The conspiracy theories about the origins of the coronavirus, debunked

Rumor is the coronavirus started in a Chinese lab. 

Here’s how we know it didn’t.

By Eliza Barclay@elizabarclayeliza.barclay@vox.com Mar 4, 2020

Workers inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, in 2017. Conspiracy theorists have conjectured the lab is the origin of the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak; scientific evidence shows it’s not. AFP via Getty Images

The signs that the small, scattered coronavirus outbreak in the United States could spiral into a larger-scale problem are growing. A new analysis, first reported by STAT, found there are likely now 500 to 600 (mostly undetected) cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in Washington state alone. “January 1 in Wuhan was March 1 in Seattle,” computational biologist Trevor Bedford, who did the analysis, told STAT, referring to the Chinese city where the virus emerged and began rapidly infecting humans.

The decisions federal and local public health officials make this week — to test more people with symptoms, inform the public about the risk, isolate the sick, and institute other measures — will be crucial. So will the speed at which they execute them.

This could be a make-or-break moment where US cases remain relatively low and dispersed, or explode in the coming weeks, like they did in Wuhan in January.

Meanwhile, on Fox News and social media, a dangerous conspiracy theory about the origin of the health crisis won’t die.

There are two main versions of the rumor, and they have one common thread: that the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, originated in a level 4 (the highest biosafety level) research laboratory in Wuhan.

In one version of the rumor, the virus was engineered in the lab by humans as a bioweapon. In another version, the virus was being studied in the lab (after being isolated from animals) and then “escaped” or “leaked” because of poor safety protocol.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is a real place, and the exact origin of the novel coronavirus is still a mystery, with researchers racing since the outbreak began to figure it out. But already, virologists who’ve parsed the genome and infectious disease experts who study coronaviruses have more than enough evidence to show that the virus is brand new and came from nature, not the Wuhan lab. A large group of them, citing genome analyses from multiple countries, recently affirmed in The Lancet that the virus originated in wildlife.

The emergence of the virus in the same city as China’s only level 4 biosafety lab, it turns out, is pure coincidence.

Conspiratorial claims about the Wuhan lab are circulating on cable news and social media

Before we get to debunking, let’s note who is spreading rumors about the origins of the virus.

First, several prominent US conservative pundits and politicians — known to regularly spew nonsense (and bash China) — have been politicizing the bioweapon rumor for weeks.

“It probably is a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized,” right-wing radio host and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh said of the virus on February 24. “All superpower nations weaponize bioweapons.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has repeatedly suggested before Congress and on Fox News that the virus could have come from the lab.

The Arkansas senator furthered “infodemic” by pushing debunked claim that the novel coronavirus may have been created in a Wuhan laboratory. https://t.co/oJvVzjOyxw— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) March 1, 2020

On Monday, former White House strategist Steve Bannon went on Fox News to defend Cotton and imply that the Chinese Communist Party was still hiding something about the origin of Covid-19. “The mainstream media and far left [are] saying, ‘Oh, he’s a conspiracy theorist,”’ Bannon said. ”All he’s saying: It’s incumbent upon the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi [Jinping] to come out and give all information ... this is all Cotton’s saying.”

In the New York Post, Steven Mosher, a regular critic of China’s population control measures, has stoked the leakage rumor, using an array of circumstantial clues that Chinese labs’ handling of deadly pathogens can’t be trusted.

Similar rumors have also been running rampant in online forums in China. The South China Morning Post on February 20 debunked yet another rumor of the virus escaping from the lab in China:

More rumours swirled online over the weekend, this time that [Wuhan Institute of Virology] researcher Chen Quanjiao had reported the head of the institute, Wang Yanyi, claiming she had “sold experimental animals” to the live animal and seafood market and “leaked the virus” from the lab.

But Chen denied the claim, saying she was angry that her name had been used to fabricate information. “The recent rumours about the institute have affected the researchers as they try to tackle key problems,” Chen said in a statement.

The scientific evidence disproving these rumors matters because the conspiracy theory could persist and undermine trust in public health authorities at this critical moment. As the Washington Post reported Sunday, the rumor that the virus came from a Chinese lab is one reason residents of one Alabama county are currently unnerved and distrustful of the response to Covid-19 in their state.

“Conspiracy theories about manmade viruses are not new. We saw this with HIV — the rumor that the US made it and introduced it into Africa. But they are really dangerous kinds of things to get spread around,” Gerald Keusch, a professor of medicine and international health and associate director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, told Vox.

So let’s walk through what we know about the virus, and why it’s time to put the lab rumor to rest.

The virus originated in bats and then jumped to humans, perhaps through other animals

Soon after the Chinese government acknowledged there was an outbreak of a mysterious new virus in late December in Wuhan, scientists raced to sequence its genome. By mid-January, they had it and shared it with the World Health Organization.

Soon after that, scientists saw that the virus closely resembled viruses that circulate in bats. “If you look at the genetic sequence of the virus, it’s closely related to a bat virus, about 96 percent the same,” Jim LeDuc, head of the Galveston National Laboratory, a level 4 biosafety lab in Texas, told Vox. “There’s been talk about a pangolin intermediate host; that’s probably not true.”

Chinese officials also reported that several of the first cluster of cases had ties to a live animal market where both seafood and other wildlife were sold as food. (The market has since been closed.) The market soon became the leading hypothesis for how the virus made the leap into humans, where it’s been able to spread efficiently ever since.

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The genetic evidence and epidemiological information, according to three esteemed infectious disease researchers writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, “implicates a bat-origin virus infecting unidentified animal species sold in China’s live-animal markets.”

According to a genome analysis by Tanja Stadler from the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel, the virus first began transmitting in humans in China as early as the first half of November 2019.

“The widespread hypothesis that the first person was infected at an animal market in November is still plausible,” Stadler said in a statement. “Our data effectively rule out the scenario that the virus circulated in humans for a long time before that.”

LeDuc agrees with the hypothesis that the animal market played a role in the virus jumping to humans. “The linkage back to the market is pretty realistic, and consistent with what we saw with SARS,” said LeDuc. “It’s a perfectly plausible and logical explanation: The virus exists in nature and, jumping hosts, finds that it like humans just fine, thank you.“

Unfortunately, there’s a long history of these “spillover” events, where an emerging disease jumps from wildlife to humans, turning into a pandemic. And scientists say we should expect them with more travel, trade, connectivity, urbanization, climate change, and ecological destruction, if we don’t stop the drivers.

What researchers have to figure out now is how exactly the coronavirus jumped to humans: perhaps through a human eating an infected animal, or through humans being exposed to infected feces or urine. “All we know [is] its likely distant source was bats, but we don’t know who was between bats and people,” said Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia and host of the This Week in Virology podcast. “It could be a direct infection [between bats and humans] as well.”

A preliminary scientific paper shows this is a genuinely new virus, and there’s no way it could have been engineered by humans

In a recent podcast episode, Racaniello discussed with two other researchers a fascinating preprint paper (that’s currently under peer review, according to the authors) about the virus origin. The key finding: that SARS-CoV-2 is “not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus.”

The paper, which was uploaded onto Virological.org in February, is written by several leading microbiologists who closely examined the SARS-CoV-2 genome.

Specifically, they found the unusual biochemical features of the virus could only have come about two ways after the virus jumped from animal to humans, or what’s called zoonotic transfer. The ways, they write, are: “1) natural selection in a non-human animal host prior to zoonotic transfer, and 2) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.”

In other words, nature came up with these weird characteristics in the genome, either in an intermediary animal between bats and people or in humans after the virus infected one. As Racaniello put it on his podcast: “Humans could never have dreamed this up.”

