10 December 20
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Dhruv Khullar | The Deadly Cost of America's Pandemic Politics
Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker
Khullar writes: "Vaccines are on the way, but until they arrive tens of thousands of lives depend on the battle for public opinion."
n March 15, 1902, Henning Jacobson, a pastor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, refused the smallpox vaccine. At the time, Massachusetts was one of eleven states that allowed officials to enforce mandatory immunizations; a resurgent outbreak had led the local health board to order vaccination or revaccination of the city’s inhabitants. For his refusal, Jacobson was prosecuted and fined. He spent the next three years arguing that mandated vaccination violated his liberty. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, where Justice John Marshall Harlan delivered the majority opinion upholding the Massachusetts law. “Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own . . . regardless of the injury that may be done to others,” Harlan wrote. “A community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.”
The case is among the most important in American public health. Since then, the courts have generally recognized that the government may use its powers expansively to protect the health of the people it represents. In 1944, Congress went further, passing the Public Health Service Act, which clearly established the federal government’s authority to enforce quarantines and other health measures. Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court struck down an order issued by Governor Andrew Cuomo limiting the size of gatherings in houses of worship during the coronavirus pandemic. But the Court, following precedent, objected not to the existence of public-health restrictions but to their uneven application. The Constitution does not tolerate “color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote.
The law around pandemic restrictions is mostly clear. It’s the politics that are at issue. The balancing of individual liberty and public health may now be the most contentious issue in American life. Vaccines for the novel coronavirus are on the way, but until they arrive tens of thousands of lives depend on community-based intervention—such as masks, distancing, and isolation—that must be carried out by ordinary Americans. Their willingness or unwillingness will determine how many people die. Our differences of opinion, therefore, have concrete, immediate, and drastic consequences.
Recent surveys indicate that Americans hold a slew of conflicting beliefs about the virus and the pandemic. Most recognize that the virus will eventually surge in their area—but, at the same time, eight in ten think that they can avoid getting infected. Though Americans generally agree that the pandemic is getting worse, they have become less likely to say that they will comply with shelter-in-place orders, should they become necessary. (In the spring, more than two-thirds of Americans said that they were very likely to follow them; now less than half say they will.) The decline has been driven mainly by a shift in the attitudes of Republicans, who are now less than half as likely as Democrats to say that they will stay home. Among citizens of high-income countries, Americans are the most likely to say that they feel more divided now than they did before the pandemic; we also disagree more than is usual about whether the government has handled the pandemic well so far. For President-elect Joe Biden’s supporters, the pandemic was the most important issue in the 2020 election; for Donald Trump’s, it was among the least. Americans are also growing more divided on a host of individual subjects, including vaccines, contact tracing, mask mandates, and the trustworthiness of public-health officials.
In recent months, this discontent and disarray have bubbled over, culminating in record and increasing numbers of coronavirus infections and hospitalizations. In the course of the late summer and early fall, conservative media outlets cast doubt on the effectiveness of demonstrably effective public-health strategies, and many governors, fearing political repercussions, shied away from imposing distancing mandates until their states’ I.C.U.s overflowed with COVID-19 patients. Meanwhile, achieving widespread vaccination will require overcoming high levels of vaccine hesitancy: in a recent poll, only fifty-eight per cent of Americans said that they would get immunized, citing the vaccines’ rushed timelines as a key concern. Hesitancy is more common on the right, but it exists on the left, too: though less than half of Republicans said that they were willing to get vaccinated, three in ten Democrats were also resistant.
“You can always expect some opposition,” Howard Markel, a physician and historian at the University of Michigan, who helped create the concept of “flattening the curve,” told me. “The first word in ‘public health’ is ‘public.’ There are a great many people. The public is not a monolith, especially in an open, democratic society.” Even so, Markel is surprised by the breadth and intensity of disagreement. “It’s the most polarized pandemic in history,” he said. During the 1918 flu, there were protests against public-health measures—in San Francisco, for instance, a group called the Anti-Facemask League objected to a local mask ordinance—but they amounted to “a sliver of what we’re seeing today.” That pandemic unfolded alongside the First World War, and leaders positioned adherence to public-health recommendations as a form of patriotism. “What’s different today is that elected officials are pouring gasoline on the embers of discontent,” Markel said. “It’s incredibly dangerous.”
Adam Berinsky, a political scientist at M.I.T., studies the links between public opinion, misinformation, and political polarization. Berinsky divides the population into three groups: people who are correctly informed, people who are uninformed, and people who are actively misinformed. He believes that our efforts should focus primarily on engaging the second group—“people who don’t necessarily know what they think”—and on limiting the influence of the third. The problem is that, in a networked age, fringe misinformation spills easily into mass consciousness. “If the misinformed people kept to themselves, it would be less of a problem,” he said. “But, by polluting the information ecosystem, they cause others to doubt. Then more people think, Maybe where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
Berinsky thinks that much of the responsibility for quelling misinformation rests with our politicians. “It starts from the top,” he said. “Had there been a unified response from elected leaders, there would have been more unified attitudes among the public.” The arrival of the Biden Administration will undoubtedly improve federal communication about the pandemic. But the horse may have left the barn: at this point, nearly every aspect of our response has become politicized. Elected officials are already thinking about tomorrow’s primary challengers; even as they watch hospitals fill, they seek to prove their ideological bona fides. Our greatest challenge is not the virus, but ourselves.
