I can’t believe it’s been five years since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
What lessons have we as a society learned from that tragic experience that killed 1.2 million Americans and left others with the debilitating effects of Long Covid? This week on More To The Story, host Al Letson chats with epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera about the anniversary as the country faces measles outbreaks and the spread of bird flu. (You may remember Rivera from Reveal’s Covid Tracking Project.)
You'll hear why Rivera doesn’t think that we learned our lessons from Covid, and why she fears the Trump administration isn’t prepared for what may be coming down the line.
There's a lot of scary stuff happening in the world, but staying informed about disease and how to prevent it gives us some power. I hope you’ll take a listen.
"I think ceasefire is a very loose term,” said one physician in Gaza. “I wouldn’t say we entered Gaza at a time of peace and quiet.”
BY SOPHIE HURWITZ
The ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, instituted in mid-January, was always shaky. It could even be argued it never fully existed. Sixteen days ago Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza, prohibiting any food or medical supplies from entering the territory, and cutting off electricity to Gaza’s water desalination plants. At the beginning of March, Israeli negotiators refused to move into the second—more durable—phase of the ceasefire agreement. Three days ago, Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of Palestinians, including a group of journalists. In total, between the ceasefire’s start on January 19th and yesterday, Israeli forces killed at least 170 Palestinians.
Then, the official break: Over the past day, Israeli airstrikes killed over 404 Palestinians and wounded 560, targeting residential areas and reportedly wiping out entire families. Now, it is inarguable. The ceasefire is dead.
The United States was helpful throughout to its partner. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in direct consultation with US President Donald Trump’s administration as he ordered airstrikes, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said. In late February, Trump bypassed a congressional review to authorize $3 billion worth of arms transfers—mostly, 2000-pound bombs—to Israel. (Netanyahu benefitted personally, too; he was excused from a scheduled court hearing for his corruption trial today. And the mass killing has paid other dividends—ultranationalist right-wing minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, in an apparent response to the airstrikes, said today that he will rejoin Netanyahu’s governing coalition.)
Netanyahu has called the offensive “open-ended,” making it unclear whether this means another ground assault into Gaza, where Palestinians have hardly begun rebuilding from the previous sixteen months of nearly nonstop bombardment.
“This is only the beginning,” Netanyahu said Tuesday. Future ceasefire talks, he said, will take place “only under fire.”
Trump’s justification for his “full backing” of these airstrikes was that Hamas has not released all of the scheduled Israeli hostages. But many hostage families are decrying the resumption of violence. Bombing the place where their family members are being held hostage puts relatives in danger.
The international condemnations are rolling in, too. United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Volker Türk described this round of bombing as “adding tragedy onto tragedy.” Palestinians themselves want more than condemnations, though. As Palestinian UN ambassador Riyad Mansour told his colleagues Tuesday, “You are the Security Council. Act. Stop this criminal action. Stop them from denying our people food in the month of Ramadan. You have resolutions. Act. You have power. Act.”
Throughout both the bombardment and the ceasefire the only internationals allowed into Gaza have been doctors and aid workers. Two of those doctors called me from Gaza and told me what they saw.
Sabrina Das, an OBGYN from the UK, entered Gaza earlier this month hoping to be part of the rebuilding effort. She was there to train primary healthcare workers in using ultrasound machines for prenatal care. She traveled from south to north Gaza each day to go to the clinic.
The training was “really, really successful,” Das said. “There’s just been this real thirst for knowledge and development, and also, you know, just normalcy.” She was planning to bring handheld ultrasound machines to the north Gaza clinic where she holds the training “within the next couple of days.”
But, in the middle of the night on March 18th, she woke up to the sound of bombs—and the news that the Netzarim Corridor between north and south Gaza was closed once again. That meant she wouldn’t be able to deliver the ultrasound machines after all.
“I mean, my brain knew that the ceasefire might or might not hold,” Das said. But her colleagues’ hope to rebuild their lives was infectious. “I’d just gotten so caught up in the optimism all around me.”
She and her colleagues plan to go to Nasser Hospital and serve as extra hands while they can. And for some of those doctors, this all feels familiar. Dr. Tammy Abughnaim, from California, has been to Gaza three times in the past year.
“I think ceasefire is a very loose term,” Abughnaim said. “Although the frequency of air strikes was minimized, that did not necessarily guarantee our safety.” When she arrived, the infrastructure around her was still demolished—and, two weeks before today’s bombings, Israel stopped letting food into Gaza. “I wouldn’t say we entered Gaza at a time of peace and quiet.”
“We haven’t had any meat or chicken in Gaza for the last two weeks,” she said. “There’s only so many ways that you can make canned tuna, and they’re utilizing all of them.”
Nonetheless, Abughnaim said, the day before the bombing was the most normal she had ever felt in Gaza. She had the chance to walk on the beach, and she even planned to take a bus north to visit friends. People sold goods out of pop-up market stalls in front of the hospital complex, and children played in the streets. There was, for once, “a semblance of people returning to life around us.”
Then they woke up to the bombs.
“We were up from two to 6 a.m., maybe got a half-hour of sleep, and all I could think was: we’re going to go back to this, and the world is going to continue to not care,” Abughnaim said. “I don’t know why more people aren’t burning shit down over this, I really don’t.” She has tried to talk to her legislators about Gaza, she said, but is met with canned responses that Israel has the right to defend itself.
El Shifa hospital, destroyed in previous attacks.Dr. Sabrina Das
Meanwhile, she said, she was receiving dispatches from colleagues across the strip. One doctor, at Shifa Hospital, went out on the balcony after a night spent intubating children and counted 50 bodies in the courtyard.
