It's Live on the HomePage Now: Don't Blame Sharia for Islamic Extremism - Blame Colonialism
These political debates – which cite terrorism and political violence in the Middle East to argue that Islam is incompatible with modern society – reinforce stereotypes that the Muslim world is uncivilized. They also reflect ignorance of Sharia, which is not a strict legal code. Sharia means “path” or “way”: It is a broad set of values and ethical principles drawn from the Quran – Islam’s holy book – and the life of the Prophet Muhammad. As such, different people and governments may interpret Sharia differently. Still, this is not the first time that the world has tried to figure out where Sharia fits into the global order. In the 1950s and 1960s, when Great Britain, France and other European powers relinquished their colonies in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, leaders of newly sovereign Muslim-majority countries faced a decision of enormous consequence: Should they build their governments on Islamic religious values or embrace the European laws inherited from colonial rule? The big debate Invariably, my historical research shows, political leaders of these young countries chose to keep their colonial justice systems rather than impose religious law. Newly independent Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Somalia, among other places, all confined the application of Sharia to marital and inheritance disputes within Muslim families, just as their colonial administrators had done. The remainder of their legal systems would continue to be based on European law. To understand why they chose this course, I researched the decision-making process in Sudan, the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence from the British, in 1956. In the national archives and libraries of the Sudanese capital Khartoum, and in interviews with Sudanese lawyers and officials, I discovered that leading judges, politicians and intellectuals actually pushed for Sudan to become a democratic Islamic state. They envisioned a progressive legal system consistent with Islamic faith principles, one where all citizens – irrespective of religion, race or ethnicity – could practice their religious beliefs freely and openly. “The People are equal like the teeth of a comb,” wrote Sudan’s soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Hassan Muddathir in 1956, quoting the Prophet Muhammad, in an official memorandum I found archived in Khartoum’s Sudan Library. “An Arab is no better than a Persian, and the White is no better than the Black.” Sudan’s post-colonial leadership, however, rejected those calls. They chose to keep the English common law tradition as the law of the land. Why keep the laws of the oppressor? My research identifies three reasons why early Sudan sidelined Sharia: politics, pragmatism and demography. Rivalries between political parties in post-colonial Sudan led to parliamentary stalemate, which made it difficult to pass meaningful legislation. So Sudan simply maintained the colonial laws already on the books. There were practical reasons for maintaining English common law, too. Sudanese judges had been trained by British colonial officials. So they continued to apply English common law principles to the disputes they heard in their courtrooms. Sudan’s founding fathers faced urgent challenges, such as creating the economy, establishing foreign trade and ending civil war. They felt it was simply not sensible to overhaul the rather smooth-running governance system in Khartoum. The continued use of colonial law after independence also reflected Sudan’s ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity. Then, as now, Sudanese citizens spoke many languages and belonged to dozens of ethnic groups. At the time of Sudan’s independence, people practicing Sunni and Sufi traditions of Islam lived largely in northern Sudan. Christianity was an important faith in southern Sudan. Sudan’s diversity of faith communities meant that maintaining a foreign legal system – English common law – was less controversial than choosing whose version of Sharia to adopt. Why extremists triumphed My research uncovers how today’s instability across the Middle East and North Africa is, in part, a consequence of these post-colonial decisions to reject Sharia. In maintaining colonial legal systems, Sudan and other Muslim-majority countries that followed a similar path appeased Western world powers, which were pushing their former colonies toward secularism. But they avoided resolving tough questions about religious identity and the law. That created a disconnect between the people and their governments. In the long run, that disconnect helped fuel unrest among some citizens of deep faith, leading to sectarian calls to unite religion and the state once and for all. In Iran, Saudi Arabia and parts of Somalia and Nigeria, these interpretations triumphed, imposing extremist versions of Sharia over millions of people. In other words, Muslim-majority countries stunted the democratic potential of Sharia by rejecting it as a mainstream legal concept in the 1950s and 1960s, leaving Sharia in the hands of extremists. But there is no inherent tension between Sharia, human rights and the rule of law. Like any use of religion in politics, Sharia’s application depends on who is using it – and why. Leaders of places like Saudi Arabia and Brunei have chosen to restrict women’s freedom and minority rights. But many scholars of Islam and grassroots organizations interpret Sharia as a flexible, rights-oriented and equality-minded ethical order. Religion and the law worldwide Religion is woven into the legal fabric of many post-colonial nations, with varying consequences for democracy and stability. After its 1948 founding, Israel debated the role of Jewish law in Israeli society. Ultimately, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his allies opted for a mixed legal system that combined Jewish law with English common law. In Latin America, the Catholicism imposed by Spanish conquistadors underpins laws restricting abortion, divorce and gay rights. And throughout the 19th century, judges in the U.S. regularly invoked the legal maxim that “Christianity is part of the common law.” Legislators still routinely invoke their Christian faith when supporting or opposing a given law. Political extremism and human rights abuses that occur in those places are rarely understood as inherent flaws of these religions. When it comes to Muslim-majority countries, however, Sharia takes the blame for regressive laws – not the people who pass those policies in the name of religion. Fundamentalism and violence, in other words, are a post-colonial problem – not a religious inevitability. For the Muslim world, finding a system of government that reflects Islamic values while promoting democracy will not be easy after more than 50 years of failed secular rule. But building peace may demand it. |
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Russell Vought at the White House in October 2019. (photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Meet the Trump Saboteur in Charge of Undermining Biden - and America
Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Milbank writes: "What Russ Vought is very good at is sabotage. He's sabotaging national security, the pandemic response and the economic recovery - all to make things more difficult for the incoming Biden administration."
