18 December 22
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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
The poll, from the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, reveals that a visceral fear of encountering Elon Musk is what drives eighty-nine per cent of those who follow his movements.
Drilling down into the results, that percentage is even higher among people who work for Elon Musk.
The widespread anxiety about crossing paths with Musk bodes well for a new Twitter account, launched last night, which indicates locations where the Tesla C.E.O. is least likely to be found.
The account, @WhereElonIsnt, offers users real-time updates on safe spaces where they have virtually no chance of running into Musk, such as blood-donation centers and the Amtrak quiet car.
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California congressman Adam Schiff and member of House January 6 committee. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Does a Criminal Referral
From the January 6 Committee Mean Anything?
Dramatic statement comes one day before January 6 panel set to release outline of its investigative report on US Capitol attack
Schiff’s dramatic statement on CNN’s State of the Union came one day before the House January 6 select committee to which he belongs is poised to release an outline of its extensive investigative report on the US Capitol attack, which has been linked to nine deaths, including the suicides of traumatized law enforcement officers.
The committee is expected to use its last meeting on Monday to refer Trump, as well as others, to the US justice department in relation to the former president’s attempts to reverse his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden.
During this final meeting, the panel is expected to outline an executive summary of its findings, propose legislative recommendations, vote to adopt the report – and then vote on possible criminal and civil referrals. Schiff is one of nine members, seven of whom are Democrats like him, serving on the January 6 committee.
The potential referrals involving Trump are expected to involve obstruction of an official congressional proceeding as well as conspiracy to defraud the United States. The Guardian first reported the nature of these referrals.
Schiff told CNN host Jake Tapper that he “can’t comment” on specifics of any possible referrals. The predicted criminal referrals are effectively symbolic because Congress can’t force prosecutors to pursue charges.
“I think that the evidence is there that Trump committed criminal offenses in connection with his efforts to overturn the election,” said Schiff, who chairs the House intelligence committee. “And viewing it as a former prosecutor, I think there’s sufficient evidence to charge the [former] president.”
Tapper asked Schiff whether this was enough to secure a conviction.
“Well, I don’t know what the justice department has. I do know what’s in the public record. The evidence seems pretty plain to me, but I would want to see the full body of evidence, if I were in the prosecutor’s shoes, to make a decision,” Schiff responded. “But this is someone, who in multiple ways, tried to pressure state officials to find votes that didn’t exist. This is someone who tried to interfere with a joint session, even inciting a mob to attack the Capitol.
“If that’s not criminal, then – then I don’t know what it is.”
Asked whether he thought Trump would face criminal charges, Schiff said: “The short answer is, I don’t know. I think that he should. I think he should face the same remedy, force of law that anyone else would.”
Schiff said he was worried, however, that “it may take until he is no longer politically relevant for justice to be served. That’s not the way it should be in this country, but there seems to be an added evidentiary burden with someone who has a large enough following.”
“That simply should not be the case, but I find it hard, otherwise, to explain why, almost two years from the events of January 6, and with the evidence that’s already in the public domain, why the justice department hasn’t moved more quickly than it has,” Schiff also said.
The Guardian previously reported that the Trump allies who might face criminal referrals include former high-ranking White House staffers. The panel is also expected to make civil referrals to the House ethics committee involving Republican Congress members – as well as suggest disbarment for some of Trump’s attorneys.
The January 6 committee has largely concluded that the insurrection was rooted in a conspiracy, sources previously told the Guardian. The panel found that Trump oversaw a “political” plan for his Vice-President Mike Pence to refuse to certify election results in a joint session on January 6 as well as a “coup” plot to force Congress’s hand if he refused.
Committee investigators think that Trump’s alleged desire to illegally thwart the certification of the election he lost was obvious months before January 6. They believe it extended from the time he agreed with a fake elector plot so states would swap Biden’s electoral college votes for him until he refused for hours to call off Capitol attackers, sources had told the Guardian.
Trump did not leave documentary evidence of his alleged involvement, but his staffers left a paper trail. During Trump’s presidency, he used his power to stifle inquiries, the committee is expected to say. One of Trump’s attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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A Lockheed Martin F-35 on display in 2020. The company booked more than $950 million of its own missile defense orders from the Pentagon, in part to refill stockpiles for key missile systems now being used in Ukraine. (photo: Jakub Porzycki/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
The combination of the war in Ukraine and concern about longer-term threats from Russia and China is driving a bipartisan push to increase U.S. capacity to produce weapons.
Congress is on track in the coming week to give final approval to a national military budget for the current fiscal year that is expected to reach approximately $858 billion — or $45 billion above what President Biden had requested.
If approved at this level, the Pentagon budget will have grown at 4.3 percent per year over the last two years — even after inflation — compared with an average of less than 1 percent a year in real dollars between 2015 and 2021, according to an analysis by Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments for The New York Times.
Spending on procurement would rise sharply next year, including a 55 percent jump in Army funding to buy new missiles and a 47 percent jump for the Navy’s weapons purchases.
On Friday, Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, put the buildup in strategic terms, saying the war in Ukraine had exposed shortfalls in the nation’s military industrial base that needed to be addressed to ensure the United States is “able to support Ukraine and to be able to deal with contingencies elsewhere in the world.”
Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest military contractor, had booked more than $950 million worth of its own missile military orders from the Pentagon in part to refill stockpiles being used in Ukraine. The Army has awarded Raytheon Technologies more than $2 billion in contracts to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons used to help Ukraine.
“We went through six years of Stingers in 10 months,” Gregory J. Hayes, Raytheon’s chief executive, said in an interview earlier this month, referring to 1,600 of the company’s shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles sent by the U.S. government to Ukraine. “So it will take us multiple years to restock and replenish.”
But those contracts are just the leading edge of what is shaping up to be a big new defense buildup. Military spending next year is on track to reach its highest level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011, and the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II — a level that is more than the budgets for the next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined.
Even more orders are coming in to military contractors from U.S. allies in Europe and Asia, as they too have concluded they must do more to arm themselves against rising global threats. Japan moved this month to double its spending on defense over the next five years, putting aside a pacifist stand it has largely maintained since 1945.
And none of this counts an estimated $18 billion of planned but now delayed weapons deliveries by the United States to arm Taiwan against a possible future attack by China.
The combination of the Ukraine war and the growing consensus about the emergence of a new era of superpower confrontation is prompting efforts to ensure the military industrial base can respond to surges in demand. The issue has become urgent in some cases as the U.S. and its NATO allies seek to keep weapons flowing to Ukraine without diminishing their own stocks to worrisome levels.
The Ukrainian military has run through years’ worth of the missile production capacity of Western suppliers in a matter of months. At the same time, contractors remain concerned about investing to meet growing demand for weapons that could dry up again when the war ends or politics shifts course.
“The difficulty of starting a production line back up, that doesn’t come for free,” Tom Arseneault, president of BAE Systems, which is now considering restarting its M777 howitzer manufacturing line, which the company had been in the process of shutting down. The M777 is a highly accurate, towed gun that fires 155-millimeter artillery shells, which are also in diminishing supply.
