02 April 20
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Isaac Chotiner | Imagining a Justice-Based Health System
Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker
Chotiner writes: "In the U.S. - a country that is infamous for the unequal outcomes of its health system - hospitals find themselves overwhelmed with patients and short on medical equipment."
EXCERPT:
What have you made specifically of the W.H.O. response to the coronavirus?
I think that what we’ve seen is that there’s been a significant underinvestment globally in what we have seen from the latest emerging threats. They’re coming from animals. And we know that. We’ve got SARS, coronavirus, Ebola. And yet we’re underinvesting in the science toward understanding what diseases are prevalent in animals, the scientific basis for the development of treatments and vaccines, and the coördination across different countries toward those endeavors. We do have some investment in it. We have some investment globally. We have some investments, for example, in the United States. We have a whole unit on that at the C.D.C. But we need to recognize, now more than ever, given this latest pandemic, that this is a major area for investment going forward.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Pelosi Announces House Committee on Coronavirus Crisis to Exercise Oversight of Pandemic Response
Clare Foran, Haley Byrd and Manu Raju, CNN
Excerpt: "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday announced the creation of a new bipartisan House select committee on the coronavirus crisis that will exercise oversight of the federal response to the pandemic and be chaired by Majority Whip Jim Clyburn."
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Hopefully governments will respond to this knowledge by helping combat climate change more aggressively and moving all their spending away from solely the military. (photo: Getty)
Michael Klare | Avenger Planet: Is the Covid-19 Pandemic Mother Nature's Response to Human Transgression?
Michael Klare, TomDispatch
Klare writes: "As the coronavirus sweeps across the planet, leaving death and mayhem in its wake, many theories are being expounded to explain its ferocity."
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U.S. medical supplies were shipped abroad in the run up of the Covid 19 pandemic. (photo: Soohee Cho/The Intercept)
Lee Fang | Key Medical Supplies Were Shipped From US Manufacturers to Foreign Buyers, Records Show
Lee Fang, The Intercept
Fang writes: "While much of the world moved swiftly to lock down crucial medical supplies used to treat the coronavirus, the U.S. dithered, maintaining business as normal and allowing large shipments of American-made respirators and ventilators to be sold to foreign buyers."
EXCERPTS:
The foreign shipments, detailed in dozens of government records, show exports to other hot spots where the pandemic has spread, including East Asia and Europe.
American hospitals around the country are now running low on all forms of personal protective gear, such as N95 masks or purified air personal respirators, for medical staff, as well as life-saving ventilators, which pump oxygenated air into the lungs, for patients. Experts say the U.S. could face a drastic shortage of intensive care units equipped with ventilators and breathing aids to meet the expected wave of seriously ill patients. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has pleaded for more ventilators and said that the city may run short as soon as April 5.
Drive DeVilbiss Healthcare, a Pennsylvania-based health product firm that produces supplemental oxygen machines, sent at least three different shipments of respiratory equipment to Belgium in mid-February and early March. The total cargo included 14 containers weighing more than 55 tons. DeVilbiss and its owner, Clayton Dubilier & Rice, a New York-based private equity firm, did not respond to a request for comment.
Invoice records confirm the international shipments. On March 8, two tons of Vapotherm’s high-flow disposable patient circuit units, used for operating its respiratory aids, were loaded onto a container ship in the Port of Los Angeles. The shipment was sent to Kobe, Japan, for Japan Medicalnext Co., a health care distributor.
The records show dozens of other shipments of respirator equipment, medical garments, medical masks, oxygen concentrators, and ventilators sent abroad over the last two months.
On February 28, a ship left New York for Hamburg, Germany, with about 1.5 tons of ventilator masks manufactured by Allied Healthcare Products, a health product business based in St. Louis. The masks are used for the company’s portable ventilator unit.
The current supply crisis has been precipitated by a variety of administration failures, from cuts to international programs for disease detection and preparation to a refusal to swiftly mobilize supplies. Trump did not declare a national emergency until March 13 and the federal government did not start issuing major federal contracts for the purchase of personal protective equipment, as The Intercept previously reported, until early and mid-March.
Despite demands by public health officials and lawmakers, Trump moved sluggishly to deploy the Defense Production Act, a law that allows the federal government to compel private firms to produce vital supplies.
Lobbyists with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an influential business trade group, reportedly pressed the administration against using the act. It was not until March 27 that Trump finally utilized it to narrowly compel General Motors to build ventilators.
