckitt. “From the moment that that recall was announced, we reached out immediately to retail partners like Target and Walmart to tell them this is what we think will happen.”
  • “We have been doing this whole-of-government approach since the recall,” she said at the White House daily press briefing after Biden met with the executives. “We have been working on this for months, for months. We have been taking this incredibly seriously.”When pressed why Biden himself said he was unaware of the “whole-of-government approach,” Jean-Pierre said that Biden “has multiple issues, crises at the moment” and that administration officials often respond to problems before the president is aware.
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  • In recent weeks, Biden has scrambled to show he is on top of the matter. He invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up domestic production of baby formula, and his administration has airlifted supplies from foreign countries to try to address the mushrooming crisis. But the declaration by industry leaders that the scope of the problem was immediately clear to them in February raises questions of why the president was slow to learn of the issue.
  • “Seeing the empty shelves is unacceptable,” she said. “Seeing what families are going through is unacceptable. This is why we have been working 24-7 to make sure that we are using every lever at our disposal to deliver for the American people.”
  • Officials said United Airlines had agreed to transport Kendamil formula for free from Heathrow Airport in London to multiple airports across the United States over a three-week period. The formula will be distributed and available for purchase at selected U.S. retailers nationwide as well as online, the White House said.All told, about 3.7 million 8-ounce bottle equivalents of Kendamil infant formula will be delivered, it said.
  • Still, despite the all-hands-on-deck approach to replenishing the American supply, store shelves continue to be emptier: Data firm IRI reported Tuesday that the nationwide in-stock inventory figure was 76 percent for the week ending May 22, down from 79 percent the week before.
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