The annual military authorization bill that passed the Senate on Thursday prevents the Air Force and Navy from retiring aging weapons systems that the military would like to take out of service, including certain C-130 transport planes or F-22 fighter jets. At the same time, it includes billions of dollars in extra money to build even more new ships and planes than the Pentagon itself asked for, including $2.2 billion alone for an extra Navy-guided missile destroyer, according to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
And there is $678 million to expand ammunition plants in spots such as Scranton, Pa.; Middletown, Iowa; and Kingsport, Tenn., where contractors work with the Army to manufacture the ammunition that Ukrainian artillery crews have burned through at an alarming rate. (The money for these programs is expected to be included in a huge appropriations bill that appears to be on track to pass Congress and signed into law by Mr. Biden by the end of the week.)
Spending could be even higher, as Congress is also considering a request for an extra $21.7 billion for the Pentagon, above the already expanded 2023 annual budget, to allocate more money to resupply materials used in Ukraine.
In an indication of how government policy is shifting to rebuild industrial capacity for the military, Congress this year has moved to allow the Defense Department to more broadly make multiyear spending commitments for certain weapons systems and shipbuilding operations. That is a provision that industry lobbyists have long pushed for, arguing it gives companies certainty that investments they make to start production will see continued returns in future years.
“We have to make a commitment with the industry,” said Senator Deb Fischer, Republican of Nebraska and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who supported the change. “Then the industry will step forward to restart or grow their production lines.”
That move alone suggests $73 billion in additional munitions orders could be on the way in the next three years, contracts that will largely benefit the big players like Lockheed and Raytheon, according to an analysis by Myles Walton, a military industry analyst at Wolfe Research, a Wall Street research firm.
These trends help explain stock market performance of the major military contractors — a small group of which control the bulk of sales to the Pentagon. Lockheed and Northrop Grumman both have seen their stock prices jump more than 35 percent so far this year in a market whose main indexes are down overall for the year.
Opponents of higher military budgets say they are frustrated.
Military contractors are “riding high again, and Ukraine just gives them another argument as to why things need to continue onward and upward,” said William D. Hartung, a fellow at the non-interventionist Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
“The trillion-dollar defense budget — that is where we are headed,” said Lawrence J. Korb, who served as an assistant defense secretary during the Reagan administration and was once a vice president at Raytheon. “Nobody seems to want to make the tough choices. Even the Democrats now seem to be afraid to be seen as being soft on defense.”
The biggest barrier for growth for major military contractors — the list includes Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, BAE, Northrop Grumman and Huntington Ingalls Industries — is finding sufficient supplies of key components, such as microelectronics and missile warheads, as well as a steady supply of new employees to assemble all these items.
“You cannot throw much more money at the seven shipbuilders that build U.S. warships in the United States of America right now,” Adm. Michael M. Gilday, the chief of naval operations, said this month during the Reagan National Defense Forum in California, referring to a $32.6 billion shipbuilding budget in the military authorization bill that is $4.7 billion more than the Pentagon requested. “Their capacity is about at max. And Congress is helping us max them out.”
Raytheon, which has 180,000 workers, has hired 27,000 new employees so far this year, its chief executive said in October. But even with that, it is still running into bottlenecks in terms of available parts and labor shortages that are slowing sales, its executives said.
The sheer scale of the munitions and missiles sent to Ukraine illustrates just how much matériel a war can consume.
That includes more than 104 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, at least one million rounds of 155-millimeter artillery shells, 46,000 anti-tank weapons, more than 1,600 Stinger antiaircraft missiles and 8,500 Javelin anti-armor missiles, according to a Pentagon tally.
The resupply challenge is not just a matter of money. Military contractors have nearly stopped manufacturing Stingers — Raytheon’s last contract from the U.S. government was in 2002, Mr. Haynes said. And while Javelins are still being made jointly by Raytheon and Lockheed — in September they were awarded a $311 million contract to deliver more of them — historically they have been able to make only about 2,100 a year, or about a quarter of what Ukraine has burned through since the outbreak of the war in February.
In total, the Pentagon as of early December had awarded at least $6 billion to military contractors to resupply these and other items sent to Ukraine.
“We’re going to ramp up,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said this month. “We’ve really been working closely with industry to both increase their capacity and also the speed at which they’re able to produce.”
The overall spending on national defense still remains relatively low as a percentage of the nation’s economy: about 3.2 percent of the gross domestic product this year, compared to 37 percent during World War II and 13 percent during the Korean War, according to Pentagon records.
Still, companies are scrambling to avoid or resolve bottlenecks caused by the increase in demand.
Lockheed, for example, spent more than $60 million of its own money in advance of getting Pentagon contract commitment to build more of its High Mobility Artillery Rocket System vehicles, or HIMARS, which fire guided rockets carrying 200 pounds of explosives that can hit targets nearly 50 miles away. The vehicles have been much sought after by Ukraine, which has used them to devastating effect against the Russians.
Traditionally, Lockheed has been able to build 60 of these trucks per year, but it is now shifting production to 24 hours a day and seven days a week in an effort to bring that annual total to 96 units. It also now has a new $430 million contract to deliver more HIMARS, along with a new $521 million contract to build more of the rockets, called GMLRS, that these vehicles can fire.
These resupply orders, while large in terms of many other contracts the federal government issues, are still relatively small for the biggest contractors. At Lockheed, for example, about 70 percent of sales come from the U.S. government, and most of the rest from other governments worldwide. Supply chain and labor shortage problems are cutting into sales and profits, including at Lockheed, which expects to see annual sales decline this year to $62.3 billion from $67 billion.
“The clutch is engaging but into some lower gears initially,” James Taiclet, Lockheed’s chief executive, said in October, adding that higher sales might not show up for another year.
But there are more of the big-ticket orders coming. In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Switzerland and Germany have both moved in recent months to finalize orders for the F-35 fighter jets, collectively worth $16 billion. Overall foreign military sales notifications to Congress so far in 2022 have totaled $81 billion, the third highest figure in the last 25 years, with an increasing share of these sales going to European and Asian nations.
Next year’s military budget also includes major investments in new hypersonic weapons that are also being aggressively pursued by China. Raytheon and Northrop Grumman in September won a $1 billion contract just to build prototypes for the Air Force.
Other companies want to replace older equipment sent to Ukraine with newer models. BAE, for example, intends to sell the Army more armored vehicles called AMPVs, in place of the more than 200 of BAE’s Vietnam-era M113 armored personnel carriers sent to Ukraine, which it no longer makes.
“Nothing’s cheap, right?” said Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro this month at the conference in California, as he ran through many new investments the Navy is making. “Nothing’s free.”
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Dr. Stephanie Crewe, a pediatrician at the Virginia Commonwealth University's Children's Pavilion, says she became suspicious of the health care system herself when her aunt died of breast cancer in her 30s. (photo: Cheriss May/POLITICO)
Organ thieves, the Tuskegee Experiment and why so many Black people distrust the health care system.
The next afternoon, May 25, his heart was sewn into the chest of a white business executive named Joseph Klett, also 54, at the Medical College of Virginia. It was one of the first heart transplants in the country, and it gave the med school the status it had sought at the forefront of transplant science.
Tucker’s family hadn’t consented. In fact, they didn’t even learn about the transplant until the funeral home in Stony Creek, Va., told them that there was something peculiar about the dead man’s body. It was missing its kidneys and its heart.
