RSN: William Boardman | Defund the Police State, Before It's Too Late

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RSN: William Boardman | Defund the Police State, Before It's Too Late

William Boardman, Reader Supported News
Boardman writes: "The American police state is currently making its boldest test run to date in Portland, Oregon, escalating violence and lawlessness against the peaceful population of an American city."
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Video of Trump's Federal Officers Attacking Protesters in Portland
KOIN 6
Excerpt: "Raw video of reporter Jennifer Dowling and photojournalist Matt Rashleigh's camera showing the lead up of protesters and federal officers on July 16, 2020."

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Demonstrators rally at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. on April 23, 2019 to protest a proposal to add a citizenship question in the 2020 census. (photo: Mandel Ngan/Getty)

Trump Wants to Strip House Seats From States Under Three-Fifths Clause
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
Stern writes: "Donald Trump's new memorandum to exclude undocumented immigrants from the next round of congressional apportionment is morally repulsive, illegal, and impossible."
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An immigrant child looks out from a U.S. Border Patrol bus leaving as protesters block the street outside the U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center in McAllen, Texas. (photo: David J. Phillip/AP)

The Trump Administration Is Detaining Immigrant Children as Young as 1 in Hotels, Sometimes for Weeks
Nomaan Merchant, Associated Press
Merchant writes: "The Trump administration is detaining immigrant children as young as 1 in hotels, sometimes for weeks, before deporting them to their home countries under policies that have effectively shut down the nation's asylum system during the coronavirus pandemic."
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Robert Kennedy Jr. (photo: Gage Skidmore)

Another Bogus Vaccine Attack From RFK Jr.

Stuart Blume and Maurizia Mezza, The Daily Beast

Excerpt: "Across the globe, billions of people are anxiously awaiting a COVID-19 vaccine, hoping that when they have one everything will be normal again. But there are also millions who think differently."

The infamous anti-vaxxer is trying to scare people by hyping recently published data on cancer incidence and HPV vaccination in Australia.

But there are also millions who think differently. Surveys in a number of countries show that a substantial percentage of the public don’t want the vaccine, or at least are unsure about taking it. In the US, that figure is as high as 50 percent. A major reason, according to the surveys, is that some people fear possible side effects. 

It’s safe to assume it isn’t the prospect of a slight inflammation around the injection point that bothers them, nor a temporary stiffness in their arm—the only modern vaccine side effects on which there is a consensus within the scientific community.

No, straight-up vaccine skepticism—often personified by so-called anti-vaxxers—in the United States and abroad is the problem here. And now Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., perhaps the most infamous of the bunch, is trying to scare people by hyping recently published data on cancer incidence and HPV vaccination in Australia.

That in and of itself isn’t shocking given his history. But he's making a mockery of the data, and compounding larger vaccine skepticism in the midst of a global pandemic, a climate in which vaccine faith—not blind faith, but belief—could prove essential to reining in death and suffering.

A recent article by Kennedy, citing Australian data, says girls there are suffering from cervical cancer—and dying—as a result of having been immunized with the HPV vaccine Gardasil. Could this be the same effect as was seen with oral polio vaccine, perhaps the only documented case wherein a weakened (“attenuated”) virus from a vaccine became virulent and really did cause the disease it was designed to protect against?

Nope. 

Gardasil is made in a totally different way. It is inert, which is to say it contains no genetic material from the virus. Kennedy’s sensationalist claim that the vaccine can cause cancer is an attempt to prey on people’s anxieties by making abusive use of statistics. 

Gardasil was introduced in Australia 13 years ago, initially given only to girls. Women who are now 25 or 30 years old are likely to have been vaccinated, whereas older women almost certainly were not. Kennedy states that data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, a government agency, show that the rate of cervical cancer has increased by 16 percent in 25-year-olds, and 28 percent in 30-year-olds. This is the basis for the claim that Gardasil causes cancer. 

But reaching this conclusion on the basis of these numbers is highly problematic. For one thing, there’s no clear timeframe. When did rates start rising? Immediately after the first girl was vaccinated? That would be absurd. It takes anything from 10 to 30 years for infection with the virus to lead to cancer. If Gardasil were somehow linked to increased rates of cervical cancer, the effect wouldn’t yet be visible.

There’s also the question of which number we look at. The number of cases? The number of cases compared to the Australian population? If we look at the number of new cases divided by the population at risk of cervical cancer (the ‘crude rate’), in 1998 it was 7.0 per 100 000. By 2016, it had fallen to 6.2. 

Should this reduction then be attributed to Gardasil? This conclusion, too, is premature. There are too many complicating factors. The newer version of Gardasil is designed to protect against nine types of the HPV virus: the ones most likely to cause cervical cancer, as well as cancer of the anus, vulva, vagina, penis and throat. For a definitive answer to the question of how effective Gardasil is in stopping cancer, we will have to wait a few more years. In the meantime, studies have found strong evidence vaccinations—including in Australia—are reducing HPV infections and genital warts.

