A faulty CDC coronavirus test delays monitoring of disease’s spread

AMERICA UNPREPARED THANKS TO TRUMP

AND CANADA RELIES ON THE CDC FOR INFORMATION

Problems with a government-created coronavirus test have limited the United States’ capacity to rapidly increase testing, just as the outbreak has entered a worrisome new phase in countries worldwide. Experts are increasingly concerned that the small number of U.S. cases may be a reflection of limited testing, not of the virus’s spread.

While South Korea has run more than 35,000 coronavirus tests, the United States has tested only 426 people, not including people who returned on evacuation flights. Only about a dozen state and local laboratories can now run tests outside of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta because the CDC kits sent out nationwide earlier this month included a faulty component.

U.S. guidelines recommend testing for a very narrow group of people — those who display respiratory symptoms and have recently traveled to China or had close contact with an infected person.

But many public health experts think that in light of evidence that the disease has taken root and spread in Iran, Italy, Singapore and South Korea, it’s time to broaden testing in the United States. Infectious disease experts fear that aside from the 14 cases picked up by public health surveillance, there may be other undetected cases mixed in with those of colds and flu. What scares experts the most is that the virus is beginning to spread in countries outside China, but no one knows whether that’s the case in the United States, because they aren’t checking.

“Coronavirus testing kits have not been widely distributed to our hospitals and public health labs. Those without these kits must send samples all the way to Atlanta, rather than testing them on site, wasting precious time as the virus spreads,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

In a congressional hearing Tuesday, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on whether the CDC test was faulty. He denied that the test did not work.

But in a news briefing that was going on about the same time, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said that she was “frustrated” about problems with the test kits and that the CDC hoped to send out a new version to state and local health departments soon.

“I think we are close,” she said. She said that the agency is working as fast as possible on the tests, but that the priority is making sure they are accurate.

Currently, she said, a dozen state and local health departments can do the testing, although positive results need to be confirmed by the CDC. She also said she hoped that tests from commercial labs would soon come online.

Messonnier said the agency was weighing widening its testing protocols to include people traveling to the United States from countries beyond mainland China, considering the rapid spread of the virus in other places in recent days.

The nation’s public health laboratories, exasperated by the malfunctioning tests in the face of a global public health emergency, have taken the unusual step of appealing to the Food and Drug Administration for permission to develop and use their own tests. In Hawaii, authorities are so alarmed about the lack of testing ability that they requested permission from the CDC to use tests from Japan. A medical director at a hospital laboratory in Boston is developing an in-house test, but is frustrated that his laboratory won’t be able to use it without going through an onerous and time-consuming review process, even if demand surges.

“This is an extraordinary request, but this is an extraordinary time,” said Scott Becker, the chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which is asking the FDA for permission to allow the laboratories to create and implement their own laboratory-developed tests.

At one hospital in the Mid-Atlantic region, a patient who recently returned from Singapore, which has 90 cases, was admitted to the hospital with mild upper respiratory symptoms, according to a hospital official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the patient’s privacy. The patient tested negative for flu. Because of underlying medical conditions, the person was at higher risk for severe illness if this was a coronavirus infection.




Even though clinicians suspected coronavirus, and treated the person for it and placed the patient in isolation, the patient was not tested.

“If this person had returned from mainland China, they would have been tested for coronavirus,” the official said. The patient recovered and was discharged to their home.

Testing also affects other aspects of care.

People with confirmed cases can enroll in clinical trials for therapeutics. For patients who need more intense care in a facility with a biocontainment unit, that facility can receive reimbursement from the federal government for care, the official said.

The CDC announced a week and a half ago that it would add pilot coronavirus testing to its flu surveillance network in five cities, a step toward expanded testing of people with respiratory symptoms who didn’t have other obvious risk factors. Specimens that test negative for flu will be tested for coronavirus. But that expanded testing has been delayed because of an unspecified problem with one of the compounds used in the CDC test. About half of state labs got inconclusive results when using the compound, so the CDC said it would make a new version and redistribute it.

To public health experts, the delays — and lack of transparency about what, exactly, is wrong with the test — are extremely concerning.

“We have over 700 flights every month between Hawaii and Japan or South Korea,” where the virus is spreading in the community, said Hawaii Lt. Gov. Josh Green (D), who is also an emergency physician. It’s unlikely that the CDC would allow state labs to accept a test from another nation, he said, but “this is an exceptional circumstance.”

In a letter to the FDA, the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which represents state and local laboratories, asked the agency to use “enforcement discretion” to allow the laboratories to create and use their own laboratory-developed tests.

“While we appreciate the many efforts underway at CDC to provide a diagnostic assay to our member labs … this has proven challenging and we find ourselves in a situation that requires a quicker local response,” said the letter, which was co-signed by Becker. “We are now many weeks into the response with still no diagnostic or surveillance test available outside of CDC for the vast majority of our member laboratories.”

 © AP/AP This electron microscope image made available by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in February 2020 shows the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, yellow, emerging from the surface of cells, blue/pink, cultured in the lab.Because a public health emergency has been declared, certified hospital laboratories that usually have the ability to internally develop and validate their own tests can’t use them without applying for an “emergency use authorization,” a major barrier to deploying the test.

“I think a lot of people, myself included, think it’s very likely this virus might be circulating at low levels in the United States right now. We can’t know for sure because we haven’t seen it,” said Michael Mina, associate medical director of clinical microbiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He said the optimal testing scenario for flu is a 30-minute turnaround on a test, but right now, shipping samples to Atlanta to test for coronavirus means a 48-hour wait.