f, in the new year, pandemic vaccines aren’t available as promised, Americans can’t return to work because economic relief isn’t delivered or an adversary successfully attacks the United States because national security agencies couldn’t pay for new defenses, a hefty share of the blame should be placed on a man you’ve probably never heard of: One Russell Thurlow Vought.
As President Trump’s budget director, he conspicuously failed in his stated goal of controlling the debt. Despite his efforts, the debt increased by $6 trillion on his two-year watch as director of the Office of Management and Budget, the biggest jump in history.
He also has been disastrous in his fiscal forecasts. On Feb. 10, he predicted 2.8 percent growth for the year, saying, “our view is that, at this point, coronavirus is not something that is going to have ripple effects.” A few weeks later, the economy collapsed.
But what Russ Vought is very good at is sabotage. He’s sabotaging national security, the pandemic response and the economic recovery — all to make things more difficult for the incoming Biden administration. That he’s also sabotaging the country seems not to matter to Vought, who has spent nearly two decades as a right-wing bomb thrower.
He has blocked civil servants at OMB from cooperating with the Biden transition, denying President-elect Joe Biden the policy analysis and budget-preparation assistance given to previous presidents-elect, including Barack Obama and Trump himself. Transition figures warn that it will likely delay and hamper economic and pandemic relief and national security preparation (the Pentagon is the other key agency resisting transition cooperation with the incoming administration).
Thursday afternoon, Vought released a bombastic letter accusing the Biden transition of making “false statements” about OMB’s uncooperativeness — and then essentially confirming that it would not cooperate: “What we have not done and will not do is use current OMB staff to write the [Biden transition’s] legislative policy proposals to dismantle this Administration’s work. . . . Redirecting staff and resources to draft your team’s budget proposals is not an OMB transition responsibility. Our system of government has one President and one Administration at a time.”
Nobody should have expected otherwise from Vought.
He was the author of a Sept. 4 memo attacking critical race theory and canceling racial sensitivity programs, which he called “divisive, anti-American propaganda.” The issue, apparently prompted by a segment Trump viewed on Fox News, became key to the final weeks of Trump’s race-baiting campaign.
Vought was also the mastermind of Trump’s executive order that attempts to reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants who work in policy roles so they can be easily fired. Vought has proposed reclassifying 88 percent of OMB staff (425 people).
He was a key figure in the Ukraine imbroglio, freezing military aid to the country as Trump pushed for Ukraine’s president to announce a probe of Joe and Hunter Biden and the Democrats. The Government Accountability Office determined the budgetary freeze violated the Impoundment Control Act. Vought also ignored a subpoena during the impeachment inquiry.
Vought’s 2017 nomination to be OMB deputy director (he later served 18 months as acting director and has served five as director) was nearly undone over a 2016 article in which he wrote: “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, his Son, and they stand condemned.”
Vought spent seven years on the vanguard of conservative extremism as a senior official at Heritage Action, the political wing of the Heritage Foundation. The group fought GOP leadership and pushed lawmakers into unyielding positions.
During that time, Vought wrote a series of rambling posts for RedState.com arguing that “incrementalism doesn’t work for the right,” that Republicans “are fundamentally in their DNA unwilling to fight” and that Republicans needed to have “a willingness” to shut the government down. He exhorted Republicans to “embrace the sort of brinkmanship that shows they are playing to win.” He railed against a 2012 infrastructure bill as “communism.”
Before Heritage, Vought worked for the right-wing House Republican Study Committee whose job, he said, “is to push leadership as far to the right as is possible and flat out oppose it when necessary.”
He has continued to lob grenades from inside the White House. At an antiabortion rally, he claimed credit for blocking Planned Parenthood’s funding. He infuriated Democrats by refusing to share projections with Congress.
But when it comes to governing, Vought has been a loser. He ran the botched White House response to the 2019 government shutdown, issuing legally dubious decisions and, as one Republican budget expert told The Post, “making up the rules as they go along.” It became the longest-ever shutdown and ended in Trump’s surrender.
