FAIR: Newspapers Won't Connect the Dots on Postal Service Threats

View article on FAIR's website Newspapers Won't Connect the Dots on Postal Service Threats Julie Hollar More than six weeks after a bill was introduced to require vote-by-mail to be available for the November 3 elections, no federal steps have been taken to ensure a fair and free election in the shadow of a pandemic that threatens people's ability to access the polls. In fact, while some states scramble to put together vote-by-mail plans—shouldering the financial burden themselves—others are doing nothing, and New York went so far as to cancel its presidential primary. Meanwhile, commenting on Fox & Friends (3/30/20) about the Democratic vote-by-mail bill, Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud:  The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again. Atlantic (4/24/20: "The Postal Service has been under attack by conservatives for years." Now, with the US Postal Service reeling (like so many others) under the economic impact of the pandemic, Trump has revived the right-wing crusade to privatize all mail and package delivery, threatening to refuse desperately needed aid for the Postal Service unless it quadruples its rates, cuts service and guts its union—which provides hundreds of thousands of secure middle-class jobs. Without federal aid, the USPS will run out of money by September; adopting Trump's measures will effectively drive the USPS out of business, as competitors undercut its rates (Atlantic, 4/24/20).  In either case, the Postal Service's ability to handle a crush of mail-in ballots in November would almost certainly be threatened. The right-wing vendetta against the Postal Service long predates the pandemic, but gutting it now has the potential to undermine the integrity of the November election. Yet establishment media seem remarkably uninterested in connecting the dots. In the New York Times, Trump's revitalized crusade against the postal service has gone largely unremarked upon outside the opinion section. On April 25, the story made it into the bottom of a "Virus Briefing," in which Trump's "belief that Amazon and other online retailers have been profiting from low prices that have left it asking for a government bailout" was not countered until the last paragraph, which explained that the USPS "in fact...makes money from its business with Amazon, which is likely to shift to alternatives such as UPS or FedEx if the Postal Service raised prices substantially." Others didn't bother at all with factchecking Trump's central claim about the postal service propping up Amazon. The Hill (4/24/20), for example, headlined Trump's subsequent remarks that he "would never let our Post Office fail," not explaining either how that squares with his commitment to forcing massive rate hikes, or the fact that the USPS's relationship with Amazon is actually a revenue-generator for the service. And at the LA Times, the only brief mention of the USPS issue in the print edition (4/25/20) noted without comment that Trump "has berated the Postal Service for years, claiming it is exploited by Amazon and other e-commerce sites." The Washington Post's front-page story (4/24/20) on Trump's threat to the Postal Service doesn't mention voting by mail as an issue. The Washington Post (owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos) did put the story of Trump's threat to the Postal Service on its front page (4/24/20), but reporters Lisa Rein and Jacob Bogage didn't find room to mention vote-by-mail in the entire story.  In response to Trump's threats, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden (whose campaign urged supporters to the polls in primary contests despite the threat of the coronavirus—FAIR.org, 3/28/20, 4/6/20) speculated that Trump might try to "kick back the election somehow." Biden suggested that Trump's threat not to fund the Postal Service suggests he is "trying to let the word out that he’s going to do all he can to make it very hard for people to vote. That’s the only way he thinks he can possibly win." Biden's comments got press attention—but again, little connecting of the dots. As virtually every report pointed out, Trump has not threatened to postpone the election, nor would it be constitutional, which makes Biden's first suggestion less probable. But, just as they did a month ago in the first wave of stories about threats to the November election (FAIR.org, 3/23/20), journalists continue to focus on reassuring the public about what can't go wrong (simply not holding an election) rather than digging into what can (claiming the election results are illegitimate because of security, fraud or delays, or simply making it impossible for people to vote without putting their lives at risk). Turn the page from the Post's page one story and you'd find a report (4/24/20) from Annie Linskey on Biden's musings, which told the story as nothing more than a partisan political squabble. Linskey quoted seven partisan political sources (four Republicans and three Democrats, including Biden and a Biden spokesperson), plus Amy Walter from the Cook Political Report, who analyzed Biden's remarks as a way to rally his supporters. One reference to a concern of "voting experts" (that "polling locations will be drastically reduced in November if the virus returns and election workers become scarce”) appeared in the third-to-last paragraph.  In a separate article that appeared only online, Colby Itkowitz (Washington Post, 4/24/20) managed to speak to voting-rights experts, but still spent the first half of the piece emphasizing that "the president has no power over when America votes." For those who made it that far, the piece was one of the few places for readers to hear that there were other ways for the president to keep people from the polls, including making voting by mail difficult or using "emergency powers to keep people in cities where outbreaks have been worse from going to polling places in person, in the name of public health." Nowhere was the legitimacy of the election under those circumstances mentioned.  The New York Times (4/24/20) called Joe Biden's statement that Trump is "going to do all he can to make it very hard for people to vote" an "extraordinary claim." Meanwhile, at the New York Times (4/24/20), Biden's remarks appeared to raise hackles: It was an extraordinary claim for the presumptive Democratic nominee to make about an opponent, especially for Mr. Biden, a former vice president and Washington veteran who prides himself on civility and respect for American institutions, including and especially the presidency. Reporter Katie Glueck reassured readers that  Mr. Trump has not moved to delay the election, and Mr. Biden, who once taught constitutional law, most likely knows as well as the voting experts do that it would be exceedingly difficult to postpone the election and that the president does not have the authority to unilaterally take such action. When, later in the article, Glueck pivoted to note that "Mr. Biden has also signaled that he is acutely aware of the roadblocks to voting that Americans may face as an election unfolds amid a pandemic," she—like Linskey—presented those roadblocks through an almost purely partisan lens. Glueck quoted Biden, two other Democratic officials and pundit Jon Meacham to argue that: Taken together, there is a real concern among many Democrats that Mr. Trump, who recently claimed “total” authority as president during the crisis before ceding some authority to the governors, will pursue re-election ruthlessly and with no regard for traditional norms. Those concerns are obviously not confined to Democrats—they're shared by all who genuinely care about democratic institutions in this country. Based on their coverage of the November election, and the crucial political battles happening now that will determine whether that election can happen freely and fairly, it's safe to question whether all the journalists who are meant to safeguard democracy consider themselves part of that group.