“A lot of hospitals are trying to do something similar, which is get a test up and running on an instrument, get it validated in-house,” Mina said. “I think all of us are coming to the same realization that we can’t do anything as long as this remains under the control of CDC and state labs.”

Marion Koopmans, a virologist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, which has performed a few hundred tests on behalf of more than a dozen countries, said that developing a test for a new pathogen is complicated and involves refinement and a back-and-forth between researchers who are constantly learning from one another.

“That is typical for a new disease outbreak. No one actually knows how this works, so you really have to build these assays on the fly,” Koopmans said.

But as the United States struggled to ramp up its capacity, the coronavirus test was added to the sentinel flu surveillance system in the Netherlands two weeks ago. The test was recently rolled out to 12 high-performing molecular diagnostic laboratories in the Netherlands so that they can be ready to scale up if demand increases.

Part of the problem in the still-struggling United States is the tension between regulations intended to ensure a high-quality standard for tests and the need to roll out diagnostic capabilities very quickly. No test is perfect, and with high stakes for missing or misidentifying a case, public health officials want to make sure that tests are as accurate as possible and are validated by labs that run them. But the slowness may also reflect years of underinvestment in public health infrastructure — and a bias toward developing treatments that may seem more appealing to the public.

“The public health system is not sufficiently built to surge very rapidly,” said Luciana Borio, the former director of Medical and Biodefense Preparedness Policy at the National Security Council and now a vice president at In-Q-Tel, a strategic investor that supports the U.S. intelligence community. “Over the years, when given limited dollars, we applied it toward vaccines and therapeutics, more so than diagnostic tests. I think there’s this idea: The diagnostic test is not going to save my life. But the fact is they underpin so much of the response and deserve a lot more attention.”

Read More:

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Most coronavirus cases are mild, complicating the response

Crews battle large fire at L.A.-area refinery after explosion

EDMONTON IS A REFINERY CITY AS WELL AND LIKE LA OUR REFINERIES WERE BUILT FIFTY YEARS AGO 

An explosion and a large fire erupted at a Los Angeles-area refinery late Tuesday.

Marathon Petroleum's Los Angeles refinery is the largest on the West Coast with a crude oil capacity of 363,000 barrels per day

© Scott Varley/The Orange County Register Image: A fire burns after an explosion at the Marathon Refinery in Carson

The blaze at a Marathon refinery in the city of Carson happened about 11 p.m. Tuesday.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department tweeted that an explosion preceded a fire in the cooling tower, and that Marathon fire crews were keeping the flames in check while the system was being depressurized. No injuries were reported by the county fire department, which was assisting.

Carson is a city in southern Los Angeles County, south of Compton.

Resident Pricilla Reyes told NBC Los Angeles in a phone interview that her niece came running over to ask whether she heard an explosion and that they saw the fire from their home, which is about four blocks from the refinery.

"I heard about four or five explosions, really loud," said Reyes. "You could see the flames and the smoke from our house," she said.

Reyes said she shut the windows of her home in case the smoke was harmful.

Michael Molina told NBC Los Angeles he saw sparks and then "a big fireball in the air."

"I heard a couple more thumps, and I could see like a big ball of smoke," Molina said.

Molina, a truck driver who works in the area, said the force of the blast shook his truck.

The city of Carson did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Tuesday.

The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Carson station tweeted crews had secured a perimeter around the facility but did not anticipate needing to evacuate residents. The fire department was monitoring air quality.

Marathon Petroleum's Los Angeles refinery is the largest on the West Coast with a crude oil capacity of 363,000 barrels per day, according to its website.

Why Evolution Is True

PARIS IN THE THE SPRING

Paris: Food, cats, and scenery

Across the river lies Shakespeare and Company, a famous independent bookstore founded (in another Paris location) by Sylvia Beach in 1919, but now located right across from Notre Dame. Because of its literary reputation (many famous authors visited the original store, which also first published Ulysses in 1922), it remains a mecca for literary Anglophones. I went to see its famous cat, Agatha. (You can see Aggie’s page at Hotels with Cats, a great website).

Outside the store is a cat-lover’s sign:

And here’s Agatha, who roams the store. I think she resented my interrupting her nap.

More cat stuff in stores nearby. This store sells nothing but items with black cats on them. The proprietor wouldn’t let me take pictures inside, the meanie!

Peter Singer deplatformed in New Zealand for his stand on euthanasia of newborns

Why Evolution Is True

It seems to me that an enlightened philosophy would allow people to be able to end their lives in a humane way if they’ve undergone proper medical and psychiatric vetting. Some form of this “assisted suicide” is already legal in Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Colombia, Switzerland, Victoria in Australia, and and in some states of the U.S. (California, Colorado, Washington state, Oregon, and—by court order—in Montana).

I further believe—and I’ve gotten into trouble for this—that we should also allow newborns afflicted with incurable conditions—conditions from which they will suffer and die young—to be euthanized humanely. The conditions under which I think this is not only allowable, but ethical, were first laid out in this post of mine. I was aware at the time that philosopher Peter Singer had agreed with and defended this view, but I can’t remember whether I arrived at it independently or read it in some of his writings. No matter, for it’s a view that people need to consider, and of course Singer has defended this view far more extensively and ably than I.