The case of the “The Organ Thieves,” as local writer Chip Jones entitled his 2020 book about it, is not broadly known outside Richmond. But it is one of countless incidents across the decades of abusive and exploitative practices directed at, or performed on, Black Americans in the name of science. The most famous, of course, is the “Tuskegee Experiment,” where the government conducted a 40-year study that withheld treatment for syphilis from Black men.
With that kind of history, it should not be surprising that there is still broad distrust in the Black community toward medical professionals. As recently as October 2020, a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Undefeated found 70 percent of Black Americans believe people seeking care are treated unfairly based on race or ethnicity.
Yet blaming suspicions and distrust on long-ago atrocities lets the current health care system — still rife with inequities and injustices — off the hook.
Like many areas in American life, health care is in the midst of a reckoning on racial justice. It was catalyzed, of course, from the 2020 police murder of George Floyd that galvanized millions of people across the country. But it was further fueled by the huge disparities in Covid disease and death that emerged early in the pandemic, as Black people and other minority groups bore the brunt of the devastation.
The last few years have seen a burst of initiatives popping up to tackle health equity and racial disparity and distrust in American health care. But it will take profoundly honest and sustained efforts to bring about real change. In interviews and conversations with several dozen Black Americans across the country, including policymakers, medical professionals and ordinary people, young and old, some of whom have been hurt by the system itself, it’s clear that skepticism in the Black community toward the health care system is pervasive — and warranted.
Discrimination, albeit in subtler and sometimes unintentional forms, persists today and Black patients and their families encounter it again and again. That perpetuates widespread Black distrust of health care which in turn perpetuates health disparities and broader suffering. And it’s not just poor Black Americans. Serena Williams’ riches and fame didn’t shield her from nearly dying after childbirth. This reality also gives rise to myths and conspiracy theories, whether about HIV/AIDS in the 1980s or the coronavirus in the 2020s, which only makes it harder to convince people to get the treatment they need and deserve — including Covid tests, vaccines and boosters. (A concerted national effort narrowed the racial gap on takeup of the initial round of Covid vaccinations, but CDC data shows it has re-emerged on who’s getting boosters.)
The “theft” of Bruce Tucker’s heart has not been forgotten in Richmond, the one-time capital of the Confederacy, which is still grappling with racism in its past and present. The big medical system, now part of Virginia Commonwealth University, which absorbed the Medical College that same year, has embarked on a host of equity and trust-repairing programs within the institution and the community. That includes a “health hub” providing access to medical and social services in a poor part of town and regular “Faith and Facts Friday” Zoom calls bringing together VCU doctors and Black clergy to combat health myths and misinformation — on Covid, cancer and more.
Regular participants like the Rev. Todd Gray, a community fixture who’s spent nearly 30 years at the Fifth Street Baptist Church, come out of those meetings better equipped to help congregants distinguish between fearmongering and misinformation, on one hand, and facts and science, on the other. “Conversations lead to trust, which leads to more folks accessing medical care,” he says. “We have saved many, many lives.”
Dr. Robert Winn, director of VCU’s Massey Cancer Center, one of the very few Black oncologists to lead a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center anywhere in the country, is a convener of “Faith and Fridays,” and a leader of many of the VCU community outreach efforts.
Upbeat and energetic, Winn sees progress. “At my institution, we’re going beyond talk. We’re making real efforts,” he says. But he’s also a realist. “I have grown up in racism since the day I was born,” he says. He understands that when a Black patient walks into his clinic, they bring with them not just a fear of cancer, but fear, or at least suspicion, of the health system itself. Our history, he notes, is our history.
Ronald Wyatt, 68, a physician and nationally recognized expert on patient safety, grew up on a dirt road with an outhouse in Perry County, Ala. Wyatt remembers hearing of a Black woman nearby who took her child to get a bad cut stitched up. When the white doctor learned she couldn’t pay, he took out the stitches — and a veterinarian ended up treating the kid. He remembers another white doctor who would treat Black people but wouldn’t touch them — not even with a stethoscope. The doctor had a Black woman assistant do all that. And she had to use a separate stethoscope; he had a different one for his white patients.
“A lot of people didn’t know a damn thing about Tuskegee. But they knew what was happening to them,” Wyatt says.
It’s not so blatant nowadays, but Wyatt still sees condescending and inferior treatment of Black patients — including members of his own family — over and over again. It makes him distrustful. It makes him mad. He says he is what people used to call “an angry Black man” until that term went out of style; now they’d call him “passionate.”
Experiences like his may sound like random anecdotes. Mountains and mountains of data show they are an ongoing reality. And it all leads to much worse medical outcomes.
Black people have higher rates of uninsurance and less access to care. They are less likely to have a regular primary care provider, and when they do have a primary care doctor, they are less likely to be referred to a specialist. Their doctors write about them more critically or skeptically in their medical records. Their pain is undertreated, whether for a child with a broken bone or for someone at end of life. As recently as 2016, a study of medical students and residents found that nearly half of them believed that Black people tolerate pain better than white people. Some of these very highly educated people, at an elite university, actually believed the nonexistent pain differential was because Black people have thicker skin.
Black people have higher maternal mortality rates (triple that of white women), higher rates of preterm birth and higher rates of infant mortality. They have more lead poisoning. They have higher rates of asthma, diabetes and advanced (i.e. often late detected) cancer.
They live sicker. They die younger.
Discrimination, lack of access, mistrust and mistreatment aren’t unique to Black Americans; Latinos and other minority groups experience it, too. Poor people often wait longer for worse care in underfunded, understaffed — and often de facto racially segregated — public hospitals and clinics than richer, better-insured people. And they know it.
Growing up in Detroit, Michael Winans, now in his early 40s, was “too busy getting by” to pay attention to a syphilis experiment that ended before he was born. But distrust of the medical establishment flowed in his family. His grandmother survived a stroke but died during routine follow-ups; the family suspected sub-par care. Later, his mother hesitated when she needed fibroid surgery. When she finally went in, she ended up with an unexpected hysterectomy. Winans knows that sometimes happens, that the less invasive operation isn’t always enough. But was it necessary for his mother? He wonders.
“When you grow up in a predominantly Black town like Detroit, you can go much of your life without really interacting with someone of another race,” he says. “If the first time is when you have a health issue … you ask yourself, ‘Does this person care for me? Or see me as a number?’ It’s another level of potential trepidation or concern.”
The Black American experience is getting particular scrutiny right now, along with hopes for change. Some of the people interviewed for this story were more optimistic than others about progress. But none saw the health system as color-blind.
“People see that I’m Black before they notice — if they ever get to the point that they notice — that I have a PhD.,” says Cara James, who ran the Office of Minority Health at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the Obama administration. James, who also previously led work on racial disparities at the Kaiser Family Foundation, is now the president and CEO of Grantmakers in Health, which works with foundations and philanthropies to improve health care.
Things may have gotten better since the days when James would carefully select which suit to wear as she accompanied her grandmother, an agricultural worker in the South with little formal education, to medical appointments. But they haven’t improved enough.
“We are human,” she says, “We have perceptions and biases about others.”
Those biases can be subtle — or not.
When Matthew Thompson, a financial officer at a reproductive health organization in Texas, fell ill soon after relocating to Austin a few years back, he didn’t yet have a regular doctor but managed to get an appointment with someone. That doctor, who was white, took one look at Thompson, a 40-something Black male, and on the basis of a brief examination and blood pressure reading, diagnosed him with hypertension and handed him a prescription.