The failure of the U.S. to recognize Covid-19 as a serious problem follows years of efforts to dismantle federal programs designed to maintain international disease surveillance. The Trump administration cut 14 employees from the Beijing office of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and closed U.S. Agency for International Development programs in China working to monitor disease outbreaks over the last two years. In 2018, Trump disbanded the National Security Council office devoted to pandemic preparation.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provided a contract to develop 10,000 low-cost ventilators from Philips Respironics, an American subsidiary of Royal Philips N.V that produces medical respiratory equipment. But the device, the Trilogy Evo Universal, was never delivered to the national stockpile. The terms of the contract do not require delivery until November 2022, and sources for ProPublica suggest that the administration granted a preferential window to Philips that has allowed the company to first sell the product to a variety of buyers at higher prices.
The subsidiary, CBP records show, has instead exported at least six shipments of respiratory equipment abroad, largely to Europe, over the last two months. Last November, the company also shipped products associated with the Trilogy Evo Universal to the Netherlands.
Chinese residents wear masks while waiting at a bus station near the closed Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. (photo: Stringer/EPA)
You Don't Need to Believe China About China's Coronavirus Success
Jim Naureckas, FAIR
Naureckas writes: "Neither the Chinese government nor US intelligence agencies are particularly trustworthy sources. So if they disagree about whether China's figures on its Covid-19 outbreak are accurate, as Bloomberg reported, is there any way to tell who's telling the truth?"
EXCERPTS:
Or you could look to the Journal of the American Medical Association, which has published many reports on the Chinese outbreak of Covid-19, including “Characteristics of and Important Lessons From the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) Outbreak in China” (2/24/20), which noted that “the Chinese government has improved its epidemic response capacity” since the 2002–03 SARS outbreak, when 88 days passed from the first case of SARS emerging to China notifying WHO of the epidemic, at which point there were 300 cases and five deaths. With Covid-19, by contrast, there were only 23 days between the onset of symptoms in the first case and China’s warning to WHO on December 31, 2019, when there had been just 27 cases and no deaths.
That’s not how the Chinese data was interpreted by the WHO mission. As Aylward said at the press conference:
There is no question that China’s bold approach to the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of what was a rapidly escalating and continues to be deadly epidemic…. that’s what happens when you have an aggressive action that changes the shape that you would expect from an infectious disease outbreak. This is extremely important for China, but it’s extremely important for the rest of the world, where this virus you’ve seen in the last few days is taking advantage to explode.
People who took part in a Tablighi Jamaat gathering in March wait to board buses to a quarantine facility amid concerns of infection in New Delhi on Tuesday. (photo: Biplov Bhuyan/Getty)
India Confronts Its First Coronavirus 'Super-Spreader' - a Muslim Missionary Group With More Than 400 Members Infected
Joanna Slater, Niha Masih and Shams Irfan, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "As the pandemic continues, people practicing their faith have become unwitting but powerful vectors in the spread of the virus. A cultlike church helped fueled the pandemic in South Korea. A synagogue north of New York City was at the center of an early outbreak. An evangelical congregation in France was the source of hundreds of infections."
he devotees came by the thousands from all corners of India and beyond, converging on a large white complex in a crowded quarter of Delhi to share a message of piety.
When they left in the first weeks of March, they unknowingly carried the coronavirus with them.
Gatherings last month at the headquarters of a prominent Muslim missionary group are emerging as India’s first “super-spreader” event, complicating efforts to control rising infections in this nation of 1.3 billion people.
More than 400 confirmed cases and at least 10 deaths across the country — stretching from Tamil Nadu in the south to Kashmir in the north — have been linked to people who attended events at the Tablighi Jamaat center near a historic shrine in India’s capital.
The infections, which represent about a fifth of India’s total cases, have sparked a frantic effort to track down anyone who attended the recent meetings. In at least two states, potential contacts are being traced using mobile-phone location data.
The outbreak has also provoked a spasm of Islamophobia in India, a Hindu-majority nation that is home to 200 million Muslims. In February, the country witnessed its deadliest sectarian clashes in years after the government’s pursuit of a controversial citizenship law sparked violence.
As the pandemic continues, people practicing their faith have become unwitting but powerful vectors in the spread of the virus. A cultlike church helped fueled the pandemic in South Korea. A synagogue north of New York City was at the center of an early outbreak. An evangelical congregation in France was the source of hundreds of infections.
India banned all religious gatherings when it instituted a three-week nationwide lockdown March 25. But several states and cities already had implemented their own restrictions: Delhi, for instance, prohibited all assemblies of more than 50 people March 16.