For his views, Singer has undergone considerable pushback, and has been not only deplatformed, but subject to calls for his resignation from Princeton (he splits his time between Princeton and the University of Melbourne). I, too, was subject to a surprising amount of publicity, nearly all negative, for my one website post about this. On her own website Heather’s Homilies, Heather Hastie defended my views, summarizing and answering some of the pushback I got (thanks, Heather!), I also wrote about the surprising opposition to my views here and here.

The opposition, of course, comes largely from believers, who see euthanasia of any sort as “playing God.” I swear that some of these people are Mother-Teresa-like in preferring horrible suffering to a merciful end. After all, Jesus suffered! (That was Mother Teresa’s excuse.)

But others object because they see the euthanasia argument as a slippery slope, leading to scenarios in which we can do away with Grandma in the nursing home simply by signing a paper. It doesn’t work like that, of course, as the states and countries who allow adult euthanasia have strict regulations. And euthanizing newborns with horrible and fatal conditions, like anencephaly, is even more unacceptable. Even though such infants are doomed, there’s something about them having been born that makes the prospect of euthanasia especially appalling to people. Of course I agree that strict procedures, including the agreement of doctors and parents, are essential here, but since these infants will die I see no credible objection to letting them have a peaceful death.

Against the strong negative publicity and many emails I got saying I’m a latter-day Satan (I also got emails from some handicapped people accusing me of wanting to deprive them of life), I received several letters from nurses and doctors who, having seen infants suffer and die, agreed with me. But these people, understandably, don’t want their views made public. I stand by what I said, and Singer stands by what he said. The man is clearly no monster, as his books and papers on ethics are extremely humane. And he walks the walk, giving away lots of his own income to the poor. (I should add that Singer is a recipient of the honor of Companion of the Order of Australia, that country’s highest civilian honor.)

Singer has been deplatformed for his views on infant euthanasia (see here, for instance). And, according to the Newshub article below (click on screenshot, and see a similar piece in Think, Inc.), now a country that’s supposed to be extremely liberal and enlightened, New Zealand, has deplatformed him as well. Singer had a contract to speak at SkyCity in Auckland in June, but the venue canceled his contract. And this was also due to his views on euthanasia.

Although Think, Inc. says that the Auckand incident shows that Singer “has been de-platformed for the first time in his 50-year career”, that’s not really true. Singer was disinvited from a philosophy meeting in Germany and also effectively deplatformed at the University of Victoria in British Columbia when shouting students made his talk inaudible. Those disruptions were also for his views on euthanasia of newborns, although Singer’s talk in Canada was about effective altruism, not euthanasia.

Anyway, the New Zealand story is here:





A quote from the piece above:

Singer, a philosopher who has been recognised both as the Australian Humanist of the Year and the most dangerous person in the world, was scheduled to appear at the Auckland central venue on June 14 for ‘An Evening with Peter Singer’.

However, the figure now says the event had been cancelled by SkyCity after a “news article attacking” his view that it may be ethical for parents to choose euthanasia for severely disabled newborn infants.
“We decided that yes it was a reasonable decision for parents and doctors to make that it was better that infants with this condition should not live,” he has said.

On Saturday, Newshub reported that the New Zealand disabled community was frustrated by his appearance. Dr Huhana Hickey, who has used a wheelchair since 1996 and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2010, said he wasn’t an expert in disability.

Do you have to be an expert in disability to know when a childhood condition or deformity is invariably fatal and causes suffering


Even Singer says it was the first time he was deplatformed, which mystifies me. But never mind. His contract was canceled because of a “free speech but. . ” argument (my emphasis below):

A statement from Singer on Wednesday said that this was the first time he had been “de-platformed” in his 50-year career.

“It’s extraordinary that Skycity should cancel my speaking engagement on the basis of a newspaper article without contacting either me or the organiser of my speaking tour to check the facts on which it appears to be basing the cancellation,” Singer said.
“I have been welcomed as a speaker in New Zealand on many occasions and spent an enjoyable month as an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury more than 20 years ago. If New Zealand has become less tolerant of controversial views since then, that’s a matter for deep regret.”

A SkyCity spokesperson told Newshub: “Following concerns raised by the public and local media, SkyCity has cancelled the venue hire agreement for ‘An Evening with Peter Singer’.

“Whilst SkyCity supports the right of free speech, some of the themes promoted by this speaker do not reflect our values of diversity and inclusivity.”

Is it “inclusive” to allow children born with only part of a brain, or a brain outside the skull—children doomed to die within days or weeks—to suffer before their deaths? For that is what this is all about. In fact, in September Kiwi citizens will have a referendum on the legalization of voluntary euthanasia for adults with less than six months to live. At a time when they’re debating this, it is not only proper but essential to discuss the euthanasia of doomed newborns, who suffer but cannot give consent. As Wikipedia notes, “A poll in July 2019 found that 72% of the [New Zealand] public supported some kind of assisted dying for the terminally ill. Support over the past 20 years has averaged around 68%.” Why must the “terminally ill” include only adults?

In such a climate, it’s unconscionable to deplatform somebody for his views, especially when it’s not even clear that his “evening with Peter Singer” was going to touch on this subject. As the report notes above, nobody checked with Singer before canceling his contect.

Promoters of the talk are looking for a new venue, and I’ll report back if they find one.