“He was a white doctor … he gave the whole speech about genetics and race,” Thompson recalls.
But most health differences between Black people and white people are not genetic; many are socioeconomic or the result of inequality or the lingering distrust that might deter a Black patient from seeking care earlier.
That doctor was right that hypertension is common in Black men. The problem is that Thompson didn’t have it. The doctor treated a stereotype, not a person.
Ironically, trust — tragically misplaced trust — was part of what allowed the Tuskegee study to go on for 40 long years. That’s according to Lillie Tyson Head, who leads the Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation, an organization created by the descendants of those who suffered. The men, like her father, Freddie Lee Tyson, who was born with syphilis, were told they had “bad blood,” not syphilis. And they trusted those men in white coats who kept studying them, untreated, endangering them, their wives and their children.
“Those men were trusting,” says Tyson Head, 78, a retired schoolteacher. “They went forth thinking they would be treated. And they were still trusting for over 40 years.”
It wasn’t only Alabama. For generations, in cities with medical schools, including here in Richmond, Black children were afraid to venture out after dark for fear that the “night doctors” would snatch and dissect them in a med school class. There was no such thing as murderous “night doctors,” but there were graverobbers furtively working for med schools, obtaining cadavers of Black people (and poor white people) without consent for anatomical study. VCU has found bones dumped in wells.
The aftereffects linger, generations later and far from Richmond. One warning occasionally passed down in the Black community is not to check the box to be organ donors, amid fears that hospitals would let Black people die if they were injured in order to take their organs.
A legacy of forced sterilization, often ordered or encouraged by governments or public agencies, also still reverberates for the Black community. Sterilizations without consent went on for decades, targeting people who were “feebleminded,” “promiscuous,” disabled, poor — and disproportionately Black women (as well as women in Puerto Rico, which had the highest sterilization rate in the world). The practice, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927, declined in the 1960s and 70s but did not disappear. In California prisons, for instance, 1,400 women underwent forced sterilization between 1997 and 2013. That history, family planning clinics say, makes some Black women still leery of longer-lasting forms of contraception like shots and implants.
More recently, the story of Henrietta Lacks was amplified in a best-selling book and an Oprah Winfrey-produced movie. A Black woman in her 30s with little education, Lacks was treated for terminal cervical cancer in Baltimore in 1951. In those days, doctors at prestigious institutes like Johns Hopkins took cells for research from all sorts of patients without knowledge or permission. But it was Lacks’ astonishing cells that have been used in countless medical research programs, saving untold numbers of lives and producing untold wealth for biotech — but not for her impoverished descendants.
Meanwhile, new modern miracles — ranging from the pulse oximeters used on Covid patients to all sorts of algorithms that fuel high-tech medicine and artificial intelligence — turn out to have racial biases baked in because they drew upon old data riddled with health disparities. The Food and Drug Administration is now looking into whether the oximeters’ faulty readings on dark skin may have elevated the Black death toll from the coronavirus. Critics wonder why it took so long.
Even now, studies find that doctors use more skeptical or derogatory terms about Black patients than white ones in electronic health records and are less likely to take Black patient narratives at face value. That simply validates Black people’s feelings of not being heard or respected, says Janiece Taylor of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, who has published research on this — and lived it. When Taylor’s husband, a Black retired detective, went to the emergency room in 2020 with severe back pain, he happened to be wearing a hoodie. He had to wait a very long time, she says, and “from his perspective, from what he assumed, they waited for him to take off the hoodie” so they could see if he had tracks on his arms.
“Now, as a nurse, I understand, there are drug-seeking patients,” she adds. But there are protocols for identifying that. And they don’t involve leaving a retired cop in severe pain, just sitting there until he got hot enough to take off the hoodie so someone could sneak a look at his bare arms.
Sometimes the legacy of distrust manifests in unexpected ways.
A 75-year-old woman who goes by “Miss Jacquie” and lives in a senior housing complex in Baltimore, spent the first 20 years of her life getting care in medical facilities that were segregated, officially or de facto. Now, on Medicare, she has choices, and she often intentionally chooses white doctors. Not because she thinks they are better listeners or more respectful (though she adores her own ultra-attentive physician, affectionately calling him Dr. Dracula because he’s always drawing her blood). But because she still can’t shake off suspicions — incorrect but implanted earlier in her life — that white doctors just got better medical education than Black ones.
“If you are sane, if you are smart, you will go into things with some skepticism,” says Derek Griffith, a health management professor at Georgetown and founding co-director of the Georgetown Racial Justice Institute. “Some of that can be passed down. But it’s also usually people’s own experiences.” Griffith defines mistrust as something like not trusting a doctor or a hospital, while distrust is more of a “lingering skepticism, I can’t put my finger on why.” Both are an issue, with huge consequences.
There’s a fair amount of agreement on what the solutions look like, on how to actually break down the distrust and mistrust of the health care system within the Black community. Whether meaningful action will be taken, and how quickly, is another question.
Hospitals can’t unilaterally address all the economic inequality in America that fuels health disparities, but they can invest in their communities. That includes diversifying the health care workforce, so it looks more like the country it serves, and patients feel there are people who understand them. Doing so will require building pipelines in the early grades at school that encourages kids to consider health professions and helps them envision themselves as doctors and nurses and researchers. The medical community also needs to expand Black participation in clinical trials, so that patients can be confident that new drugs and vaccines are safe for them, too. Amid the countless diversity, equity and inclusion projects that have been launched nationwide, health care experts need to get — and really listen to — community input, like the pastors of Richmond, are trying to do. And as trite as it sounds, opening hearts and minds is key. Bad faith has built up since the early days of this country; cultural change won’t come easy, but it’s doable over the long term.
Stephanie Crewe, a pediatrician who practices adolescent medicine at VCU, grew up poor in a tough neighborhood on the south side of Richmond and attended schools that, while legally desegregated, were still all Black. She learned suspicion of the health system at a young age, when her aunt died of breast cancer in her late 30s. Yet she was drawn to medicine herself. So devoid of role models in her real life, she turned to a 1980s TV sitcom about a young white physician prodigy. “Doogie Howser did a lot of stuff, and it was fascinating to me,” she recalls.
Now, she works both in traditional clinical settings through the med school and health system, and out in the community, including with kids in juvenile detention and those with behavioral health problems. “What makes the difference? How did I make it?” she wonders. It’s important, she notes, for kids not to have to rely on some TV fiction but “to see someone like me.” That in itself is a trust builder. “People start to trust when they have a shared experience, shared language, shared history.” She can build those bridges.
And rebuilding trust means reckoning with the past.
When the U.S. Public Health Service syphilis study began in Tuskegee in the 1930s, one thing was missing from the budget: money for funerals. The government asked a private philanthropy, the Milbank Memorial Fund, to cover the cost of burying these men. It quietly did so.
Decades later, Christopher Koller, a tall, lanky white man, became president of the foundation and learned about its past. He began exploring what had happened, what it had meant, and how wrong it felt. In time, that led him to the Tuskegee descendants and Lillie Tyson Head.
Their dialogue was not an easy one, not on either side. But for Tyson Head, it was a chance for enlightenment — not for the descendants, who knew the story, but for others. She wants to transform the legacy of that study from “shame and trauma, to honor and triumph.”