© 2020 Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. All rights reserved. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting Our mailing address is: FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING 124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201 New York, NY 10001 FAIR's Website

RSN: FOCUS: Scientists Say a Now-Dominant Strain of the Coronavirus Appears to Be More Contagious Than Original

05 May 20

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FOCUS: Scientists Say a Now-Dominant Strain of the Coronavirus Appears to Be More Contagious Than Original

Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times
Vartabedian writes: "Scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic."

cientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated quickly to the East Coast of the United States and has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, the scientists wrote. 

In addition to spreading faster, it may make people vulnerable to a second infection after a first bout with the disease, the report warned.

The 33-page report was posted Thursday on BioRxiv, a website that researchers use to share their work before it is peer reviewed, an effort to speed up collaborations with scientists working on COVID-19 vaccines or treatments. That research has been largely based on the genetic sequence of earlier strains and might not be effective against the new one.

The mutation identified in the new report affects the now infamous spikes on the exterior of the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells. The report’s authors said they felt an “urgent need for an early warning” so that vaccines and drugs under development around the world will be effective against the mutated strain.

Wherever the new strain appeared, it quickly infected far more people than the earlier strains that came out of Wuhan, China, and within weeks it was the only strain that was prevalent in some nations, according to the report. The new strain’s dominance over its predecessors demonstrates that it is more infectious, according to the report, though exactly why is not yet known.

The coronavirus, known to scientists as SARS-CoV-2, has infected more than 3.5 million people around the world and caused more than 250,000 COVID-19 deaths since its discovery late last year. 

The report was based on a computational analysis of more than 6,000 coronavirus sequences from around the world, collected by the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza Data, a public-private organization in Germany. Time and again, the analysis found the new version was transitioning to become dominant. 

The Los Alamos team, assisted by scientists at Duke University and the University of Sheffield in England, identified 14 mutations. Those mutations occurred among the nearly 30,000 base pairs of RNA that other scientists say make up the coronavirus’s genome. The report authors focused on a mutation called D614G, which is responsible for the change in the virus’ spikes.