Finally, here’s cartoon from Heather’s post, underscoring the futility of religion when it comes to helping the afflicted:

NO! AMERICA; FIDEL CASTRO IS NOT BERNIE SANDERS RUNNING MATE

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who is seeking a strong win in South Carolina to keep his campaign afloat, argued only he has the experience to lead in the world. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota repeatedly contended that she alone could win the votes of battleground state moderates. And Pete Buttigieg pointed to Sanders' self-described democratic socialism and his recent comments expressing admiration for Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's push for education.

HOW BERNIE SUPPORTERS SEE HIM

HOW DNC, MSNBC/CNN/FOX OTHER DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES AND MIKE BLOOMBERG SEE BERNIE

JAMES CARVILLE CLAIMS THIS IS BERNIE'S RUNNING MATE 

The Obsolete Politics of James Carville | The New Republic

https://newrepublic.com › article › obsolete-politics-james-carville

Feb 10, 2020 - To news junkies of that era, there was James Carville: omnipresent and ... 

cryochamber to deliver a “fiery rant” against Bernie Sanders, to which ...

Trump’s flailing incompetence makes coronavirus even scarier

America’s pandemic response capabilities have been systematically dismantled.

By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Feb 25, 

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump visit the 

Taj Mahal in Agra, India, on February 24, 2020. 

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Late last week, the US government overruled objections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to put 14 coronavirus-infected Americans on an airplane with other healthy people.

The Trump administration swiftly leaked that the president was mad about this decision, and that nobody told him about it at the time. That could be true (or not — Trump and his team lie about things all the time). But even if it is true, it’s a confession of a stunning level of incompetence. The president is so checked out that he’s not in the loop even on critical decisions and is making excuses for himself after the fact.

Resolving interagency disagreements is his job. But Trump has never shown any real interest or aptitude for his job, something that used to loom large as an alarming aspect of his administration. That fear has faded into the background now that the US has gone years without many major domestic crises (the disasters and failed response in Puerto Rico being a big exception).

The Covid-19 outbreak, however, is a reminder that it remains a scary world and that the American government deals with a lot of important, complicated challenges that aren’t particularly ideological in nature. And we have no reason to believe the current president is up to the job. Trump not only hasn’t personally involved himself in the details of coronavirus response (apparently too busy pardoning former Celebrity Apprentice guests), he also hasn’t designated anyone to be in charge.

Italy has reported its fourth death from the new coronavirus, as the number of people contracting the virus continued to mount. Above, a woman in Milan with a face mask. Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images

Infectious disease response necessarily involves balancing a range of considerations from throughout government public health agencies and critical aspects of economic and foreign policy. That’s why in fall 2014, the Obama administration appointed Ron Klain to serve as “Ebola czar” — a single official in charge of coordinating the response across the government. Trump has, so far, put nobody in charge, even though it’s already clear that because of the coronavirus’s effect on major Asian economies, the virus is going to be a bigger deal for Americans.

The Trump administration has asked Congress for $2.5 billion in emergency funding to fight the outbreak. But this is just a fig leaf. The reality is this administration keeps trying to — and at times does — slash funding for relevant government programs.
Trump keeps slashing pandemic response

In 2005, during the H1N5 bird flu scare, the US Agency for International Development ran a program called Predict to identify and research infectious diseases in animal populations in the developing world. Most new viruses that impact humans — apparently including the one causing the Covid-19 disease — emerge through this route, so investing in early research is the kind of thing that, at modest ongoing cost, served to reduce the likelihood of rare but catastrophic events.

The program was initiated under George W. Bush and continued through Barack Obama’s eight years in office; then, last fall the Trump administration shut it down.

RELATED
“We are at a turning point”: The coronavirus outbreak is looking more like a pandemic

That’s part of a broader pattern of actual and potential Trump efforts to shut down America’s ability to respond to pandemic disease.
Trump’s first budget proposal contained proposed cuts to the CDC that former Director Tom Frieden warned were “unsafe at any level of enactment.”
Congress mercifully didn’t agree to any such cuts, but as recently as February 11 — in the midst of the outbreak — Trump proposed huge cuts to both the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.
Perhaps because his budget officials were in the middle of proposing cuts to disease response, it’s only over this past weekend that they pivoted and started getting ready to ask for the additional money that coping with Covid-19 is clearly going to cost. But experts say they’re still lowballing it.
In early 2018, my colleague Julia Belluz argued that Trump was “setting up the US to botch a pandemic response” by, for example, forcing US government agencies to retreat from 39 of the 49 low-income countries they were working in on tasks like training disease detectives and building emergency operations centers.
Instead of taking such warnings to heart, later that year, “the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure,” according to Laurie Garrett, a journalist and former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

As it happens, the Covid-19 problem arose from China, rather than from Africa, where the programs Trump shut down were working. But now that containment in China seems to have failed, the next big global risk is that the virus will spread to countries that have weaker public health infrastructure, from which it will spread uncontrollably — exactly the sort of countries where Trump has scaled back assistance.

Meanwhile, to the extent Trump has done anything in the midst of the crisis, his predominant focus seems to have been on reassuring financial markets, rather than on addressing the public health issue.
Trump picked a strange time to turn globalist

Austria, which borders northern Italy, is looking at reimposing border controls in light of the Covid-19 outbreak in several towns near Milan. Israel has taken action to bar all foreign nationals who have been to South Korea and Japan in the past 14 days from entering the country — adding to an existing ban on visitors from China.


The Israeli response, so far, is a bit of an outlier and perhaps has gone too far.

