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Not everything here is about the CDC and SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, but a lot of it is. And Trump's CDC Director is a fundamentalist jackass who called AIDS "God's judgement" on queers back in the 80s, one of those fucks, so... yeah. Anything the CDC says has to be highly suspect. Sorry.
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[Whole thread, really. CDC Director Redfield is a Trump sycophant and earlier in this thread says that the most important thing he wants to say today is how great Trump is. It's grotesque. For background, Director Redfield, a Trump appointee, back in the 80s called AIDS God's Judgement against the Queers. But I picked this one because it's the one where Dumpster calls our governor a snake.]
Aaron Rupar
twitter.com/atrupar
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1236057271727202305
Trump smears Jay Inslee, governor of the state at the heart of the coronavirus outbreak: "I told Mike [Pence] not to be complimentary of the governor, because that governor is a snake."
-----
[ARTICLE FROM 2018. Background on Redfield.]
Why Trump's new CDC director is an abysmal choice
By Laurie Garrett
Updated 11:51 PM ET, Sun May 13, 2018
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/13/opinions/trumps-terrible-choice-for-cdc-redfield-garrett/index.html
(CNN)The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a new boss, Dr. Robert Redfield, who ignited controversy because of his dubious qualifications for the job and the over-the-top salary offer that came with it. Initially slated to earn $375,000 a year, Redfield faced questions from Democrats, led by Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, and last week agreed to work for $209,700 instead.
"Dr. Redfield did not want his compensation to become a distraction from the important work of the CDC and asked that his salary be reduced," Caitlin Oakley, spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said Tuesday night.
Redfield's original salary was unusually, astoundingly high. Redfield's boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar makes only $175,300, and most scientists and physicians working in HHS make less than $170,000 a year.
...
In the 1980s Redfield worked closely with W. Shepherd Smith, Jr. and his Christian organization, Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy, or ASAP. The group maintained that AIDS was "God's judgment" against homosexuals, spread in an America weakened by single-parent households and loss of family values.
Redfield wrote the introduction to a 1990 book, "Christians in the Age of AIDS," co-written by Smith, in which he denounced distribution of sterile needles to drug users and condoms to sexually active adults, and described anti-discrimination programs as the efforts of "false prophets."
In the early 1990's, ASAP and Redfield also backed H.R. 2788, a House bill sponsored by deeply conservative Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-California). It would have subjected people with HIV to testing, loss of professional licenses and would have effectively quarantined them. (The bill died in Congress.) In the 2000s, Redfield was a top advocate for the so-called "ABCs of AIDS" in Africa, pressing to prevent HIV infection through sexual abstinence, monogamy and the use of condoms only as a last resort.
-----
Liz Specht
twitter.com/LizSpecht
https://twitter.com/LizSpecht/status/1236095180459003909
[START OF THREAD - READ ENTIRE THREAD]
I think most people aren’t aware of the risk of systemic healthcare failure due to #COVID19 because they simply haven’t run the numbers yet. Let’s talk math. 1/n
-----
Trump and CDC Director Insist Coronavirus Tests Are Working
By Justin Sink
and Mario Parker
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-06/trump-aides-say-virus-is-contained-while-u-s-count-grows
President Donald Trump and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defended the agency’s development of a test for the coronavirus, dismissing assertions that the federal agency’s missteps have handicapped diagnosis of the disease.
“Anybody who wants a test can get a test,” Trump said during a tour of the CDC’s laboratories in Atlanta. He swiftly revised the statement, saying moments later: “Anybody who right now and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test.”
The number of cases of the virus in the U.S. has more than doubled since Monday, to 260, Johns Hopkins University reported on Friday. There are hotspots in Santa Clara, California; outside Seattle; and in Westchester County, New York. There have been 14 deaths, most of them in King County, Washington.