What’s more, he noted, no known lab anywhere in the world was working on a coronavirus like this one, and its closest relative is a bat virus found in a cave in 2013 in Yunnan, China, 1,000 miles from Wuhan.“Presumably there’s a common ancestor, most likely from a bat or an intermediary animal that was contaminated by that bat,” Racaniello says.
The coronavirus would be a bad bioweapon

Several experts told me the theory that the virus was meant to be a bioweapon doesn’t make sense, either. One big reason: Covid-19 isn’t all that deadly or transmissible, compared to other potential pathogens out there.

“To make it as a bioweapon, if that’s what you wanted to do, there are scarier and more virulent pathogens to work with,” said Keusch of Boston University.

For instance, Ebola and the West African Lassa virus are deadly threats that can only be studied in biosafety level 4 labs, like Wuhan. Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever is a tick-borne disease that has a death rate of 30 to 50 percent. The global death rate for Covid-19, meanwhile, is around 3 percent at the moment, but it’s expected to come down dramatically as more cases are discovered in the coming weeks. And even now, it varies widely by country and region.

Simply put, if you wanted to release a bioweapon to kill a lot of people, there are much deadlier pathogens you could use.
The Wuhan lab has the same safety protocols as top biosafety labs in the US and Europe

In his article in the New York Post, Mosher suggests that we shouldn’t trust the officials who ran the Wuhan lab. “It sure sounds like China has a problem keeping dangerous pathogens in test tubes where they belong, doesn’t it?” he says.

I asked LeDuc, who runs the Galveston biocontainment lab, if he has any experience with the Wuhan lab. Turns out he has a lot. He and his colleagues have worked for six years with the Chinese team there, both in advising them on building their lab and keeping it safe, and on scientific collaboration. “I can tell you that lab in Wuhan is equivalent to any lab here in the US and Europe,” he said.

For instance, many labs now use radio waves to track and inventory vials containing dangerous pathogens.

Keusch agrees. “I don’t think there’s any likelihood that the lab is less prepared in terms of protocol and capability than any lab in the US. It’s really good, though nothing is perfect,” he said.

The rumors have also reportedly hurt the lab’s ability to do its work.

“The rumours … have caused severe damage to our researchers who have been dedicated to working on the front line, and seriously interrupted the emergency research we are doing during the epidemic,” the lab said in a statement, according to the South China Morning Post.

Why we need to figure out all the details of where the virus came from

According to Bruce Aylward, an epidemiologist who led the World Health Organization’s recent mission to China to assess its Covid-19 response, the investigation into where and how the virus jumped to people is ongoing. The focus remains on the (now closed) Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, the wildlife market inside it, and other area markets.

“Ever since SARS, the market authorities now have to record which animals are sold by whom and where they come from in these markets. So now there’s a list of 10 vendors from seven provinces,” he told my colleague Julia Belluz in a recent interview. “Then China’s CDC can do a case control study based on where in the market these animals were.”

The focus in the past month has been on saving lives, he said, but as new cases and deaths decline, the investigators will eventually be able to turn back to getting animal info from the market vendors and testing the animals.

Racaniello says it’s critical that the source is identified to eliminate the chance that the virus is introduced into people again.

For LeDuc, China’s experience with the coronavirus should be a clear message of the great public health threat live animal markets post.

“The reason we’re seeing [coronaviruses like SARS and SARS-CoV-2 emerge] in China is they have these live animal markets, where they bring in animals alive and co-house them, one cage on top of another, where there’s an opportunity for transmission between atypical hosts,” says LeDuc.

We’ll need to be patient for Chinese investigators to get to the bottom of how the virus made the jump from animals to humans. In the meantime, remember that in a public health crisis, conspiracy theories are a distraction. Rather, it’s our collective responsibility to stay focused on keeping each other safe.

Facebook doubles down on removing coronavirus conspiracy theories

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok are all battling misinformation related to the novel coronavirus.

By Shirin Ghaffary and Rebecca Heilweil Updated Mar 4, 2020


By late February, coronavirus cases were spreading quickly throughout Europe, and new hoaxes followed. Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images

Social media companies are increasing their vigilance about removing coronavirus conspiracies. Facebook, in particular, continues to update its policies as the outbreak — and corresponding disinformation — spreads.

On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg reiterated in a Facebook post that the platform was removing conspiracy theories related to the coronavirus that have been flagged by global health organizations, in addition to labeling coronavirus misinformation with “fact check” labels to let users know that such content had been rated false. Zuckerberg also said that Facebook is providing the World Health Organization (WHO) “as many free ads as they need.” At the same time, Zuckerberg said the company will block ads that try to exploit the situation, such as those that claim a product has a miracle cure for the Covid-19 disease.

It’s been more than two months since a novel strain of coronavirus popped up in Wuhan, China, and proceeded to spread to countries across the world. And as that’s happened, panic has continued to disseminate throughout social media, forcing tech platforms to grapple with what the World Health Organization is calling an “infodemic.”

As of March 4, the novel coronavirus linked to Wuhan, China, has infected nearly 95,000 people, mostly in mainland China, and there are cases popping up throughout the United States. More than 3,200 people have died, though researchers at Johns Hopkins tracking the disease also report more than 51,000 recoveries from the illness.

With more and more people searching online for information about the coronavirus outbreak, they can easily encounter a barrage of misleading and potentially dangerous information. And the WHO, which has also released its own “myth-busting” resources, is warning that misinformation about the novel coronavirus has caused harmful stigmatization and discrimination. In the US, for instance, there is a growing number of reports about misinformation fueling racism against Asian Americans.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok have all told Recode that they’ve been working to promote factual content and some are limiting the reach of posts with misinformation on their platforms. Twitter, for instance, has put a warning label linking to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) when users search “coronavirus.” Meanwhile, the WHO has now joined TikTok in an effort to boost accurate information about the illness, and several of those companies met with the public health organization at Facebook back in February.


The CDC and the WHO recommend several basic measures to help prevent the spread of respiratory diseases such as Covid-19:

DO
Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after going to the bathroom; before eating; and after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing.
Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.
Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects and surfaces using a regular household cleaning spray or wipe.
Stay home when you are sick; contact your health care provider immediately if you think you’ve been exposed to Covid-19.

DON’T
Touch your face, particularly your eyes, nose, or mouth.
Travel if you have a fever and cough.
Wear a face mask if you are well. Face masks should be used by people who show symptoms of Covid-19 to help prevent the spread of the disease to others.

Information on the coronavirus outbreak, including its severity, may change as it spreads. Find answers to common questions here, and stay up to date with Vox’s coverage here.

Still, efforts by these social media platforms have not managed to stop the spread of misleading or outright false hoaxes about the outbreak in the form of posts and videos that have racked up thousands of clicks, “Likes,” and shares. A significant amount of false information about the coronavirus is also spreading on private channels. Take WhatsApp, for instance. As the Washington Post reported, the encrypted platform has seen a flurry of wrong information about the coronavirus, creating panic among its users throughout the world.

Another problem involves politicians promoting the idea that the coronavirus is a hoax or spreading other conspiracy theories about the virus. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Recode that the company would remove false claims and conspiracy theories flagged by world health organizations that have been shared by politicians or elected officials.

While we’re seeing a wide variety of false coronavirus posts across these platforms, it’s still hard to say how widespread the misinformation problem is. But it’s significant enough that well-regarded institutions, including Johns Hopkins University, research centers in England, and even NASA have had to issue statements or comments debunking claims that have been floated online. Advocacy groups such as Media Matters have also been busy tracking down false and misleading posts.