Now Vought is intentionally botching the transition, without regard for the dire consequences Americans could suffer. This is what happens when you put an arsonist in charge of the fire department.
Georgia voters. (photo: Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Early Voting Ends With Record 3 Million Georgia Voters for US Senate Runoffs
Mark Niesse, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Niesse writes: "A record 3 million Georgia voters cast their ballots before early voting ended for the U.S. Senate runoffs, setting up a showdown that will be decided on election day Tuesday."
The high turnout so far reflects the national importance of the dual runoffs, which will determine control of the Senate. Republican U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue face Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
No votes will be counted until polls close at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, but state election data analyzed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution indicate more ballots have been cast so far by groups and in areas that tend to favor Democrats.
Turnout lagged in rural, conservative congressional districts through Thursday, especially in northwest Georgia where President Donald Trump plans to rally voters on Monday.
Meanwhile, Black voters, who generally support Democrats, made up a higher portion of voters so far than in the presidential election.
But Republicans could make up ground with a strong showing on election day, as in the general election. For example, Trump and Perdue each won about 60% of in-person votes cast on Nov. 3. Loeffler also benefited from election day voting in the 20-candidate Senate special election.
The 3 million early votes cast so far have already shattered the previous record for total turnout in a Georgia runoff set in 2008, when 2.1 million people participated in a U.S. Senate runoff between Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin.
Hundreds of thousands more ballots are likely to be cast on Tuesday. During the presidential election, nearly 1 million Georgians voted on Election Day. Total turnout reached 5 million. Trump and President-elect Joe Biden are both coming to Georgia Monday to push election day voting.
Early voting turnout for the runoff approached presidential levels. About 77% as many voters participated in the runoff during three weeks of early voting.
Turnout stayed strong during this holiday week, with more than 150,000 people casting in-person votes each day, similar to the pace seen in the final days of early voting before the general election.
The heaviest turnout came in areas that lean Democratic and embrace early and absentee voting, including the 6th and 4th congressional district in metro Atlanta.
While turnout in rural areas was generally lower than the rest of the state, some populated counties like Chatham and Richmond also had subpar early voting numbers.
By race, election data show that Black voters have outperformed their share of the electorate. About 31% of voters in the runoff so far identified themselves as Black compared to 27% in the general election. Overall, Black voters make up 30% of the state’s registered voters.
White voters are also turning out, accounting for 56% of runoff voters, higher than their 53% of registered voters.
An influx of new voters will also influence the outcome of the runoffs. Over 114,000 voters who didn’t participate in the general election have cast ballots in the runoffs. Those voters are more racially diverse than the state’s electorate as a whole — 37% Black and 43% white.
Of voters who have participated in both the primary and the runoffs, Democrats hold an advantage going into election day.
About 57% of runoff voters who also voted in last June’s primary requested Democratic ballots. About 41% pulled Republican Party ballots. About 44% of runoff voters didn’t participate in the primary.
By the numbers
3 million: Turnout at the end of early voting before the runoff
3.9 million: Turnout at the end of early voting before the general election
5 million: Total turnout in the general election
Critical care pharmacist Jennifer Cortes prepares the first Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston on Dec. 15, 2020. (photo: Annie Mulligan/The Texas Tribune)
Unsurprisingly, Trump's Rollout of the COVID Vaccine Is an Utter Fiasco
Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times
Hiltzik writes: "For some mysterious reason, people are shocked - shocked! - that distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. has been screwed up."
And screwed up it is. As of Monday, about 11.4 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been distributed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But only 2.1 million people have been vaccinated.
By the administration’s own standards, this is a massive failure. On Dec. 10, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar promised that 20 million Americans would be vaccinated in “the next several weeks.”
Considering that it will be three weeks since then this weekend, that’s obviously not going to happen. So the White House moved the goalposts, promising that 20 million doses would be distributed by the end of the year. Then it revised its pledge to 20 million doses by the first week of January. Either way, the prospect of meeting that self-imposed mark is dim.
Projecting the pace of actual vaccinations into the future yields a grim conclusion.
Based on the judgment that 80% of Americans, or 264 million people, would need to be inoculated for the nation to reach herd immunity — that is, enough immunity that the virus can’t spread significantly even among the unvaccinated — public health expert Leana Wen of George Washington University estimated that “at the current rate, it would take the United States approximately 10 years to reach that level of inoculation.”
President-elect Joe Biden spoke out about the lagging effort. In a statement Tuesday, he said the country would have to step up its vaccination rate five- or six-fold to meet his own goal of fully vaccinating 50 million Americans (that is, with both doses of the two-shot Pfizer and Moderna vaccines) in his first 100 days in office.
At the current rate, he said, “It’s going to take years, not months, to vaccinate the American people.”