For Koller, talking with Tyson Head and other descendants became a privilege. The foundation issued a formal, public apology and participated in a Tuskegee ceremony this past June, everyone together under a tent singing “Lift Every Voice.”
It was a profound trust-building experience, Koller says, and a glimpse of what a more just future could be. And it was a relief for him and the foundation he leads: “We could finally come clean.”
Recalling that ceremony a few months later, Tyson Head says it was “surreal. … My emotions went in a lot of different directions.”
It didn’t lift her burden or obliterate the pain and trauma. But that moment, the trust she and Koller had built, gave her hope. And their experience helped her articulate the difference between “moving on” and “moving forward.”
When you move on, she says, “You want to leave the past behind and not think about what was in the past.” But that doesn’t break its power or release its grip on the present.
When you move forward, as she believes the Milbank Foundation has done, and the Tuskegee descendants are doing, you move ahead while keeping your eye on the past. And that, she says, lets you move on not with shame, or fear, or denial but with understanding toward something better.
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People fleeing war-torn Ukraine arrive on a train from Poland at the Hauptbahnhof main railway station in Berlin, Germany, on March 9. (photo: Steffi Loos/Getty Images)
Governments are trying to find more housing and meet other needs, as the humanitarian situation in Ukraine may prompt more to flee this winter.
That number is on top of the more than 1 million who’ve already made their way into Germany, and the more than 4.8 million Ukrainians who have registered as refugees in Europe since February. In total, nearly 8 million people have fled the country; another 6.5 million have moved within Ukraine. It is the spillover of months and months of war, a humanitarian tragedy that has gotten quieter but never stopped.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created the fastest and one of the largest displacements of people since World War II. Civil society and aid organizations immediately stepped up: strollers and winter coats and hot food at train stations, citizens offering up their basements and spare bedrooms. The European Union, too, mounted an unprecedented response, granting temporary protection to most people fleeing Ukraine. The mechanism bypassed EU countries’ traditional asylum processes and granted Ukrainian arrivals immediate residency rights and access to the labor market, among other benefits, for at least one year, but potentially longer.
Now, as the war in Ukraine inches closer to the year mark, the situation in Ukraine — and across Europe — is entering a new, unpredictable phase. Organizations, volunteers, and local governments are stretching to support Ukrainians already in Europe, as they prepare for the potential of more arrivals this winter.
In the summer and early fall, with fighting mostly concentrated in the Donbas, Ukrainian arrivals to Europe slowed, and more traffic began moving in the opposite direction, as Ukrainians returned. But this fall, Moscow unleashed a series of all-out assaults on Ukraine from the sky, targeting civilian and energy infrastructure. The Ukrainian government says about 50 percent of its infrastructure is now damaged, and the entire country is facing dangerous disruptions to electricity, heat, and water as it gets colder. The Ukrainian government warned citizens who have already sought refuge abroad not to return.
The violence reversed the summer’s trend, and once again, more people are leaving Ukraine than going back, though it’s nowhere close to the numbers in the first days of the invasion. And those who perhaps thought of returning — to see their family or check on their homes — are now planning to stay in host countries.
The continent has, so far, absorbed millions, with countries like Poland and Germany among those who’ve registered the most arrivals. Local governments are scrambling to find accommodations for refugees. Access to housing is a major challenge, but so is finding employment and child care. Some organizations also say donations and support are way down. Some volunteers, stressed by energy bills and unprepared for the length of the war, are unable to keep housing Ukrainian guests.
The fallout from the Ukraine war is also straining European economies, with high inflation and an energy crisis that threatens to tip the region into a recession. There are signs of some fatigue with the bloc’s generosity, and these pressures threaten to fracture public and political solidarity.
“The war is unfortunately not anywhere close to ending and needs remain substantial, so the support for people fleeing Ukraine is going to remain, and it’s going to need to be scaled up and need to continue,” said Niamh Nic Carthaigh, director of EU policy and advocacy with the International Rescue Committee.
How the European Union responded to Ukrainian refugees
In early March, just days into Russia’s Ukraine invasion, the European Union adopted temporary protection for Ukrainian nationals and some others fleeing war in Ukraine. The mechanism was shaped during wars in the Balkans, when European governments also had to prepare for a rush of people escaping conflict.
After Russia’s invasion, EU governments understood that hundreds of thousands would cross the border immediately, and countries’ already-overwhelmed asylum systems would implode. By granting Ukrainians temporary protection, they would bypass that bureaucracy, and refugees would get immediate benefits: documentation, financial support, access to the labor market, residency, education, all for at least a year, with the possibility of renewal for up to three years. (Unless terminated, the Temporary Protection Directive will automatically extend for a six-month period twice until March 2024, according to a spokesperson for the European Commission.) Each EU country can implement the scheme slightly differently, and, as some experts pointed out, that has created some disparities and has made some EU destinations more attractive than others. But the underlying goal was the same: quickly give Ukrainians in Europe humane, practical, clear status.
“It has shown that the Europe can coordinate — and can coordinate quite efficiently and quite fast if it kind of wants,” said Jöel Machado, migration researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER).
As experts said, this was a revolution in how Europe approached people fleeing war and seeking safety within its borders — a marked contrast to how some European states responded during 2015 and 2016, when a record number of asylum seekers arrived from Syria and other parts of the Middle East and Africa.
Temporary protective status grants Ukrainian refugees rights other asylum seekers in the EU do not have; for example, Ukrainians can choose the city or country they want to reside in, rather than applying for asylum in the “first safe” country they reach. (Ukrainians also have visa-free travel in EU for 90 days, so they can wait to register in the EU.) This has created an unmistakable divide in how those seeking safety are treated in Europe, and has come with allegations of racism and xenophobia in how the bloc views migration from outside versus within Europe. Some of this is practical; the countries bordering Ukraine would struggle to assist so many people at once. Some of this came from the sense that this war would be a temporary crisis. Some of it is how Europe framed the displacement from Ukraine, which it sees as one component of a broader geopolitical crisis at their doorstep.
“The EU sees the Russian war as a kind of a direct threat to its own security, and the refugee issue is much less politicized,” said Florian Trauner, director of the Research Center for Migration, Diversity, and Justice at the Brussels School of Governance.
Even as the EU acted swiftly, the speed and size of displacement from Ukraine meant some official structures were initially swamped, especially in countries like Germany, which quickly became host to tens of thousands. “So many refugees arrived so suddenly that the official structures for welcoming them were completely overwhelmed, and a lot of private persons stepped in and offered accommodation to Ukrainian refugees,” said Niklas Harder, a postdoctoral fellow who studies migration at the DeZIM Institute.
Inna works with Berlin Arrival Support, a volunteer group that formed on Telegram in the early days of war to help Ukrainians bound for Berlin. (She asked that her last name be withheld to protect her privacy.) She described an organic, somewhat chaotic coming-together of volunteers: people piling up donations — suitcases, clothes, food — at the train station. Others offered spots in their homes. These volunteers were on the front lines, consoling people, giving travel advice, helping with translation, carrying luggage. They, and other groups like them in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, were the bridge for Ukrainians, from the moment they reached safety to the much longer process of settling in. Even as state and government structures and processes formalized, nongovernmental, civil society, and volunteer organizations continue to fill the gaps.
“We’re like this sort of flexible, liquid-ish mass that can get into every crack,” Inna said.