Ohio, where I grew up and where my parents still live, is a compelling case study in the mutual incomprehension that has taken root during the pandemic. Ohio has been a quintessential swing state for more than half a century, although over the past decade it has moved steadily to the right. Barack Obama carried it narrowly in 2012, but Trump won easily in 2016 and 2020. In recent years, Ohioans have been weighed down by a stagnant economy, which never fully recovered after the Great Recession. In parts of northeastern Ohio, three-quarters of the population live in a neighborhood with rising poverty; Cleveland is among the fastest shrinking cities in the country.
Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has led one of America’s more aggressive COVID-19 responses. Ohio was the first state to close schools when the coronavirus began spreading in the spring; since then, DeWine has ordered mask mandates, curfews, and business closures, even as other G.O.P. leaders have railed against them. For much of the year, Ohio seemed to have the virus under control. Now, though, like much of the Midwest, it is experiencing skyrocketing cases and hospitalizations; the state, DeWine says, is “on fire.” All the same, Ohio’s Republican legislature has repeatedly introduced bills to limit the governor’s authority, and some in the Party have moved to impeach him. Although DeWine has relatively high approval ratings statewide, he is struggling to position his decisions within a conservative movement that sees pandemic restrictions as ideologically objectionable. “I’m completely pro-life,” he said recently, after ordering a statewide curfew. “And that means I worry about the child before it’s born and I worry about the eighty-year-old who’s in a nursing home who might get COVID.”
Stark County, where I grew up, is a swing county within a swing state. Curious about how people there were thinking about the virus, I reached out to friends and acquaintances, asking them to connect me with people I could interview. Many were eager to talk; some had been active on social media, vehemently disagreeing with my pandemic coverage. Andrew Sigler, one of the Ohioans I talked with, works at a software company in northeastern Ohio; now in his mid-thirties, he grew up in the area but spent much of the past decade in San Francisco and Chicago, before moving back home. Sigler told me that, like many people he knows, he’s grown resentful of public-health mandates and what he views as attempts to shame people for going about their lives. “It’s been an evolution for me,” he said. “When this first started, I was as scared as anyone. This was uncharted territory. But now we know a lot about who’s at risk and how much risk they’re taking. I think it’s reasonable for people to have different priorities based on their situations.”
Sigler told me that he’s been living a “relatively at-risk” life style. He eats at restaurants indoors. He’s flown to Las Vegas for a weekend. He regularly plays pickup basketball with his friends. “I think you have to take a risk-versus-reward approach,” he said. “Living in fear is no way to live. A lot of people have painted a picture of pure doom and gloom, which I don’t buy.” Sigler shares some of the concerns of public-health officials, but disagrees about what’s at stake and about the trade-offs worth making. “This is absolutely a dangerous virus,” he told me. “It needs to be respected, but so do people’s choices and freedoms. I think it’s fine to have some restrictions, but mandates and shutdowns—I don’t think that’s the answer. You’re just killing people in a different way. It’s not through disease—it’s by destroying a business someone took decades to build. I can’t help but think about all the damage we’re doing to families with little kids who aren’t going to school, to people who lost their jobs, to those struggling with isolation and substance use.”
Sigler cited the virus’s disproportionate effects—although it can sicken people of all ages, the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths occur among older Americans—and objected to measures that upend society as a whole in order to protect a relatively small number of vulnerable individuals. He admits that his argument is inflected with ageism, but holds to it nonetheless. “Are we shutting down our country to protect an age group that’s on the back nine of life?” he said. “You need to recognize who you are in society. The older you are, the more precautions you should take. But we shouldn’t be imposing lockdowns and mandates on everyone else. Who is Mike DeWine to tell people they can’t go out for a drink?” I asked him about the recent surge in infections, pointing out that, without aggressive public-health action, many states are struggling with overwhelmed I.C.U.s and shortages of medical staff; some are on the brink of rationing care. “They kept telling us we need to lock down to flatten the curve and build capacity,” Sigler said. “They knew there was going to be another surge. Well, why didn’t they use all that time to build capacity? Shame on the system for dragging its feet.”
This fall, Sigler’s family called to check in on his ninety-three-year-old grandfather, who’d been relatively careful during the pandemic—going out for groceries, gas, and the occasional dinner, but otherwise staying isolated. They couldn’t reach him. Growing concerned, they went to his house; they found him slumped over and unresponsive in his chair—“deadweight,” Sigler said. They rushed him to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with COVID-19. After that, he bounced between I.C.U.s, emergency departments, and an assisted-living facility. A few days after I first spoke with Sigler, his grandfather was back in the hospital, and his family was struggling to decide whether to insert a feeding tube and conduct a tracheostomy. Ultimately, he said, they decided to “let nature run its course.” Medications were stopped; the ventilator was disconnected. Sigler’s grandfather was transferred home for hospice care, and died. I asked Sigler if his grandfather’s death had changed his views on the virus. “I stand by what I said,” he told me. “This is a horrible and dangerous disease. I’m all for precautions. But shutdowns aren’t safe or reasonable. My grandfather lived a long and full life.”