The activities of Tablighi Jamaat have emerged as a particularly potent vehicle for transmitting the virus. Founded in India nearly a century ago, the group has as many as 80 million adherents worldwide. It is built around small bands of itinerant missionaries who urge fellow Muslims to deepen their observance and model their lives directly on the ways of the prophet Muhammad.
The group eschews politics and in theory operates without formal record-keeping, said Barbara Metcalf, a prominent historian of South Asian Islam. It stresses proselytizing and travel, producing a “state of vulnerability and uncertainty in which one learns to be dependent on God,” Metcalf wrote.
The Tablighi Jamaat cases in India may be linked to another religious gathering held by the same group in Malaysia. At the end of February, 16,000 people from numerous countries attended a multiday Tablighi Jamaat event at a mosque in Kuala Lumpur. That gathering was the source of hundreds of coronavirus cases in Malaysia and dozens more in Brunei, Cambodia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Cases have also emerged at a Tablighi center in Pakistan.
By early March, missionaries from several Southeast Asian countries were in India. Nearly all of them passed through the bustling complex in Delhi’s storied Nizamuddin district and then traveled on to different parts of India. Several of them later died, including a Filipino man and six Indonesians. One Indian who went home to Kashmir after participating in a three-day event at the Delhi center also died.
Missionaries and devotees continued to arrive at the center even after Delhi authorities banned large gatherings. Then India suspended all passenger trains March 22, followed swiftly by the countrywide lockdown.
About 2,300 people were stuck at the Tablighi Jamaat headquarters, unable to leave or travel. Yet the authorities took no action to remove them until this week, when all of those at the center were shifted to quarantine facilities or hospitals.
“Everybody now wishes that [activities] had been discontinued earlier,” said Fuzail Ayyubi, a lawyer representing the Delhi center, adding that the group had communicated its situation to the authorities and cooperated with the police.
“This is not the right time to blame us or the government,” Ayyubi said. “Everybody is stuck in a situation mankind hasn’t seen before.”
Local authorities across India are racing to contain the outbreak, sometimes using methods that appear to be without precedent here. In Kashmir, a restive Muslim-majority region, the government compiled a list of more than 800 residents who were present earlier in March in Delhi, including in the neighborhood where the Tablighi Jamaat center is located.
The list was assembled with the help of telecom companies after an analysis of data from cellphone towers, call records and travel itineraries, said a senior police official in Srinagar, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter with the media.
Three other officials and doctors in Kashmir confirmed they had received instructions to check on the health of the individuals mentioned on the list. The Washington Post reviewed a copy and contacted 10 people listed. All confirmed they had either recently been near the Tablighi Jamaat center or in another Delhi neighborhood frequented by Kashmiris.
Kashmir has been subject to a broader crackdown since last August, when India stripped the territory of its autonomy and statehood. Rohit Kansal, the top bureaucrat in Jammu and Kashmir, did not confirm or deny that the region was using cellphone data in its effort to trace contacts. The territory is “following a proactive and aggressive policy of test and trace,” he said.
In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, authorities say that about 1,100 residents traveled to the Tablighi Jamaat headquarters in March. Many of those have come forward, and the state is using a “multitude of methodologies,” including “clustering of cellphone data,” to trace people, said Beela Rajesh, the state’s health secretary.
The Indian government has expansive authority to require mobile-phone operators to share data. While the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a right to privacy in 2017, its legal contours remain unclear.
Indian officials are increasingly looking to cellphone data to help enforce measures to control the pandemic. Arvind Kejriwal, the top elected official in the state of Delhi, announced Wednesday that the local government would temporarily use cellphone data to determine if more than 20,000 people were violating orders to quarantine themselves at home.
Some Indian Muslims worry that the infections linked to the missionary group will intensify anti-Muslim rhetoric. The cases can be used as “a convenient excuse for some to vilify Muslims everywhere,” wrote Omar Abdullah, a senior politician in Kashmir. One prime-time anchor referred to the coronavirus cases as “a murderous attack in the name of faith,” and “CoronaJihad” trended on social media.
The first-known Indian victim of the outbreak at the Tablighi center was Mohammad Ashraf Anim, a 65-year-old Kashmiri businessman. He had traveled to Delhi to take part in a special three-day quarterly event for devotees, said a person familiar with his plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Anim returned home to Kashmir and attended prayers at a mosque the following Friday. A few days later, he developed coronavirus-related symptoms. He died March 26.
Grant Township, Pennsylvania. (photo: Mike Belleme/The Rolling Stone)
Environmentalists Score a Big Win Against Fracking in a Small Pennsylvania Town
Justin Nobel, Rolling Stone
Justin Nobel, Rolling Stone
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