Associated Press have been doing an investigation into the toll that the coronavirus pandemic has taken on healthcare officials. Amid a fractured federal response, the usually invisible army of workers charged with preventing the spread of infectious diseases has become a public punching bag. Their expertise on how to fight the coronavirus is often disregarded.
Some have become the target of far-right activists, conservative groups and anti-vaccination extremists who have coalesced around common goals: fighting mask orders, quarantines and contact tracing with protests, threats and personal attacks.
The backlash has moved beyond the angry fringe. In the courts, public health powers are being undermined. Lawmakers in at least 24 states have crafted legislation to weaken public health powers, which could make it more difficult for communities to respond to other health emergencies in the future.
“What we’ve taken for granted for 100 years in public health is now very much in doubt,†said Lawrence Gostin, an expert in public health law at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
It is a further erosion of the nation’s already fragile public health infrastructure. At least 181 state and local public health leaders in 38 states have resigned, retired or been fired since 1 April, according to an ongoing investigation by the Associated Press and KHN. According to experts, this is the largest exodus of public health leaders in American history. An untold number of lower-level staffers have also left.
Tisha Coleman, public health administrator for Linn County. She has been harassed and sued over her health recommendations to take precautions against Covid-19. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP
Tisha Coleman is one who is still in her job, but suffering. She has lived in close-knit Linn County, Kansas, for 42 years and never felt so alone.
As the public health administrator, she’s struggled every day of the coronavirus pandemic to keep her rural county along the Missouri border safe. In this community with no hospital, she’s failed to persuade her neighbors to wear masks and take precautions against Covid-19, even as cases rise.
In return, she’s been harassed, sued, vilified and called a Democrat, an insult in her circles. Even her husband hasn’t listened to her, refusing to require customers to wear masks at the family’s hardware store in Mound City.
“People have shown their true colors,†Coleman said. “I’m sure that I’ve lost some friends over this situation.â€
By November, the months of fighting over masks and quarantines were already wearing her down. As of 14 December, 1 out of every 24 residents in Linn County had tested positive. Coleman herself got Covid-19, likely from her husband, who she thinks picked it up at the hardware store.
Her mother got it, too, and died on Sunday, 11 days after she was put on a ventilator. The day after her mother was put on a ventilator, Coleman fought to hold back tears as she described the 71-year-old former health care worker with a strong work ethic.
“Of course, I could give up and throw in the towel, but I’m not there yet,†she said, adding that she will “continue to fight to prevent this happening to someone else.†Coleman.
She said she has noticed more people are wearing masks these days. But at the family hardware store, they are still not required.
The vaccine roll-out is a complicated business. According to Gen. Gustave F. Perna, who is the chief operating officer of the federal effort to get a vaccine out, 145 sites were to receive the vaccine on Monday, with 425 getting it today and a further 66 sites getting deliveries on Wednesday.
It will be too late for some people – currently the US has over 110,000 people hospitalised with Covid for the first time, according to numbers from the Covid tracking project.
Meanwhile, according to the Johns Hopkins University figures, not a single US state is seeing an increase rate in cases that is lower than 3%, and over twenty states have an increase rate higher than 10%.
The delivery of a vaccine to healthcare workers makes a huge step-change in the American battle against coronavirus. Daniella Silva at NBC News had this about one of the first people to take it – Dr. Gregory Schmidt.
Schmidt, an intensive care physician with the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, was among those to get the vaccine Monday.
“The emotional power of this moment is something that we have been anticipating, striving to reach for about 10 months,†he said. “To be able to take this step feels like a piece of what we all need to do to make our world safe again, to get back to the life where we can see each other’s faces.â€
Schmidt, who is also the associate chief medical officer of critical care in the hospital system, said about 75 percent of the patients he has treated in the intensive care unit for months have been coronavirus patients. He and his staff have had to watch many of them die from the virus.
“I feel, in a very personal way, the risk to me. I feel the personal risk to my family,†said Schmidt, the father of three children.