Perhaps most important, if Gardasil is responsible for an increase in rates of cervical cancer, this should appear in other countries, too. HPV vaccines have been widely introduced worldwide. One hundred countries have now introduced one of the three HPV vaccines available on the market. Wouldn’t we therefore expect to see rising cervical cancer rates in other countries, especially ones (like Australia) with high rates of vaccination? 

We know of no data showing that this is so. 

Finally, Kennedy says cervical cancer rates rose in young women who have supposedly been vaccinated, while cervical cancer-related mortality in (unvaccinated) older women decreased. However, comparing the  incidence rate in one group with the death rate in another is an illegitimate abuse of statistics. 

So the numbers reported by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare do not show that Gardasil cause cervical cancer. Does this mean the vaccine has no side effects? Not necessarily. 

There have been reports from a number of countries (including Denmark, Colombia, and Japan) of girls suffering a variety of strange symptoms after HPV vaccination. There has been widespread denial of any link between these symptoms and the vaccine. However, some researchers have noted consistency in the symptoms, attributing them to hard-to-diagnose autoimmune diseases. More research is needed, but the possibility of auto-immune reactions in some specific groups cannot yet be ruled out.

Still, claiming that Gardasil causes cervical cancer is wholly unjustified fearmongering. But just as with a future COVID-19 vaccine, we shouldn’t regard the existence of a vaccine as  the ultimate solution to a problem in which politics as much as people’s health is at stake.

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Yemen's conflict has killed more than 100,000 people and created the world's worst humanitarian disaster. (photo: Anadolu)

UN Agencies Warn of More Food Shortages in War-Torn Yemen
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Food shortages will rise sharply in parts of war-torn Yemen in the next six months mainly because of the overall economic decline and the coronavirus pandemic that has ripped through the Arab world's poorest country, United Nations agencies have warned."
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Forest fire in Russia. (photo: Pixabay)

Why the Next President Should Establish a Department of Climate
Allison Crimmins, Vox
Crimmins writes: "It's been a big month for new climate policy ideas in the US, with a flurry of plans out, brimming with hundreds of policy recommendations."

t’s been a big month for new climate policy ideas in the US, with a flurry of plans out, brimming with hundreds of policy recommendations. The presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden campaign’s task force on climate change, for example, released new proposals on July 14 for reducing fossil fuel use, aiming to establish a national clean energy standard and rectify climate injustices. 

Earlier in July, the campaign also convened a new Climate Engagement Advisory Council to mobilize more people in the fight against climate change and systemic racism. And in late June, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming put out a 500-plus-page Climate Crisis Action Plan. 

But so far, none of these plans has included a key action that would strengthen the government’s ability to make these policies a reality: the creation of a new, Cabinet-level Department of Climate. 

To give these new proposals a fighting chance, the committees and councils must recognize that the executive branch is not yet properly aligned to respond to climate change, a complex problem of unmatched size and duration. 

The idea of a high-level executive body focused on climate is not radical. Countries around the world — from Austria to Australia, Pakistan to Portugal — have created dedicated departments or ministries specifically to address climate change threats. 

Establishing new Cabinet departments in the US isn’t that unusual either. In fact, more than half of the government’s 15 active departments have been formed in just the past 75 years, four within my lifetime. But among these executive-level departments and in all the hundreds of federal agencies, not one has a mission solely dedicated to the climate crisis. There isn’t even one with the word “climate” in its name. 

To meet the threat of climate change, one of the first actions of the next administration and the 177th Congress should be to create this Department of Climate. Its mission would be to mitigate global climate change, reduce America’s vulnerability to climate impacts, build resiliency to the impacts that do occur, and strengthen our nation’s infrastructure by forging a sustainable, thriving, and just economy. 

Here are three reasons why the US needs this new agency, how to do it, and why now is the time to start building one:

1) Climate change is a threat to our security — and we need a unified structure to fight it

Climate change is a critical national security challenge that will not be resolved over the course of one administration. In a report published earlier this year, the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Climate and Security identified several major ways in which climate change puts national security at risk. These include: social and political instability due to drought and water stress, damages to military bases and infrastructure from rising seas and increased flooding, and detrimental effects on force readiness and health caused by more frequent heat waves and wildfires. 

But perhaps the greatest risk to national security is the fact that climate change threatens our health, social equity, and economy, weakening the nation’s resilience. Current and future climate impacts put our very life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness at risk. It is well past time we defend against such threats. 

When the United States faced grave security threats in the past, we rose to those challenges by reorganizing the executive branch. For instance, after World War II, the National Security Act of 1947 was enacted by Congress and signed by President Truman. The act reorganized military and intelligence branches, established the National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency, and merged the War and Navy department into what became the Department of Defense. 

Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security was established, integrating 22 different federal agencies and offices into one unified Cabinet department. In a message to Congress on June 18, 2002, President George W. Bush wrote: “History teaches us that new challenges require new organizational structures. History also teaches us that critical security challenges require clear lines of responsibility and the unified effort of the US Government.”

