“As testing continues, the ship will keep enough Sailors on board to sustain essential services and sanitize the ship in port. There have been zero hospitalizations,” the Navy said Wednesday. The next day, one sailor was transferred to a hospital and put under intensive care, according to the Navy.
Pentagon officials warned Thursday that the ship’s outbreak will not be an isolated incident for the Navy, The Associated Press reports. “It’s not a good idea to think that the Teddy Roosevelt is a one-of-a-kind issue,” said General John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We have too many ships at sea. … To think that it will never happen again is not a good way to plan.”
The USS Roosevelt still has 1,164 pending coronavirus tests, according to Hyten.
At the same briefing, Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist told reporters the Defense Department understands that the coronavirus could be a long-term problem in the military, and said that some ships may have to quarantine before they deploy.
“We’re going to need to change and adapt because even over the coming months, the virus isn’t going to go away,” Norquist said. “We’re going to have to be able to operate in a COVID environment.”
The situation on board the USS Theodore Roosevelt first gained attention after its captain, Brett Crozier, went outside his chain of command and sent a memo to more than 20 people pleading for help, and describing the carrier’s dire conditions — when only dozens of sailors had tested positive. That memo quickly made its way to The San Francisco Chronicle, which first reported the story on March 31.
In his memo, Crozier suggested that most of the 4,000 crew members on board should be removed from the ship and put into 14-day individual quarantines, in keeping with the CDC’s recommended guidelines for preventing infection. “We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die,” he wrote. “If we do not act now, we are failing to take care of our most trusted asset — our Sailors.”
Crozier was later relieved of his command by the Navy. Acting secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly, said he fired Crozier after losing confidence in his ability to lead under the stress of dealing with the viral outbreak. Modly went on to harshly criticize Crozier in front of his crew.
In an address obtained by The Chronicle and the website Task & Purpose, Modly can be heard telling sailors that Crozier was either “too naive or too stupid” to lead the ship if he thought an alarming memo he circulated wouldn’t become public.
However, Modly submitted his resignation on Tuesday, one day after the recording of him disparaging the ousted captain became public.
Crozier’s crew cheered him as he left the ship after being fired.
Administration officials said they also plan to look into the timeline of the WHO’s reaction to the coronavirus after it first appeared in China, as well as “links” to China.
“What the WHO knew and how it reacted to that knowledge is relevant to the U.S. government’s response to the crisis,” a senior administration official said.
Trump’s focus on the WHO comes as he continues to face questions about his early statements playing down the virus and how unprepared his administration has been. The president’s embrace of a broadside against the WHO echoes similar criticism from hosts on Fox News Channel, including Tucker Carlson, and some Republican lawmakers.
“We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it,” he said, although he said later that his administration would review it.
He also accused the WHO of being “China-centric” and slow to sound alarms about the coronavirus.
“They could have called it months earlier,” the president said.
The director of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, responded Wednesday by essentially accusing Trump of politicizing the virus.
“The focus of all political parties should be to save their people. Please don’t politicize this virus,” Ghebreyesus said. “If you don’t want many more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it.”
But the president doesn’t appear poised to back down.
On Wednesday, he said again that the WHO “got it wrong.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who appeared alongside Trump at the daily coronavirus briefing at the White House, said the administration was reevaluating its funding for the WHO, but he said it isn’t the time for a change of leadership at the organization as it fights a pandemic, as some Republicans have advocated.
Asked about the notion that a period of global pandemic isn’t the most opportune time to cut funding, a second senior administration official shot back: “Now is not the time to be misleading the world about how China covered up the pandemic.”
Dr. Amesh Adalja of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said the U.S. should be supporting the WHO.
“This is our premier public health agency in the world, and it is important that it be supported,” Adalja said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.”
Emmanuel Macron also offered his support to the world health body, a French presidency official told Reuters.
In a call with its director, the French president “reaffirmed his trust, his support for the institution and refuses to see it locked into a war between China and the USA,” the official said.
The U.S. is the largest funder of the WHO, contributing $14.7 million for the international group’s coronavirus fund. But Trump recently proposed cutting the U.S. contribution. So the president’s attacks in some ways advance two of his goals: They could cut back on international aid and minimize blame for his administration’s handling of the pandemic.
“There is a lot in the WHO that does not jibe with the president’s agenda,” a senior administration official said.
Cutting U.S. financial support for the WHO would also remove a key talking point for American diplomats promoting the image of U.S. leadership during the pandemic.