Schmidt said he almost burst into tears as he arrived Monday knowing the vaccine was “so close.â€
He said his message to the public would be: “Trust the science. This vaccine has been developed with care, and it’s been tested extensively.â€
Stephen Collinson at CNN has this analysis of what he says was the beginning of the US “turning the pageâ€:
Biden’s statement was a clear effort not just to move the country forward after its most acrimonious modern post-election period. It was also a firm attempt to assert his authority as the incoming president, to create the symbolism of a transfer of power that is being denied by Trump and to begin to establish legitimacy even among Trump supporters.
There is no sign that a president who has constantly ignored constitutional norms is moving any closer to accepting the reality of his defeat. But there were signs of a crumbling of the ancient regime, as a few of Trump’s Republican allies in the Senate began to grudgingly accept, six weeks after the election, that Biden is indeed president-elect.
One source close to Trump told CNN’s Jim Acosta that while the President has privately conceded he won’t be staying in the White House for a second term, he won’t stop trying to discredit the election. Another adviser said it was highly unlikely that the President would show up at Biden’s inauguration for a ceremonial tableau that is an emblem of America’s mostly unbroken chain of peaceful transfers of executive authority.
There is also likely to be no cathartic national moment analogous to then-vice president Al Gore’s graceful December concession speech after a bitter legal battle handed the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000.
Trump’s behavior is certain to complicate Biden’s call for healing. There is still a chance that Republicans in the House – who remain in Trump’s thrall – will try to mount a futile rear guard to challenge the election result when Congress holds a joint session on January 6 to tally the results of the Electoral College. The President’s malfeasance has convinced many of the more than 70 million people who voted for him that the election was stolen, a dynamic that is likely to continue to be corrosive in the run-up to the midterm elections in 2022.
Vaccinating a whole country – especially one as large as the US – was always going While the vaccine will only be available to the majority of Americans by summer 2021 at the earliest, the coming months may see serious debate over whether businesses, including hospitals and long-term care facilities, should mandate the vaccine for their employees to ensure things can go back to normal as quickly as possible.
Employers, particularly in sectors that have been radically changed by the pandemic, have shown an eagerness to get their workers vaccinated. The National Restaurant Association and other food and agricultural organizations wrote a letter to Donald Trump and Joe Biden asking them to prioritize getting food workers vaccinations “to ensure the agricultural and food supply chains remain operatingâ€.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers unions in the country, has also said that the union supports schools requiring teachers to get vaccinated, saying it is “just like we have vaccines we require kids to take to be in school in normal times.
And in the private sector other bosses are hoping to get all their staff vaccinated. Daniel Schreiber, the CEO of Lemonade insurance company, wrote on the company’s website that he will be trying to get a 100% vaccination rate at the company. While he said the company will not enforce vaccination, he wrote: “A corporate directive, coupled with educational sessions, can inject the urgency and reassurances needed to move the needle.â€
Employers generally have the right to require employees to get vaccinations. Employment in the US is typically at-will, which means an employer can fire an employee for any reason as long as it does not have to deal with an employee’s protected identity, for example, an employee’s race or religion. Barring some religious and health-related exemptions, private businesses have the specific right to maintain their own health and safety standards and are legally able to fire employees who violate their rules, including if they do not get certain vaccines.
China appears to have used mobile phone networks in the Caribbean to surveil US mobile phone subscribers as part of its espionage campaign against Americans, according to a mobile network security expert who has analysed sensitive signals data.
The findings paint an alarming picture of how China has allegedly exploited decades-old vulnerabilities in the global telecommunications network to route “active†surveillance attacks through telecoms operators.
The alleged attacks appear to be enabling China to target, track, and intercept phone communications of US phone subscribers, according to research and analysis by Gary Miller, a Washington state-based former mobile network security executive.
Miller, who has spent years analysing mobile threat intelligence reports and observations of signalling traffic between foreign and US mobile operators, said in some cases China appeared to have used networks in the Caribbean to conduct its surveillance.
At the heart of the allegations are claims that China, using a state-controlled mobile phone operator, is directing signalling messages to US subscribers, usually while they are travelling abroad.
Signalling messages are commands that are sent by a telecoms operators across the global network, unbeknownst to a mobile phone user. They allow operators to locate mobile phones, connect mobile phone users to one another, and assess roaming charges. But some signalling messages can be used for illegitimate purposes, such as tracking, monitoring, or intercepting communications.