Between phone calls with Sigler, I spoke with John Emmert, a sixty-year-old Army veteran who has run a small, family-owned grocery store in Navarre, Ohio, for more than twenty years. Emmert manages the store mostly by himself, from 9 A.M. to 6:30 P.M. each day. Earlier this year, his girlfriend, who had been ill with Stage IV colon cancer, entered a home-hospice program; along with visiting nurses, Emmert cared for her in the mornings, during his lunch break, and after work. She died on May 1st. Although Emmert was able to be with her during her final days, he has friends who, because of pandemic restrictions, were separated from their loved ones at the end of their lives. “The lockdowns, the isolation—that’s way worse than the virus will ever be,” he told me. “Lockdowns are going to kill more people than the virus could hope to kill on its best day.”
Emmert believes that the government has substantially overstepped in its quest to quell the virus. “I’m fine if you want to wear a mask,” he said. “But they have no right to mandate that you do.” (He doesn’t require masks for customers in his store, nor does he wear one, although he does wash his hands “a lot.”) “I believe in small, necessary government,” he said. “Right now, they’re involved in so many things they have no business in. DeWine is treating us like we’re teen-agers.” During our conversation, Emmert often argued against the state’s public-health measures by repeating false claims made by President Trump: that sunshine can prevent coronavirus infection, that hydroxychloroquine can treat it, that Anthony Fauci cannot be trusted because he is a Democrat. “COVID deaths are overblown,” Emmert said. “A lot of these people are dying with COVID, not of COVID. They have lung cancer or bad diabetes. They already had one foot on a banana peel.”
In September, Emmert took a trip to Cancún with his eighty-five-year-old father and his father’s seventy-nine-year-old girlfriend. They flew from Akron to Philadelphia, then on to Mexico. They wore masks while in the airport, he said, but “we took them off as soon as we got outside and never put them back on.” I asked him whether he feared for the health of his elderly father. “There was a doctor on staff at the resort,” he said. Emmert told me that he doesn’t plan to get immunized when a coronavirus vaccine becomes available; he pointed to a recent tweet from Senator Rand Paul, which inaccurately described “naturally acquired COVID-19” as conferring stronger immunity than what could be acquired through the vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer. “It’s in God’s hands,” Emmert said. “Every time you walk out your door in the morning, there’s risk everywhere. You could get hit by a car, struck by lightning. COVID is just another type of risk.”
Emmert’s sister, Carol Harmon, takes the opposite view of the pandemic. Harmon, who taught Spanish to thousands of high-school students over three decades, retired last year. “I’m lucky to have retired when I did,” she said. “As an older teacher, this would have been very scary.” She has been active in her community’s COVID-19 response. In the spring, she saw a Facebook post from a local hospital, which issued a call for homemade masks; in the following weeks, she sewed more than a hundred, dropping them off at a nearby parking lot where hospital representatives and a few dozen vehicles would gather. “You’d pull up, open the back of your S.U.V., and hand off the goods,” she said. “No one knew each other. It felt like a drug deal.”
Harmon has felt mounting dismay at the motivated and conspiratorial thinking of those around her. “When I see some of the things people say and believe, I think, Where did our public-school system go so wrong?” she said. “People totally dismiss science. They’re so eager to accept misinformation. They can’t assess the credibility of a source.” Harmon has never been a political person, but as the pandemic has unfolded she has come to see politics as the defining factor in what people believe and how they behave. Those politics aren’t always partisan—“I’d watch DeWine in the afternoon and Trump in the evening, and think, Wow, these are both Republicans, and what a world of difference between them”—but, for the most part, the party lines are clean-cut. “I know people who think this is all a hoax by the Democrats,” Harmon said. “I try to tell them, ‘Think about it. This is happening all over the world—why would the Democrats be doing this everywhere from China to Timbuktu?’ ”
It’s possible that, as coronavirus cases rise further and fear of infection grows, pandemic polarization will shrink; a recent study found that partisan differences over public-health measures grow smaller among Americans who are more concerned about the virus. But there’s also a large body of research showing that people systematically dismiss evidence that contradicts their views: instead of changing their minds, they double down. Harmon hopes for the first outcome, but fears the second. “There are just so many people in denial,” she told me. “They think it’s only old people or people in nursing homes who are dying. When I tell them that more than seventeen hundred health-care workers have died, they say, ‘Well, they knew what they were signing up for.’ I think, My gosh, how can you be so callous? These are people!”
In recent months, Harmon’s relationship with her brother has become strained. For a while, they had spirited arguments about the virus, about mail-in voting, about what and who could be trusted. But, over time, she came to see his views as hopelessly enveloped in misinformation, conspiracy thinking, and ideology; further engagement was futile. “At some point,” she said, “you just have to walk away.” They haven’t spoken since Election Day.
The strength of a democratic society rests on its citizens’ ability to express their views and debate their merits. In the face of scientific uncertainty, economic pain, and conflicting values, it’s understandable that we disagree. But it’s also true that we know a lot about how the virus works, and that some views are beyond reasonable debate. Their persistence reflects a triumph of tribalism and the cowardice of those elected officials who have misused their influence, failing to protect the people they serve.
Still, if many Americans now hold ideologically entrenched views, they are also asking reasonable questions—questions that I myself ask when contemplating our collective situation. Why weren’t hospitals and public-health systems better prepared for this current surge, after months of warnings over the summer? Could the consequences of widespread social isolation, and of sweeping business, school, and church closures, actually be comparable to or worse than the deaths caused by the coronavirus? Couldn’t COVID-19 be seen as just another one of the countless risks we accept every day?