-----
Hopkins experts share latest coronavirus information with Congress
Panelists from Johns Hopkins discuss how COVID-19 is transmitted, how it is being tracked, and how governments, institutions, and individuals can prevent its spread
By Saralyn Cruickshank and Katie Pearce
https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/03/06/covid-19-coronavirus-expert-testimony-to-congress/
Six Johns Hopkins experts convened on Capitol Hill today for a discussion of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak that has spread throughout the world since early January, infecting more than 101,000 and killing 3,300 people.
Speaking to an audience of reporters and congressional staffers in the Rayburn Office Building in Washington, D.C., the experts shared the latest insights and evidence about how the COVID-19 virus is transmitted, how it is being tracked, and how governments, institutions, and individuals can prevent its spread. The panel discussion was moderated by Lauren Sauer, director of operations for the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response.
...
As the number of cases of coronavirus rises across the U.S., the experts said they expect to see a greater emphasis on social distancing measures—precautions that increase the physical space between people during an epidemic. These measures typically include business and school closures and the cancellation of social gatherings—such as the popular Texas music and media festival South by Southwest, which was canceled today due to coronavirus concerns. About 300 million students are currently out of school across the world as a result of shutdowns related to the virus, Inglesby said.
For those who can't work remotely, there are a number of straightforward ways they can protect themselves as coronavirus spreads, Farley said. The most important way to prevent the spread of illness is to practice good personal hygiene by washing your hands frequently and coughing and sneezing into your elbow or a tissue.
...
"Every institution has some manner of pandemic respiratory virus planning," she said. "We need to … dust off those plans and think about the nitty gritty of what it would take to operationalize and implement those plans."
But further insights into the way coronavirus spreads may complicate those preparedness plans. Although the disease primarily spreads through droplets from the mouth and nose, Pekosz suggested that new evidence indicates it can also spread via airborne pathways. Additionally, virus pathogens that land on surfaces can be stabilized within the droplets from the infected person, allowing the virus to survive longer outside the body and infect others.
According to Maragakis, this new evidence about the potential for coronavirus to become airborne indicates that institutions should consider adapting their response plans to include airborne precautions. In health systems, that may include increasing the number of rooms or facilities with air handling processes specifically designed for treating people with airborne diseases.
-----
Exclusive: The Strongest Evidence Yet That America Is Botching Coronavirus Testing
“I don’t know what went wrong,” a former CDC chief told The Atlantic.
Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal
March 6, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many-americans-have-been-tested-coronavirus/607597/
March 6, 2020.
It’s one of the most urgent questions in the United States right now: How many people have actually been tested for the coronavirus?
This number would give a sense of how widespread the disease is, and how forceful a response to it the United States is mustering. But for days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to publish such a count, despite public anxiety and criticism from Congress. On Monday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, estimated that “by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed” in the United States. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised that “roughly 1.5 million tests” would be available this week.
But the number of tests performed across the country has fallen far short of those projections, despite extraordinarily high demand, The Atlantic has found.
“The CDC got this right with H1N1 and Zika, and produced huge quantities of test kits that went around the country,” Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, told us. “I don’t know what went wrong this time.”
-----
Evangelical Christians are linking LGBTQ people to the coronavirus now
That didn't take long.
By Bil Browning
Friday, March 6, 2020
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2020/03/evangelical-christians-linking-lgbtq-people-coronavirus-now/
Evangelical Christians have blamed LGBTQ people for all sorts of natural disasters and diseases, from Ebola to earthquakes, and now they’re starting to falsely link the community to the new coronavirus COVID-19.
Steven Andrew from USA Christian Church has named March “Repent of LGBT Sin Month” to protect “the USA from diseases, such as the Coronavirus.” The flamboyant preacher has been nicknamed “Pastor Jazz Hands” by blogger Joe Jervis.
“God’s love shows it is urgent to repent because the Bible teaches homosexuals lose their souls and God destroys LGBT societies,” the minister said in a video posted to YouTube.
“Our safety is at stake since national disobedience of God’s laws brings danger and diseases, such as coronavirus, but obeying God brings covenant protection… God protects the USA from danger as the country repents of LGBT, false gods, abortion and other sins.”