Still, it’s a bit strange that Donald Trump of all people has done so little to restrict travel at this point — you can book a direct flight from Beijing to Los Angeles tomorrow for $680 while Trump is busy expanding his anti-Muslim travel ban and crippling refugee resettlement based on made-up terrorism concerns.

Trump’s only public statements about this growing crisis are a weeks-old series of tweets in which he expressed confidence in Chinese leadership and said the problem would go away when the weather gets warmer. (Scientists say that may not be true.)

....he will be successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone. Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 7, 2020

Now that the stock market is potentially crashing on coronavirus fears, maybe Trump will try to rouse himself to do something rather than underreacting for the sake of the Dow. But the biggest problem with Trump is it’s far from clear he really can pull himself together to do the job.
Trump is busy corrupting the American government

Over the past week, when the breakdown of some containment measures became known, Trump was busy replacing his director of national intelligence with an unqualified political hack who will also simultaneously serve as ambassador to Germany. It’s bad to have unqualified people in key roles, but the reason Trump did it is worse — Richard Grenell was installed after his predecessor Joseph Maguire got fired for briefing Congress about intelligence regarding Russian activities and the 2020 presidential election.

Trump felt the contents of Maguire’s briefing were politically embarrassing to him, and therefore wanted the information withheld.

That’s typical of Trump’s approach to governance — he sees the entire executive branch as essentially his personal staff, whose only obligation is to advance his personal interests.

President Trump, flanked by first lady Melania Trump and

 India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, began a two-day 

visit to India with a “Namaste Trump” rally in Ahmedabad, 

on February 24, 2020. Money Sharma/AFP via Getty Images

But in a crisis, it can be good for the country for embarrassing information to come to light if that’s what it takes to provoke a stronger and more accurate response. Trump, however, has clearly signaled he does not think this is the right way to do things. Consequently, in the middle of the crisis, Trump’s national security adviser went on Sunday shows to smear Sen. Bernie Sanders, rather than provide credible information about the international situation to the public.

Trump is also busy having his Customs and Border Protection officials wield airport security as a tactical weapon against the population of New York when these are the people who we’ll need to screen travelers.

More broadly, Trump has a well-deserved reputation for dishonesty and has acted over the years to clean house of any officials (James Mattis, Dan Coats, etc.) who develop a reputation for contradicting him. It’s almost impossible to know how this administration could convey accurate and credible information to Americans in a crisis even if it wanted to.

The country has thus far muddled through with Trump at the helm better than Americans had any right to hope, but the emergence of the occasional crisis is a constant in government. And with the world on the brink of a potential disaster, it’s terrifying to contemplate the reality that the man in charge just isn’t up to the job.

The US Supreme Court just held that a border guard who shot a child will face no consequences 

Hernandez v. Mesa ends with a decidedly Trumpy result.

By Ian Millhiser Feb 25, 2020

US Border Patrol agents conduct a training exercise in the Anapra area. David Peinado/NurPhoto via Getty Images


Hernández v. Mesa is a case about a horrific event.

Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca, a 15-year-old Mexican boy, was with his friends near the US-Mexican border when one of those friends was detained by US Border Patrol agent Jesus Mesa. Hernández ran onto Mexican soil, and Mesa fired two shots at the boy — one of which struck him in the face and killed him.

Hernández and his family disagree about the events that led up to this shooting. The family says that Hernández and his friends were simply playing a game where they would run to the fence that separates the United States from Mexico, touch it, then run back to their own country’s soil. Mesa claims that Hernández and his friends threw rocks at him. (Significantly, the Justice Department has refused to take any action against Mesa.)

Regardless of who is telling the truth, the question in the Hernández case is whether Mesa is immune from a federal lawsuit even if he shot and killed Hernández in cold blood. The Supreme Court held, in a 5-4 decision along familiar partisan lines, that Mesa cannot be sued.

The case turns upon whether the Supreme Court’s decision in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), which permitted federal lawsuits against law enforcement officers who violate the Constitution, has any real force in 2020. After Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Hernández, the answer to this question is a resounding “no.”

Alito’s opinion does not explicitly overrule Bivens, but it appears to be laying the groundwork for a future opinion that will eliminate Bivens’ protections against federal officers who violate the Constitution. Notably, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a separate opinion in which he argues that “the time has come to consider discarding the Bivens doctrine altogether.”

Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, briefly explained

The Constitution’s Bill of Rights places a number of restrictions on law enforcement, including the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures.” But the Constitution is silent about whether an individual officer may be sued if they violate one of these restrictions. Although a federal law does permit suits against state law enforcement officers who violate “any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws,” there is no such statute that explicitly authorizes suits against federal agents.

Nevertheless, Bivens held that the right to sue federal law enforcement is implicit in the Constitution. “Power,” Justice William Brennan wrote for the Court in Bivens, “does not disappear like a magic gift when it is wrongfully used.” An officer who acts unlawfully “in the name of the United States possesses a far greater capacity for harm than an individual trespasser exercising no authority other than his own.” And thus the Constitution must offer a remedy to victims of such rogue officers.

Bivens, in other words, rests on something comic book fans will recognize as the Spider-Man rule — with great power comes great responsibility. If the federal government gives someone a badge and a gun, and that person unconstitutionally abuses that power, then they may be held accountable for their actions and can be ordered by a court to compensate their victim.

But Bivens fell into disfavor not too long after it was decided, in large part because the Supreme Court took a sharp right turn.