Although there is currently no one department or agency focused solely on climate change, there are many people spread across the federal government working on climate-related issues. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find an agency that does not already work on some element of climate change: from monitoring current environmental conditions to projecting climate impacts, from creating innovative energy solutions to building climate-resilient communities. 

But this legion of civil servants, who have devoted their careers to combating climate change, are fragmented and lack that clear line of responsibility President Bush described as necessary to address critical security challenges. These leading experts could be convened under one broad mission, with the potential for producing unified actions and outcomes far greater than the sum of their disaggregated parts.

Just as the Department of Homeland Security promises “relentless resilience” to attacks against the United States, a Department of Climate could deploy this same mindset, ensuring the US has the foundation it needs to take on the threats climate change poses to this nation and to future generations.

2) Climate change is a threat to our health — and we need dedicated resources to respond to it 

In the US, Americans are already experiencing more frequent extreme heat days, increases in wildfires that lead to poor air quality (which likely makes people more susceptible to Covid-19), more severe storms with long-term, devastating health impacts, and longer seasons for disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks. Rising carbon dioxide levels means longer and more severe allergy seasons and less nutritious crops. Not to mention the impact on our mental health. 

As the House Select Committee points out in its Climate Crisis Action Plan, “the United States currently lacks a comprehensive national strategy to respond to the health risks and harms of the climate crisis.” Their plan calls for Congress to strengthen such planning, placing much of the burden of action on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

However, federal health agencies’ ability to focus on climate-related health impacts is currently inadequate. This is in part because of leadership dismissive of climate change — and in part because their attention is, understandably, on the Covid-19 pandemic. And the 2018 hurricane season before that, and Zika before that, and Ebola before that. While the CDC and other health agencies are full of experts working to mitigate climate-related health threats, their priorities will always be driven by the next new global health crisis — and by each new administration’s political whims. 

A new department would not be completely immune to the same geopolitical winds that tug on other federal health agencies’ attention; but a dedicated budget and clear language in its mission mandating action on climate change would better position it against such winds. Instead of each new administration interpreting whether work on climate falls within the scope of an agency’s mission, there would be no question that addressing climate change is within the purview of the Department of Climate. 

While there are many offices or divisions across numerous agencies engaged in work related to energy or transportation, these cross-cutting topics nevertheless have Cabinet-level leadership and congressionally determined budgets to ensure their missions are met regardless of who sits in the White House. As with education, labor, or agriculture, we should have a Department of Climate so that our nation always has the clear dedication of resources it needs to concentrate on crucial issues.

The department could take the lead on addressing climate threats to human health— collaborating with CDC and other health agencies to strengthen, not further tax, our health sector — and obviate the seasonal question of whether the US is making climate change a priority or not. 

3) Climate change is a threat to equity — and we need to build the capacity to do better 

Climate change threatens our health, but it does not threaten it equally. Certain communities are disproportionately vulnerable to climate change, including children, older adults, people with pre-existing health conditions, low-income communities, certain occupational groups, Indigenous peoples, and many communities of color. 

As we see with Covid-19, discrimination leads to disproportionate rates of illnesses and deaths from environmental health hazards among Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous peoples. 

Climate change does not just exacerbate the impacts of racism, it is also caused by white supremacy, a snake eating its own tail. As Hop Hopkins wrote for the advocacy group the Sierra Club: “You can’t have climate change without sacrifice zones, and you can’t have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can’t have disposable people without racism.” 

And people of color— who, as the writer and podcast host Mary Annaïse Heglar points out, have faced their own existential threats for hundreds of years and have unrivaled experience building activist movements — often do not have enough seats at the table when it comes to developing or implementing environmental policy.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) work to enforce health and safety rules and pursue criminal anti-pollution cases, efforts the Biden campaign’s new environmental justice plan proposes to strengthen. But even providing more resources to these existing government structures won’t be enough to guarantee meaningful involvement of all people in actions to address climate change. We need to build out additional capacity and create more jobs in the environmental justice field. 

One way to do this is by building divisions in the Department of Climate that, in addition to helping the EPA and DOJ prosecute violators of environmental protections, work to prioritize those communities made most vulnerable to climate change and ensure diverse voices are part of the climate solution. 

By bringing in more people with social movement-building experience and new voices from communities often unheard, we could accomplish so much more — and more quickly. This is important because the world has a lot of lost time to make up for in terms of fighting climate change and systemic inequity. The threads of these two existential threats are intricately and tragically interwoven; the most effective way to unravel them both is to solve them together. 

A Department of Climate, not just working for the people disproportionately affected, but made of the people with the most expertise in social justice and the most knowledge of their communities’ unique needs and strengths, would give the US its best chance of implementing creative, long-lasting, and just solutions to climate change.