China, working to rehabilitate its image as the country of origin of the coronavirus, has tried to usurp the title of global humanitarian savior by providing medical equipment, protective gear and even medical professionals to several countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The U.S., still in the middle of its own fight against the outbreak, is keeping all critical medical supplies at home until demand is met, and it is instead pointing to its financial assistance.
“We’ve long maintained an unsurpassed commitment to global health and humanitarian assistance,” Pompeo told reporters at the end of last month. “The United States remains by far the largest contributor to the World Health Organization, as we’ve been since 1948. Our contribution exceeded $400 million last year, 10 times that of China.”
Still, earlier this year — just as the extent of the coronavirus outbreak was starting to be understood — the Trump administration proposed a budget that would slash funding to the WHO by more than half what it had been the previous year.
The president has repeatedly touted the anti-malaria drug as a coronavirus treatment despite a lack of medical evidence.
President Donald Trump reportedly owns a stake in a company that produces hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug he has repeatedly touted as a coronavirus treatment even though his experts say there’s no strong evidence it works.
Trump “has a small personal financial interest” in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine, The New York Times reported Monday.
In addition, Sanofi’s largest shareholders include a mutual fund company run by major Republican donor Ken Fisher, the paper said. Trump’s three family trusts, as of last year, each had investments in a mutual fund whose largest holding was Sanofi, according to the Times. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross also had ties to the drugmaker, the Times reported.
Trump’s “assertiveness” in promoting the drug contrary to the recommendation of top health experts “has raised questions about his motives,” the Times noted.
The financial news site MarketWatch and The Washington Post later estimated Trump’s stake to be worth between about $100 and $1,500, though the Post noted his trusts may have amassed other investments since his most recent disclosure. “He does look to have more than that modest sum invested in Sanofi, because, unmentioned in the Times report, his trusts also hold broader European stock-market index funds,” MarketWatch pointed out.
A chorus of Trump supporters with no medical expertise have backed the president’s urging of doctors to treat COVID-19 patients with the drug, including his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Fox News host Sean Hannity.
In the face of warnings from top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci that the drug’s safety and effectiveness are uncertain in treating COVID-19, Trump has continued to laud its supposed benefits.
“What do you have to lose?” he asked at a press briefing this week urging those sick with the virus to take the drug.
Turns out plenty.
“There could be deaths,” American Medical Association President Dr. Patrice Harris said. “This is a new virus, and so we should not be promoting any medication or drug for any disease that has not been proven and approved by the FDA.”
Generic drugmakers also are gearing up to produce hydroxychloroquine pills. One of those companies was co-founded by Trump golfing buddy Chirag Patel, according to the Times.
The White House didn’t immediately answer HuffPost’s request for comment.
John Dillard, a spokesperson for Fisher Investments, called the Times article a “false report” and said Sanofi “is neither a material holding of Fisher Investments nor of Ken Fisher personally.” He also took issue with the characterization of his boss as a Republican donor, saying Fisher also had contributed to Democrats in the past.
To all staunch supporters and allies of TOTUS: Your “leader” is leading you down the “Jim Jones” path to the fatal “kool aid”. TOTUS is self promoting you and the rest of us to a worse outcome than you can imagine. His irritation at not being able to hold rallies has morphed into contentious and unhelpful “press conferences” which instead of informing us is again (still) misleading us about a National Health issue. If you are following the “Trump” news organization, then you should realize there are few real scientists involved in the pronouncements from the on air personalities. It is apparent to most of us that we really do not have a National leader but we do have a self serving miscreant aided and abetted by a party line Congress. This election is crucial to the survival of our country with all of its “faults” perceived or real. This could be a great moment for a impotent leader but as usual the baser instincts over ride what little (if any) common sense that may be there. The Presidency is not a personal position, it is a National one that extends to our allies in the rest of the world.
We have heard the phrase ” did you get the memo?” in movies and real life so I am sending this one out now and hopefully you get it!
The past three years of TOTUS’ administration has given us no reason to rejoice as the governing style has been shown erratic, dis jointed and totally with no real merit. Therefore on the net election day we need to get some new people in place from the Congress to the White House. It should be apparent that this administration has brought the country to an unprecedented low in production and world status. It is incumbent on the voters to correct this lean towards right or left. VOTE!.
Comments Off on Trump administration ended pandemic early-warning program to detect coronaviruses
Stable Genius has struck again. In the pursuit of undoing the Obama Presidency and associated actions TOTUS and his minions have put us all in jeopardy. MA
Two months before the novel coronavirus is thought to have begun its deadly advance in Wuhan, China, the Trump administration ended a $200-million pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China and other countries to detect and respond to such a threat.