“The story is worrying, as we see a mutated form of the virus very rapidly emerging, and over the month of March becoming the dominant pandemic form,” study leader Bette Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos, wrote on her Facebook page. “When viruses with this mutation enter a population, they rapidly begin to take over the local epidemic, thus they are more transmissible.”

While the Los Alamos report is highly technical and dispassionate, Korber expressed some deep personal feelings about the implications of the finding in her Facebook post. 

“This is hard news,” wrote Korber, “but please don’t only be disheartened by it. Our team at LANL was able to document this mutation and its impact on transmission only because of a massive global effort of clinical people and experimental groups, who make new sequences of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) in their local communities available as quickly as they possibly can.”

Korber, a graduate of Cal State Long Beach who went on to earn a PhD in chemistry at Caltech, joined the lab in 1990 and focused much of her work on an HIV vaccine. In 2004, she won the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, the U.S. Department of Energy’s highest recognition for scientific achievement. She contributed a portion of the financial prize to help establish an orphanage for young AIDS victims in South Africa. 

The report contains regional breakdowns of when the new strain of virus first emerged and how long it took to become dominant.

Italy was one of the first countries to see the new virus in the last week of February, almost at the same time that the original strain appeared. Washington was among the first states to get hit with the original strain in late February, but by March 15 the mutated strain dominated. New York was hit by the original virus around March 15, but within days the mutant strain took over. The team did not report results for California. 

Scientists at major organizations working on a vaccine or drugs have told The Times that they are pinning their hopes on initial evidence that the virus is stable and not likely to mutate the way influenza virus does, requiring a new vaccine every year. The Los Alamos report could upend that assumption. 

If the pandemic fails to wane seasonally as the weather warms, the study warns, the virus could undergo further mutations even as research organizations prepare the first medical treatments and vaccines. Without getting on top of the risk now, the effectiveness of vaccines could be limited. Some of the compounds in development are supposed to latch onto the spike or interrupt its action. If they were designed based on the original version of the spike, they might not be effective against the new coronavirus strain, the study’s authors warned.

“We cannot afford to be blindsided as we move vaccines and antibodies into clinical testing,” Korber wrote on Facebook. “Please be encouraged by knowing the global scientific community is on this, and we are cooperating with each other in ways I have never seen … in my 30 years as a scientist.”

David Montefiori, a Duke University scientist who worked on the report said it is the first to document a mutation in the coronavirus that appears to make it more infectious. 

Although the researchers don’t yet know the details about how the mutated spike behaves inside the body, it’s clearly doing something that gives it an evolutionary advantage over its predecessor and is fueling its rapid spread. One scientist called it a “classic case of Darwinian evolution.”

“D614G is increasing in frequency at an alarming rate, indicating a fitness advantage relative to the original Wuhan strain that enables more rapid spread,” the study said. 

Still unknown is whether this mutant virus could account for regional variations in how hard COVID-19 is hitting different parts of the world.

In the United States, doctors had begun to independently question whether new strains of the virus could account for the differences in how it has infected, sickened and killed people, said Alan Wu, a UC San Francisco professor who runs the clinical chemistry and toxicology laboratories at San Francisco General Hospital. 

Medical experts have speculated in recent weeks that they were seeing at least two strains of the virus in the U.S., one prevalent on the East Coast and another on the West Coast, according to Wu.

“We are looking to identify the mutation,” he said, noting that his hospital has had only a few deaths out of the hundreds of cases it has treated, which is “quite a different story than we are hearing from New York.” 

The Los Alamos study does not indicate that the new version of the virus is more lethal than the original. People infected with the mutated strain appear to have higher viral loads. But the study’s authors from the University of Sheffield found that among a local sample of 447 patients, hospitalization rates were about the same for people infected with either virus version.

Even if the new strain is no more dangerous than the others, it could still complicate efforts to bring the pandemic under control. That would be an issueif the mutation makes the virus so different from earlier strains that people who have immunity to them would not be immune to the new version.

If that is indeed the case, it could make “individuals susceptible to a second infection,” the study authors wrote.