“I’ve gotten messages from nurses saying, this is the worst night we’ve experienced in a very, very long time,” Abughnaim said. Today, outside the guest house where the foreign physicians are staying, there were no children playing.
“Americans need to know that the Trump administration has signed off on all of this,” Abughnaim said. “They need to know that Israel has violated the terms of the ceasefire by this unprovoked attack, and they need to know that the ceasefire itself was not, in reality, a ceasefire. It has been a time of strategic mass starvation for the Palestinian people. I don’t know what kind of ceasefire agreement includes provisions for mass starvation, but it’s not one that any reasonable person would accept.”
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Six days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Alishea Kingdom went to a medical appointment at the federal prison in New Jersey where she’s incarcerated. It was time for her to take the hormonal medication she’d been prescribed years before to treat her gender dysphoria. But prison staffers would no longer give her the medicine—or the bras, underwear, and other feminine items she’d gotten used to wearing. Without her hormone therapy, Kingdom started having panic attacks, struggled to sleep, and experienced suicidal thoughts.
Kingdom is one of about 2,000 transgender people in federal prisons who have lost access to medical care or may soon lose access to it because of the Trump administration’s new policies. Now she’s part of a class-action lawsuit filed last week against the president and his team. On Monday, her attorneys at the ACLU and the Transgender Law Center asked a federal judge in DC for a preliminary injunctionthat would allow trans people in federal prisons to continue receiving hormone therapy or other prescribed medical care as the litigation unfolds.
This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
Before he was abruptly fired last month, Derek Copeland worked as a trainer at the US Department of Agriculture’s National Dog Detection Training Center, preparing beagles and Labrador retrievers to sniff out plants and animals that are invasive or vectors for zoonotic diseases, like swine fever. Copeland estimates the center lost about a fifth of its trainers and a number of other support staff when 6,000 employees were let go at the USDA in February as part of a government-wide purge orchestrated by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Before he received his termination notice, he says, Copeland had just spent several months training the only dog stationed in Florida capable of detecting the Giant African land snail, an invasive mollusk that poses a significant threat to Florida agriculture. “We have dogs for spotted and lantern flies, Asian longhorn beetles,” he says, referring to two other nonnative species. “I don’t think the American people realize how much crap that people bring into the United States.”
Dog trainers are just one example of the kind of highly specialized USDA staff that have been removed from their stations in recent weeks. Teams devoted to inspecting plant and food imports have been hit especially hard by the recent cuts, including the Plant Protection and Quarantine program, which has lost hundreds of staffers alone.
“It’s causing problems left and right,” says one current USDA worker, who like other federal employees in this story asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “It’s basically a skeleton crew working now,” says another current USDA staffer, who noted that both they and most of their colleagues held advanced degrees and had many years of training to protect US food and agriculture supply chains from invasive pests. “It’s not something that is easily replaced by artificial intelligence.”
In what appearsto be the first arrests of health care providers for allegedly violating a post-Roe v. Wade state abortion ban, Maria Margarita Rojas, a midwife working in the region around Houston, and her employee, medical assistant Jose Manuel Cendan Ley, were taken into custody by Texas authorities on Monday.
Court records from Waller County, west of Houston, show that law enforcement initially accused Rojas with practicing medicine without a license, but on Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he was adding the illegal performance of an abortion to her indictment—a second-degree felony in Texas, carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Ley is facing the same charges.
The New York Times reports that court documents allege that Rojas “attempted an abortion” on a woman on two occasions in March and was “known by law enforcement to have performed an abortion” on another patient this year. In his press release, Paxton claimed that Rojas ran a network of clinics in towns around Houston that “unlawfully employed unlicensed individuals who falsely presented themselves as licensed medical professionals.” The website for the network, Clinicás Latinoamericanas, advertises urgent care services, treatment for chronic illness, and dietary counseling to a Spanish-language community. Paxton’s office said it had filed for a temporary restraining order to shut down the clinics.
On this week’s episode of “More To The Story,” how public health emergencies and the dismantling of federal agencies are colliding.
BY REVEAL
The last 10 years Donald Trump spent running for president had an organizing principle: They ruined America, and we have to take it back. The “theys” were a varied group: immigrants, whistleblowers, trans people, journalists, Democrats, civil servants, independent-minded Republicans. But Trump’s option for dealing with resistance was the same: unsparing retribution, often trampling the norms of a legal and political system attempting to thwart his antidemocratic power grabs.
As the second term begins with an onslaught of often cruel and sometimes unconstitutional executive orders, we asked those whom Trump has explicitly targeted how they plan to face the next four years. Our reporters talked to people who are threatened and those who are fighting back: an asylum seeker, a former government official, a reproductive rights advocate, a parent of a trans child. The dire consequences of Trump’s potential actions can be lost in the sheer scope of his intentions, summarized in the 900-plus-page Project 2025 playbook that was drawn up by the Heritage Foundation and is now deployed by his administration. Yet the damage of Trump’s agenda has already changed the lives of millions of people.
With Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, a bevy of Cabinet picks selected mainly for their loyalty to Trump, and years of planning, our institutions already appear to be struggling under the sheer force of his actions. And Trump’s second term has only just begun. “Together, we’re going to unlock America’s glorious destiny,” Trump promised in his campaign victory speech. “We’re going to achieve the most incredible future for our people.” That promise comes at a cost—for you, your neighbors, and our country.
"There’s a clear distinction between things that work and costly efforts that make the problem worse."
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