Although there is a seemingly endless stream of sources spreading misinformation about the Wuhan coronavirus around the web, we’ve identified and debunked a few of the most pervasive hoaxes.
False: The novel coronavirus sickness is caused by 5G

On social media, some are pushing the idea that the novel coronavirus was caused by or can be linked to deployment of 5G technology in Wuhan, China. There are several “strains” of this theory floating around online. One premise is that 5G technology can weaken the immune system and make the common cold more virulent. Another promotes the idea that the 5G technology itself is causing the symptoms that have been attributed to the novel coronavirus. One version of the theory pushes the idea that the technology absorbs oxygen in the lungs, which “causes coronavirus.”

That idea has been flagged false by a UK-based third-party fact-checker, called Full Fact, that works with Facebook. There’s no evidence that 5G impacts the immune system, and no proof that it has any link to the novel coronavirus.
False: There’s a plot to “exterminate” people infected with the new coronavirus

On social media, some have floated the claim that China sought permission from the country’s Supreme Court to kill people infected with the novel coronavirus. Several fact-checkers, including Snopes, have determined these reports to be false and to have originated from a website with several “red flags.”
An account with more than 30,000 followers share this false theory.

Poynter observed that some social media accounts continue to push the idea that China is planning to kill people with the illness. Meanwhile, some accounts have floated that the idea that the incineration of human bodies is causing an excess of sulfur dioxide, which they imply can be seen from satellite images. There is no evidence that any of this is true, and a research meteorologist from NASA told the UK fact-checking organization Full Fact that the images these theories are based on aren’t live satellite data.

“Although satellite data has been used in the construction of the emission inventories, these emissions do not account for the day-to-day variations in SO2 emissions and as such cannot account for sudden changes in human activity,” Arlindo M. da Silva told the fact-checking organization.
False: Scientists have proven that humans got the novel coronavirus from eating bats

One prominent theory is that the coronavirus spread through human consumption of bats. BuzzFeed reported that a prominent video about the novel coronavirus in Hindi that’s attracted more than 13 million amplified the claim that eating bats caused the coronavirus outbreak. This theory, which has popped up throughout social media, is also linked to unfounded speculation that the coronavirus was started at the Wuhan Virology Institute.

Those claims have helped fuel racism against people of Chinese descent, and Asian people more broadly, throughout the world.

YouTube

It’s true that there has been research into a potential link between bats and the coronavirus, but it’s important to be very cautious in interpreting the findings. First, there is no evidence that eating bats caused the coronavirus outbreak. And Jonathan Epstein, a veterinarian and an epidemiologist EcoHealth Alliance, told Vox earlier this month that it’s “still not known” whether this outbreak started with bats at an animal market.

“It’s clear there was some environmental contamination in the market that includes this virus. And that’s what we know so far. So it’s likely that people were infected in that market,” Epstein told Vox. “But I think there is still some question about how the earlier cases may have been exposed.”

And here’s what the CDC reports: “Analysis of the genetic tree of this virus indicates it originated in bats, but whether the virus jumped directly from bats or whether there was an intermediary animal host is not, yet, known.”
False: Scientists predicted the virus will kill 65 million people

In October 2019, a Johns Hopkins research center ran an “exercise” that aimed to model the global response to a potential epidemic. Many people online have misinterpreted the study and erroneously linked its predictions to the possible death toll of an outbreak similar to what we’re currently witnessing with the novel coronavirus. In other words, the Johns Hopkins study had nothing to do with the coronavirus, although the scenario studied might seem similar. 


This is a popular line of misinformation on Twitter. There are several tweets, including one that’s still up with over 140,000 “likes,” claiming that scientists have predicted that the Wuhan coronavirus will kill 65 million people. That’s not accurate.

“We modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction,” the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said in a statement. “We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people.”
False: China built a biological weapon that was leaked from a lab in Wuhan

Right now, it’s not clear where this new strain of coronavirus originated. Officials believe it may be linked to a seafood market in Wuhan, but scientists still aren’t exactly sure how or where it developed.

On social media, however, there are many other completely unproven theories about its origin that imply the outbreak of the virus may be linked to bioweapons research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research institute that houses the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory. This Facebook post that’s been shared more than 4,000 times says that it’s “believed that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is where the disease may have originated.”
Screenshot from the “Behold Israel” account, which implies that the Wuhan-linked coronavirus may have originated at a biosafety laboratory in Wuhan.

This idea appears to be based, in part, on comments a former Israeli military officer shared with the Washington Times, a right-wing outlet whose past articles have suggested that President Barack Obama might be Muslim and have spread conspiracy theories. Back in January Jim Banks, a Republican congressman from Indiana, even tweeted out a link to the Washington Times article. His tweet has been shared more than 1,000 times. (Rep. Banks did not respond to a request for comment.) And this month, Sen. Tom Cotton also amplified similar speculations.

As shocking as the biowarfare lab theory might be, experts have told the Washington Post that there’s no evidence to support it. And the lab itself said in a statement that misinformation had “caused severe damage to our researchers who have been dedicated to working on the front line, and seriously interrupted the emergency research we are doing during the epidemic.”

False: Chinese spies smuggled the virus out of Canada

Social media posts are pushing the unproven premise that the novel coronavirus found in Wuhan was smuggled from a lab in Canada as part of China’s clandestine quest for a bioweapon, a theory debunked by Politifact. It’s a theory that seems to be somewhat related to the Wuhan lab conspiracy. One tweet by Republican Party official Solomon Yue, who has more than 100,000 followers, said: “#coronavirus is stolen from Canada by espionage & sent to Wuhan to be weaponized to kill foreign enemies.”

#coronavirus is stolen from Canada by espionage & sent to Wuhan to be weaponized to kill foreign enemies. Now the deadly weaponized virus kills 80 Chinese & no foreigners & becomes Emperor Shithole's Chernobyl! https://t.co/aOyIbvmC39— Solomon Yue (@SolomonYue) January 27, 2020

Although a Chinese researcher working in Canada is under investigation for a possible policy breach after she was invited to the Wuhan lab twice a year for two years, according to Politifact, there’s “no evidence” to support the claim that she “stole coronavirus samples and gave them to the Wuhan lab to create biological weapons.”

False: A coronavirus vaccine already exists

Another popular theory is that a vaccine for the novel coronavirus already exists, and some are even suggesting that the vaccine was previously patented. While researchers in several countries are working to develop a vaccine, no such vaccine has yet been developed, according to FactCheck.org and Politifact. But this hasn’t stopped people from going online and claiming otherwise.

A recent post on Facebook claims that the coronavirus was a “set up” to sell vaccines and includes screenshots claiming to show a patent for a new vaccine. In this particular case, because Facebook’s fact-checkers verified the post as containing false information, a handful of “related articles” show up below the post, pointing users to verified sites that debunk the vaccine conspiracy theory. If you try to share the post, Facebook issues a warning stating that independent fact-checkers have said it contains false information.

But even though Facebook has placed warnings on some vaccine hoaxes related to the Wuhan coronavirus, the content isn’t flagged as false on every platform. On Twitter, for example, one tweet that’s gained close to 2,000 “likes” suggests that a vaccine for the coronavirus is owned by the Pirbright Institute, an English infectious disease research institute that focuses on farm animals.

This claim is false. The Pirbright Institute issued a statement shared by FactCheck.org, clarifying that its researchers don’t work with human coronaviruses, and that a patent that they hold is unrelated to the current coronavirus linked to Wuhan.

Some have also attempted to profit from spreading the false information that’s there’s a cure (there’s none yet), and the Federal Trade Commission warned the public earlier this month that “scammers are taking advantage of fears” about the illness and “setting up websites to sell bogus products, and using fake emails, texts, and social media posts as a ruse to take your money and get your personal information.
False: There were 100,000 confirmed cases in January

As of March 4, there were nearly 95,000 cases of the coronavirus, but at the very end of January, when that number was less than 10,000, people were vastly inflating the number of infected people beyond what any official source has reported.