-----
Trump falsely claimed that Obama administration slowed down diagnostic testing
By Elizabeth Cohen and John Bonifield, CNN
Updated 3:54 PM ET, Fri March 6, 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/04/politics/donald-trump-obama-testing-lamar-alexander/index.html
(CNN) - President Donald Trump Wednesday sought to lay blame on the Obama administration for slowing down new diagnostic testing but there's no evidence to support that claim.
"The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we're doing," Trump said Wednesday during a meeting on addressing the coronavirus outbreak. "And we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place in a much more rapid and accurate fashion."
The White House did not offer a comment when asked to explain why the President said it was an Obama-era decision, but a source close to the coronavirus task force told CNN's Jim Acosta it's not clear where Trump got his information that an Obama administration rule had somehow slowed diagnostic testing.
-----
Civilian vacancies at Trump’s Pentagon hit new high
One Defense official pushed back on the notion of a disagreement between the White House and the Pentagon over Rood’s replacement.
By LARA SELIGMAN and DANIEL LIPPMAN
03/06/2020
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/pentagon-vacancies-donald-trump-122805
The number of high-level civilian vacancies at the Pentagon has hit a new high for the Trump administration as lawmakers raise concerns that the department doesn't have enough qualified people in place to tackle the nation's biggest national security problems.
More than a third of all Senate-confirmed civilian positions at the Department of Defense are now vacant or filled by temporary officials, a peak level for the administration outside of the transition period, according to information provided to POLITICO by a Defense Department spokesperson. Out of 60 senior positions, 21 lack permanent appointees. Thirteen of those positions have no nominee identified, including the slots for comptroller, space policy chief, and the head of international security affairs.
Lawmakers this week raised new questions about the state of civilian control of the military in the Trump era, as the administration faces decisions on winding down the war in Afghanistan, countering Iran's military moves and investing for competition with China and Russia.
-----
Bernie Beats Trump
twitter.com/doctorow
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1235949765784821760
[START OF THREAD - READ ENTIRE THREAD]
Club of Rome founder Frits Böttcher was the Netherlands' leading climate denier. He died in 2008. Investigative journalists combing through his papers, discovered that he was paid €500K by Shell and others to sow doubt about climate change.
-----
[Whole thread, really. CDC Director Redfield is a Trump sycophant and earlier in this thread says that the most important thing he wants to say today is how great Trump is. It's grotesque. For background, Director Redfield, a Trump appointee, back in the 80s called AIDS God's Judgement against the Queers. But I picked this one because it's the one where Dumpster calls our governor a snake.]
Aaron Rupar
twitter.com/atrupar
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1236057271727202305
Trump smears Jay Inslee, governor of the state at the heart of the coronavirus outbreak: "I told Mike [Pence] not to be complimentary of the governor, because that governor is a snake."
-----
[ARTICLE FROM 2018. Background on Redfield.]
Why Trump's new CDC director is an abysmal choice
By Laurie Garrett
Updated 11:51 PM ET, Sun May 13, 2018
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/13/opinions/trumps-terrible-choice-for-cdc-redfield-garrett/index.html
(CNN)The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a new boss, Dr. Robert Redfield, who ignited controversy because of his dubious qualifications for the job and the over-the-top salary offer that came with it. Initially slated to earn $375,000 a year, Redfield faced questions from Democrats, led by Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, and last week agreed to work for $209,700 instead.
"Dr. Redfield did not want his compensation to become a distraction from the important work of the CDC and asked that his salary be reduced," Caitlin Oakley, spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said Tuesday night.
Redfield's original salary was unusually, astoundingly high. Redfield's boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar makes only $175,300, and most scientists and physicians working in HHS make less than $170,000 a year.
...
In the 1980s Redfield worked closely with W. Shepherd Smith, Jr. and his Christian organization, Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy, or ASAP. The group maintained that AIDS was "God's judgment" against homosexuals, spread in an America weakened by single-parent households and loss of family values.
Redfield wrote the introduction to a 1990 book, "Christians in the Age of AIDS," co-written by Smith, in which he denounced distribution of sterile needles to drug users and condoms to sexually active adults, and described anti-discrimination programs as the efforts of "false prophets."