“For almost 40 years,” Alito writes in Hernández, “we have consistently rebuffed requests to add to the claims allowed under Bivens.” When faced with a Bivens claim, the Court typically looks for reasons why the most recent case is “different in a meaningful way from previous Bivens cases decided by this Court.” If it is, the Court will dismiss the lawsuit if there are any “special factors counselling hesitation.”

Much of Alito’s opinion is a laundry list of reasons why the courts should hesitate to allow suits against border patrol agents involved in a cross-border shooting.

“The political branches, not the Judiciary, have the responsibility and institutional capacity to weigh foreign-policy concerns,” Alito claims, and “a cross-border shooting is by definition an international incident.” Thus, it is better for these incidents to be resolved through international diplomacy, rather than through a lawsuit.

Similarly, “the conduct of agents positioned at the border has a clear and strong connection to national security.” These agents “detect, respond to, and interdict terrorists, drug smugglers and traffickers, human smugglers and traffickers, and other persons who may undermine the security of the United States.” Allowing suits against these agents risks “undermining border security.”

Alito’s opinion, in other words, rests on a kind of anti-Spider-Man rule. Border patrol agents are given great power so that they can use that power. And it is not typically the job of the courts to interfere with how those guards exercise such power — even when it results in the death of a child.

Bivens is probably in its final days

The striking thing about Alito’s opinion is the sheer amount of ink he spills presenting Bivens as an anomaly that’s since been rejected by a new line of decisions. Bivens suits are “a ‘disfavored’ judicial activity,” and the Court has even suggested that if its previous decisions applying a Bivens remedy were “decided today” that it is “doubtful we would have reached the same result.”

Alito also suggests that Bivens does not show sufficient “respect for the separation of powers.” According to his Hernández opinion, “when a court recognizes an implied claim for damages on the ground that doing so furthers the ‘purpose’ of the law, the court risks arrogating legislative power.” If individual plaintiffs are to be given the right to sue law enforcement agents for constitutional violations, that right must be given by Congress, and not the courts.

Setting aside the fact that there are court cases stretching back at least 200 years holding that government actors may be sued when they violate the law, Alito’s view of the separation of powers is debatable. The Supreme Court, after all, established very early in American history that “it is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is,” and no one can reasonably question that the Fourth Amendment places limits on what law enforcement officers do with their weapons.

The question in cases like Bivens is whether the Fourth Amendment means anything — especially in cases where the government refuses to discipline an officer who steps out of line — or whether the right to be free from unlawful searches and seizures necessarily implies that there must be some way to enforce that right.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Hernández transforms the Bill of Rights into a paper tiger in many cases involving law enforcement overreach. And it foreshadows a future where Bivens is overruled in its entirety.

The coronavirus cruise ship outbreak confirms cruises are bad
YOU DON'T NEED CORONAVIRUS TO PROVE THIS, 

ANY OLD NOROVIRUS WILL DO

Disease spread — along with environmental destruction and sexual assault allegations — is just one of the arguments against cruising.

By Aditi Shrikantaditi@vox.com Updated Feb 25, 2020

The quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship at Daikoku 

pier cruise terminal in Yokohama on February 24, 2020. 

KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images

This piece originally published on November 15, 2018. It has been updated to account for the February 2020 coronavirus cruise ship outbreak. You can see all of our coronavirus coverage here.

Off the coast of Yokohama, Japan’s second-largest city, floated the Diamond Princess, a luxury cruise ship that claims to be a “treasure trove of exceptional delights.” On board were steakhouses, spas, a 700-seat theater, and the highly contagious, rapidly spreading coronavirus. Of the 3,711 passengers and crew members on board, 695 have reported contracting the virus (almost one-fifth of the ship’s manifest). It is the largest coronavirus outbreak outside of China and it happened on a ship operated by the most profitable cruise line in the world, Carnival Corp.

The first reported incident was from a guest who traveled for five days on board the ship, from January 20 to January 25, before disembarking in Hong Kong. He was diagnosed with coronavirus on February 1. Symptoms may not appear for as long as two weeks after exposure, according to the CDC, meaning the passenger might have contracted and spread the virus while on board.

According to reporting by the New York Times, Hong Kong officials had alerted the Japanese health ministry of the infected passenger on February 2, a day before the ship was scheduled to dock. A spokeswoman from Princess Cruises says they only received “formal verification” on February 3 and then notified the passengers. What commenced after the announcement was the opposite of luxury: two weeks of quarantine in passenger rooms, the least expensive of which have no windows.

Exhaustive coverage of this specific outbreak has illuminated what a bastion of disease cruises can be. But even before this incident threatened the $45 billion industry, cruises were always both popular and divisive.

The number of people who cruise has increased every year for the last 10 years, and 32 million people are expected to cruise this year, according to data from Statista. And it’s not just seniors who are interested. A study by the Cruise Line International Association found that the demographic with the highest growth in bookings is people ages 30 to 39. From 2016 to 2018, this demographic booked 20 percent more cruises. The CLIA 2020 report found that 71 percent of millennials have a more positive attitude toward cruising than they did two years ago.


Despite steadily climbing ticket sales and evidently broader appeal, there remains a vocal contingent of anti-cruisers — people who take pride in saying they would never book one, citing their refined tastes and disdain for being ferried from port to port on a floating amusement park.