It’s an important reminder that, when trying to figure out the scale of the virus’s spread, it’s worth looking to reputable, official sources, such as the World Health Organization. The Center for Systems Science and Engineer at Johns Hopkins also maintains a useful map documenting the number of confirmed cases throughout the world.

It’s true that on January 26, one public health expert told the Guardian, however, “Almost certainly many tens of thousands of people are infected.” He added, “My best guess now is perhaps 100,000 cases right now.” But that big scary number can be misleading because it was a guess and that number had not been confirmed.
A video on YouTube that claims to portray a nurse in Wuhan, China, who is transcribed as saying that 90,000 are now infected with the new coronavirus.

Nevertheless, many popular posts on social platforms spread statistics that served to scare people with numbers that do not match the official count. Some of these posts cite medical workers in Wuhan, without evidence. For instance, one YouTube video posted on January 25 shows someone identified as a nurse, who says there were as many as 90,000 people infected with the disease in China alone.

Similarly, in late January on Twitter, an account disguised as a news outlet shared an audio clip that claimed that the time, 100,000 people have been infected.

It’s worth noting that there’s legitimate doubt about whether the Chinese government is accurately reporting the extent of the virus’ impact. At least eight people have been arrested by the Chinese government for spreading hoaxes, according to reporting from the Poynter Institute in January. On the popular Chinese social media app WeChat, some have said that frontline reports by medical workers are being taken down.

Still, the exact number of people infected by the coronavirus remains unknown.
False: A teen on TikTok is the first case in Canada

On TikTok, some teenagers have pretended to be infected with the virus. One student in Vancouver posted a popular video falsely claiming his friend had the first Canadian confirmed case of coronavirus. The video showed a teenager vomiting in school trash cans and wearing a mask around campus. In an interview with the Daily Beast, a spokesperson for the British Columbia Department of Health confirmed that the video is fake. At the time, the only confirmed case of coronavirus in British Columbia, at the time of the video was posted, was a man in his 40s. 

A screenshot of one of the TikTok coronavirus videos that was taken down.

TikTok appears to have deleted the original viral video which had over 4.1 million views, but a similar video, posted by the same user, showed a teen alleging a classmate had contracted the virus remained up as of February 20. That morning, the company said it released a feature directing users to trusted sources of information, like the WHO, when they search for coronavirus-related content in the app.

False: The Chinese government built a hospital overnight

It’s worth noting that the Chinese state media has also been spreading false information. As BuzzFeed News first pointed out, two state media outlets — Global Times and People’s Daily — circulated an image of a newly constructed building and claimed it was a hospital in Wuhan that was constructed in just 16 hours. In fact, the building in the image was an apartment building more than 600 miles away.


This is just one example of how the Chinese government and state-backed organizations have used false or misleading information to portray the outbreak as being under control.
How tech platforms are responding

Every social media company Recode reached said they were working to reduce the impact of false information about the coronavirus in some way, to varying extents.

In addition to taking down conspiracy theories and provided WHO free advertising, Facebook said it’s also working on “blocking people from running ads that try to exploit the situation.” Zuckerberg said, as an example, that would include a company promoting a product that claimed to cure a disease. He also said,: “Researchers are already using aggregated and anonymized Facebook data — including mobility data and population density maps — to better understand how the virus is spreading.

In a statement, Twitter appeared to echo some of the latest steps being taken by Facebook. The company said it would “halt any attempt by advertisers to opportunistically use the Covid-19 outbreak to target inappropriate ads,” that it was working with fact checkers to promote accurate content on the site, and that it was also supplying data to researchers.

Twitter also said it’s not “seeing significant coordinated platform manipulation efforts around these issues.” This doesn’t mean that there’s not false information about coronavirus on Twitter, as the hoaxes we mentioned earlier prove. Twitter’s response simply indicates that the company hasn’t found any evidence of intentional disinformation campaigns by someone, like a state actor or political group.

In the early days of the outbreak, Facebook’s approach was to put fact-checking alerts on false content related to conspiracy theories. But at the end of January, the company announced that it would take additional action:

We will also start to remove content with false claims or conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organizations and local health authorities that could cause harm to people who believe them. We are doing this as an extension of our existing policies to remove content that could cause physical harm. We’re focusing on claims that are designed to discourage treatment or taking appropriate precautions. This includes claims related to false cures or prevention methods — like drinking bleach cures the coronavirus — or claims that create confusion about health resources that are available. We will also block or restrict hashtags used to spread misinformation on Instagram, and are conducting proactive sweeps to find and remove as much of this content as we can.

Twitter has also placed a warning label linking to the CDC when users search “coronavirus.”Twitter shows a banner linking to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when you search for “coronavirus” on the platform.

Meanwhile, starting in late January, TikTok began issuing a notification for users when they search for the “coronavirus” hashtag in the app. The alert encourages users to look to “trusted sources” like the WHO for accurate information and to report content that might violate its community guidelines. TikTok told Recode in a statement that its guidelines “do not permit misinformation that could cause harm to our community or the larger public,” adding that “[w]hile we encourage our users to have respectful conversations about the subjects that matter to them, we remove deliberate attempts to misrepresent authoritative sources of news.”

YouTube has its own version of an advisory. Beginning in late January, the video platform began showing short previews of text-based news articles about the coronavirus in search results. If you search “coronavirus” on YouTube, for example, you’re linked to a WHO landing page about the novel coronavirus. YouTube told Recode that false information generally does not violate the platform’s rules unless it involves hate speech, harassment, scams, or inciting violence. The company also said it aims to reduce the recommendations of what it deems “borderline content” or videos that could misinform users in harmful ways — including false information about coronavirus.

Despite these efforts, it’s seemingly impossible for these platforms to take down every false coronavirus post as soon as one pops up. As with any kind of misinformation, it’s a game of never-ending whack-a-mole. But the continued prevalence of false info about the outbreak, one month into its existence, shows how essential it is to contain the spread of misinformation, especially with serious health consequences involved.

Update March 4: This post has updated throughout with more examples of hoaxes as well as new information on the outbreak and tech company responses.

HERSTORY USA
Abortion rights had a surprisingly hopeful day in the Supreme Court

Louisiana’s lawyer did such a bad job defending an anti-abortion law that she may have lost Chief Justice Roberts.

By Ian Millhiser Mar 4, 2020

Thousands of protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday morning as oral arguments were underway over a restrictive Louisiana abortion law. Melissa Lyttle for Vox

Wednesday morning’s arguments in the biggest threat to abortion rights to reach the Supreme Court in nearly 30 years went so badly for Louisiana Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill, who was defending Louisiana’s restrictive abortion law, that by the end even Chief Justice John Roberts appeared uncomfortable with her arguments.

Murrill spent 20 awkward minutes appearing to test whether it is possible to botch an argument badly enough to lose a case widely expected to go her way.

Given that conservatives hold the power on the Supreme Court, Louisiana still remains likely to prevail in June Medical Services LLC v. Russo. But Murrill’s performance was so weak, and the liberal justices successfully exposed so many flaws in her argument, that it raised questions about whether Roberts might join his liberal colleagues to strike down Louisiana’s law.

Chief Justice Roberts could join his liberal colleagues after hearing arguments in Louisiana’s restrictive abortion law. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images

June Medical involves a Louisiana law that requires abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital that is within 30 miles of the clinic where the doctor provides abortion care. If that law sounds familiar, it should: Less than four years ago, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that is virtually identical to the one at issue in June Medical.