These are questions with answers too complex to fit in a tweet. The country’s health systems actually are much better prepared than they were at the beginning of the pandemic: new protocols, proven remedies, and more ventilators are all helping to drive down the COVID-19 mortality rate. But increasing capacity requires more than building field hospitals and manufacturing equipment. As the virus has spread, the supply of trained health-care workers has emerged as a major limiting factor. Staffing problems are compounded when the virus surges everywhere. In March and April, doctors from around the country travelled to New York City and other epicenters to help. Now there is no epicenter—instead, nearly the whole country is engulfed. The virus is also forcing many health-care workers into quarantine.
Disrupted education, vast unemployment, profound isolation—skeptics are right to say that the collateral damage of the pandemic is severe and troubling. But the cost of letting the virus run free is also vast—so vast that we may have trouble imagining it. It will take decades to grapple with the social damage caused by the sudden death of half a million Americans. Although the virus is most lethal for older people, COVID-19 has killed tens of thousands of younger and middle-aged brothers, sisters, parents, teachers, nurses, mentors, and friends. Many of these people have had decades stolen from them: in aggregate, the virus is said to have taken more than two and a half million years of American life, more than half from people under sixty-five. Meanwhile, each American who dies of COVID-19 is survived, on average, by nine close family members, who mourn alongside friends, neighbors, and coworkers. If we choose to dismiss or attack measures that prevent disease now—when vaccines are on the horizon—the damage will become not just more expansive but more grotesque.
It’s true, finally, that to live life is to accept some level of risk. Even now, amid the pandemic, COVID-19 is one of many dangers: you could still die in a car crash or of a heart attack. But infectious disease differs from most other hazards in that any individual’s choice to embrace risk threatens, directly and predictably, the lives of others. Pandemic skeptics often underestimate the sheer contagiousness of SARS-CoV-2 and, therefore, the risk that their behavior poses to other people. The virus’s ability to be transmitted asymptomatically makes it even riskier: even if we feel perfectly well, we could be spreading it. Within households, young, healthy individuals are known to be a major source of infection for older family members. And the consequences of individual decisions can extend far beyond the home: a small wedding in Maine, for example, led to three separate coronavirus outbreaks, involving some hundred and seventy-seven people. Of the seven who died, none had attended the wedding; some lived a hundred miles away. It is as though, by driving drunk, you could kill not only the other drivers you pass but drivers who use the same road days later.
There’s a world in which things might have turned out differently—in which, early on, all elected officials committed to speaking honestly, consistently, and accurately about the virus. In this world, politicians forthrightly engaged with the concerns of constituents while dismissing fringe voices and resisting efforts to tie public health to politics; this critical mass of leaders made it easier for wavering politicians to join in, and for skeptical citizens to believe.
We still need to build this world. The vaccines are coming, but the harsh reality is that they are arriving too late for tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of Americans this winter. Those people’s survival depends on the public coalescing around policies that are both effective and sustainable. If anything, the coronavirus vaccines heighten the communications challenge. With the end of the pandemic in sight, dissenters may hold more ardently to the view that continued restrictions are unwarranted; advocates may lose the will to persuade. And yet the virus killed ten thousand Americans last week, and will kill at least as many each week until we correct course. Amid this devastation, the battle for buy-in remains indispensable.
As a physician, I recognize that I’m also part of a tribe—one that celebrates science, authority, expertise. It’s easy for me to empathize with the suffering I see—hospitals full, patients dying, health-care workers overwhelmed—and harder to grasp the suffering I don’t: job loss, social disintegration, rising crime. By belittling or dismissing such concerns, instead of engaging and explaining, we divide the country further and compound the challenges of bringing the pandemic to heel. The Biden Presidency is an opportunity to reset how we talk about the virus, not just at the federal level but also in statehouses, hospitals, and public-health departments across the country. Biden has said, repeatedly, that he hopes to unify Americans. Almost certainly, this will require listening and responding to the concerns of the millions of people who see and experience the pandemic from a skeptical perspective.
In considering the challenge ahead, I find myself returning to Emmert and Harmon—siblings who could not see the pandemic, or their role in it, more differently. Like many Americans with opposing views, they now inhabit separate worlds. But rarely, if ever, have so many lives depended so directly on the project of persuasion, empathy, and understanding. Faced with the prospect of the deadliest winter in modern U.S. history, we must not give up on that project. We cannot stop talking to one another.
Joe Biden. (photo: Michael Dwyer/AP)
Trump Administration Is Planting Loyalists in Biden Transition Meetings
Lisa Friedman, The New York Times
Friedman writes: "Loyalists to President Trump have blocked transition meetings at some government agencies and are sitting in on discussions at other agencies between career civil servants and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s transition teams, sometimes chilling conversations, several federal officials said."
Supporters of the president are monitoring many of the conversations between Biden teams and civil servants, chilling the flow of information.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, political appointees have joined virtually every discussion between career staff members and Mr. Biden’s team, monitoring conversations on climate change, scientific research and other topics. At the State Department such drop-ins are happening on what Trump appointees define as an as-needed basis. On Tuesday Mr. Biden’s transition team was allowed for the first time into the National Security Agency, but at the United States Agency for Global Media, parent of Voice of America, the Trump-appointed leader is refusing to cooperate with the Biden transition team, two agency officials confirmed.