But there are bigger problems than being trapped in a consumerist funhouse. As recent events have indicated, cruises can be bastions of disease. Ships can also be dangerous, with high sexual assault rates, frequent poisonings, and the ever-present possibility of going overboard. And, of course, cruises are horrible for the environment: Their heavy and growing use of fossil fuels means someone on a seven-day cruise produces the same amount of emissions as they would during 18 days on land. And they can damage fragile ocean ecosystems due to practices like irresponsible disposal of sewage.
Cruises are regimented and creepy

In his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” first published by Harper’s in 1996, David Foster Wallace describes his cruising experience as a “special mix of servility and condescension that’s marketed under the configurations of the verb ‘to pamper.’”

Through the piece, he exhaustively recalls every event, person, and feeling he has during his seven-night voyage on the ship he rechristens “the Nadir.” His experience gets to the heart of what is so insulting about what a cruise offers — you are told what to eat, what will entertain you, what will relax you, all in the name of “luxury.” Instead of creating serenity, the repetition of activities can be quite maddening, no matter how much you may like unlimited lobster or the thrill of slot machines. A trip without agency feels too Wall-E-esque to be peaceful.

Even cruise enthusiasts recognize how limiting the onboard activities are. Miami resident Carolyn Smith has been on 32 cruises since 2002 and says being a captive audience has led others she knows to hate cruising. “While on a land-based vacation, you can branch out for meals and other events from your hotel or resort; at sea on a cruise ship, that is not an option,” she says. “I have friends who never cruised again for this exact reason. I have actually heard comments like, ‘I didn’t enjoy feeling like I was being herded like cattle!’”
Crime is rampant on cruises

The creepy captivity of cruises is actually not the most potent case against them. Ross Klein, a Canadian academic, studies corruption surrounding cruise corporations and logs all the misfortune that happens on and off board.

Although he is blacklisted from many cruise lines for publishing information from his studies in books and on his website CruiseJunkie.com, Klein says his website has no agenda other than to report the facts. In fact, as a former cruise enthusiast, he doesn’t find his site inflammatory at all. “My page is not anti-cruising; it’s just information you won’t find at the cruise line website,” he says.

Visit the site (Klein denies its name was chosen to troll cruise-lovers), and you are confronted with the Comic Sans header “cruisejunkie dot com your resource for the other information about the cruise industry.” Below that are a handful of links such as “Persons Overboard, 1995 - 2018” and “Ships that have Sunk, 1979 - 2013,” which lead readers to charts with staggering numbers.

Since 2000, apparently 322 people have gone overboard or just went missing while cruising. Klein says about 20 percent of those who go overboard are rescued.

On the night of October 18, a crew member on Celebrity Reflections went overboard, but no one searched for them until the next morning. In May, a 50-year-old Carnival Paradise passenger went missing. After searching for 55 hours, the Coast Guard called off the search; the man has still not been found. In January 2015, a Mexican newspaper reported that a Disney cruise ship rescued a passenger who had fallen overboard from a Royal Caribbean cruise. Royal Caribbean had not even noticed a passenger missing.


In 2011, a cruise waiter on Costa Atlantica threw himself overboard and was found face down in the water, dead. Apparently, he was being investigated for sexual assault at the time of his death, which was suspected to be a suicide. And sexual assault is a problem on cruise ships. As of September 30, there were 60 reported sexual assaults this year on cruise ships, according to the Department of Transportation. NBC noted a 2013 congressional report found that minors were victims in one-third of assaults.

Jim Walker, a maritime lawyer, echoed that statistic on his site Cruise Law News, writing that most reported cases are not investigated. According to his site, one-third of the 100 victims he has represented in the past 15 years were minors. He writes that one of his clients was drugged and raped by a cruise line bartender. The employee was fired but then hired again to Princess Cruises. Walker contacted Princess Cruises’ in-house legal team and informed them they had hired a rapist, and the man was fired once again.
Cruises shake down local economies — and their own workers

Grandeur of the Seas is a Royal Caribbean ships that has been in service since 1995. It holds more than 2,400 passengers. Roger W/Flickr/Creative Commons

Klein is also the author of the book Cruise Ship Squeeze, which details how cruises take advantage of local economies. As opposed to working with the places they port, many cruises invest in terminals that only benefit their own economic interests.

According to Klein’s book, cruises threaten to boycott destinations if they attempt to raise their port charges, which can be as little as $1 per person. In 2004, the Florida-Caribbean Cruise Associations’ 12 members threatened to boycott Antigua and Barbuda because the countries raised their port charges to $2.50 per person. The threat worked, and the ports backed off.

Another way cruises turn a large profit is by investing in port terminals. For example, in Belize, Royal Caribbean invested $18 million for co-ownership of the Fort Street Tourism Village. The port charge is $5 per person, $4 of which goes to Tourism Village, meaning Royal Caribbean recouped its money in six to seven years.


When a ship docks for a few hours, cruise lines give passengers suggestions of what to do with their time before returning to the boat. But instead of offering sincere recommendations, cruise lines employ a certain pay-to-play model in which vendors on the island can pay to be recommended.

Crew members are known to be overworked, which, according to Klein, is because cruise ships are not beholden to US labor laws. According to Cruise Law News, crew members could work 10 to 12 hours a day for up to 10 months of the year. “If you’re a cleaner on the Grandeur of the Seas, there are 35 public bathrooms,” he says. “You’re making about $560 a month and you may have an assistant, you may not.”