Indeed, the only real distinction between Whole Woman’s Health and June Medical is the makeup of the Supreme Court. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018, was an uneasy defender of the right to an abortion. Though he typically voted to uphold abortion restrictions, he refused to overrule Roe v. Wade (1973) outright. And he joined his liberal colleagues in Whole Woman’s Health.

Kennedy’s replacement, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has historically been much more skeptical of abortion rights. And his questions at Wednesday’s oral argument left few doubts that he will vote to uphold Louisiana’s law.

Yet the case appeared to turn on Roberts, who joined the dissent in Whole Woman’s Health and who almost always votes to uphold abortion restrictions. Roberts repeatedly asked whether there is any difference between the burden the Texas law struck down in Whole Woman’s Health imposes on people seeking abortions and the burden imposed by the nearly identical Louisiana law.

Neither Murrill nor US Principal Deputy Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, who defended the law on behalf of the Trump administration, was able to give Roberts a straight answer.
Louisiana tried to restrict abortion through a sham health law

Abortion rights advocates refer to laws like the one at in June Medical as “targeted restrictions on abortion providers,” or “TRAP” laws. TRAP laws superficially appear to make abortions safer, but they do very little to advance patient health — while simultaneously making it much harder to operate an abortion clinic.

Louisiana claims that its admitting privileges law serves two interlocking purposes. It is a credentialing requirement, which supposedly helps screen out incompetent doctors who shouldn’t perform abortions. And it is supposed to ensure that abortion patients who experience complications can be admitted to a nearby hospital by the doctor who performed the abortion.

RELATED
Getting an abortion in “the most pro-life state in America”

Yet, as the four liberal justices took turns pointing out, neither of these goals is meaningfully advanced by this particular law.

As Justice Elena Kagan noted, for example, hospitals often rely on criteria other than the quality of a physician when deciding whether to give a particular doctor admitting privileges. Many hospitals only give such privileges to doctors with a sufficient number of patients, who admit a certain number of patients every year to that hospital. Others outright refuse to give privileges to abortion providers.

Additionally, the law’s requirement that abortion providers have admitting privileges near their clinic undercuts the state’s argument that the law serves to screen out bad doctors. There’s no reason to believe that hospitals near clinics do a better job of screening doctors than hospitals far from clinics.

Similarly, the fact that so many hospitals require doctors to admit a certain number of patients if they want to receive privileges is a special barrier to abortion providers, because abortions are a very safe medical procedure. As Kagan explained, the clinic that brought this lawsuit has performed around 70,000 abortions. It’s transferred only four of those patients to a hospital. These doctors would struggle to meet their quotas because their patients are so unlikely to require medical care.

And there’s another reason an abortion doctor is unlikely to need to admit one of their patients to a nearby hospital. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly pointed out, many abortion clinics perform medication abortions — meaning that the patient is given pills to take in the comfort of their own home. Even if a complication does arise, this patient is unlikely to seek care from a hospital near the clinic. They will seek care from a hospital close to their home, which is likely to be outside the 30-mile radius prescribed by the Louisiana law.

The Supreme Court held in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that “unnecessary health regulations that have the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion impose an undue burden on the right,” and both Murrill and Wall struggled to explain why this particular law isn’t an “unnecessary health regulation.”

These weaknesses in Louisiana’s arguments seemed to trouble Chief Justice Roberts: Twice, Roberts inquired what the “benefits” of such a law were, and he did so in a way that directly contradicted the state’s defense of its law.

The core of the state’s argument, after all, is that its admitting privileges law benefits abortion patients by making abortions safer — and that it does so even though the Supreme Court held in Whole Woman’s Health that a very similar Texas law does not benefit such patients. But Roberts appeared to reject this argument rather explicitly.

“I understand the idea that the impact might be different in different places,” the chief justice told Murrill at one point, “but as far as the benefits of the law, that’s going to be the same in each state, isn’t it?”

Justices Alito and Kavanaugh offered competing arguments in defense of the anti-abortion law

Justice Samuel Alito, for his part, did his best to rescue Louisiana by arguing that the wrong party brought this particular lawsuit. In at least eight previous cases, the Supreme Court has allowed an abortion clinic or an abortion provider to bring a lawsuit challenging an abortion restriction. Alito argued that providers and clinics should be stripped of their ability to do so, meaning that future abortion suits would have to be brought by individual patients who are seeking an abortion.

But no other justice really picked up on this argument. Kavanaugh, meanwhile, suggested that maybe the Court’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health should be limited to just Texas. “What if all doctors in a state could easily get admitting privileges?” he asked at one point. Kavanaugh’s questions seemed to borrow from a federal appeals court opinion, which rather dubiously argued that Whole Woman’s Health should not apply in Louisiana because it is easier for Louisiana doctors to get admitting privileges than it is for Texas doctors to do so.

Roberts, for his part, initially seemed sympathetic to Kavanaugh’s argument. But his sympathy seemed to fade as the argument proceeded. Early in the argument, Roberts asked whether the question of whether a particular law violates Whole Woman’s Health is a “factual one that has to proceed state by state,” or whether all admitting privileges laws should be viewed with skepticism.

But the state was unable to demonstrate that Louisiana doctors will have an easy time getting admitting privileges. At one point, Justice Sonia Sotomayor rattled off individual doctors in Louisiana who struggled to get such privileges. At another point, Justice Stephen Breyer asked Murrill to identify which of the several doctors involved in this case presented the best case that Louisiana abortion providers can, indeed, get admitting privileges.

Murrill named a doctor who, according to the state’s own expert witness at trial, was unlikely to be able to obtain admitting privileges — an error that both Breyer and Sotomayor swiftly pounced on.

Indeed, by the end of the argument, Roberts appeared to explicitly reject Kavanaugh’s attempt to save the Louisiana law — wondering why it would make sense to treat every state differently when the (virtually nonexistent) benefits of an admitting privileges law are the same in every state.
The future of Roe v. Wade remains grim

Wednesday’s oral argument was not a high point for the anti-abortion movement. Murrill appeared unprepared for predictable questions, made tone-deaf arguments, and even argued with Ginsburg about the history of the Supreme Court’s feminist jurisprudence.

When Sotomayor asked Murrill whether a particular abortion provider performs surgical abortions, for example, Murrill did not appear to know the answer to the question — though she eventually replied that “to the best of my knowledge,” the doctor performs surgeries. Murrill contracted her state’s own expert witnesses and on many occasions seemed to contradict facts in the record.

At one point, Murrill got into an argument with Ginsburg, the most significant feminist lawyer in American history, about the facts of Craig v. Boren (1976), a seminal women’s rights decision that was heavily influenced by a brief filed by Ginsburg.

Murrill also came to Court to defend a law that is rooted in an outdated strategy.

TRAP laws made sense in a world where Kennedy, who was unwilling to overrule Roe but willing to uphold many abortion restrictions, held the crucial swing vote on abortion. They were a test of whether Kennedy would uphold severe restrictions on abortion, so long as those restrictions were written to look like a health regulation. That strategy failed in Whole Woman’s Health.

But TRAP laws were always rooted in deception. They depend on judges who are willing to pretend that an anti-abortion law that does nothing to protect patient health is, in fact, a health regulation.

On Wednesday, Roberts appeared uncomfortable with this deception. But even if he does vote to strike down this Louisiana law, there is a much more honest way for anti-abortion advocates to approach the Supreme Court in the future: They can simply ask Roberts to overrule Roe v. Wade. When that day comes, Roberts remains likely to give these advocates what they want.

BOOKS

The Confounding Truth About Frederick Douglass

His champions now span the ideological spectrum, but left and right miss the tensions in his views.