It’s possible that the mutation changes the spike in some way that helps the virus evade the immune system, said Montefiori, who has worked on an HIV vaccine for 30 years. “It is hypothetical. We are looking at it very hard.”

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Ammon Bundy Blames Jews For The Holocaust At Idaho Anti-Lockdown Rally AND MUCH ELSE.....

The militiaman’s comments, one civil rights activist said, "crossed a moral line."

huffpost.com

Ammon Bundy Blames Jews For The Holocaust At Idaho Anti-Lockdown Rally

The militiaman’s comments, one civil right

LINK

WOW! Ya got 'em all riled up!

"...The Boise rally appears to have been organized, in part, by an anti-vaccination conspiracy group called Health Freedom Idaho, together with the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a powerful far-right libertarian organization in the state with ties to right-wing billionaire Charles Koch...."

There have been reports elsewhere that anti-vaxxers were Russian supported.

One of these clowns was accused of rape or child molestation - they're such sleaze, I'm not gonna look it up.

They're dead beats who used public lands and refused to pay the nominal amount that periodically becomes an issue because it's inadequate and hasn't been increased in years.

The issue of PUBLIC LANDS is KOCH-BACKED issue because the wealthy want to buy it CHEAP.

https://www.salon.com/.../fox_news_worst_cliven_bundy.../


https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/01/ammon-bundy-oregon-protest-sba-loan/


Welfare Ranching Show Down in Nevada Progressives
https://www.alternet.org/.../exposing-americas.../

FOCUS | Armed, Pathetic and Hungry: How the Oregon Militants ...
https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34445-focus-armed-pathetic-and-hungry-how-the-oregon-militants-revolutionary-plan-went-sideways

COMMENTS:
I find it Interesting that the same people who suffer from extreme xenophobic Jewish paranoia will subvert any American value to support an Administration that one could reasonably argue has several Jewish members only inches away from the national seat of power including Stephan Miller, Jared Kushner and his newly converted wife and possible pretender to the Trump throne Ivanka. All have a hugely greater chance of usurping Washington power than the likes of George Soros or themselves and yet they remain blase and unconcerned. Which just goes to show you it isn't about Judism and Jewish subversion of politics and the economy at all, It is about having a scapegoat to assist them in in the local and regional assimilation of personal wealth and power.

OK, folks: It's the London Blitz, and the bombs are falling randomly in the streets, killing people. These jackasses are out waving Nazi flags, blaming the Jews, and demanding that they keep their lights on to help the bombers. These morons are the intellectual descendants of the British Blackshirts - the Nazis led by Oswald Mosley in the 1930's, and they deserve exactly the same scorn and derision. We are awash in bullshit, fueled by morons like this and their enablers. It's time to end the BS.

Cape Cod Women for Change

"Commission claims fundraising victory for pandemic fight even as total new money is unclear."
Russia and the United States, onetime superpower rivals in science as well as politics, pointedly did not participate, highlighting the real risk that some wealthy countries could look to control vaccines or treatments to benefit their own citizens first.

https://www.politico.com/…/world-leaders-pledge-to-fight-co…

Commission claims fundraising victory for pandemic fight even as total new money is unclear.

politico.com

World leaders pledge to fight coronavirus, but the U.S. skips the meeting

Commission claims fu

LINK

Cape Cod Women for Change

"Bright alleges in the complaint that political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services had tried to promote hydroxychloroquine “as a panacea.” The officials also “demanded that New York and New Jersey be ‘flooded’ with these drugs, which were imported from factories in Pakistan and India that had not been inspected by the FDA,” the complaint says. "

https://apnews.com/68ff635c752d056a3f6242fa555b163b…

WASHINGTON (AP) — A government scientist was ousted after the Trump administration ignored his dire warnings about COVID-19 and a malaria drug President Donald Trump was pushing for the...

About this website

apnews.com

Whistleblower: Trump official ignored warning on drug, virus

WASHINGTON (AP) —

LINK

A Democrat in the Wilderness

That is really bad news.

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have discovered a mutation to the coronavirus's spike protein that may make it more infectious - and it has spread around the globe.

dailymail.co.uk

Dominant mutant strain of coronavirus now 'dominant,' study warns

Researchers at

LINK