What the future could hold

The United States has faced crises in the past, as we do today, and will again. We don’t need to look very far back in history for examples of how effective federal restructuring can provide the means to meet such challenges. Try reading these lines from the 2002 Proposal to Create the Department of Homeland Security with the words “climate change” swapped in to see just how easily a similar proposal could be created for a Department of Climate: 

“Today, no single government agency has homeland security climate change as its primary mission. In fact, responsibilities for homeland security climate change are dispersed among more than 100 different government organizations. America needs a single, unified homeland security climate change structure that will improve protection against today’s threats and be flexible enough to help meet the unknown threats of the future.” 

Creating the scaffolding for such a department now would be a clear signal to our country’s youth and to the communities most at risk that they don’t have to take on the entire burden of addressing climate change themselves. And it would be a clear signal to the rest of the world that the United States is finally ready to be a leader among the global community fighting climate change.

We have the urgency of the crisis to drive us, the precedence to guide us, the blueprint to build it, and the experts to unify it— everything we need to create a response commensurate to the size of this huge task. 

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RSN: FOCUS: Nothing Can Justify the Attack on Portland

23 July 20

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22 July 20

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A BUDGET: WE HAVE TO HAVE IT - There’s no way around paying the bills. “Reasonable” support will easily do it, and always has. Who can step up and help out? In earnest. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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FOCUS: Nothing Can Justify the Attack on Portland

Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes, The Atlantic
Excerpt: "The question of whether these arrests are appropriate has a clear answer - at least in a nation that purports to live under the rule of law." 

he Trump administration has faced outrage since reports first surfaced of federal agents in unmarked vehicles picking up and detaining protesters in Portland, Oregon. Rather than backing down, though, President Trump appears to have decided to go all in: In a July 20 interview, he threatened to send “more federal law enforcement” to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, and Oakland—cities run by “liberal Democrats,” he asserted. The question of whether or not the administration has the legal authority to take such action will be fought out in legal challenges. But the question of whether or not these arrests are appropriate has a clear answer—at least in a nation that purports to live under the rule of law.  

Asked on July 17 by an NPR reporter whether the reporting was true, Ken Cuccinelli, a senior Department of Homeland Security official, didn't seem troubled by the department's activities. Yes, he said, at least one person had been arrested in this fashion in Portland—though he wouldn’t say whether others had been as well, and if so how many. Cuccinelli added that this was how the Trump administration planned to respond to demonstrations at federal buildings and monuments elsewhere, too. “This is a posture we intend to continue not just in Portland, but in any of the facilities that we’re responsible for around the country,” he declared. And days later, he doubled down on CNN, insisting that the government had “intelligence about planned attacks on federal facilities” in Portland: “If we get the same kind of intelligence in other places … we would respond the same way.”

Reports of unidentified federal law-enforcement officials patrolling areas of Portland—and conducting arrests by scooping suspects up into vans—have generated a lot of anxiety. The Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum argued that the government’s actions amount to “performative authoritarianism.” Mary McCord, a lawyer who previously oversaw national-security issues at the Justice Department, warned The New York Times that manhandling Portland residents in this way “sends the message that these people are terrorists and need to be treated like terrorists.” And Oregon’s congressional delegation wrote a letter to the U.S. attorney general stating that the Portland arrests “are more reflective of tactics of a government led by a dictator, not from the government of our constitutional democratic republic.” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and Ron Wyden, the senior senator from Oregon, both decried the arrests as unconstitutional.

There will be time to sort out the legalities of the federal government’s actions. The attorney general of Oregon has filed suit against various federal agencies and officers involved in one arrest, arguing, “Ordinarily, a person ... who is confronted by anonymous men in military-type fatigues and ordered into an unmarked van can reasonably assume that he is being kidnapped and is the victim of a crime.” The American Civil Liberties Union has also sued the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Marshals Service. The chairs of three House committees have requested an internal DHS investigation of the matter. Between these varied proceedings, the Trump administration will have to answer legal questions like whether it’s really okay for unidentified federal officers and agents to patrol streets, and whether an agency whose mission is to patrol the border is properly used without training for crowd control. The administration will also have to justify the propriety of the individual arrests both in any prosecutions of those detained and in any civil suits filed.

But let’s leave the legalities aside for now. Because whether the Trump administration has the technical legal authority to deploy this show of force in this particular matter does not answer the question of whether it should do so. The use of federal officers in this manner is corrosive of democratic culture, it makes for bad and ineffective law enforcement, and it’s likely physically dangerous both for the law-enforcement officers and for the protesters in question.

According to The New York Times, Homeland Security officers were deployed under the department’s authority to protect federal property—including, in this case, the Portland federal courthouse. The deployment of armed forces comes along with increased domestic intelligence operations. Yesterday, Lawfare reported that the Department of Homeland Security’s little-known intelligence arm had authorized intelligence collection on people connected to threats to monuments and statues, having designated the protection of such monuments a homeland-security mission following President Trump’s monument-protection executive order last month.

The existence of the department’s authority to protect federal property is uncontroversial. The federal government has the power to defend federal buildings and facilities from civil unrest, and a variety of federal laws protect federal property from attack and vandalism and federal officials from interference with their discharge of the government’s business.