It’s proper to acknowledge that major public health projects such as mass vaccinations are difficult and prone to missteps and disappointment in their early stages.
The launch, for instance, of the government website for Affordable Care Act health plan signups starting Oct. 1, 2013, was a landmark in botched technology. But the Obama administration took matters in hand, and within weeks the site was up and fully functioning.
The Trump administration had seven years to absorb lessons from the Obamacare debacle but doesn’t seem to have done so. It blindsided several states in mid-December by informing them that their allocations of the Pfizer vaccine, the first to be approved for widespread use, would be as much as 40% below initial expectations.
Government officials attributed the confusion to misunderstandings of the original promises, but for many governors that explanation didn’t hold water.
Gen. Gustave Perna, the chief operating officer of the government’s Operation Warp Speed funding program for the vaccines and other anti-pandemic products, later acknowledged that the confusion resulted from “a planning error, and I am responsible.”
At a press briefing Wednesday, Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, acknowledged that the vaccinate rate as a proportion of available doses is “lower than what we hoped for.”
But Perna, at the same briefing, tried to put a happy gloss on the record. “Everybody collectively should be very proud,” he said. “It has been a whole of America approach.”
Yet many of the factors slowing the pace of vaccinations are obvious. They include inadequate planning and the administration’s refusal to take more of the task in hand. The latter reflects Trump’s approach to the pandemic from the start. Boiled down to its essence, that approach has been: “It’s not our problem.”
As recently as Tuesday, Trump was blaming any problems on state governments. “It is up to the States to distribute the vaccines once brought to the designated areas by the Federal Government,” he tweeted. “We have not only developed the vaccines, including putting up money to move the process along quickly, but gotten them to the states. Biden failed with Swine Flu!”
But experts say that leaving vaccine administration solely to the states is no answer at all. What was needed—and isn’t coming—is federal coordination.
There has been “no real planning on what happens when vaccines arrive in state,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, tweeted this week. “No plan, no money, just hope that states will figure this out.”
The state health departments likely to inherit the task of vaccine management are already hopelessly overstretched, Jha observed. All year long they’ve been grappling with the need to “manage all the testing, data analysis & reporting, providing advice to businesses, schools, doing public campaigns, etc. Non-stop.” Now they’ll have vaccination loaded on their plates.
Mass vaccination programs like that needed for COVID-19 aren’t unprecedented. The oft-cited model is a smallpox vaccination campaign conducted in New York City after an outbreak was detected in 1947.
The city set up vaccination stations in police precincts, municipal buildings, community centers and “practically every hospital in the city,” Israel Weinstein, the city health commissioner, reported a few months later. Shots were given free of charge.
Mayor William O’Dwyer called for universal vaccination and received one himself, as did President Harry Truman, who traveled to the city for the purpose. The program enjoyed a level of cooperation between officials and the public, government support and popular faith in science that have all been undermined today.
“In a period of less than a month, more than 6,350,000 people were vaccinated,” Weinstein wrote, “over 5,000,000 of them within the two week period following the appeal for universal vaccination made by the Mayor.”
By contrast, the vaccine rollout is being ceded to pharmacies, whether local or parts of big chains such as Walgreens and CVS. But those retailers don’t have the ability to coordinate local or regional vaccination programs, which involve ensuring that everyone in a vaccination group, whether designated by age, health condition or job description, can be found and prompted to report for vaccination when it’s his or her turn.
Furthermore, the Trump White House hasn’t exploited all the capabilities it has available for manufacturing and distributing the COVID-19 vaccines.
For example, despite the constraints on vaccine supply caused by limited manufacturing capacity, the government has left to Moderna and Pfizer the sole right to contract with manufacturers — even though federal law gives the government the right to “march in” and make its own manufacturing deals in exactly this situation.
Murky advice from the CDC about which cohorts should receive priority for vaccination during a period of straitened supply has left states to craft their policies on their own. Even in ideal circumstances, not every state might adhere to CDC recommendations, but the situation isn’t helped by the Trump administration’s systematic destruction of the reputation of the CDC, once the gold standard for public health agencies.
Florida and Texas, for example, have started giving shots to residents over 65, moving “essential” workers — those who need to come into frequent contact with the public to do their jobs — further back in line.
“The problem is people that are 73, 74 would be in the back of the line for a young 21-year-old worker who’s considered ‘essential,’” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said. “That doesn’t, I think, make sense.”
According to one account, elderly residents in southwest Florida were prompted to report personally to vaccine centers, where they waited in maskless crowds for hours.
No system for enforcing priority rules for vaccines appears to exist, leading to the likelihood of line-jumping by people with low priority but a surfeit of pull. Moderna announced Tuesday that it would make its vaccine available to its “workers, contractors and board members” and adult members of their households “to reduce the risk of absenteeism and disruption due to a COVID-19 infection.”