Presidential transition experts said the presence of political officials at agency handoff meetings was not unheard-of and could even be seen as helpful. President George W. Bush, for example, worked closely in late 2008 with Barack Obama’s incoming team to help calm volatile financial markets. But against a backdrop of Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede election defeat, the actions of Trump appointees appeared to be a pernicious effort to slow the transition, some experts said.
Lloyd Austin. (photo: Getty Images)
Biden Pick for Defense Secretary Faces Democratic Pushback Over Recent Army Service
Simon Lewis and Joseph Ax, Reuters
Excerpt: "President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday will introduce his pick for defense secretary, a post that traditionally goes to a civilian, amid concern among some Democrats in Congress about retired Army General Lloyd Austin's recent military career."
The nomination of Austin, who would be the country’s first Black secretary of defense, requires both houses of Congress to waive a law requiring the military’s top brass to have been out of the armed forces for at least seven years before running the Pentagon. Austin, 67, retired in 2016.
At least two Democratic U.S. senators - Richard Blumenthal and Jon Tester - say they would oppose a waiver, casting doubt on whether Austin can pass a closely divided Senate.
Austin has built a reputation as an intensely private man who avoided the spotlight during a distinguished four-decade career in uniform, including a stint as head of the military’s Central Command, which oversees U.S. troops across the Middle East.
Biden, a Democrat, has urged that Austin be “swiftly” confirmed, and said Austin shared with him a commitment to using force only as a last resort. The president-elect is scheduled to present Austin at a news conference in Wilmington, Delaware, at 1.30 p.m. (1830 GMT).
“The fact is, Austin’s many strengths and his intimate knowledge of the Department of Defense and our government are uniquely matched to the challenges and crises we face,” Biden wrote in an essay published by The Atlantic magazine. “He is the person we need in this moment.”
President Donald Trump’s first defense secretary, retired Marine General Jim Mattis, required a waiver as well.
Biden will nominate Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor, as agriculture secretary, according to two sources familiar with the decision. Vilsack held the same role during the Obama administration.
He also plans to nominate Marcia Fudge, a Black congresswoman from Ohio, as his housing and urban development secretary, according to news reports.
Biden will take office on Jan. 20 and is likely to spend much of his first few months focused on the coronavirus pandemic and the struggling economy.
Four members of his economic team, including Treasury secretary nominee Janet Yellen and Office of Management and Budget director nominee Neera Tanden, were due to meet virtually with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday morning, according to a senior Democratic aide, as they prepare for confirmation hearings.
The other nominees include Wally Adeyemo for deputy Treasury secretary and Celia Rouse, who would chair the Council of Economic Advisers.
On Tuesday, as Biden introduced members of his public health team, he vowed to distribute 100 million coronavirus vaccines in his first 100 days and to make reopening schools a “national priority.” He again implored Americans to wear masks to slow the spread of the virus.
Biden’s health and human services secretary nominee, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, will help oversee the government’s response to the pandemic, which has killed more than 286,000 in the United States.
The state of Texas has filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the election outcome in four other states, a lawsuit that legal experts said had little chance of success.
On Tuesday, the nation’s highest court refused to block Pennsylvania from formalizing Biden’s victory there, rejecting a request to hear an argument that the state’s 2019 expansion of mail-in voting was illegal.
Activists rally outside Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C. on October 21, 2020. (photo: Nicolas Moreland/InTheseTimes)
Activists Demand Rich Countries Suspend Patent Laws and Share Vaccines Freely
Hadas Thier, In These Times
Thier writes: "As rich countries hoard vaccine stocks, activists are calling for a just global distribution."
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Border wall. (photo: The Hill)
Whistleblower: Companies Building Trump's Wall Smuggled in Armed Guards From Mexico
Matt Stieb, New York Magazine
Stieb writes: "Donald Trump's early, unachieved goal of building a border wall during his first term was a lofty one, and according to two law-enforcement officers involved with the project, the companies contracting out the work may have lowered the standard from the 'great,' 'big, beautiful' project that he promised."
According to two whistleblowers — a former deputy sheriff in San Diego County and an FBI agent on construction-security detail — some companies working on the wall had failed to properly run their personnel through the necessary Customs and Border Protection vetting process, going so far as to hire armed guards from across the border to protect the job sites. The New York Times obtained a copy of the complaint first filed in February, and much of it has to do with companies called Sullivan Land Services Co. and the more Trump-appropriate Ultimate Concrete. The Times reports:
The whistle-blowers said Ultimate Concrete went so far as to build a dirt road to expedite illegal border crossings to sites in San Diego, using construction vehicles to block security cameras …
Ultimate Concrete “constructed a dirt road that would allow access from the Mexican side of the border into the United States,” the whistle-blowers said in the complaint. “This U.C.-constructed road was apparently the route by which the armed Mexican nationals were unlawfully crossing into the United States.”
An S.L.S. project manager then pressured one of the whistle-blowers in July 2019 to not include information about the Mexican security guards in reports required to be submitted to the Army Corps of Engineers.