The project, launched by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2009, identified 1,200 different viruses that had the potential to erupt into pandemics, including more than 160 novel coronaviruses. The initiative, called PREDICT, also trained and supported staff in 60 foreign laboratories — including the Wuhan lab that identified SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
Field work ceased when the funding ran out in September, and organizations that worked on the PREDICT program laid off dozens of scientists and analysts, said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a key player in the program.
On Wednesday, USAID granted an emergency extension to the program, issuing $2.26 million over the next six months to send experts who will help foreign labs squelch the pandemic. But program leaders say the funding will do little to further the initiative’s original mission.
“Look at the name: Our efforts were to predict this before it happens. That’s the part of the program that was exciting — and that’s the part I’m worried about,” Daszak said.
“It’s absolutely critical that we don’t drop the idea of a large-scale, proactive, predictive program that tries to catch pandemics before they happen. Cutting a program that could in any way reduce the risk of things like COVID-19 happening again is, by any measure, shortsighted,” he added.
It is unclear whether another five-year grant would have dulled the impact of the current pandemic. But the Trump administration has come under increased criticism for its past moves to downgrade global health security, including proposals to slash funding to science agencies and the elimination of the National Security Council’s key global health post.
A spokesman for USAID said PREDICT was “just one component of USAID’s global health security efforts and accounted for less than 20% of our global health security funding.” He also said a new initiative to stop the spillover of viruses from animals to humans is scheduled to be awarded in August.
The PREDICT project, which operated on two five-year funding cycles that formally concluded last September, enrolled both epidemiologists and wildlife veterinarians to examine the types of interactions between animals and humans that researchers suspect led to the current outbreak of COVID-19.
The pandemic “didn’t surprise us, unfortunately,” said Jonna Mazet, executive director of the One Health Institute in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, who served as the global director of PREDICT for a decade. “The work had been ongoing for some time. And when the crisis hits, everybody stands up and takes notice and says, ‘OK, we believe you.’”
The PREDICT project, launched in response to the 2005 H5N1 “bird flu” scare, gathered specimens from more than 10,000 bats and 2,000 other mammals in search of dangerous viruses. They detected about 1,200 viruses that could spread from wild animals to humans, signaling pandemic potential. More than 160 of them were novel coronaviruses, much like SARS-CoV-2.
They also took blood samples from people in rural China, and learned that, in living among wildlife, they had been exposed to coronaviruses — a clear sign that, if those viruses spread easily among humans, they could take off. That “raised the red flag,” said Mazet.
“Coronaviruses were jumping easily across species lines and were ones to watch for epidemics and pandemics,” she said.
The program also trained nearly 7,000 people across medical and agricultural sectors in 30 countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East to help them detect deadly new viruses on their own. One of those labs was the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the Chinese lab that quickly identified SARS-CoV-2, Mazet said.
The Wuhan lab received USAID funding for equipment, and PREDICT coordinators connected the scientists there with researchers in other countries in order to synchronize tracking of novel viruses before SARS-CoV-2.
The project’s second funding cycle concluded on Sept. 30, 2019, less than two months before the new coronavirus probably began spreading. It was granted a zero-dollar six-month extension — through March 2020 — to write up final reports.
Dennis Carroll, a widely respected scientist who headed USAID’s emerging threats division, oversaw the initiative for its duration, but retired around the time it was shut down. Carroll did not respond to an inquiry from The Times, but told the New York Times last year that by January 2019, the program had “essentially collapsed into hibernation,” and that its conclusion was due to “the ascension of risk-averse bureaucrats.”
Other members of the consortium included Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity and several institutes that manage major U.S. zoos.
Earlier this year, as COVID-19 took off, U.S. lawmakers expressed frustration over the program’s end.
“Addressing and preventing the spread of coronavirus and potential pandemic disease outbreaks is a serious matter that requires adequate resources for and cooperation between experts throughout the federal government,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Angus King wrote in a letter to USAID’s administrator earlier this year, asking for details on the decision.
On Wednesday, the PREDICT program was extended through September to offer emergency technical assistance to foreign labs battling the coronavirus pandemic. To date, PREDICT-supported labs in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia are actively testing for coronavirus cases, Daszak said, and he has been sending reagents and other supplies to assist them.
Meanwhile, in Rwanda, scientists who had been trained in the PREDICT program triggered early social distancing measures, Mazet said. “I do think that what we were doing has changed the outcomes for a lot of countries,” she said.
“But unfortunately, not our own,” she added.
Daszak said he’s eager to further examine the hundreds of wildlife samples collected during the PREDICT initiative over the years, looking to identify whether any of them could have been intermediate hosts for the virus currently sweeping the globe.