When the humanitarian emergency begins to get more permanent
In late March, Berlin turned Tegel Airport — the city’s formerly main, sometimes-maligned international hub — into an arrival center for Ukrainian refugees. It is again a transit hub, just now mostly going in one direction. The airline check-in desks are used to register guests. The cafe is open, drinks in those coolers, but everything is free. There is a place to pick up clothes, another for toiletries, and another for pet supplies — so many people came with their cats and dogs. There is a foosball table in the kids’ area, which is wallpapered with drawings, so many of them with blue-and-yellow hearts and blue-and-yellow flags.
“They can have a bed, they can have a shower, they get food, of course, they get medical attention, if they need it. But I think most of all, after their journey, they need a space to rest,” Charlotte Knust, communications director with the Germany Red Cross, which helps manage the airport, said on a tour in October.
Tegel Airport shows how governments within and across Europe adjusted to Ukrainian arrivals, but also some of the persistent challenges — none of which have easy solutions. Housing is perhaps the biggest one; in Germany, it is one experts, advocates, and volunteers brought up consistently. At Tegel, Ukrainians are now mostly housed in Terminal C; other asylum seekers are now in Terminals A and B. There is capacity for about 1,800 people in Terminal C — inside, and two heated tents outside for about 800 people, though the process had begun to put up more tents. As of the first week of December, about 200 Ukrainians were arriving each day. The average stay used to be 24 hours, maybe a bit longer; now it is 6 to 10 days. People have to stay longer because there is just nowhere for them to go. (About 85,900 Ukrainians refugees are registered in Berlin, according to the Berlin State Office for Refugee Affairs, though not all have passed through Tegel.)
Cities like Berlin already faced housing shortages, which has added to the difficulty of finding longer-term placement for both Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers from elsewhere. This is also happening elsewhere in Europe. Governments are trying to meet this need by providing more temporary housing — on a ferry in France, in hotel rooms in Ireland, in the airport hangars of another abandoned airport in Berlin — but none solve the problem.
In Germany, many individuals and volunteers offered space for Ukrainian refugees, but that informal system of housing is also under strain as the war continues. Marvin, who works with Housing.Berlin to find places for Ukrainians (and asked that his last name be withheld to protect his privacy), said now they are leaning more on churches to accommodate refugees because there is so little capacity elsewhere. “We realized that it will be a longer thing, so we also started to look more into longer-term options — but that’s super hard to find,” Marvin said.
Many people who opened up their homes early in the war may have thought those arrangements might last a few weeks or months, at the most. Assistance is available for some who help, but not always. Nine months into the war, shared apartments may feel more cramped, food and utility bills less sustainable. “The supporters don’t get enough support,” said Christiane Beckmann of Moabit hilft e.V, a refugee and asylum support organization in Berlin.
The lack of housing also has ripple effects. As experts said, if refugees have to keep shifting homes, it is a lot harder for their kids to enroll in schools, or for parents to find jobs. Many of those fleeing Ukraine are women and children, as most of the men had to stay behind and fight. According to survey data from United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, nearly a quarter of Ukrainian refugees reported a family member who had heightened risk — a disability, or an elderly dependent, for example. The relative ease of travel from Ukraine (compared to, say, crossing the Mediterranean) makes evacuation of the vulnerable a bit more possible (though those populations are still the most likely to struggle to get out). Some parents may be caring for both young kids and older adults, which means access to child care and schooling is even more necessary.
Ukrainians refugees also report that finding and affording accommodation and jobs are among the biggest concerns. Access to the labor market is also fraught, though Ukrainians benefit by being able to work immediately. But, as experts said, employers may be reluctant to invest in hiring people if they are not going to be permanently in the EU. For refugees, they may have to choose whether to start taking language classes and rebuild a career in a place like Germany, or to work a quick job — cleaning houses, for example — to help supplement the financial support they receive. At the heart of all these questions is a deeper one Ukrainian refugees are facing: whether they want to build a life in, say, Germany, or if this is temporary until they can return.
“They can’t know how, when the war will end,” said Lisa Küchenhoff, head of programs at the International Rescue Committee Deutschland. “And then at the end of the war, what would they be going back to in Ukraine?”
What will this winter bring?
This winter will not look like the last, when Russia’s lightning-quick invasion of Ukraine uprooted tens of thousands each day. But Russia has since inflicted incredible damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure, and the continued threat of unpredictable violence and crisis may prompt more Ukrainians to seek refuge in Europe again. The Norwegian Refugee Council has warned that Europe must prepare to accept hundreds of thousands of more refugees.
But so far, even as winter is basically here, that scenario is not yet playing out. According to data from the UNHCR, neighboring countries like Romania and Roland have reported slight increases in arrivals recent weeks. Neighboring countries have also noted that the number of people going back to Ukraine has also declined.
But the scale of the infrastructure damage poses a real threat. Millions are facing disruptions to heat, hot water, and electricity, including in homes and apartments damaged by war. Eastern European countries on the border with Ukraine are preparing to reopen reception centers and replenishing emergency food supplies. In Berlin, the government is trying to build more temporary housing, between 8,000 to 10,000 places for Ukrainian refugees by the end of the year. They are now repurposing hangars 2 and 3 at another abandoned airport, Tempelhof, and putting up more tents there, too.
According to Berlin’s State Office for Refugee Affairs, the number of Ukrainian arrivals has stayed pretty consistent in recent months. About 4,000 registered in September, and in October, but only about 2,700 registered in November. For the first week of December, though, about 1,400 people registered — a pace that would put December back on par or even ahead of those earlier fall months.
“It’s getting cold. People will come. And right now [Putin] is attacking so many cities. ... So we don’t know what happens. And he knows how to how to fight a war. He has 10 years experience with Idlib [in the Syrian conflict]. He knows how it works,” Beckmann, of Moabit hilft e.V, told me last month.
Europe is also under strain because of its own competing inflation and energy crises. The EU — along with other Western allies — is trying to provide more humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, including money and tools to help repair Ukraine’s infrastructure. In late October, the European Union set aside more than 100 million euros to assist front-line states, in addition to 400 million to support Ukrainian refugees.
But there is fear of a broader fatigue setting in, that once this emergency turns into a prolonged crisis, support among governments and their populations will flag. Right-wing parties have seized on inflation and energy crises to try to exploit divisions around Ukraine support. These sentiments are not yet broadly shared, though. In Germany, a poll in September said 74 percent of the population still supported access to state-funded programs for refugees. But in Poland — which has welcomed more than 1.5 million refugees — a commitment to support Ukrainian families fell from more than 60 percent in March 2022 to 40 percent in September 2022, according to one poll.
At the same time, the number of asylum seekers coming from other parts of the world has also increased, because of continued instability and the easing of Covid restrictions. That is also likely to test EU solidarity and resources that may bleed into feelings on Ukraine.
Lagging enthusiasm is what Putin is banking on to divide and strain the West.
“The aim of Putin is to create a refugee crisis and to put even more pressure on us,” Ylva Johansson, the EU’s migration commissioner, recently told the Financial Times.