Similar to the president’s own habit of overcharging the Secret Service at his properties as a way to bilk taxpayers, the complaint also states that Ultimate Concrete employees submitted fraudulent invoices to the federal government, including for diesel fuel and overstating their costs. “If they were using a forklift, they would use it only sporadically throughout the day but charge the government for fuel, in sum and substance, ‘as if it was running all the time,’” the complaint said.
Since the Trump administration placed its first steel bollard slats in the desert, the border wall has been something of a national tragicomedy — representing some of the more hysterical failures of the current White House, as well as the xenophobia that blinded the president to the futility of the project. Sections of the “virtually impenetrable” wall have blown over in high, but not uncommon, winds, while other areas require gates to be open for months to handle flash flooding. Smugglers have used $100 reciprocating saws to cut through the barrier in minutes, and have employed cheap, rebar ladders to get over the top, making the $18.4 billion allocated to the project ever more absurd. Lest we forget, a little over 400 miles of barrier have been built, but the majority of that has served as a replacement for existing fencing, and Trump instituted a government shutdown over the whole thing — a tantrum that resulted in a budget deal from Democrats that was less than they offered before the president melted down for the longest federal time-out in U.S. history.
In the report on the whistleblower complaint, the Times also provides new information on the frequency at which migrants have been able to cross through sections of the border scarred by the barrier. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol documents obtained by the paper reveal that between October 2019 and March 2020, the wall was breached over 320 times in four areas in California and Arizona.
Mexico City crime scene in June. (photo: Getty Images)
'They're Culpable': The Countries Supplying the Guns That Kill Mexico's Journalists
Phineas Rueckert and Nina Lakhani, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Many of the weapons used in the murders of 119 journalists were imported - and Mexico's laws and culture make tracing them impossible."
t was around daybreak when Mexican crime reporter Luis Vallejo received a call from a local police officer telling him that a bag of human remains had been found in the city of Salamanca where he lives.
Vallejo had become accustomed to calls like this: in recent years, violence in Guanajuato, the surrounding region, has spiraled to unprecedented levels amid bloody turf wars between rival cartels.
But when he reached the scene he found Israel Vázquez, a fellow reporter – and a lifelong friend of Vallejo – gasping for breath in a pool of blood. Vázquez, 31, had been shot 11 times by drive-by assailants as he prepared to broadcast live on Facebook. Police found bullet casings from two guns: a 9mm and a .45 caliber.
Vázquez, a father of two little girls, died later on 9 November, becoming the third journalist shot dead in 10 days in Mexico – the most dangerous country in the world for the media outside war zones.
“Everything came crashing down on me,” said Vallejo, 32, who was inspired to become a journalist by his friend.
A few days later, two men linked to the murder were arrested, along with seven other alleged local gang members. According to local news reports, authorities also seized an arsenal of high-caliber weapons from around the world, including a US-made semi-automatic rifle, Israeli and German assault rifles, and a modified semi-automatic shotgun from Turkey.
Since 2000, almost three-quarters of the 119 journalists murdered in Mexico were killed by firearms, an investigation by the Cartel Project has found – and most of those weapons are imported.
“Almost all of the journalists in Mexico are killed with foreign weapons,” said Laura Angelina Borbolla, a former federal prosecutor in charge of investigating crimes against journalists. More than 90% of the killings remain unsolved.
An international coalition of journalists, coordinated by the non-profit Forbidden Stories, examined the flow of weapons into Mexico in an effort to understand where the guns are coming from.
The main findings include:
- Weapons manufactured in Europe and Israel sold legally to the Mexican army – as well as guns trafficked illegally across the US border – are probably being used to commit human rights violations and gangland executions, according to declassified military documents obtained by the non-governmental organization (NGO) Stop US Arms to Mexico.
- Trade is booming, but European arms companies are shipping hundreds of millions of dollars worth of guns, parts and ammunition to Mexican states with dire human rights records.
- Multinational arms companies could be violating European export laws as only a fraction of end-users are being reported, according to analysis of the documents published in a new report by a group of international NGOs.
- A combination of weak international regulations and a culture of impunity in Mexico makes tracing firearms used to commit crimes back to their origins virtually impossible.
A booming business
In 2006, the Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, launched a militarized war against drugs which has been continued by successive presidents, and has led to a sustained surge in human rights violations. Violence has since soared: about 300,000 people have been murdered, and tens of thousands more have disappeared.
Mexico’s misery has been a bonanza for the arms trade.
According to US International Trade Commission data, about 28,465 weapons, mostly handguns, were legally sold to Mexico in 2019, but many more US weapons are trafficked across the border, with some estimating as many as 213,000 weapons illegally making their way to Mexico each year.
And between 2006 and 2018, European and Israeli companies exported more than 238,000 firearms to Mexico for use by state and local police. More than half came from just two companies, Beretta, based in Italy, and Austria-based Glock, in trade deals worth tens of millions of euros, according to declassified Mexican military documents obtained by Stop US Arms to Mexico.
The documents show that European weapons have regularly been sold to states where security forces have a well-documented history of human rights violations and collusion with criminal groups, such as Guerrero, where local police and soldiers have been implicated in the 2014 forced disappearance of 43 trainee teachers.
“In most cases where we have documented enforced disappearance, there is always this collusion between the state authorities and organized crime – and there is always the exchange of weapons between these two entities,” said Erika Guevara Rosas, the Americas director for Amnesty International.