While this authority certainly extends to the power to investigate federal crimes and arrest those suspected of them, it is not some general authority to patrol the downtowns of major cities and pick up and detain protesters merely because a federal building may be in the neighborhood.

Likewise, federal law-enforcement officers should conceal their identities only under highly specific circumstances—none of which involves crowd control at a protest or policing a public area. Officers might reasonably go undercover in an effort to infiltrate a criminal organization, for example. Federal air marshals are generally unidentified so they can blend in with passengers on commercial flights—preventing would-be hijackers from knowing which flights are patrolled. But it should be quite unthinkable for armed officers exercising coercive arrest powers in the streets of an American city to not identify themselves by name and affiliation.

A similar situation to the one in Portland arose in Washington, D.C., last month, when the president deployed National Guard units and a smorgasbord of federal law-enforcement agencies, including officers from the Department of Homeland Security, during protests over the killing of George Floyd. The deployment of anonymized federal muscle in various locations in the district angered many people, and rightly so. These recent actions in Portland are more jarring still.

For better or worse, residents of D.C. are used to a significant federal law-enforcement presence in their daily lives—albeit one that’s quite open and overt. A significant area of the city is patrolled by the United States Capitol Police, for example; uniformed Secret Service officers protect embassies; the United States Park Police has jurisdiction over national parkland, which is abundant in the city. And one or more unmarked dark SUVs accompanying some official-looking car is a pretty normal affair. But even a certain baseline comfort with a heavy federal presence didn’t prepare D.C. for an invasion of little green men. How much more shocking it must be for people in Portland, who lack that general familiarity, to suddenly have unidentified officers snatching people off the street and hustling them into unmarked vehicles.

There are additional concerns. The tactical divisions of the Homeland Security Department from which the officers in Portland appear to hail—Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—are not typically deployed at protests, but charged with enforcing immigration law and guarding the U.S. border. And as an internal department memo obtained by The New York Times shows, the officers sent into Portland’s streets were not trained to handle crowds. “If this type of response is going to be the norm,” the memo cautions, “specialized training and standardized equipment should be deployed to responding agencies.”

All of which brings us to the dangers—for everyone involved—of protecting federal buildings in this particular fashion. Sending out officers untrained for demonstrations risks violence if the agents end up in situations they don’t know how to handle. Recall that some of the protests in the wake of Floyd’s death swung out of control in large part because of ill-considered police actions. This anonymized deployment risks compounding that problem. Because if, as Oregon’s attorney general hypothesizes, a protester ”confronted by anonymous men in military-type fatigues and ordered into an unmarked van” were to “reasonably assume that he is being kidnapped and is the victim of a crime,” he might plausibly resort to violence in self-defense. This may be a particular risk if the person in question happens to be suspicious of police authority in the first place. And the risk may be further heightened by the fact that various militia groups have been known to organize armed groups in defense of supposed law-enforcement interests. Ambiguity about an officer’s identity or power to make an arrest serves the interests of neither law enforcement nor protesters.

So why is the Trump administration sending into American cities officers who aren’t appropriately trained for the mission, are acting on legal authority that will require litigation to defend, and are being deployed to address a problem that the federal government could address by means far less provocative and in a fashion far less likely to escalate disorder?

The answer is unfortunately obvious. Having given up on controlling the pandemic that has now killed more than 140,000 Americans, and faced with dimming reelection prospects, Trump is doing his best to substantiate the tough-guy vision of the presidency that has always appealed to him. During earlier stages of his administration, he played out this fantasy along the southern border of the United States by deploying troops to the American Southwest and warning about “caravans” of travelers illegally entering the country. Now, as officers typically tasked with enforcing the border have been deployed into Portland, Trump’s apocalyptic warnings about the need for a brutal response to any perceived threat have also moved from the edge of the country into American cities.

The message is as simple as it is ugly: The caravan isn’t just coming north through Mexico. It is already here—in the efforts to take down statues, in the protests, in the pockets of disorder in American urban areas and in the gatherings of people exercising their First Amendment rights to object to police misconduct. The caravan, in fact, is the city. And only Trump can protect you from it—whether it is what you see when you look south or what you see when you look downtown.

Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working. Last night in Portland, as happened last month in Washington, D.C., peaceful protests only grew in response to the federal show of force. If Trump follows through on his promise to export the federal muscle to other cities, the anonymous agents may be met with more large crowds defying Trump’s efforts at vilification and coercion.

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POLITICO NIGHTLY: Are kids safe?

BY MYAH WARD

Presented by

ARE THE KIDS ALRIGHT? In today’s coronavirus press conference at the White House, President Donald Trump suggested that science was on the side of in-person schooling this fall, because children are less likely to get sick and die from Covid-19. “They don’t catch it easily,” he said. “They don’t bring it home easily. And if they do catch it, they get better fast.”

That did appear to be one tiny blessing in March as Covid-19 sprawled across the globe. Early reports suggested kids were virtually untouched by the pandemic.

