28 April 20
Trump Is Exhibiting All the Symptoms of a Hydroxychloroquine Overdose
Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Milbank writes: "My study hasn't been peer reviewed yet, but my evidence - based on a hunch that originated in my gut - is very strong: President Trump has overdosed on hydroxychloroquine."
Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Milbank writes: "My study hasn't been peer reviewed yet, but my evidence - based on a hunch that originated in my gut - is very strong: President Trump has overdosed on hydroxychloroquine."
Trump, who claims a “natural instinct for science" not from formal training but because his late uncle was a scientist, once used this innate ability to determine that climate change was a hoax and that windmills cause cancer. More recently he mobilized the U.S. government to make sure thousands of covid-19 patients were treated with the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin — because Trump’s instinct told him the drug cocktail would be a “phenomenal” “game changer.”
Sadly, evidence from all over suggests that the drugs cause heart problems and worsen death rates.
No matter! The stable genius dropped his hydroxychloroquine hypothesis faster than you can say “snake oil” and is now touting a new miracle cure for the virus: injecting the lungs with bleach, alcohol or other common disinfectants, possibly along with massive doses of heat and ultraviolet light.
Noting that disinfectants kill the virus “in a minute” on inanimate surfaces, Trump asked: “Is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside? Or almost a cleaning? … It would be interesting to check that.”
Government scientists dutifully promised to investigate the boss’s lung-bleaching idea.
As it happens, I, too, have a natural instinct for science (my brother is a urologist) and I have used it to conclude that hydroxychloroquine abuse has caused Trump and some top aides and allies to suffer a condition we experts refer to as acute nuttiness.
First, it is scientifically obvious from Trump’s enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine that he has been using it himself. While taking the drugs, he has not succumbed to coronavirus. He has concluded, therefore, based on his study population (N=1), that the drugs prevent coronavirus 100 percent of the time.
To this I can add clinical evidence, derived from searching the Mayo Clinic’s website for side effects of azithromycin, hydroxychloroquine and its cousin, chloroquine. Among them, I found: “change in hair color” (Trump has recently faded from orange to gray), “discoloration of the skin” (originally and mistakenly attributed to tanning beds), “trouble sleeping” (see his overnight tweets), “noisy breathing” (that gasping during his Oval Office address), “difficulty with speaking” (whenever using a teleprompter), “runny nose,” (the sniffing!) and “unusual facial expressions” (‘nuff said).
Also, consider the mental side effects the drugs can cause: Irritability. Confusion. Aggression. Anger. Hostility. Quickness to react or overreact emotionally. Unusual behavior. Unsteadiness. Severe mood or mental changes. Restlessness. Paranoia. Depersonalization (an emotional “numbness”). Feeling that others are watching you or controlling your behavior. Feeling that others can hear your thoughts. Feeling, seeing or hearing things that are not there.
Confusion, paranoia, aggression, unsteadiness, severe mental shifts: These would seem to describe not just the president’s actions of late but those of some top aides and allies.
Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services, Reuters just reported, had initially installed as head of the agency’s coronavirus response one Brian Harrison, who among his other qualifications was until April 2018 a Labradoodle breeder.
Trump officials ousted the man who until recently led the federal government’s effort to come up with a vaccine for coronavirus, Rick Bright, because, Bright said, he had declared that hydroxychloroquine treatments “clearly lack scientific merit.”
They also removed Nancy Messonnier of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from her job leading the coronavirus response after saying (correctly) that Americans should expect “significant disruption” to their lives.
HHS has just hired, as its chief spokesman, former Trump campaign operative Michael Caputo, who, CNN found, authored an array of racist tweets and trafficked in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
New White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has “cried while meeting with members of the White House staff on at least two occasions,” the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reports. “Crying” is another of the listed side effects.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed that states file for bankruptcy rather than receive emergency funds — potentially devastating public health, not to mention millions of Americans’ pensions.
Nervousness and “general feeling of discomfort” are side effects. This can be seen in Robert Redfield, head of the CDC, being forced to recant warnings about a second wave of coronavirus in the fall. And Tony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, walking back his claim that lives could have been saved if the federal government acted more quickly.
And now we have Trump talking about killing the virus by scrubbing the lungs with household disinfectant.
Where does it end? French researchers have speculated that smokers may have protection against the virus. Perhaps Trump will distribute to every ICU in America a case of Marlboros from the national stockpile?
Patients, after a rejuvenating lung cleaning, can enjoy a smoke with their chloroquine cocktail.
Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, China, on February 23, 2017. (photo: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images)
In the Midst of a Pandemic, Trump Continues to Cut Funding That May Prevent Pandemics
Matt Stieb, New York Magazine
Stieb writes: "Setting aside the bigger picture of how the United States should handle its relationship with China, the president seems to possess an instinct that drives him to take the exact-wrong approach relative to his short-term goals regarding Beijing."