Beretta and Glock did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Even countries that sell relatively few weapons to Mexico – such as the United Kingdom – have seen exports increase. According to figures from Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), UK export licenses to Mexico increased from 58 in 2008 to 350 in 2017.
In early 2015, just weeks after the 43 students were forcibly disappeared, the UK ambassador to Mexico told the Guardian: “In the long term we would aspire to become a player in Mexico’s military procurement.”
Since then, Mexico is listed as a “priority market” for arms exports for the UK.
While most licences have been for large-scale military equipment, the UK has also sanctioned £4m of small arms to Mexico. But the true value of the arms deals could be higher, as there were three open export licences which campaigners say make tracking sales much more difficult. Open export licences, which typically last for about five years, allow for unlimited exports.
“By using this opaque mechanism, the government is making proper scrutiny of arms sales even harder,” said Andrew Smith of CAAT.
A government spokesperson said: “The UK operates one of the most comprehensive export control regimes in the world.”
A perverse monopoly
In Mexico, the army controls all weapons imports and resales to local and state police, and private individuals. More than 95% of European weapons the army has sold to police forces since 2006 were classified as for “military use” under Mexican law, which on paper restricts legal gun sales to civilians.
Beyond the use of these arms by police, evidence suggests that some of the European weapons flooding the market in Mexico have also been linked to the killing of journalists, human rights defenders and civilians, according to analysis of the army documents published in a new report, by a group of international NGOs including Global Exchange.
José Armando Rodríguez Carreón who worked for El Diario de Ciudad Juárez, was shot dead in 2008 with an Italian pistol, according to prosecutor Borbolla. In 2013, a Belgian weapon was used to gun down Jaime Guadalupe González Domínguez in the northern state of Chihuahua.
Veracruz – the Mexican state with the highest number of journalists killed since 2000 – has regularly received weapons and ammunition from a number of European and Israeli companies.
US law enforcement officials said that the many killings and disappearances, including of local journalists, in Veracruz during the 2010-2016 administration of Governor Javier Duarte, could not have taken place without complicity between the cartels, politicians and police.
The most frequently targeted journalists are those who dare to investigate relationships between corrupt officials and organized crime. The Mexico Violence Resource Project estimates that nearly half of threats against journalists came from state actors such as police and mayors, compared to 5% by criminal groups.
Despite this, international weapons manufacturers are undiscerning when it comes to selling to states with a long track record of human rights violations, according to John Lindsay-Poland, the director of Stop US Arms to Mexico.
“They clearly know that weapons are going to states like Guerrero and Veracruz and Tamaulipas and Chihuahua that have long, well-documented histories of corruption and human rights abuses and impunity,” he said. “In our view, they’re culpable.”
Evidence suggests that significant numbers of military-grade European weapons have ended up in the hands of cartels, according to Forbidden Stories’ analysis of open-source photos.
Security guards working for Dámaso López Serrano – the son of a senior lieutenant in the Sinaloa cartel, who Mexican prosecutors say ordered the murder of journalist Javier Valdez in 2017 – were photographed carrying a German-produced machine gun. The same model has been sold to police in more than half of Mexico’s 32 states including Sinaloa, according to the declassified documents.
Other cartels have also obtained military grade weaponry from abroad. Images from the attempted assassination of police chief Omar García in Mexico City in June 2020 by the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion show a Belgian assault rifle sitting in the bed of a pickup truck.
In the past decade, more than 4,000 weapons from companies based in Europe – Italy, Romania, Austria, Belgium and Germany – were recovered at crime scenes in Mexico, according to the army documents.
Between 2000 and 2015, more than 20,000 weapons were lost by or stolen from federal, state and local police, according to the army data. In Guerrero and Tamaulipas, two of the most violent states in Mexico, 20% and 10% of weapons respectively, were lost between 2006 and 2017.
After Israel Vásquez was shot dead in Salamanca, protesters took to the streets when the local mayor appeared to blame the journalist for reporting early in the morning in a dangerous neighborhood.
Despite the arrest of two men linked to his murder, Vásquez’s colleagues continue to demand a full investigation into the weapons and motive behind the killing.
“The people of Salamanca are demanding justice for Israel – for the loss that he left as a brother, son, father and friend,” Vallejo said. “We don’t want him to be just another cold case.”
Javier Francisco Parra was one of the officials who visited the location of a serious fire in Caño Cristales, La Macarena, in February 2020. (photo: Cormacarena)
Colombian Environmental Official Assassinated in Southern Meta Department
Antonio José Paz Cardona and Genevieve Belmaker, Mongabay
Excerpt: "December 3, 2020 was a fateful day for the defense of the environment in Colombia."
ecember 3, 2020 was a fateful day for the defense of the environment in Colombia. Javier Francisco Parra Cubillos, an official from regional environmental authority Cormacarena in the department of Meta – was shot several times while traveling through the municipality of La Macarena, in the department’s southern region.According to information from Cormacarena (La Macarena Regional Corporation for the Sustainable Development of the La Macarena Special Management Area) a couple on a motorcycle ambushed him and left him for dead before fleeing. Gravely injured but still alive, Parra was taken to the municipal hospital. He was going to be transferred in a Colombian Air Force helicopter to Villavicencio, in the capital of Meta, to receive continued specialized care.