Now it’s July, and some school districts are just weeks away away from opening up classrooms. Like the president, some politicians — and parents — are arguing the risk is low for kids. Is it?

Kids still appear to be less likely to catch and transmit the virus. The leading explanation is that kids make fewer receptors, a protein called ACE2, making it more difficult for the virus to latch on, said Mark R. Schleiss, a pediatric infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota Medical School. As children move into adolescence and become adults, they make more of these receptors, theoretically increasing their chance of contracting the virus. The evidence for this hypothesis is limited, and would require more research.

Other theories suggest children’s smaller lungs, or even their shorter height, play a role in the likelihood of transmission, Schleiss said.

There are 317,711 reported Covid-19 cases in children and teenagers across the U.S., according to the COVKID Project, led by a team of epidemiologists who track cases in children and teens. There have been 77 reported deaths, and 805 intensive care hospitalizations in children 17 and under.

There are at least 342 cases of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in U.S. children, according to the CDC, and six reported deaths. The Covid-linked illness causes symptoms like rashes, conjunctivitis and stomach problems. While Covid primarily affects the lungs, MIS-C primarily attacks a child’s heart. Most children are developing the illness two to four weeks after being exposed to the virus. But outside of its existence, “we don’t really know what that’s about,” Schleiss said.

And just as Covid-19 is disproportionately affecting Black and Hispanic adults, MIS-C is striking Black and Hispanic children, who make up about 70 percent of reported cases.

Skewed data doesn’t help. Undercounts are likely because kids often don’t show symptoms, tests are scarce, results lag and data collection and reporting is sporadic across the country. Jason Salemi, a professor of epidemiology at the University of South Florida, is working with the COVKID project to help provide nationwide data on how the virus is affecting children. “We’re only as good as the data. Currently, with few exceptions, it’s in a pretty woeful state, which precludes our ability to focus on geographic differences, temporal trends, race/ethnic disparities and differences in age within the pediatric population,” he said.

Poor data collection is just one example of how “kids always get the short end of the stick,” Schleiss said. Whether it’s contact tracing, screening for infections or clinical trials for a new drug, children often don’t get the resources and attention they should, he said.

The risk of children dying or becoming critically ill is low, Schleiss said, but that doesn’t mean parents shouldn’t be concerned. He used chicken pox as an example, a virus that killed 100 to 150 people a year before a vaccine was licensed in the U.S. “If you’re that family going through the unspeakable agony and heartbreak of that happening, then it’s pretty damned important,” he said.

“The history of pediatric medicine is peppered with many examples of rare diseases that we took very seriously because we could do something about them. The same thing is true here. We could do something about this — social distancing, face masks, appropriate precautions. We can decrease the likelihood that children will get Covid-19.”

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Renu is on the move, but her inbox is still right here. Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.

A message from Emergent BioSolutions:

Our global team is going full speed to develop potential therapies that may help treat COVID-19. At the same time, we’re collaborating on innovative vaccine candidates that can be made by the millions. Discover what we’re doing right now.

FIRST IN NIGHTLY

TRUMP HOPES FOR OCTOBER SURPRISE — The president’s bet that a proven-effective coronavirus vaccine will be the October surprise to catapult him into a second term is facing increasingly long odds. But that doesn’t mean he won’t find just enough reason to declare victory anyway.

While the race to find an effective vaccine for Covid-19 has crucial implications for nations around the world, it also carries political ramifications in the United States — with Trump banking heavily on finding a vaccine to quell both the pandemic and mounting unhappiness over his handling of the coronavirus response, health care reporter Adam Cancryn writes.

Buoyed by a series of encouraging early trial results, the administration is laying the groundwork for a high-profile rollout of initial coronavirus vaccines in as little as three months. It’s a best-case timetable that also tracks with the final weeks before the Nov. 3 election. The White House’s Operation Warp Speed has poured billions of dollars into developing a vaccine in record time, funding several efforts in parallel and buying up doses of the experimental shots in a wager that one will ultimately pay off. “We’ll end up with a cure,” Trump asserted on Tuesday. “We’re very close to the vaccine — I think we’re going to have some very good results."

DON'T MISS - POLITICO'S NEW "FUTURE PULSE" NEWSLETTER: The coronavirus pandemic accelerated long-simmering trends in health care technology and one thing is certain: The health care system that emerges from this crisis will be fundamentally different than the one that entered. From Congress and the White House, to state legislatures and Silicon Valley, Future Pulse spotlights the politics, policies, and technologies driving long-term change on the most personal issue for voters: Our health. SUBSCRIBE NOW.

FROM THE HEALTH DESK

WHO GETS IT? Executive health editor Joanne Kenen emails us:

The Trump administration announced its latest deal, this one worth close to $2 billion, today to buy millions of doses of a potential coronavirus vaccine, jump-starting production so people can start getting immunized quickly if and when the shots are approved. It’s one pandemic response approach where the White House has a clear national strategy, not a handoff to states. The preemptive stockpiling is one of the few aspects of the Trump coronavirus response that health experts broadly support.