READ MORE
Matt Stieb, New York Magazine
Stieb writes: "Setting aside the bigger picture of how the United States should handle its relationship with China, the president seems to possess an instinct that drives him to take the exact-wrong approach relative to his short-term goals regarding Beijing."
READ MORE
President Barack Obama is greeted by Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, center, and Elena Kagan, right, as he enters the House Chamber to give his State of the Union address on Tuesday, February 12, 2013. (photo: Melina Mara/WP/Getty Images)
A Republican Effort to Sabotage Obamacare Was Just Rejected by the Supreme Court
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "On Monday, the Supreme Court voted 8-1 to reject a Republican effort to sabotage parts of the Affordable Care Act. The upshot of this decision is that health insurers will receive payments owed to them under Obamacare's 'risk corridor' program."
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "On Monday, the Supreme Court voted 8-1 to reject a Republican effort to sabotage parts of the Affordable Care Act. The upshot of this decision is that health insurers will receive payments owed to them under Obamacare's 'risk corridor' program."
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s majority opinion in Maine Community Health Options v. United States, relies on “a principle as old as the Nation itself,” according to the opinion. That principle: “The Government should honor its obligations.”
The vote in Maine Community was not close. Eight justices joined all or nearly all of Sotomayor’s opinion, leaving Justice Samuel Alito in a lonely dissent. That’s a bit of a surprising outcome given what was at stake in the case, which involved a $12 billion Republican scheme to sabotage Obamacare.
And yet, after years of litigation seeking to destroy the Affordable Care Act, and after many more years of partisan rancor bitterly dividing the two major political parties on whether Obamacare should continue to exist, only Justice Alito was willing to endorse this particular effort to undercut President Obama’s primary legislative accomplishment.
The other eight justices all agreed that the risk corridors program should be preserved.
Risk corridors, briefly explained
Insurance operates on a fairly basic model. People who fear some kind of unfortunate event agree to pay premiums to the insurer. If that event happens, the insurer pays at least some of the customer’s costs.
This model necessarily involves risk for insurance companies. If they set premiums too high, they won’t be able to attract customers. But if they set premiums too low, an insurer can potentially be obligated to pay for costs that vastly exceed the amount of money they’ve brought in. For this reason, insurers are often reluctant to enter new markets because they might not know enough about that market to set the right premiums.
But the whole point of the Affordable Care Act was to provide insurance to populations that historically have struggled to obtain health coverage. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted during oral arguments in Maine Community, the law seeks to benefit people “who were otherwise uninsurable.” So, absent some sort of enticement, insurers would be particularly reluctant to enter the Obamacare markets because they were being asked to take on a considerable amount of risk.
Risk corridors are one enticement that the Affordable Care Act provides to bring these reluctant insurers into the Obamacare exchanges. Under this program, insurers that set their premiums too high paid a percentage of their excess profits to the government. And insurers who set their premiums too low are reimbursed a percentage of their losses. That way, insurers enjoy some cushion against catastrophic loss if they set premiums too low.
The risk corridors were a temporary program, which expired after 2016. But many insurers that were entitled to payments under the risk corridor program never received those payments — to the tune of about $12 billion — largely due to a Republican effort to undermine the program.
Beginning in 2013, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) began pushing for legislation to end the risk corridor payments. Eventually, Congress enacted a provision in its appropriations bills for 2014, 2015, and 2016 — known as a “rider” — seeking to prevent the federal government from making most of the payments it owes under the risk corridors program. The core issue in Maine Community is whether this rider actually cut off these payments.
If Congress wants to repeal one of the government’s financial obligations, it must do so clearly
To understand why the rider did not successfully cut off the risk corridor payments and why the Supreme Court sided with the insurers in Maine Community, it’s useful to dig into the text of the Affordable Care Act itself, and the text of the riders.
The Affordable Care Act’s language governing the risk corridors is written in mandatory terms. It states that the government “shall pay” a fraction of the costs of insurers that qualify for relief under the risk corridor program. “Shall” is a strong word. It suggests that the government must do the thing that Congress has instructed it to do.
Moreover, as Sotomayor writes, Obamacare creates something very akin to a contract between insurers and the federal government. The Affordable Care Act “imposed a legal duty of the United States that could mature into a legal liability through the insurers’ actions—namely, their participating in the healthcare exchanges.”
That is, insurers were told that they would be entitled to benefit from the risk corridor program if they agreed to sell plans on the Obamacare exchanges. If the government were to back out of this arrangement after an insurer upheld its part of the bargain, it would not honor its legal obligation.