And the needs of those here, and those yet to arrive, are huge. Who is coming now, a year into war, is also different. Ralph Achenbach, the CEO of IRC Deutschland, said that at first, many individuals and families were relatively well-prepared — had anticipated fleeing and were packed up to leave. As the war dragged on, they saw more people more directly impacted, leaving active warfare. “I would anticipate that that is going to be amplified further yet as we approach winter and that ultimately we will see a population at greater need also of psychosocial support, and other ways of assisting and really overcoming the trauma of war,” Achenbach said.
All of this requires readjustment in real time. And many see Europe’s approach to Ukrainian refugees fleeing war as a potential opening, as well as a potential risk. The temporary protective order showed Europe’s potential for generosity and solidarity, and a way to be more expansive to all kinds of vulnerable people fleeing war. But if weariness sets in, if the largesse is temporary, they worry the systems might not change but instead harden, even as global instability rises and more people seek out safe havens.
Across Europe, there are signs of people still fleeing — welcome kiosks with pamphlets at airports, flyers in Ukrainian posted throughout train stations. They are the small signs of the millions and millions of Ukrainians who have been uprooted because of war, and of a continent being transformed alongside it.
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Frank Pavone, head of Priests for Life, has been defrocked by the Vatican for what it said were "blasphemous communications on social media" as well as 'persistent disobedience' of his bishop. (photo: Greg Kahn/AP)
A letter to U.S. bishops from the Vatican ambassador to the U.S., Archbishop Christophe Pierre, obtained Sunday, said the decision against Pavone, who heads the anti-abortion group Priests for Life, had been taken Nov. 9, and that there was no chance for an appeal.
Pavone had been investigated by his then-diocese of Amarillo, Texas, for having placed an aborted fetus on an altar and posting a video of it on two social media sites in 2016. He posts frequently about U.S. politics and abortion, and the video of the aborted fetus was accompanied by a post saying that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic platform would allow abortion to continue and that Donald Trump and the Republican platform want to protect unborn children.
Pavone remains a firm supporter of Trump: His Twitter handle features him wearing a "MAGA" hat with a background photo featuring the former U.S. president, whom many conservatives praise for his Supreme Court nominees who overturned the landmark decision guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion in the United States.
In a tweet Sunday, Pavone sounded defiant, comparing his fate to that of the unborn.
"So in every profession, including the priesthood, if you defend the #unborn, you will be treated like them! The only difference is that when we are "aborted," we continue to speak, loud and clear."
His supporters immediately denounced the measure, including the bishop of Tyler, Texas, Joseph Strickland, who referred to U.S. President Joe Biden's support for abortion rights as "evil."
"The blasphemy is that this holy priest is canceled while an evil president promotes the denial of truth & the murder of the unborn at every turn, Vatican officials promote immorality & denial of the deposit of faith & priests promote gender confusion devastating lives...evil," Strickland tweeted.
Pavone had appealed to the Vatican over restrictions placed on his ministry in 2011 by the Amarillo bishop, succeeded in getting the restrictions eased, and relocated away from Texas while remaining active with Priests for Life.
In his letter, Pierre cited information from the Congregation for Clergy that Pavone had been laicized — he can no longer present himself as a priest — after being found guilty in a canonical proceeding "of blasphemous communications on social media and of persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop." The letter was first reported by Catholic News Agency.
The statement said Pavone was given "ample opportunity to defend himself" as well as to submit to his bishop. "It was determined that Father Pavone had no reasonable justification for his actions."
The statement concluded that since Priests for Life is not a Catholic organization, it would be up to the group to determine whether he could continue his role "as a lay person."
Laicization, or being reduced to the lay state, is one of the harshest sanctions in the church's canon law.
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P-22, the celebrated mountain lion who lived in Los Angeles and became a symbol of urban pressures on wildlife, was euthanized Saturday after a decade of fame. Seen here in 2014, P-22 took up residence in Griffith Park after crossing two major freeways in 2012. (photo: U.S. National Park Service/AP)
P-22 had “significant trauma” to his head and internal organs after apparently being hit by a car last week, officials said. An examination by a team of veterinarians from the San Diego Zoo Safari Park also revealed several other chronic health problems.
The chronic conditions and need for surgery and long-term medical care, combined with P-22’s age, left the puma with “no hope for a positive outcome,” the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said in a statement Saturday, five days after P-22 was captured for a health assessment.
He was euthanized at 9 a.m. Saturday at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. The death was announced by state wildlife officials in a tearful Zoom news conference.
“It’s been an incredibly difficult several days,” Charlton H. Bonham, the director of the department, said while crying. “I made the decision that the right thing to do was to bring peace now, rather than have P-22 continue through what would not have been acceptable, from a compassionate level, in my mind.”
The big cat’s life contributed to scientific research and inspired a bridge crossing for wildlife over busy Highway 101 in the Santa Monica Mountains. He was a beloved cultural figure, a symbol of survival and an ambassador for wildlife protection. His death, like his life, spoke to the plight of animals in urban environments.
P-22 was believed to be about 12 years old, having been estimated to be two when biologists first found him a decade ago, according the National Park Service. He had surpassed the life expectancy for wild mountain lions, who generally live up to 10 years. Captive ones can live up to 21 years, according to the National Wildlife Foundation.
He was too unwell to live out the rest of his life in an animal sanctuary, said Beth Pratt, the National Wildlife Federation’s regional executive director in California, who attended a briefing by the puma’s medical team. In a statement, she said keeping him alive with medical intervention would have prolonged his suffering.
“I sat near him, looking into his eyes for a few minutes, and told him he was a good boy,” wrote Pratt, who said goodbye to P-22 before he was euthanized. “I told him how much I loved him. How much the world loved him.”
Famous Los Angeles cougar, P-22, captured for medical exam
P-22’s extraordinary journey began when he crossed two multilane freeways to get from the Santa Monica Mountains to Griffith Park in 2012, where he was found by biologist Miguel Ordeñana, according to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He then found fame thanks to a National Geographic article on big cats, which included an image by photographer Steve Winter of P-22 prowling beneath the Hollywood sign.
On Saturday, the news of his death prompted an outpouring of posts on social media. More than 200 people had commented on the state’s Facebook announcement of his death, many sharing memories of the feline or saying they were crying.
“P-22 was an icon,” tweeted California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). “His incredible journey helped inspire a new era of urban conservation, including the world’s largest wildlife crossing in CA.”
The big cat was such a celebrity that his obituary was pre-written by the Los Angeles Times, reporter Laura J. Nelson said on Twitter, a practice reserved for notable figures.
“I won’t rest until P-22 has a bronze statue in Griffith Park and maybe a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,” tweeted Laura Friedman (D), a state legislator.
With black markings around his eyes and framing his white muzzle, the tawny, sleek puma was often caught on wildlife cameras mid-prowl. For locals in Los Angeles, seeing P-22 was like a celebrity spotting. He sometimes roamed around town, once even cozying up in a home’s crawl space, and showed up on residents’ doorbell cameras.
The iconic mountain lion known as P-22 — who lived in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park for a decade, became an international celebrity and was a symbol of the need for urban wildlife protection — was euthanized Saturday, California state officials said.
P-22 had “significant trauma” to his head and internal organs after apparently being hit by a car last week, officials said. An examination by a team of veterinarians from the San Diego Zoo Safari Park also revealed several other chronic health problems.
The chronic conditions and need for surgery and long-term medical care, combined with P-22’s age, left the puma with “no hope for a positive outcome,” the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said in a statement Saturday, five days after P-22 was captured for a health assessment.