The same can’t be said of the White House’s approach to the profoundly complicated challenges of how to allocate the vaccine — both within the U.S. and to 7 billion people across the globe. Who gets it? Who decides who gets it? Is the decision-making clear and transparent enough to build public trust, particularly given how much vaccine skepticism already exists?

The National Academy of Sciences announced this week that the CDC and the NIH asked it to form an ad hoc committee to “develop an overarching framework for vaccine allocation to assist policymakers in the domestic and global health communities in planning for equitable allocation of vaccines.” The first meeting is Friday.

The Academy is respected; its report will have moral weight, although it’s not clear how specific its recommendations will be or how closely they will be followed by the White House.

But the Academy is not a presidential commission. And Donald Trump is the first president since Gerald Ford to not appoint a presidential bioethics advisory board or commission — either an issue-specific one to address an emerging bioethical quandary, or, as recent presidents have done, a standing panel that’s at the ready when a crisis arises.

“The last several commissions were there to give general advice on science, ethics, bioethics, technology before you even knew there was going to be an urgent question — and there was always an urgent question,” said Lisa Lee, who was the executive director of the Obama administration commission and now helps oversee scholarly integrity and research at Virginia Tech.

Past commissions have covered a lot of bioethical ground: from the horrors of the then-newly disclosed Tuskegee syphilis experiments to choices surrounding end of life care to Dolly, the cloned sheep.

But Trump didn’t go that route, and now it would take too much time to set up an official presidential body. That makes the Academy a good fallback because it can be transparent, accountable and “broadly engage and educate the public,” said Amy Gutmann, the president of the University of Pennsylvania and the chair of Obama’s bioethics panel. (Guttman spoke to Politico before the Academy panel was named.)

After Sept. 11, Brian Strom, chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, led a National Academy group that advised the George W. Bush administration on a smallpox vaccination program to protect against a feared bioterror attack. That was more about safety and risk management than broad allocation of a scarce vaccine, but he recognizes the complexity -– and how some of the choices might appear quite provocative.

“One could easily argue that the vaccine should be given early on to people who are homeless,” he said, as they cannot safely take shelter, telecommute and social distance. “Or what about someone who wants to attend indoor political rallies? Should they go first?”

BIG DATA — A Trump administration change in the way hospitals report coronavirus data is bringing confusion and more work to medical centers and states as cases explode across the country. And hospitals that don’t get it right every day could end up receiving fewer critical drugs like remdesivir, health care reporters Darius Tahir and Rachel Roubein write.

The Trump administration uses data on coronavirus hospitalizations, drug supplies and ICU beds to allocate scarce Covid-19 treatments, as well as supplies of plasma and protective gear. But last week, the Department of Health and Human Services abruptly changed the reporting process, bypassing a long-used CDC system with an alternative designed to more quickly help track the virus’ spread.

The move marked the latest flashpoint in a power struggle between the Washington-based federal health department and the nation’s premier public health agency, located in Atlanta. And now the changeover could result in collateral damage for hospitals whose supplies are in danger and are scrambling to make quick software and staffing changes, according to health industry officials.

LISTEN — The CDC is deploying teams across the country to address racial disparities during the coronavirus pandemic. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, health care reporter Alice Miranda Ollstein explains why the deep and deadly problem can't be fixed without a dramatic shift in federal policy.

Listen to the latest POLITICO Dispatch podcast

ON THE ECONOMY

CLIFF DIVING — A dysfunctional Congress is about to go careening off yet another fiscal cliff — but this will hurt a hell of a lot more than most, Sarah Ferris and Andrew Desiderio write. Tens of million unemployed Americans are about to lose their economic lifeline during the worst recession in 80 years, with eviction protections set to expire at the same time. As the final unemployment checks are set to be processed this weekend, Capitol Hill has begun to feel some urgency. Still, it’s likely too late.

WHAT CRASH? The U.S. housing market, the epicenter of the nation’s last economic meltdown, is thriving — and that's helping to keep the country afloat during the latest crisis, even as other industries struggle to survive, financial services reporter Katy O’Donnell writes.

While the $34 trillion market faltered at the start of the pandemic, its rebound has far outperformed expectations, with existing home sales surging more than 20 percent in June, according to data released today. Some areas of housing are actually doing better than they were before the coronavirus began sweeping the U.S.

White-collar employees — many of whom are able to work from home and keep getting paychecks — are buying. And analysts believe the pandemic has prompted some millennials, now reaching the prime age for buying first homes, to pull up stakes in crowded cities and head for the suburbs. Securing a home loan, meanwhile, is cheaper than ever, with mortgage rates hitting historic lows thanks to the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policy.

A message from Emergent BioSolutions:

 

ON THE HILL

INSIDE THE GOP BILL (SORT OF) — Senate Republicans started unveiling pieces of their new coronavirus relief bill today, but negotiators remain undecided on several key issues. Republican leadership briefed Senate GOP aides on the proposed legislation this afternoon, Marianne LeVine and John Bresnahan write. The Republican initiative is expected to include a temporary flat payment for unemployment insurance for two months, although the exact amount of the federal contribution wasn’t finalized, according to sources on the call. Beefed-up $600 federal unemployment payments begin expiring at the end of this week, a deadline that has spurred GOP leaders into action.