But what of the rider? That provision, which was attached to appropriations bills laying out much of the federal government’s spending appropriations for 2014-2016, provides that “none of the funds made available by this Act” from certain health care-related appropriations “may be used for payments under section 1342(b)(1) of Public Law 111–148 (relating to risk corridors).”
The key words here are “by this Act.” Though the rider prohibits money appropriated under these specific spending bills from being used to fund risk corridors, it does not prevent the government from making these payments from a different source of funds. And, as it turns out, there is another source of funds that the government can use to make the risk corridor payments — the “Judgment Fund,” which “pays court judgments and compromise settlements of lawsuits against the government.”
Much of Sotomayor’s opinion focuses on prior precedents establishing that courts should be very reluctant to read one federal law as implicitly eliminating an obligation laid out by another law. “Repeals by implication are not favored,” Sotomayor writes, quoting from a 1974 Supreme Court decision. When confronted with two laws that seem to pull in different directions, courts should “‘regard each as effective’—unless Congress’ intention to repeal is ‘clear and manifest.’”
Thus, because it is possible to read the rider narrowly, to still preserve the government’s original obligations under the risk corridor program, that rider should be read narrowly. The risk corridor program survives.
Are the Obamacare wars finally coming to a close?
If this case involved any other law, it would be unremarkable. Sotomayor’s opinion is a straightforward application of longstanding precedent, and a fairly uncontroversial one at that. Nearly every member of the Court, after all, agreed with her.
But the Maine Community case is significant because it involved the Affordable Care Act. The history of Obamacare has, to a large extent, been the story of Republican lawyers coming up with ways to challenge the law in court that are widely dismissed as ridiculous — right up until those lawyers start to prevail before sympathetic federal judges. The Maine Community opinion suggests, however, that most of the Supreme Court is fully capable of separating their personal political views from what the law requires in an Obamacare-related case.
The big test of whether the judicial Obamacare wars are coming to a close, however, will come when the Supreme Court hears California v. Texas next fall. That case asks the courts to repeal Obamacare under a legal theory that is rejected even by many leading conservative scholars and other opponents of the Affordable Care Act.
If the justices approach the California case with the same wholly legal approach they took in the Maine Community case, this latest attack on Obamacare will also be rejected by a lopsided vote.
Women at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia hold signs asking for help. (image: The Intercept)
Women in ICE Detention Face Reprisals for Speaking Up About Fears of Covid-19
Debbie Nathan, The Intercept
Nathan writes: "As COVID-19 cases spread though Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers across the U.S., immigrants locked inside are frantic that they could get sick and die."
READ MORE
Debbie Nathan, The Intercept
Nathan writes: "As COVID-19 cases spread though Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers across the U.S., immigrants locked inside are frantic that they could get sick and die."
READ MORE
A man speaks with a library worker after receiving an unemployment form in Miami Beach, Florida. (photo: Marco Bello/Reuters)
Millions of Americans Still Can't Access Jobless Benefits
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Millions of Americans who have lost their jobs to coronavirus lockdown measures have been unable to file for unemployment benefits as the systems around the United States buckle under the sheer volume of new claims, a survey released on Tuesday finds."
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Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Millions of Americans who have lost their jobs to coronavirus lockdown measures have been unable to file for unemployment benefits as the systems around the United States buckle under the sheer volume of new claims, a survey released on Tuesday finds."
READ MORE
Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro outside the Planalto Palace in BrasÃlia on Monday. (photo: Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)
Brazil's Supreme Court Authorizes Investigation Into Bolsonaro
Marina Lopes, The Washington Post
Lopes writes: "Brazil's supreme court has authorized an investigation of alleged corruption and obstruction of justice by President Jair Bolsonaro after the country's outgoing justice minister accused him of attempting to interfere with federal police probes."
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Marina Lopes, The Washington Post
Lopes writes: "Brazil's supreme court has authorized an investigation of alleged corruption and obstruction of justice by President Jair Bolsonaro after the country's outgoing justice minister accused him of attempting to interfere with federal police probes."
READ MORE
Crabeater seals. (photo: Jerzystrzelecki)
Seals Are Helping Scientists Map the Future of Antarctic Krill
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "The western Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest warming places on Earth. But how will that impact the unique wildlife that call it home?"
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "The western Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest warming places on Earth. But how will that impact the unique wildlife that call it home?"
EXCERPT:
To find out, researchers tracked the movements of krill-eating crabeater seals in the western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) to build a model of the future distribution of krill, an important food source for Antarctic animals like penguins and whales. The results, published in Nature Climate Change Monday, showed that krill populations would shrink, shift offshore from northern coastal waters and move towards the south of the WAP, with major implications for the animals that feed on them.
"It will be challenging for a lot of species," first author Luis Huckstadt of the Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS) at UC Santa Cruz said in a university press release. "Things are changing so fast in Antarctica, the changes we're seeing in our model might be coming sooner than we expected."
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