RANDALL KENNEDY

DECEMBER 2018 ISSUE

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom 

BY DAVID W. BLIGHT SIMON & SCHUSTER

It is difficult to imagine a more remarkable story of self-determination and advancement than the life of Frederick Douglass. Emblematic of the depths from which he rose is the pall of uncertainty that shrouded his origins. For a long time he believed that he had been born in 1817. Then, in 1877, during a visit to a former master in Maryland, Douglass was told that he had actually been born in 1818. Douglass could barely recall his mother, who had been consigned to different households from the one where her baby lived. And he never discovered the identity of his father, who was likely a white man. “Genealogical trees,” Douglass mordantly observed, “do not flourish among slaves.”ARSH RAZIUDDIN

Douglass fled enslavement in 1838, and with the assistance of abolitionists, he cultivated his prodigious talents as an orator and a writer. He produced a score of extraordinary speeches. The widely anthologized “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” delivered in 1852, is the most damning critique of American hypocrisy ever uttered:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? … a day that reveals to him … the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham … your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery … There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

He wrote analyses of court opinions that deservedly appear in constitutional-law casebooks. He published many arresting columns in magazines and newspapers, including several that he started. He also wrote three exceptional memoirs, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). The most celebrated black man of his era, Douglass became the most photographed American of any race in the 19th century. He was the first black person appointed to an office requiring senatorial confirmation; in 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes nominated him to be the marshal of the District of Columbia.

Throughout his life, however, Douglass repeatedly fell victim to the brutalizations and insults commonly experienced by African Americans of his time. As a slave, he suffered at the hands of a vicious “nigger breaker” to whom he was rented. He fled to the “free” North, only to have his work as a maritime caulker thwarted by racist white competitors. As a traveling evangelist for abolitionism, he was repeatedly ejected from whites-only railroad cars, restaurants, and lodgings. When he died, an admiring obituary in The New York Times suggested that Douglass’s “white blood” accounted for his “superior intelligence.” After his death, his reputation declined precipitously alongside the general standing of African Americans in the age of Jim Crow.

 

My Race Problem RANDALL KENNEDY 

Frederick Douglass: An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage FREDERICK DOUGLASS 

Frederick Douglass: American Lion TA-NEHISI COATES

Now everyone wants a piece of Frederick Douglass. When a statue memorializing him was unveiled at the United States Capitol in 2013, members of the party of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell sported buttons that read frederick douglass was a republican. More recently, the Republican National Committee issued a statement joining President Donald Trump “in honoring Douglass’ lifelong dedication to the principles that define [the Republican] Party and enrich our nation.” Across the ideological divide, former President Barack Obama has lauded Douglass, as has the leftist intellectual Cornel West. New books about Douglass have appeared with regularity of late, and are now joined by David W. Blight’s magnificently expansive and detailed Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.SIMON & SCHUSTER

A history professor at Yale who has long been a major contributor to scholarship on Douglass, slavery, and the Civil War, Blight portrays Douglass unequivocally as a hero while also revealing his weaknesses. Blight illuminates important facets of 19th-century political, social, and cultural life in America, including the often overlooked burdens borne by black women. At the same time, he speaks to urgent, contemporary concerns such as Black Lives Matter. Given the salience of charges of cultural misappropriation, griping about his achievement would be unsurprising: Blight is a white man who has written the leading biography of the most outstanding African American of the 19th century. His sensitive, careful, learned, creative, soulful exploration of Douglass’s grand life, however, transcends his own identity.

In the wake of Douglass’s death in 1895, it was African Americans who kept his memory alive. Booker T. Washington wrote a biography in 1906. The historian Benjamin Quarles wrote an excellent study in 1948. White historians on the left also played a key role in protecting Douglass from oblivion, none more usefully than Philip Foner, a blacklisted Marxist scholar (and uncle of the great historian Eric Foner), whose carefully edited collection of Douglass’s writings remains essential reading. But in “mainstream”—white, socially and politically conventional—circles, Douglass was widely overlooked. In 1962, the esteemed literary critic Edmund Wilson published Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, a sprawling (and lavishly praised) commentary on writings famous and obscure that omitted Douglass, and virtually all the other black literary figures of the period.

Keenly attuned to the politics of public memory, Blight shows that the current profusion of claims on Douglass’s legacy bears close scrutiny: Claimants have a way of overlooking features of his complex persona that would be embarrassing for them to acknowledge. Conservatives praise his individualism, which sometimes verged on social Darwinism. They also herald Douglass’s stress on black communal self-help, his antagonism toward labor unions, and his strident defense of men’s right to bear arms. They tiptoe past his revolutionary rage against the United States during his early years as an abolitionist. “I have no patriotism,” he thundered in 1847. “I cannot have any love for this country … or for its Constitution. I desire to see it overthrown as speedily as possible.” Radical as to ends, he was also radical as to means. He justified the violence deployed when a group of abolitionists tried to liberate a fugitive slave from a Boston jail and killed a deputy U.S. marshal in the process. Similarly, he assisted and praised John Brown, the insurrectionist executed for murder and treason in Virginia in 1859.

Many conservatives who claim posthumous alliance with Douglass would abandon him if they faced the prospect of being publicly associated with the central features of his ideology. After all, he championed the creation of a strong post–Civil War federal government that would extend civil and political rights to the formerly enslaved; protect those rights judicially and, if necessary, militarily; and undergird the former slaves’ new status with education, employment, land, and other resources, to be supplied by experimental government agencies. Douglass objected to what he considered an unseemly willingness to reconcile with former Confederates who failed to sincerely repudiate secession and slavery. He expressed disgust, for example, at the “bombastic laudation” accorded to Robert E. Lee upon the general’s death in 1870. Blight calls attention to a speech resonant with current controversies:
We are sometimes asked in the name of patriotism to forget the merits of [the Civil War], and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it—those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty … May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that … bloody conflict.

The progressive tradition of championing Douglass runs deeper, not surprisingly, than the conservative adoption of him. As an abolitionist, a militant antislavery Republican, and an advocate for women’s rights, he allied himself with three of the greatest dissident progressive formations in American history. Activists on the left should feel comfortable seeking to appropriate the luster of his authority for many of their projects—solicitude for refugees, the elevation of women, the advancement of unfairly marginalized racial minorities. No dictum has been more ardently repeated by progressive dissidents than his assertion that “if there is no struggle there is no progress … Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

But certain aspects of Douglass’s life would, if more widely known, cause problems for many of his contemporary admirers on the left, a point nicely made in Blight’s biography as well as in Waldo E. Martin Jr.’s The Mind of Frederick Douglass. A Republican intra-party contest in an 1888 congressional election in Virginia pitted John Mercer Langston, a progressive black jurist (who had served as the first dean of Howard University Law School), against R. W. Arnold, a white conservative sponsored by a white party boss (who was a former Confederate general). Douglass supported Arnold, and portrayed his decision as high-minded. “The question of color,” he said, “should be entirely subordinated to the greater questions of principles and party expediency.” In fact, what had mainly moved Douglass was personal animosity; he and Langston had long been bitter rivals. Langston was hardly a paragon, but neither was Douglass. Sometimes he could be a vain, selfish, opportunistic jerk, capable of subordinating political good to personal pique.

Douglass promised that he would never permit his desire for a government post to mute his anti-racism. He broke that promise. When Hayes nominated him to be D.C. marshal, the duties of the job were trimmed. Previously the marshal had introduced dignitaries on state occasions. Douglass was relieved of that responsibility. Racism was the obvious reason for the change, but Douglass disregarded the slight and raised no objection. Some observers derided him for his acquiescence. He seemed to think that the benefit to the public of seeing a black man occupy the post outweighed the benefit that might be derived from staging yet another protest. But especially as he aged, Douglass lapsed into the unattractive habit of conflating what would be good for him with what would be good for blacks, the nation, or humanity. In this instance, his detractors were correct: He had permitted himself to be gagged by the prospect of obtaining a sinecure.