According to CruiseCritic.com, a laundry attendant makes $700 month, a cabin steward makes between $650 and $1,150 per month, including tips, and a kitchen cleaner may make as little as $600 per month. Wages for customer-facing jobs are often dependent on gratuities. Crew members in housekeeping or food and beverage may only be promised $2 a day, and tips often make up 95 percent of their income. CruiseCritic.com also notes that these numbers may change based on where the crew member is from.

By registering their companies in foreign countries, cruise lines are able to dodge not only corporate income tax but reasonable labor laws. Royal Caribbean is incorporated in Liberia, where the minimum wage is $4 to $6 per day, Carnival in Panama, where the minimum wage ranges from $1.22 to $2.36 per hour, and Norwegian in Bermuda, where there is currently no minimum wage (although one will be implemented starting in May 2019).

“Carnival will earn $3 billion and they’ll pay no corporate income tax at all,” Klein says. “That’s $3 billion net profit. Why would they want to pay their workers a little extra money and make only $2.9 or $2.8 billion?”

Klein’s website also aggregates how much each cruise line spends on lobbying; from 1997 to 2015, Carnival has spent $4.7 million, Royal Caribbean has spent $10 million. Last year, three cruise lines donated a combined $23,500 to an Alaskan senator who then ensured a tax exemption for ships stopping in Alaska.
Cruises dump fuel and human waste into the ocean

Black smoke rises from Sun Princess, a Princess Cruises 

operated ship. Jason Thein/Flickr/Creative Commons

(BUNKER OIL)

Along with the moral implications of low wages and high profits and how little ports benefit from cruise tourism, the cruise industry has a severe impact on the environment. These ships are essentially floating cities, and many of them produce as much pollution as one. In 2016, the Pacific Standard reported that “each passenger’s carbon footprint while cruising is roughly three times what it would be on land.”

Traditionally, ships use diesel engines, gas turbines, or a combination of both. Diesel fuel is linked to pollution as it produces nitrogen oxide emissions, which have been linked to respiratory disease and lung cancer. Their high sulfur content is also harmful to the environment since sulfur, when mixed with water and air, forms sulfuric acid — the main component of acid rain. Acid rain can cause deforestation, destroy aquatic life, and corrode building materials. But recently, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) announced that all vessels must switch to cleaner fuel with a lower sulfur content by 2020.


However, instead of paying for more expensive but less sulfuric fuel, such as liquefied natural gas, ships are installing “emission cheat” systems, called scrubbers. A scrubber allows a ship to wash cheap fuel and meet the IMO requirements, then discharge the pollutants from the cheap fuel into the ocean.

This will just add to the fact that a 3,000-person cruise ship generates 210,000 gallons of sewage weekly. All cruise ship sewage goes through what is called “sewage treatment,” where solid and liquid waste is separated and sterilized, then the solid is incinerated and the liquid is released back into the ocean.

Apparently, it’s just like clean water. But in 2016, Princess Cruises was fined $40 million for polluting the ocean by dumping 4,227 gallons of “oily waste” off the coast of Britain. According to Klein’s website, just this September, two cruise lines were charged with “unauthorized discharge of untreated graywater,” or a stream of sewage that comes from everywhere but the toilet.

The two most popular cruise lines, Royal Caribbean and Carnival, both received a D score from environmental advocacy group Friends of Earth, which tabulated the score based on sewage treatment, air pollution reduction, water quality compliance, and transparency.

Cruises are unique in their negatives but also their positives. What else ferries you to and from picture-perfect destinations in a vessel dedicated to pampering its inhabitants? But what else can incubate a deadly virus to so many people so quickly?

Experts say that the cruise industry will bounce back from the coronavirus news as many cruise fans may well just elect to ignore all the aforementioned dangers and repercussions.

Besides, Princess Cruises has already put out a “Help Wanted” ad for a “best-in-class cleaning and disinfection service provider.” Meaning the exact ship where almost 700 people contracted coronavirus will resume voyages, carrying hot tubs, buffets, and thousands of passengers. But hopefully, and with help, without the virus.

HARRY TRAVELS TO SCOTLAND BY TRAIN AFTER FLYING FROM CANADA 

FOR HIS ECOTOURISM CONFERENCE 

MIXES WITH THE HOI POLLOI 

NOT QUITE 

THE LADS WITH HIM ARE SAS, SPECIAL FORCES UK MILITARY,

NOT SCOTLAND YARD, RCMP, OR GREEN BERETS 

DEADLIER REAL ROUGH TRADE 

KILL YA BEFORE YOU CAN SAY HI HARRY

 Prince Harry has touched down in the U.K.!

© Provided by People SplashNews.com

After relocating with wife Meghan Markle and 9-month-old son Archie to Canada’s Vancouver Island following the couple’s decision to step down from royal life, Queen Elizabeth‘s grandson was spotted in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Tuesday. He is taking part in a working summit in support of his environmental tourism initiative, Travalyst, in the Scottish capital on Wednesday.

Keeping with the organization’s mission, Harry chose a sustainable method of travel — train. He arrived at the Edinburgh Waverley railway station dressed casually in jeans and a baseball cap. The father, 35, also wore a green backpack and carried a suit bag.

Wednesday’s outing marks Prince Harry’s first high-profile event in the U.K. since his unprecedented decision to step back from frontline royal duties in January.

Launched in September, Travalyst aims to help both companies and consumers adapt their travel habits to benefit the environment and destination communities. The Edinburgh event will see Harry work with more than 100 members of the Scottish tourism and travel industry to iron out the practical details of just how this can be achieved