That’s a good case to be made for workers. As for board members, this privileged group of nine includes, in addition to Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel, three business executives (two retired), an MIT professor and four venture investors.
Among other early recipients are White House staffers, Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress and designated staff members. Under normal circumstances, this would make sense in the interest of the continuation of government in a crisis.
But it’s a hard pill to swallow, so to speak, when so many of the newly inoculated will be legislators and other political leaders who have spent much of the last year dismissing the seriousness of the pandemic, refusing to set an example of responsible mask-wearing and social distancing, and voting against assistance for ordinary Americans facing death, illness and economic hardship.
Pence, for instance, was blaming “the media” back in June for promoting alarm about a second wave of COVID-19 infections, since daily average new cases had fallen to 20,000 from 30,000 in April and 25,000 in May. Average new case rates currently stand at 194,500 per day. This happened on his watch as head of the White House coronavirus task force, a job at which he has been majestically ill-prepared.
President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris also received shots, in public, but that’s consistent with their approach to the pandemic and their support for public health initiatives in the crisis.
It’s possible, even likely, that the vaccine program is just experiencing birth pains. That’s the view of Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, who writes that “this problem will probably get sorted out in the next few weeks and people will soon forget that it ever happened.”
He may be right. But if so, that will likely be because the program will be taken over by a new administration starting on Jan. 20, one that has already started assembling a pandemic task force of experienced experts in epidemiology and public health, devoid of the sycophants and incompetents who have predominated in the Trump administration.
Biden at least knows he’s facing an elemental challenge, and he hasn’t shown any inclination thus far to shun responsibility for meeting it.
Immigrants seeking asylum walk through the detention center in Dilley, Texas. (photo: Eric Gay/AP)
'Family Detention Still Exists': Immigration Groups Warn the Fight Is Far From Over
Amanda Holpuch, Guardian UK
Holpuch writes: "Few people have been as closely involved with family separation and reunification as attorney Erika Pinheiro, one of the leaders of the immigration advocacy group Al Otro Lado."
Advocates have hope that Biden will build better policy, but they are nervous about Obama-era officials having key roles
And though Joe Biden’s win in the presidential election puts an end to Donald Trump’s laser focus on restricting all forms of immigration, Pinheiro wants people to understand that the fight for immigrant rights in the country is far from over.
“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Pinheiro, Al Otro Lado’s litigation and policy director, said. “It’s not a given that everyone will be reunified, or families, babies are going to be let out of cages – family detention still exists.”
Al Otro Lado has offices on both sides of the border, where it assists immigrants with family reunification, detention, access to healthcare, asylum, deportation and other issues.
It was founded in 2011 and was volunteer run until Trump won the 2016 election on an anti-immigrant platform. The group’s leaders then committed to the work as a full-time, paying job.
It has been a grueling four years. Pinheiro said the Trump administration caused her to question how she could be an attorney when laws were changing each week and the government did not seem interested in following the ones which remained. “Just the baseline of being able to do our jobs as attorneys was thrown into chaos,” Pinheiro said.
There was the added factor of responding to atrocities a tired, exhausted world didn’t want to, or couldn’t, process.
“It felt in many instances that it was screaming into the ether about people dying at the border, people suffering all these horrific human rights violations,” she said. “And some of it got through to the public, like family separation, but a lot of it didn’t.”
With Covid, the group’s work has expanded even more.
“We also have had to do emergency food assistance, quarantine housing for medically vulnerable families,” Pinheiro said. “We’ve supported a dozen shelters in getting clean water and food and PPE, we have helped raise the capacity of several medical organizations here on the border to make sure our clients would have access to any care.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bars asylum seekers and refugees from the US under an order called Title 42. People who attempt to cross the border are returned, or expelled, back to Mexico, without an opportunity to test their asylum claims. More than 250,000 migrants processed at the US-Mexico border between March and October were expelled, according to US Customs and Border Protection data.
The situation is dire. Thousands of asylum-seekers are stuck at the border, uncertain when they will be able to file their claims. The camps they wait in are an even greater public health risk that before.
Outside the border, Al Otro Lado has fought for detained migrants to get PPE and medical releases. Prisons are one of the worst possible places to be when there is a contagious disease and deaths in the custody of US immigration authorities have increased dramatically this year. They have also provided supplies to homeless migrants in southern California who have been shut out of public hygiene facilities.
Pinheiro said there will be improvements with Trump out of office, but some of the Biden campaign promises to address asylum issues at the border will be toothless until the CDC order is revoked. It’s a point she plans to make in conversations with the transition team.
A prime concern for advocates about the Biden administration is that it will include some of the same people from Barack Obama’s administration, which had more deportations than any other president and laid the groundwork for some controversial Trump policies.