Douglass was also something of an imperialist. He accepted diplomatic positions under Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, in 1871, and Benjamin Harrison, in 1889, that entailed assisting the United States in pressuring Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) to allow itself to become annexed and Haiti to cede territory. Douglass acted with good intentions, aiming to stabilize and elevate these black Caribbean countries by tying them to the United States in its slavery-free, post–Civil War incarnation. He liked the idea of Santo Domingo becoming a new state, thereby adding to the political muscle in America of people of African descent, a prospect that frightened or disgusted some white supremacists. When Douglass felt that his solicitude for people of color in the Caribbean was being decisively subordinated to exploitative business and militaristic imperatives, he resigned. But here again, Douglass demonstrated (along with a sometimes condescending attitude toward his Caribbean hosts) a yearning for power, prestige, and recognition from high political authorities that confused and diluted his more characteristic ideological impulses.

Douglass is entitled to and typically receives an honored place in any pantheon dedicated to heroes of black liberation. He also poses problems, however, for devotees of certain brands of black solidarity. White abolitionists were key figures in his remarkable journey to national and international prominence. Without their assistance, he would not have become the symbol of oppressed blackness in the minds of antislavery whites, and without the prestige he received from his white following, he would not have become black America’s preeminent spokesman. That whites were so instrumental in furthering Douglass’s career bothers black nationalists who are haunted by the specter of white folks controlling or unduly influencing putative black leaders.

Douglass’s romantic life has stirred related unease, a subject Blight touches on delicately, exhibiting notable interest in and sympathy for his hero’s first wife. A freeborn black woman, Anna Murray helped her future husband escape enslavement and, after they married, raised five children with him and dutifully maintained households that offered respite between his frequent, exhausting bouts of travel. Their marriage seemed to nourish them both in certain respects, but was profoundly lacking in others. Anna never learned to read or write, which severely limited the range of experience that the two of them could share. Two years after Anna died in 1882, Douglass married Helen Pitts, a Mount Holyoke College–educated white former abolitionist 20 years his junior. They tried to keep the marriage quiet; even his children were unaware of it until the union was a done deal. But soon news of it emerged and controversy ensued. The marriage scandalized many whites, including Helen’s father, who rejected his daughter completely. But the marriage outraged many blacks as well. The journalist T. Thomas Fortune noted that “the colored ladies take [Douglass’s marriage] as a slight, if not an insult, to their race and their beauty.” Many black men were angered, too. As one put it, “We have no further use for [Douglass] as a leader. His picture hangs in our parlor, we will hang it in the stable.” For knowledgeable black nationalists, Douglass’s second marriage continues to vex his legacy. Some give him a pass for what they perceive as an instance of apostasy, while others remain unforgiving.

That Douglass is celebrated so widely is a tribute most of all to the caliber and courage of his work as an activist, a journalist, a memoirist, and an orator. It is a testament as well to those, like Blight, who have labored diligently to preserve the memory of his extraordinary accomplishments. Ironically, his popularity is also due to ignorance. Some who commend him would probably cease doing so if they knew more about him. Frederick Douglass was a whirlwind of eloquence, imagination, and desperate striving as he sought to expose injustice and remedy its harms. All who praise him should know that part of what made him so distinctive are the tensions—indeed the contradictions—that he embraced.

This article appears in the December 2018 print edition with the headline “The Confounding Truth About Frederick Douglass.”

BOOKS

Abraham Lincoln’s Radical Moderation
What the president understood that the zealous Republican reformers in Congress didn’t

ANDREW FERGUSON MARCH 2020 ISSUE

Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America 

BY FERGUS M. BORDEWICH

 KNOPF CECILIA CARLSTEDT

In the opening days of the Civil War, long before Saturday Night Live appropriated the idea, Louis Trezevant Wigfall earned the distinction in Washington, D.C., of being the Thing That Wouldn’t Leave. Elected to the United States Senate from Texas to fill a vacancy in 1859, Wigfall wasted no time in making himself obnoxious to his colleagues and the public alike. He was lavish in his disdain for the legislative body in which he had sought a seat. On the Senate floor, he said of the flag and, especially, the Union for which it stood, “It should be torn down and trampled upon.” As the southern states broke away, Wigfall gleefully announced, “The federal government is dead. The only question is whether we will give it a decent, peaceable, Protestant burial.”

By then Wigfall had been appointed to the Confederate congress, and the only question that occurred to many of his colleagues was why he was still bloviating from the floor of the U.S. Senate. Wigfall was worse than a mere gasbag. As Fergus M. Bordewich points out in his provocative new book, Congress at War, he “passed on military information to his southern friends, bought arms for the Confederacy, and swaggered around encouraging men to enlist in the secessionist forces.” At last, in March 1861, Wigfall quit the U.S. capital and showed up a few weeks later in South Carolina. Commandeering a skiff after Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, he rowed out to present terms for the fort’s surrender. He had no authorization to do such a thing; he was simply following his passion to make trouble and get attention. He went down in history as a triple threat: a traitor, a blowhard, and a shameless buttinsky.

Lincoln's Great Depression JOSHUA WOLF SHENK
From April 1861: A Connecticut Yankee visits Charleston during the Fort Sumter standoff

Wigfall, one of the many strange and colorful characters tossed up by the politics of the Civil War, typifies the time in important respects. The years leading to the Civil War, and the war itself, were political intensifiers; radicalism was rewarded and could be made to pay. This was as true of the Republican reformers who are the heroes of Bordewich’s book as it is of secessionists like Wigfall.

Bordewich’s ungainly subtitle—How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America—telegraphs the grand claims he sets out to make for a group of congressmen who mostly styled themselves as Radical Republicans. In his account, it is they who pressed for aggressive military campaigns when the will for war flagged among Abraham Lincoln’s generals; who invented the financial mechanisms that funded the war; who pushed for punitive measures against the southern slaveholders; and who deserve credit (or blame!) for the birth of big government—achievements more commonly attributed to their far less radical president. A popular historian and journalist blessedly free of academic affiliations, Bordewich is a master of the character sketch, summarizing complicated figures in a few swift phrases. But Lincoln himself never comes alive in his pages. Indeed, he scarcely appears. He lurks just offstage, stepping forward now and then to try, briefly and usually without success, to stymie the righteous zeal that propels the Radicals. The last line of the book declares that “a whole generation of politically heroic Republicans … led Congress to victory in the Civil War.” It’s an odd formulation—you probably thought the North won the war.

From June 1865: The place of Abraham Lincoln in history

Bordewich has chosen to tell his sprawling story of legislative activism and ascendancy mainly through four members of Congress: Senators Benjamin Wade of Ohio and William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, and Representatives Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Clement Vallandigham of Ohio. Vallandigham is the only Democrat, a leader of an anti-war faction whose preference for the Union was complicated by his pro-slavery sympathies. The rest are Republicans, and two of them, Stevens and Wade, proudly called themselves Radicals and behaved accordingly. Fessenden, at one time a conservative, grew more sympathetic to the Radicals’ aims as the war dragged on.

Congressional power fell in the lap of Republicans, thanks to the departure of Wigfall and his southern colleagues; their seizing of it seems, in retrospect, less a matter of superior gamesmanship than a law of political gravity. Calling for stronger prosecution of the war, immediate liberation of the enslaved, and confiscation of all property owned by the southern belligerents, Radicals quickly took control of the Republican caucus. Perhaps, Bordewich writes, the Radicals “have something to teach us about how our government can function at its best in challenging times, and how crisis may even make it stronger.” Lesson No. 1: Get most of your opponents to leave town before you try anything.