But with the limited budget and timeline, efforts to continue in-depth field work under PREDICT will be minimal. Most of the extension funding will be focused on squelching the current outbreak, not preventing the next.
“It’s common sense to know your enemy,” Daszak said. “Instead, we’re all hiding inside our houses as we wait around for a vaccine — that’s not a good global strategy to battling a dangerous virus.”
Comments Off on The TOTUS Train Still Running On The Wrong Track
This is the person TOTUS gave the high profile “Medal Of Freedom” the nations highest civilian honor. TOTUS has again reduced the office of President to yet another low point. Coupled with the refusal to extend the enrollment period for ACA aka “Obamacare”, it should be apparent to ALL voters that we as a country are going downhill with the least of us suffering the greatest harm. This is not about party, race, religion or any other malediction uttered by this administration, it is about the health of our country and its future which in my opinion will continue a backwards trend under this administration and its associates in Congress. MA
04/01/2020 07:51 am ET
Rush Limbaugh: Economy Being Destroyed ‘Under The Guise’ Of Saving Lives
The right-wing radio host pushed conspiracy nonsense about Democrats plotting with communists to ruin capitalism in the coronavirus pandemic.
Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday suggested stay-at-home measures to protect people against the coronavirus pandemic were destroying the economy “under the guise” of saving lives. He also gave air to a conspiracy theory that Democrats and communists were plotting the downfall of capitalism.
(See the video below.)
“Are we just going to sit by and watch $22 trillion — that’s the value, that’s the sum total of the GDP, that’s the U.S. economy — are we just going to sit by here and watch it evaporate?” the right-wing radio host said on “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” “Because that’s what we’re doing, under the guise of not losing any unnecessary life — meaning we want to try to save as many lives as we can.”
After fielding a phone call in which the caller said the crisis was the product of “the communist virus” invading America, Limbaugh piled on:
You’re the only person I know who thinks it’s happening without the cooperation of the Democrat Party, however. Most people tell me they think the American left is the worldwide Communist Party now, and that they are willingly subverting this economy and destroying it, for the purposes of eliminating and wiping out capitalism.
And whether that’s happening of — whether that’s the design or not, that is happening. This economy is being shut down. That’s why this is not sustainable. I’m sorry, I’m sounding like a broken record on this, but it is not sustainable.
Are we just going to sit by and watch $22 trillion — that’s the value, that’s the sum total of the GDP, that’s the U.S. economy — are we just going to sit by here and watch it evaporate? Because that’s what we’re doing, under the guise of not losing any unnecessary life — meaning we want to try to save as many lives as we can.
Limbaugh has previously claimed the outbreak was exaggerated to make President Donald Trump look bad. He also had dismissed COVID-19 as “the common cold.”
Comments Off on Dude!… It is Still Not About You!!
Totus has gone on Faux News again announcing an extension of the stay at home time frame after stating we should be “OK” by Easter. This is just another instance of his creating a problem then retracting it as if he solved the problem. If anyone who currently supports him has any doubt as to his fitness to lead, this should allay all doubts. With the cooperation of the GOP (most of them) TOTUS has in 3 years brought the US to a level of some third world countries in some areas. Our standing in the world has been eroded while the bad actors have ascended to fill in the void created by our lack of engagement and ill advised actions. Voters have the opportunity to right the ship of state starting with Congress and ending with TOTUS out of office. If it is possible to prosecute elected officials for poor performance and damage to the country, that is where we should be going. First we need to elect the best people we can or at the least the ones who have a clue of how to run a government not more self serving miscreants.
President Trump on Sunday said if his administration can keep the coronavirus death toll to 100,000 in the United States, it will have done a “very good job.”
Earlier in the day, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the coronavirus pandemic could cause between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths in the United States. Trump said while 100,000 is “a horrible number,” if the U.S. can keep its death toll to “100,000, so we have between 100,000 and 200,000, we altogether have done a very good job.”
Trump also announced he is extending social distancing guidelines to April 30, a departure from his earlier declaration of having the U.S. “opened up” by Easter on April 12. That proclamation was “aspirational,” Trump said.
As of Sunday night, there are more than 139,700 confirmed cases of COVID-19 coronavirus in the United States, and at least 2,400 people have died from the virus.
© Bullit Marquez / AP Virus Outbreak Aircraft CarrierOn Wednesday, the Navy released a statement that said 93% of the crew had been tested for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, resulting in 2,588 negative and 286 positive results. Over 2,000 sailors on the ship were subsequently moved to a base on the island, which is a U.S. territory.
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