However, he died from his before he could be transferred.
This murder occurs only two months after three others working with Cormacarena were attacked on the road. The three individuals were moving from the La Julia sector to the El Divisó village, in the rural area of the Uribe municipality in Meta, and were approached by armed individuals who they stole their belongings and burned the truck they were traveling in. They survived with their lives after the police and army intervened.
Another environmental defender sentenced to death
Javier Francisco Parra Cubillos, or ‘Pacho’ as his friends and colleagues called him, worked as regional coordinator of the Corporation for the Sustainable Development of the La Macarena Special Management Area (Cormacarena).
Parra was 47 years old and had been working with the environmental authority for 20 years. He was known in the area for his defense of the ecosystems of the municipality and he became a true promoter and defender of natural resources. Even at the beginning of this year, he was one of the officials who was in charge of the control of a great fire that threatened to destroy Caño Cristales, one of the most representative ecotourism sites in Meta and Colombia.
The director of Cormacarena, Andrés Felipe García Céspedes, said he deeply regrets the death of “this exemplary and hard-working man, who more than being an official became a true promoter and staunch defender of the department’s natural resources.” García also sent a message of condolence to Parra’s wife, their two children and other relatives.
“This is an affront against the National Environmental System [SINA], it is painful to know these types of events that attack the officials and collaborators of the corporations that defend the environment and work for the sustainable development of the country,” said Ramón Leal, director of ASOCARS, the association that brings together all the regional autonomous corporations of Colombia.
Leal noted that the community, institutions, and area authorities that work alongside the institutions, such as the CARs, “are present in the territory, and are the entities that report the most environmental achievements to the country.” He called the murder “sad” and added that others continue to “risk their lives to protect nature every day.”
Parra’s death is another name on the growing list of social, environmental and Indigenous leaders murdered in Colombia. According to the latest figures from the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz ), between January 1 and December 6, 2020, a jaw-dropping 284 such leaders have been assassinated in Colombia.
In addition, the last annual report of Global Witness noted that, in 2019, Colombia not only ranked first in the number of murders of environmental leaders in the region – with 64 homicides – but was also the most dangerous country in the world for environmental defenders.
This is not the first time this year that an official from the environmental sector has been assassinated in Colombia.
Yamid Silva Torres, park ranger of the El Cocuy National Natural Park, was assassinated in the La Cueva village of the Güicán municipality, Boyacá, on February 4. This led to the Colombia’s national parks department deciding, at the end of that month, to withdraw officials from ten protected areas from the territory. The entity’s director, Julia Miranda, confirmed there had been more than 20 officials threatened.
Mongabay has long reported on the risk to which park rangers, officials of environmental authorities and social leaders are exposed in municipalities such as La Macarena, Uribe or Vistahermosa.
In the south of Meta and northeast of Caquetá Andean, Amazonian and Orinocean ecosystems converge that make this region a biodiversity hotspot and an area of great ecological importance. However, this sector that was previously dominated by the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is also an important corridor for drug trafficking and for land grabbers who deforest even in national parks such as Sierra de La Macarena, Tinigua and Cordillera of the Picachos.
In a report published by Mongabay Latam in September this year, an environmental leader in the area who preferred not to reveal his name confirmed that the situation in the south of Meta had become more complicated. “As I understand the [FARC] dissidents have banned all environmental entities from entering, they are threatened,” he said.
They ask for justice
The murder of Javier Francisco Parra Cubillos set off alarms. Hours after his death, an extraordinary Security Council meeting was held in the city of Villavicencio, where the Minister of National Defense, Carlos Holmes Trujillo García, announced a reward of up to 300 million pesos (about $86,000) for whoever provides information that allows the capture of those responsible for the murder of the Cormacarena official.
“We are going to persecute those criminals wherever they are, we must tell those criminals that they are going to fall, because life always prevails over death […] the state exists to defend life and fight those who live by death, violence and crime, because criminality never wins the battle against the State, which is always accompanied by good citizens,” said Holmes Trujillo.
Jairo Andrés Becerra Acosta, a Villavicencio official, asked the police and prosecutor’s office to carry out investigations to find the whereabouts of those responsible for the murder.
“We cannot allow this type of tragedy to continue to occur, we call for justice to be done and the criminals respond to the judicial authorities for what happened in the municipality of La Macarena […] we must protect the right to life of the citizens,” Becerra said.
The Minister of Environment, Carlos Eduardo Correa, expressed his solidarity with the relatives and colleagues of Parra. The Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute expressed its concern about the violence against officials and environmental defenders, and joined the call made by Cormacarena to prioritize investigation work that leads to the capture of those responsible for the homicide.
For now, Defense Minister Holmes Trujillo announced that two platoons of the National Army to La Macarena would be dispatched, and new controls put in place before entering the municipality. Going forward, army soldiers and national police will now accompany environmental conservation officials activities from Cormacarena in the field.
Parra’s murder occurs shortly after the Ministry of Defense and the National Police revealed a list of nine people who would make up the cartel of those most wanted for deforestation and land grabbing in the department of Meta and in much of the region.
The authorities had just offered up to 20 million pesos (about $ 5,800) for anyone who provides information that allows the capture of one of those people.
This article was originally published on Mongabay
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