While it is a worry for Pinheiro, she has hope that the new administration will build something better. “I would hope a lot of those people, and I know for some of them, have been able to reflect on how the systems they built were weaponized by Trump to do things like family separation or detaining children,” she said.
Family separation, which has left 545 children still waiting to be reunited with their parents, was a crucial issue for many voters and Pinheiro hopes that energy translates to other immigration policies.
“How did you feel when your government committed the atrocity of family separation in your name?” Pinheiro said. “The next step is really understanding that similar and sometimes worse atrocities are still being committed in the name of border security and limiting migration.”
Boxes containing the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine are prepared to be shipped at the McKesson distribution center in Olive Branch on December 20, 2020, in Olive Branch, Mississippi. (photo: Paul Sancya/Getty)
World Faces Covid-19 "Vaccine Apartheid"
Sharon Lerner, The Intercept
Lerner writes: "Even countries that hosted vaccine trials - like Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, and Turkey - will not receive adequate supplies."
fizer CEO Albert Bourla recently heaped praise on “the almost 44,000 people who selflessly raised their hands to participate in our trial.”
“Each of you has helped to bring the world one step closer to our shared goal of a potential vaccine to fight this devastating pandemic,” Bourla wrote in an open letter to volunteers who took part in Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine research, which was conducted in Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, Germany, and Turkey as well as the U.S. His letter was published on November 9, the same day Pfizer announced that the vaccine was more than 90 percent effective at preventing the disease, and Bourla laid this considerable accomplishment at the feet of the medical volunteers: “You are the true heroes, and the whole world owes you a tremendous debt of gratitude.”
But Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, and Turkey will have to be satisfied with Pfizer’s gratitude, because (like most countries in the world) they won’t be receiving enough of the vaccine to inoculate their populations, at least not anytime soon.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and Germany — along with Canada and the rest of the European Union — have contracted for enough doses of various Covid-19 vaccines to inoculate their populations several times over. While the U.S. is struggling with the logistics of its vaccine rollout — fewer than 3 million people have received the first dose so far — adequate supplies should eventually be available. The U.S. pre-purchased 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine for $1.95 billion in the summer (and reportedly passed on the opportunity to secure another 100 million doses). Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a deal to buy another 100 million doses of the vaccine by July 2021, and the government has the option to purchase an additional 400 million doses. The U.S. has also purchased 200 million doses of the Moderna vaccine, which is also extremely effective against Covid-19. Those doses are due by the second quarter of 2021, and the government may buy up to 300 million more doses. And the U.S. has contracts for additional vaccine doses from Ology, Sanofi, Novavax, and Johnson & Johnson, whose candidates are in earlier stages of development.
Pharmaceutical companies and individual executives are already profiting handsomely from their medical breakthroughs. On the same day that he sent his open letter, Bourla, whose net worth is estimated at more than $26 million, sold more than $5 million worth of his shares of Pfizer stock. Pfizer has already made an estimated $975 million from the vaccine this year and is expected to earn another $19 billion in revenue from the vaccine in 2021, according to Morgan Stanley. Pfizer’s profit margin on the vaccine is estimated at between 60 and 80 percent. Moderna is projected to make more than $10 billion from its vaccine next year.
The estimated $100 billion in sales to be made from a Covid-19 vaccine was clearly part of what attracted pharmaceutical companies to vaccine research. For the participants in that research, the calculus is different. In developing countries, “you find people who don’t have medical care and are desperate for medical attention and will grasp at the straws of medical research,” said Harriet Washington, a medical ethicist and author.
That desperation is only part of the reason that pharmaceutical companies do the majority of their research in less affluent countries, according to Washington, who pointed to a relative lack of oversight and lower operating costs as additional reasons that the industry is drawn to those places. The Covid-19 vaccine research participants in South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Turkey “will work more cheaply than the people in the U.S. and Germany,” she said.
The ethical problem this creates — that people in developing countries have less access to medical breakthroughs despite shouldering a disproportionate share of the risk that enables their development — far predates the coronavirus pandemic. “There are inherent inequities that are repeated in every epidemic,” said Washington. “It’s a consistent pattern; you’ll see it as far back as you want to go.”
Whether they participate in drug research or not, people in low- and middle-income countries often lack access to lifesaving medical breakthroughs, which are sometimes priced out of their reach. Gilead, which holds the patent on the hepatitis C drug sofosbuvir, has provided a clear and tragic illustration of how deadly this dynamic can be. Only about one in seven people who needed the company’s lifesaving drug in Brazil had received it as of June 2019. In that country alone, thousands died of the treatable disease, according to the nonprofit group Make Medicines Affordable. Though many drugs eventually become available, access is often delayed for people in developing countries, as was the case for lifesaving HIV medications, which are still unavailable to some 15 million infected people around the world and arrived in some poorer countries more than a decade after they were used in wealthier ones.