But Republican leaders also didn't reveal whether their proposal will include a payroll tax cut, a top priority for President Donald Trump. Several GOP sources said the payroll tax cut "was out," but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declined to confirm that as he walked out of the Capitol tonight.

ASK THE AUDIENCE

Nightly asks you: Have you gotten tested for Covid-19? Do you want to get tested but are unable to? Tell us your testing experience. Send us your story with our form and we’ll include some of the responses in Friday’s Nightly.

A man browses some of the books available in the main area of the Barbican Library following its reopening in London. The United Kingdom has the world’s highest Covid-19 mortality rate at about 68 deaths per 100,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. | Getty Images

THE GLOBAL FIGHT

IT COULD BE WORSE — The U.S. is subject to its share of global Covid-shaming. But at least we’re not Bolivia, Ryan Heath writes. Police there recovered more than 400 bodies from streets, cars and homes over the last week, nearly all of them Covid-19 deaths. In the capital, La Paz, alone, 141 bodies were recovered.

Bolivians are getting desperate: Despite pleas by health officials, lawmakers are encouraging bleach as a coronavirus treatment, and people are lining up to buy it. Political problems are escalating too. The country is scheduled to hold elections in September after living with a temporary government after protests forced out long-time leader Evo Morales in November 2019. But with hospitals now full and the caretaker president, Jeanine Áñez, testing positive for coronavirus two weeks ago, the election is starting to look doubtful.

JOIN TOMORROW AT 1:30 p.m. EDT – A GLOBAL RALLYING CRY: The Black Lives Matter movement has gone global with anti-racism protests sweeping cities around the world. What does the racial reckoning look like abroad? Join Global Translations author Ryan Heath for a conversation with Dominique Day, a human rights lawyer and vice chair of the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, on how the fight for equality has become a worldwide rallying cry following the killing of George Floyd. REGISTER HERE.

NIGHTLY NUMBER

$1.95 billion The amount the U.S. government will pay Pfizer for 100 million doses of its experimental coronavirus vaccine if the shot proves safe and effective.

PARTING WORDS

LAST RITES FOR THE LOST CAUSE? The House voted overwhelmingly today to remove Confederate statues from the Capitol, the latest effort by Congress to respond to the nationwide protests over systemic racism and injustice, Heather Caygle writes.

The bill would remove the bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney from the old Supreme Court chamber, located in the Capitol. Taney authored the controversial and later widely panned Dred Scott decision in 1857, which declared African Americans weren’t citizens. The Taney bust would be replaced with a statue of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice.

Despite overwhelming support for the bill in the House, it’s unclear whether the GOP-controlled Senate will take up the legislation. It’s also unclear whether President Donald Trump would sign the bill.

The legislation would also remove three statues of Americans who promoted slavery and white supremacy — Charles Aycock, John C. Calhoun, and James Paul Clarke — and require states to reclaim and replace their Confederate statues in the Capitol. Currently, there are 12 Confederate statues in the Capitol collection.

A message from Emergent BioSolutions:

We go after public health threats. In the fight against COVID-19, we are going full speed to develop potential new therapies and vaccine candidates.
We go for critical innovations. We are developing two potential hyperimmune treatments for severe hospitalized COVID-19 patients and individuals at risk. Based on proven technology, the research and testing are underway.
We go in partnership with others. We are working with industry innovators to bring COVID-19 vaccine candidates to market. We have the capacity to manufacture vaccines in the tens to hundreds of millions, and we are propelling development forward.
We go. And go. From fighting anthrax to helping prevent smallpox and developing vaccine candidates, we go all in. Because public health threats will never stop. And neither will we.

See how we go all in.

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Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam

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Philadelphia's Top Prosecutor Is Prepared to Arrest Federal Agents

Larry Krasner is impressive!

After numerous reports and lawsuits in Portland regarding un-badged and un-uniformed federal officers arresting, beating, and detaining people in unmarked vehicles, the Trump administration’s response is that they’re going to do it even more, and in more cities. Saying that his federal agents are doing a “fantastic job,” Trump has suggested that he will also deploy agents in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Milwaukee to do the same.

In one of those cities, the city prosecutor has already preemptively warned Trump’s police forces what he will do if they bring the same tactics to Philadelphia:

“My dad volunteered and served in World War II to fight fascism, like most of my uncles, so we would not have an American president brutalizing and kidnapping Americans for exercising their constitutional rights and trying to make America a better place, which is what patriots do,” said Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner in a statement. “Anyone, including federal law enforcement, who unlawfully assaults and kidnaps people will face criminal charges from my office.”

BLOOMBERG.COM

Philadelphia's Top Prosecutor Is Prepared to Arrest Federal Agents

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