In the early 1990's, ASAP and Redfield also backed H.R. 2788, a House bill sponsored by deeply conservative Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-California). It would have subjected people with HIV to testing, loss of professional licenses and would have effectively quarantined them. (The bill died in Congress.) In the 2000s, Redfield was a top advocate for the so-called "ABCs of AIDS" in Africa, pressing to prevent HIV infection through sexual abstinence, monogamy and the use of condoms only as a last resort.
-----
Liz Specht
twitter.com/LizSpecht
https://twitter.com/LizSpecht/status/1236095180459003909
[START OF THREAD - READ ENTIRE THREAD]
I think most people aren’t aware of the risk of systemic healthcare failure due to #COVID19 because they simply haven’t run the numbers yet. Let’s talk math. 1/n
-----
Trump and CDC Director Insist Coronavirus Tests Are Working
By Justin Sink
and Mario Parker
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-06/trump-aides-say-virus-is-contained-while-u-s-count-grows
President Donald Trump and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defended the agency’s development of a test for the coronavirus, dismissing assertions that the federal agency’s missteps have handicapped diagnosis of the disease.
“Anybody who wants a test can get a test,” Trump said during a tour of the CDC’s laboratories in Atlanta. He swiftly revised the statement, saying moments later: “Anybody who right now and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test.”
The number of cases of the virus in the U.S. has more than doubled since Monday, to 260, Johns Hopkins University reported on Friday. There are hotspots in Santa Clara, California; outside Seattle; and in Westchester County, New York. There have been 14 deaths, most of them in King County, Washington.
-----
Hopkins experts share latest coronavirus information with Congress
Panelists from Johns Hopkins discuss how COVID-19 is transmitted, how it is being tracked, and how governments, institutions, and individuals can prevent its spread
By Saralyn Cruickshank and Katie Pearce
https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/03/06/covid-19-coronavirus-expert-testimony-to-congress/
Six Johns Hopkins experts convened on Capitol Hill today for a discussion of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak that has spread throughout the world since early January, infecting more than 101,000 and killing 3,300 people.
Speaking to an audience of reporters and congressional staffers in the Rayburn Office Building in Washington, D.C., the experts shared the latest insights and evidence about how the COVID-19 virus is transmitted, how it is being tracked, and how governments, institutions, and individuals can prevent its spread. The panel discussion was moderated by Lauren Sauer, director of operations for the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response.
...
As the number of cases of coronavirus rises across the U.S., the experts said they expect to see a greater emphasis on social distancing measures—precautions that increase the physical space between people during an epidemic. These measures typically include business and school closures and the cancellation of social gatherings—such as the popular Texas music and media festival South by Southwest, which was canceled today due to coronavirus concerns. About 300 million students are currently out of school across the world as a result of shutdowns related to the virus, Inglesby said.
For those who can't work remotely, there are a number of straightforward ways they can protect themselves as coronavirus spreads, Farley said. The most important way to prevent the spread of illness is to practice good personal hygiene by washing your hands frequently and coughing and sneezing into your elbow or a tissue.
...
"Every institution has some manner of pandemic respiratory virus planning," she said. "We need to … dust off those plans and think about the nitty gritty of what it would take to operationalize and implement those plans."
But further insights into the way coronavirus spreads may complicate those preparedness plans. Although the disease primarily spreads through droplets from the mouth and nose, Pekosz suggested that new evidence indicates it can also spread via airborne pathways. Additionally, virus pathogens that land on surfaces can be stabilized within the droplets from the infected person, allowing the virus to survive longer outside the body and infect others.
According to Maragakis, this new evidence about the potential for coronavirus to become airborne indicates that institutions should consider adapting their response plans to include airborne precautions. In health systems, that may include increasing the number of rooms or facilities with air handling processes specifically designed for treating people with airborne diseases.
-----
Exclusive: The Strongest Evidence Yet That America Is Botching Coronavirus Testing
“I don’t know what went wrong,” a former CDC chief told The Atlantic.
Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal
March 6, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many-americans-have-been-tested-coronavirus/607597/
March 6, 2020.
It’s one of the most urgent questions in the United States right now: How many people have actually been tested for the coronavirus?
This number would give a sense of how widespread the disease is, and how forceful a response to it the United States is mustering. But for days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to publish such a count, despite public anxiety and criticism from Congress. On Monday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, estimated that “by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed” in the United States. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised that “roughly 1.5 million tests” would be available this week.
But the number of tests performed across the country has fallen far short of those projections, despite extraordinarily high demand, The Atlantic has found.
“The CDC got this right with H1N1 and Zika, and produced huge quantities of test kits that went around the country,” Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, told us. “I don’t know what went wrong this time.”
-----
Evangelical Christians are linking LGBTQ people to the coronavirus now
That didn't take long.
By Bil Browning
Friday, March 6, 2020
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2020/03/evangelical-christians-linking-lgbtq-people-coronavirus-now/
Evangelical Christians have blamed LGBTQ people for all sorts of natural disasters and diseases, from Ebola to earthquakes, and now they’re starting to falsely link the community to the new coronavirus COVID-19.
Steven Andrew from USA Christian Church has named March “Repent of LGBT Sin Month” to protect “the USA from diseases, such as the Coronavirus.” The flamboyant preacher has been nicknamed “Pastor Jazz Hands” by blogger Joe Jervis.
“God’s love shows it is urgent to repent because the Bible teaches homosexuals lose their souls and God destroys LGBT societies,” the minister said in a video posted to YouTube.
“Our safety is at stake since national disobedience of God’s laws brings danger and diseases, such as coronavirus, but obeying God brings covenant protection… God protects the USA from danger as the country repents of LGBT, false gods, abortion and other sins.”
-----
Trump falsely claimed that Obama administration slowed down diagnostic testing
By Elizabeth Cohen and John Bonifield, CNN
Updated 3:54 PM ET, Fri March 6, 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/04/politics/donald-trump-obama-testing-lamar-alexander/index.html
(CNN) - President Donald Trump Wednesday sought to lay blame on the Obama administration for slowing down new diagnostic testing but there's no evidence to support that claim.
"The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we're doing," Trump said Wednesday during a meeting on addressing the coronavirus outbreak. "And we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place in a much more rapid and accurate fashion."
The White House did not offer a comment when asked to explain why the President said it was an Obama-era decision, but a source close to the coronavirus task force told CNN's Jim Acosta it's not clear where Trump got his information that an Obama administration rule had somehow slowed diagnostic testing.
-----
Civilian vacancies at Trump’s Pentagon hit new high
One Defense official pushed back on the notion of a disagreement between the White House and the Pentagon over Rood’s replacement.
By LARA SELIGMAN and DANIEL LIPPMAN
03/06/2020
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/pentagon-vacancies-donald-trump-122805
The number of high-level civilian vacancies at the Pentagon has hit a new high for the Trump administration as lawmakers raise concerns that the department doesn't have enough qualified people in place to tackle the nation's biggest national security problems.
More than a third of all Senate-confirmed civilian positions at the Department of Defense are now vacant or filled by temporary officials, a peak level for the administration outside of the transition period, according to information provided to POLITICO by a Defense Department spokesperson. Out of 60 senior positions, 21 lack permanent appointees. Thirteen of those positions have no nominee identified, including the slots for comptroller, space policy chief, and the head of international security affairs.
Lawmakers this week raised new questions about the state of civilian control of the military in the Trump era, as the administration faces decisions on winding down the war in Afghanistan, countering Iran's military moves and investing for competition with China and Russia.
-----
Bernie Beats Trump
twitter.com/doctorow
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1235949765784821760
[START OF THREAD - READ ENTIRE THREAD]
Club of Rome founder Frits Böttcher was the Netherlands' leading climate denier. He died in 2008. Investigative journalists combing through his papers, discovered that he was paid €500K by Shell and others to sow doubt about climate change.
