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The Food and Drug Administration’s decision to give emergency authorization for convalescent plasma as a treatment for novel coronavirus patients — touted as a historic breakthrough by President Trump on Sunday — is raising doubts among some experts who say certain claims of its effectiveness are dubious or wrong. View the post here.
President Trump is ratcheting up pressure on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve treatments and a vaccine for the coronavirus.
The agency on Sunday announced an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19 patients, following extraordinary sustained attacks on the agency by Trump.
The president on Saturday accused the “deep state” at the FDA of slowing the development of treatments and vaccines before the November election. Continue reading.
Republicans have pushed to cut the expanded unemployment benefits in upcoming legislation because they claim it discourages people from working.Top Trump administration and White House officials on Sunday said they want to replace the soon-expiring expanded unemployment benefits with a system that pays those out of work 70 percent of lost wages because they feel the current system gives people a reason not to return to the job.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told “Fox News Sunday” he believed 70 percent of wage replacement from the federal government, as opposed to the additional $600 per week, “is a very fair level.”
“I think workers and Americans understand the concept that you shouldn’t be paid more to stay home than to work,” he said. “That the fair thing is to replace wages and it just wouldn’t be fair to use taxpayer dollars to pay more people to sit home than they would get working and get a job.” Continue reading.
The secretive titan behind one of America’s largest poultry companies, who is also one of the President’s top donors, is ruthlessly leveraging the coronavirus crisis—and his vast fortune—to strip workers of protections.On June 22nd, in the baking heat of a parking lot a few miles inland from Delaware’s beaches, several dozen poultry workers, many of them Black or Latino, gathered to decry the conditions at a local poultry plant owned by one of President Donald Trump’s biggest campaign contributors. “We’re here for a reason that is atrocious,” Nelson Hill, an official with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, told the small but boisterous crowd, which included top Democratic officials from the state, among them Senator Chris Coons. The union, part of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., represents some 1.3 million laborers in poultry-processing and meatpacking plants, as well as workers in grocery stores and retail establishments. Its members, many defined as “essential” workers—without the option of staying home—have been hit extraordinarily hard by the coronavirus. The union estimates that nearly thirty thousand of its workers in the food and health-care sectors have contracted covid-19, and that two hundred and thirty-eight of those have died.
For the previous forty-two years, a thousand or so laborers at the local processing plant, in Selbyville, had been represented by Local 27. Just two years earlier, the workers there had ratified a new five-year contract. But, Hill told the crowd, in the middle of the pandemic, as the number of infected workers soared, the plant’s owner, Mountaire Corporation—one of the country’s largest purveyors of chicken—conspired, along with Donald Trump, to “kick us out.”
Hill, who is Black and from a working-class family on the Delmarva Peninsula—a scrubby stretch of farmland that includes parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia—was used to the area’s heat and humidity. But, as he spoke to the crowd, behind dark glasses, his face glistened with anger. “It’s greed, that’s what it is,” he said. “It’s a damn shame.” Continue reading.
The leader of one of the largest teachers’ unions in the U.S. accused President Donald Trump over the weekend of “trying to bury” federal guidelines warning that fully reopening schools and universities in the fall poses a high risk of spreading Covid-19 and endangering the health of students, faculty, and parents.
A 69-page packet (pdf) of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention materials obtained by the New York Times and labeled “For Internal Use Only” cautions that the “more people a student or staff member interacts with, and the longer that interaction, the higher the risk of Covid-19 spread.”
Last week, Trump complained on Twitter that non-binding school reopening guidelines offered by the CDC—which recommends that students maintain six feet of distance from each other and wear face coverings—are “very tough” and “expensive.” Continue reading.
Many far-right allies of President Donald Trump, from Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana to Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to radio host Glenn Beck, have railed against Democratic stay-at-home orders and argued that too much social distancing is strangling the U.S. economy. But economists Steven Berry and Zack Cooper, in a Politico op-ed, argue that the only way to “restore” the U.S. economy is to seriously slow down the spread of coronavirus — and doing so is going to require aggressively funding anti-coronavirus measures.
“Unfortunately, Congress and the (Trump) Administration seem poised to return to a tired playbook which isn’t working: ramping up government spending as if we are stuck in a pure financial crisis,” explain Berry and Cooper, both of whom teach economics at Yale University. “Financial aid, while vitally important for reducing the economic pain caused by COVID-19, will not hasten the end of the pandemic.”
Congress, according to Berry and Cooper, needs to fund “solutions that would shorten or mitigate the virus itself” — for example, “measures like increasing the supply of PPE, expanding testing, developing treatments, standing up contact tracing, or developing a vaccine.” Continue reading.
An overwhelming alignment of local, state and even Republican-aligned organizations oppose the rush to reopen schools and colleges.President Donald Trump has been on a rampage against public schools and colleges all week, threatening to use the power of the federal government to strong-arm officials into reopening classrooms.
But his effort is now creating a backlash: An overwhelming alignment of state and even Republican-aligned organizations oppose the rush to reopen schools. The nation’s leading pediatricians, Republican state school chiefs, Christian colleges and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have all challenged parts of Trump’s pressure campaign.
“Threats are not helpful,” Joy Hofmeister, the Republican state superintendent of public instruction in Oklahoma, told POLITICO on Friday. “We do not need to be schooled on why it’s important to reopen.” Continue reading.
President Trump is brushing off a new spike in coronavirus cases engulfing states across the South and Southwest, presenting a sunnier outlook even as Republican governors and public health officials increasingly express concern.
Trump in recent days has described the virus as “fading away” and “going away,” even as the country set a new record on Friday for new cases with more than 40,000 across the country.
The president tweeted that cases are going up because of “GREAT TESTING,” though experts widely say that an increase in testing is far from the only explanation for the rise in cases. Continue reading.
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The United States has set a record for new covid-19 cases for the third time in three days, passing the 40,000 mark for the first time, according to tracking by The Washington Post. Twelve states set their own records for the average number of new cases reported over the past seven days: Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Idaho and Utah.
Six states set new single-day highs, led by Florida with 8,942 cases, more than 60 percent higher than its previous high set on Wednesday. Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Idaho and Utah also set new single-day records.
Florida announced Friday morning that bars must close immediately, a move echoed by Texas, a state also dealing with a surge in cases and nearing its capacity to care for those suffering. Continue reading.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) mounted a fresh assault on President Trump’s efforts to kill the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, accusing Trump of putting Americans’ lives at risk during a pandemic.
At a campaign trip to the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania and on Capitol Hill, Biden and Pelosi sought to heighten public attention to the sprawling health-care law that brought insurance to millions of Americans.
The remarks were timed to coincide with the filing of legal briefs by the Trump administration and Republican attorneys general in a major lawsuit trying to rescind the ACA. Continue reading.