He was euthanized at 9 a.m. Saturday at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. The death was announced by state wildlife officials in a tearful Zoom news conference.
“It’s been an incredibly difficult several days,” Charlton H. Bonham, the director of the department, said while crying. “I made the decision that the right thing to do was to bring peace now, rather than have P-22 continue through what would not have been acceptable, from a compassionate level, in my mind.”
The big cat’s life contributed to scientific research and inspired a bridge crossing for wildlife over busy Highway 101 in the Santa Monica Mountains. He was a beloved cultural figure, a symbol of survival and an ambassador for wildlife protection. His death, like his life, spoke to the plight of animals in urban environments.
P-22 was believed to be about 12 years old, having been estimated to be two when biologists first found him a decade ago, according the National Park Service. He had surpassed the life expectancy for wild mountain lions, who generally live up to 10 years. Captive ones can live up to 21 years, according to the National Wildlife Foundation.
He was too unwell to live out the rest of his life in an animal sanctuary, said Beth Pratt, the National Wildlife Federation’s regional executive director in California, who attended a briefing by the puma’s medical team. In a statement, she said keeping him alive with medical intervention would have prolonged his suffering.
“I sat near him, looking into his eyes for a few minutes, and told him he was a good boy,” wrote Pratt, who said goodbye to P-22 before he was euthanized. “I told him how much I loved him. How much the world loved him.”
Famous Los Angeles cougar, P-22, captured for medical exam
P-22’s extraordinary journey began when he crossed two multilane freeways to get from the Santa Monica Mountains to Griffith Park in 2012, where he was found by biologist Miguel Ordeñana, according to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He then found fame thanks to a National Geographic article on big cats, which included an image by photographer Steve Winter of P-22 prowling beneath the Hollywood sign.
On Saturday, the news of his death prompted an outpouring of posts on social media. More than 200 people had commented on the state’s Facebook announcement of his death, many sharing memories of the feline or saying they were crying.
“P-22 was an icon,” tweeted California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). “His incredible journey helped inspire a new era of urban conservation, including the world’s largest wildlife crossing in CA.”
The big cat was such a celebrity that his obituary was pre-written by the Los Angeles Times, reporter Laura J. Nelson said on Twitter, a practice reserved for notable figures.
“I won’t rest until P-22 has a bronze statue in Griffith Park and maybe a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,” tweeted Laura Friedman (D), a state legislator.
With black markings around his eyes and framing his white muzzle, the tawny, sleek puma was often caught on wildlife cameras mid-prowl. For locals in Los Angeles, seeing P-22 was like a celebrity spotting. He sometimes roamed around town, once even cozying up in a home’s crawl space, and showed up on residents’ doorbell cameras.
“Whenever I hiked to the Hollywood sign, or strolled down a street in Beachwood Canyon to pick up a sandwich at The Oaks, or walked to my car after a concert at the Greek Theater, the wondrous knowledge that I could encounter P-22 always propelled me into a joyous kind of awe,” said Pratt. “We may never see another mountain lion stroll down Sunset Boulevard or surprise customers outside the Los Feliz Trader Joe’s.”
This spring, construction began on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which Pratt said “would not have been possible” without P-22’s inspiration. Construction on the massive bridge, which will allow wildlife to cross the freeway, is projected to be completed in 2025, according to the Annenberg Foundation.
Because his territory was limited to the park’s island of wilderness, P-22 never found a mate. He existed in the smallest home ever known for an adult male mountain lion, officials have said. He ate deer, coyotes and other prey. When he ventured into the Hollywood Hills, it was mostly late at night.
Tracked by the National Park Service since March 2012, P-22 had become one of the oldest mountain lions in a long-term research study on the animals. He was a “critical part” of the study and one of its most interesting participants, the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area said in a statement.
About 100 mountain lions live in the area. Los Angeles and Mumbai are the only two of the world’s largest cities with big cats.
He leaves behind a scientific legacy, the park said, in addition to his legacy as a living demonstration of the hardships and possibilities for urban wildlife.
“We’re really going to miss following him,” Seth Riley, the National Park Service branch chief for the Santa Monica Mountains, said at the news briefing, choking up. “Already this week, we don’t get to go and look and see his points on the website and see what he’s doing.”
In the Santa Monica Mountains, the long-term survival of a stable mountain lion population is threatened by development, the National Park Service has said. Roads break up habitat, prevent animals from roaming to breed and lead to car collisions.
For P-22, it eventually led to suffering. As he got older, “the challenges associated with living on an island of habitat” seemed to increase, state officials said last week.
He had lived to be “remarkably old” for a cat in the wild, they said. Recent changes in his behavior indicated he might have been in distress.
In March, P-22 left Griffith Park and went farther into an urban area than he ever had, eventually returning to the park, according to the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. He killed a pet Chihuahua in November, and had been venturing into residential areas. On camera, he looked like he was growing thin and his coat didn’t look healthy, said Deana Clifford, a state wildlife veterinarian.
State wildlife officials began planning to capture P-22 so they could give him a checkup, she said. Then, on Dec. 7, they received an anonymous report that P-22 might have been hit by a car. Biologists found him in a woman’s backyard on Monday, where wildlife officers tranquilized him and took him in for a medical examination.
P-22’s weakened health may have hindered his ability to evade cars, but if such a collision led to his death, that still represented a failure by humans to better protect wildlife, Pratt said. State officials said they would not investigate the car incident.
“This situation is not the fault of P-22, nor of a driver who may have hit him,” the wildlife agency said. “Rather, it is an eventuality that arises from habitat loss and fragmentation, and it underscores the need for thoughtful construction of wildlife crossings and well-planned spaces that provide wild animals room to roam.”
Six veterinarians from the San Diego Zoo and four veterinary specialists were involved in the assessment, the state wildlife department said. They found that the car collision had torn P-22’s diaphragm and pushed his liver into his chest cavity, damaging abdominal organs, said Hendrik Nollens, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s wildlife health vice president.
Among P-22’s other ailments were kidney disease with Stage 2 failure, liver disease, a skin infection and arthritis. He had lost at least 20 percent of his weight, Nollens said at the news conference, where he showed a CT scan of P-22’s body. The damage to his internal organs from the likely car collision would have required invasive surgery.
P-22 will have a post-mortem examination, said Clifford. His body will then be given to the county’s Natural History Museum, where it will be received by Ordeñana, the biologist who discovered him.
Bonham, the state wildlife director, said he had gone through moments of hope for the cat all week, followed by successive bad diagnoses. Officials had hoped to place P-22 in a sanctuary if he couldn’t return to the wild, the director indicated.
Bonham gave a tearful apology, saying he hoped people would “move through the pain” and find ways to honor P-22. His 11-year-old son, he said, planned to take a hike at Griffith Park. He urged the public to support making urban environments safer for wildlife.
“The animal brought us together,” he said. “Let’s make a difference, so the rest of the large animals out there have a future that’s brighter.”
Pratt said she had attended a tearful meeting with the veterinarians and state workers who had examined P-22, where they presented their findings and passed boxes of tissues around the room.
“He changed the way we look at L.A. And his influencer status extended around the world, as he inspired millions of people to see wildlife as their neighbors. He made us more human, made us connect more to that wild place in ourselves,” Pratt said. “His legacy to us, and to his kind will never fade.”
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