“We see lags occur in almost every intervention in the world whether it’s a new drug or medical device,” said Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center. “There’s not as much money in products reaching markets in low- and middle-income countries.” As a result, in much of the world, access to lifesaving developments often depends on funding from donors, “which is always less than you’d like,” he said.
The deadly consequences of delayed access to the Covid-19 vaccine will be on display in the coming year. The number of people vaccinated worldwide in 2021 will depend partly on whether other potential vaccines candidates are successful and whether they’re delivered as one dose or two. But it’s already clear that the majority of countries will not have enough, while rich countries are hoarding vaccine supplies.
An international initiative to ensure equitable access to the vaccine, called the COVAX Advance Market Commitment and governed by the public-private health alliance Gavi, aims to provide participating countries with enough vaccines to inoculate up to 20 percent of their populations by the end of 2021. But even under the best-case scenario, this goal would leave the vast majority of the population unvaccinated — and is “subject to funding availability,” as the group’s website makes clear.
Some international health activists have become frustrated with Gavi. “On day one, when the first person was vaccinated in the U.K., we should have been seeing the equivalent in a developing country,” said Kate Elder, senior vaccines policy adviser for Médecins Sans Frontières. “But we didn’t. And we don’t have any precision about when we can expect those doses in developing countries.”
Elder pointed out that, despite its stated goal of providing equal access, the international vaccine distribution effort is hindered by the global power and wealth imbalance. “Gavi will never call out vaccine nationalism because its biggest donors — like the U.K. government — are the most powerful members of their board,” she said.
The World Bank is providing additional aid for the delivery of vaccines, but it is in the form of loans, which poor countries will need to repay. As a result of the delays, many people in low-income countries will likely not get the vaccine until 2023 or 2024, which will result in an unknown number of deaths.
“We’re facing a global vaccine apartheid,” said Zain Rizvi, law and policy researcher at Public Citizen, who predicted that the delay in vaccine access will prove “calamitous.”
Public Citizen has proposed several ways that the U.S. could expand access to the vaccine, including building new production facilities and taking advantage of an obscure statute that allows the government to override companies’ patents on inventions they fund. Meanwhile, Kenya, India, and South Africa put forward a measure at the World Trade Organization that would waive some intellectual property rights for coronavirus-related products, including vaccines. The proposal, which was supported by 99 countries, has yet to pass after being opposed by wealthy countries, including the U.S., European Union members, Japan, the U.K., and Australia.
But the waiving of patents is only the first step in ensuring global access to vaccines. “Know-how is the bigger problem than patent rights in the shorter run,” said James Love, who directs the nonprofit advocacy group Knowledge Ecology International. Love pointed to Moderna, the federally funded vaccine maker that has already pledged not to enforce the patent on its vaccine. “But you still can’t go out and make their vaccine unless you know how they did it,” said Love. “You need to force the people who have the know-how to share the know-how because it’s a fucking pandemic.”
While the U.S. government and the companies it funded to make vaccines are already getting credit for ending the pandemic, Love points to a big hole in that success story: that taxpayers wound up paying for deals that limited global access.
“Some people are going to say this is a massive success because the innovation story is pretty good,” said Love. “But the reality is the government took our money, gave it to the companies, and wrote terrible contracts so we ended up with very few rights over the inventions that we financed.”
The problem was entirely avoidable, according to Love. “The government could have put mandatory sharing of know-how built into each of its contracts so the technology transfer would have started as soon as these vaccines were in clinical trials,” he said. “That did not happen. And one of the consequences of these giveaways is that we’ve condemned developing countries to delayed access to vaccines.”
The Trump administration has been particularly generous with the pharmaceutical industry, removing standard protections from some of their contracts, and has shunned international efforts to pool resources to fight the pandemic. But it’s not too late for the country to reverse course.
“President-elect Biden has the power to change that,” said Public Citizen’s Rizvi. “He can think bigger and share the vaccine recipe and help ramp up production and manufacturing capacity to further expand vaccine supply quickly.”
The ethical dilemmas raised by conducting Covid-19 vaccine research in countries that may not have their own supply for years are fixable too, according to Washington. “The inequities are easy to address,” she said. “You simply treat people in the developing world the same way you treat everyone else.”
Badland National Park in the Black Hills region of South Dakota. (photo: Jean-Marc Giboux)
Drilling and Mining Companies Got a Holiday Gift From Trump
Cameron Oglesby, Grist
Oglesby writes: "For a limited time only, some of America's protected lands are open for heavy-duty industrial development."
The Trump administration has made it a priority to open vast stretches of U.S. lands to mineral extraction projects. Over the past four years, at least 10 million acres have been leased to oil and drilling companies, turning formerly pristine forests and mountain-scapes into spreads of cratered, barren land laden with heavy machinery.