US mobile phone operators can successfully block many such attempts, but Miller believes the US has not gone far enough to protect mobile phone users, who he believes are not aware of how insecure their communications are.
Miller focused his research on messages that he said did not appear legitimate, either because they were “unauthorised†by the GSMA, an international standard-setting body for the telecommunications industry, or because the messages were sent from a location that did not match where a user was travelling.
Reuters report that Russian president Vladimir Putin has congratulated Joe Biden on his victory in the US presidential election, after Biden won the state-by-state electoral college vote that officially determines the U.S. presidency, the Kremlin said.
The Kremlin had said it would wait for the official results of the election before commenting on its outcome, even as other nations congratulated Biden on the win in the days after the 3 November vote, when it had become obvious that he had overwhelmingly won the popular vote and secured the support of enough states to head to the White House in January.
“For my part, I am ready for interaction and contact with you,†the Kremlin cited Putin as saying in a statement.
“Putin wished the president-elect every success and expressed confidence that Russia and the United States, which have a special responsibility for global security and stability, could, despite their differences, really help to solve the many problems and challenges facing the world,†the Kremlin said.
If Dick Cheney gained notoriety as George W Bush’s “Darth Vaderâ€, William Barr, the US attorney general, appeared a worthy successor as Donald Trump’s Lord of the Sith.
Barr played the role of presidential enforcer with apparent relish, whether spinning the Russia investigation in Trump’s favour or defending a harsh crackdown on this summer’s civil unrest.
But even he could not or would not pass the ultimate loyalty test: shredding the US constitution to help his boss steal an election. As Trump’s niece, Mary, puts in the title of her book, it was a case of Too Much and Never Enough.
Trump tweeted on Monday that Barr will resign before Christmas. Barr, for his part, issued a resignation letter that noted election fraud allegations “will continue to be pursued†before going on to lavish praise on Trump’s “historic†record despite resistance that included “frenzied and baseless accusations of collusion with Russiaâ€.
David Axelrod, the former chief strategist for Barack Obama, observed in a Twitter post: “In writing his fawning exit letter, Barr reflected a fundamental understanding of @realDonaldTrump: Like a dog, if you scratch his belly, he is a lot more docile. Just as[k] Kim [Jong-un] !â€
But the sycophantic words could not conceal how Barr, like the attorney general Jeff Sessions and the FBI director James Comey before him, had refused to do the 45th president’s bidding once too often. With democracy in existential danger, he was the dog that did not bark.
Barr, who previously served as attorney general under George HW Bush in the early 1990s, had always been a believer in expansive presidential power and being tough on crime. He was therefore “simpatico†– to borrow one of Joe Biden’s favourite words – with Trump from the off.
US President-elect Joe Biden delivered a forceful rebuke to president Donald Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of his victory, hours after winning the state-by-state electoral college vote that officially determines the US presidency. “In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed,†Biden said in a prime-time speech from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
“The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago,†Biden said. “We now know that not even a pandemic or an abuse of power can extinguish that flame.â€
Monday’s vote, typically a formality, assumed outsized significance in light of Trump’s extraordinary effort to subvert the process due to what he has falsely alleged was widespread voter fraud in the 3 November election.
‘Democracy prevailed,’ says Biden after US electoral college confirms his win – video
Good morning, and welcome to our US politics live coverage on the day after Joe Biden secured an overwhelming victory in the electoral college, confirming that he won November’s election.
Joe Biden hailed the presidential election and its uncharted aftermath as a triumph of American democracy and “one of the most amazing demonstrations of civic duty we’ve ever seen in our countryâ€.
In his address to the nation, Biden said: “There is urgent work in front of all of us. Getting the pandemic under control to getting the nation vaccinated against this virus. Delivering immediate economic help so badly needed by so many Americans who are hurting today – and then building our economy back better than ever.â€
Biden won the electoral college 306 votes to 232, making Donald Trump the first one-term president of the 21st century, and the first US president to lose the popular vote twice.
US attorney general, William Barr, one of Donald Trump’s staunchest allies, resigned just weeks after he contradicted the president by saying the justice department had uncovered no evidence of the widespread voter fraud that Trump has repeatedly and baselessly claimed.