The next administration is likely to take a different approach to federal lands. President-elect Joe Biden will take office on January 20, 2021, and has announced a diverse and climate-conscious set of cabinet nominees. Notably, the nomination of Deb Haaland — who would become the first Native American Secretary of Interior — brought many environmental organizations hope for the responsible and equitable management of federal lands in the future.
But in a last-minute dash before President Trump leaves office, his administration has approved several mining and drilling projects that may commence before Biden has any say. These projects, in states around the country, would bring in thousands of jobs for residents — but as The New York Times noted recently, that would often come at the expense of protected lands, endangered species, and sacred Indigenous sites. Here’s a sampling of what’s been happening in public and federal lands over the holidays.
Arizona
The Southwest has been a prime target for corporate projects under the Trump administration, and Arizona is no exception. Now in question: part of the Chí’chil Biłdagoteel Historic District in Tonto National Forest in central Arizona. The landmark is considered sacred ground by many tribes, and has served as a site of cultural and ceremonial significance for close to 1,500 years.
An act passed by Congress in 2014 proposed the transfer of 2,422 acres of this land to Rio Tinto’s Resolution Copper Mining. (The international mining operation Rio Tinto recently faced backlash for destroying a 46,000-year-old aboriginal heritage site in Australia.) Now, the Trump administration is rushing the environmental assessment process to make the land transfer happen earlier than originally planned. The Forest Service is expected to release its final environmental assessment next month, after which — no matter the outcome — the lands will be transferred to Rio Tinto. The U.S. Department of Agriculture notes that the mining operation could leave a 1.8 mile-wide crater in the middle of the desert oasis.
Representative Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona, told the Guardian that the administration was “cutting corners” for the mining project while the tribes dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic. “Trump and Rio Tinto know the tribes’ reaction would be very strong and public under normal circumstances,” he said, “but the tribes are trying to save their people right now.”
Utah
The Interior Department may approve drilling in the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness Area next to Utah’s famous Horseshoe Canyon. The Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, is in conversations with the company Twin Bridges about their Bowknot Helium project to extract what is believed to be a huge underground helium deposit.
Labyrinth Canyon has one of the most iconic, world-renowned tributary systems in the United States, and it was designated as wilderness in a sweeping land conservation bill from 2019. When lands are set aside as wilderness, legally, they are to be left undisturbed from any commercial use. However, just a couple of weeks before the bill went into effect, the BLM issued a lease for the helium extraction project. Earlier this month, several environmental nonprofits filed a lawsuit against the Interior Department over its plans for the area, claiming that it rushed to complete the deal, forgoing a proper public comment period and an adequate review of the project’s environmental consequences.
Nevada
The lithium deposit at Thacker Pass, in public land in northern Nevada, is one of the biggest on the planet. The Department of Interior may soon grant final approval for a proposed open-pit lithium mine and processing facility here.
Lithium is a key resource for transitioning to renewable energy — it’s used to create batteries for storing energy generated by wind turbines and solar panels, in addition to use in electric vehicles, cell phones, computers, and other devices. Currently, there is only one other lithium mine in the country, the Silver Peak lithium mine (also in Nevada). The proposed project in Thacker Pass is expected to provide 60,000 tons of battery-grade lithium carbonate every year.
But there may be some drawbacks. Several Humboldt residents expressed concerns over the proposed mine in reaction to the mine’s draft environmental impact statement. They argue that the project could contaminate the groundwater, disrupt local cattle operations, and threaten endangered species like the sage grouse.
Virginia
Jefferson National Forest comprises almost 1.8 million acres of public lands spanning Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Soon, it may see another natural gas pipeline built through its trees. The Forest Service plans to push forward the Mountain Valley Pipeline project, a 300-mile pipeline spanning from northern West Virginia into southern Virginia. The pipeline would pass under the Appalachian Trail through approximately 3.5 miles of woods, disrupting old-growth forest.
The project, started in 2017, was halted after environmental organizations and community members expressed concerns over sedimentation, erosion, and threats to endangered species. Earlier this year, the Forest Service released a revised environmental impact statement for the project, which critics said provided limited details and underestimated its impact on the protected lands.
South Dakota
The Oglala Sioux Tribe has been fighting a proposed uranium mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The Dewey-Burdock mine, proposed by the Canadian company Powertech, would span more than 12,600 acres and is slated for construction on an area that was formerly part of the Great Sioux Reservation. Members of the tribe claim that the project would violate an 1868 treaty and federal laws that protect the land as an ancestral burial ground.
They also have concerns about the process for extracting uranium, which they fear could pollute underground water resources. The mine would extract as much as 8,500 gallons of groundwater a minute from the Inyan Kara aquifer to collect a total of 10 million pounds of uranium.
Last month, the EPA provided final approval on several permits for the construction of the uranium mine. However, the project will need regulatory approvals from other state and federal agencies before it can move forward.
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