The Radicals were quick on their feet, exploiting national turmoil to break a legislative logjam. For decades Southern Democrats, their numbers swollen by the Constitution’s infamous three-fifths clause, had blocked a series of domestic programs proposed first by the Whigs and then by their Republican successors. Here was the chance to neutralize the Democratic aversion to centralized power and advance a collectivist vision of the commercial republic, laying the foundation, Bordewich writes, “for the strong activist central government that came fully into being in the twentieth century.”

The flurry of legislating was indeed “transformative,” as Bordewich says. He points in particular to four pieces of legislation as landmarks. The Homestead Act promised 160 acres of federal land to any citizen willing to live on it and farm it for five years. The Pacific Railway Act financed the transcontinental railroad and further opened up the western territories to white settlement. The third bill created the federal Department of Agriculture. And the Morrill Land Grant College Act would distribute federal land to states and localities for the purpose of building public institutions of higher learning dedicated to teaching agriculture and other practical arts—a miracle of democratization in the history of American education.

Yet in Bordewich’s telling, Lincoln had little to do with the ambitious measures, as if the bills were signed by autopen during coffee breaks. In fact, two of them were explicitly endorsed in the Republican platform that Lincoln ran on in 1860; he made a special plea for the Department of Agriculture in his first annual message to Congress. Bordewich also downplays the inevitable unintended consequences that accompany government expansion, even what seem to be the most benign reforms. The railway act, with its crony capitalism and funny-money bond issues, led straight to the Gilded Age and the creation of half a dozen robber-baron fortunes. Those “federal lands” that Washington gave away in the railway and homestead acts were not, except in the sneakiest sense, the federal government’s to give away; the land rush they touched off may have guaranteed the otherwise merely predictable genocide of the Native Americans already living there.

In the name of designating the Radicals as the forerunners of contemporary liberalism, Bordewich tries to draw a continuous line from the Civil War Congress to the New Deal and the Great Society. Yet the line has too many zigs and zags and ups and downs to clinch a causal connection. And in fact, many of the features of big government (19th-century style) fell away before long. Calvin Coolidge, for instance, 60 years after the Civil War and a few years before the New Deal, oversaw a federal government that was in most respects closer in size and scope to the antebellum government than to the modern state that was soon to emerge.

From July/August 2009: Christopher Hitchens on Lincoln’s emancipation

If bordewich oversells the legacy of the Radicals in Congress, his more fundamental misapprehension lies elsewhere: His version of events shortchanges the greatness that humanists of all stripes—not only historians—have found in Lincoln. The problem is partly a failure to appreciate that the Radicals were kibitzers, as many legislators are. But misjudging Lincoln’s role as executive and his commitment to larger obligations is Bordewich’s more telling mistake. Lincoln the executive shouldered the responsibility to lead an entire government and, just as important, an unstable political coalition. From Radicals to reactionaries, Republicans were held together by a single strand: a hostility, varying in degree, to slavery. A collapse of this delicate alliance—brought on by a sudden call for immediate, nationwide abolition, for instance—would have doomed the war effort.

Lincoln was required to be more cautious than a Radical congressman had to be—more serious, in a word. Bordewich credits the Radicals with forcing Lincoln year by year to pursue the war more savagely, culminating in the elevation of General Ulysses S. Grant in 1864. But his evidence is thin that Lincoln paid anything more than lip service to the Radicals’ pleas for bloodshed. Bordewich is a particular admirer of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War—“this improvised vigilante committee,” Lincoln called it, “to watch my movements and keep me straight.” It was put together by Benjamin Wade and stocked with his fellow Radicals.

The committee researched and rushed into print massive reports after failed and sometimes catastrophic military engagements. The accounts totaled millions of words and accused officers and bureaucrats of horrifying lapses in military judgment and execution. Some of the accusations were implausible; others were all too real. Historically, the reports are invaluable. At the time, however, their primary effect was to second-guess generals disliked by the committee’s majority and to advance the generals with whom the majority was politically aligned. The committee’s “greatest purpose,” Lincoln told a friend, “seems to be to hamper my action and obstruct military operations.”

Shelby Foote, in his history of the Civil War, tells a story that illustrates why Lincoln and the Radicals were destined to be so often at odds. One evening Wade rushed to the White House to demand that Lincoln fire a weak-willed general who had failed to press the Union advantage. Lincoln asked Wade whom he should enlist to take the general’s place. “Anybody!” Wade cried. “Anybody will do for you,” Lincoln replied, “but I must have somebody.” Lincoln had to be serious.

As Bordewich concedes, the Radicals were as bloody-minded as the Wigfalls of the world. “Nothing but actual extermination or exile or starvation will ever induce [southern rebels] to surrender,” Stevens once said, in a speech Bordewich doesn’t quote. There can, of course, be no moral equivalence between Stevens and a slavery apologist like Wigfall. One of them was on the side of the angels, and it wasn’t Wigfall. But both were radicals.

Radicalism is more than a packet of views or policies. The contents of the packet will change with circumstances and over time. (One reason Bordewich admires the Radical Republicans is that their views on race are so close to current mainstream attitudes; today’s radicals, valorizing group identity above all else, will likely find both the views and the politicians who held them hopelessly retrograde.) Radicalism is a disposition. The same is true of its contrary, moderation. Lincoln’s moderation was so infuriating to the Radicals because it reflected a hierarchy of values different from theirs.

The ultimate concerns for Stevens and his fellows were the liberation of the enslaved, the punishment of the enslavers, and the reorganization of southern society. The ultimate concern for Lincoln was the survival of the Union, to which he had an almost mystical attachment. The old question—was the war fought to preserve the Union or to free the slaves?—underestimates how closely the two causes were entwined in his mind. Lincoln’s goal was to uphold the kind of government under which slavery could not in the end survive. This was a government, as Lincoln said, dedicated to a proposition.

From September 1999: Lincoln’s greatest speech

In a hectoring letter written at a low point in 1863, a Radical senator insisted that Lincoln “stand firm” against conservatives in his government. It was a common complaint of the Radical Republicans that Lincoln was hesitant, easily led, timid—weak. “I hope to ‘stand firm’ enough to not go backward,” Lincoln replied, “and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country’s cause.” Lincoln struck this balance with unmatched skill and sensitivity.

It was a feat of leadership peculiar to self-government, captured most famously by the only 19th-century American who could rival him as a prose artist and a statesman. Frederick Douglass was an enthusiastic admirer of Lincoln, once calling him, not long after the assassination, “emphatically the black man’s president: the first to show any respect for their rights as men.” Years later, Douglass’s enthusiasm had cooled—and ripened.

From December 1866: Frederick Douglass on Reconstruction

Lincoln “was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,” Douglass now said. “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground”—the ground, that is, from which Bordewich and many of today’s historians want to judge him, and the ground from which the Radicals did judge him—“Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent.” Douglass knew, though, that Lincoln never claimed to govern as an abolitionist, and Douglass knew why. “But measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

The italics are mine, but the insight belongs to Douglass. Lincoln was radical without being a Radical—and never more radical than a leader can afford to be when he leads a government of, by, and for the people.


ANDREW FERGUSON is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces; Land of Lincoln; and Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course on Getting His Kid Into College.

SEE 

http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2006/11/era-of-common-man.html

http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2005/07/new-american-revolution.html

The Questions Sex-Ed Students Always Ask

For 45 years, Deborah Roffman has let students’ curiosities guide her lessons on sexuality and relationships.

SARAH CARR

DEBORAH ROFFMAN / THE ATLANTIC


Editor's Note: In the next five years, most of America’s most experienced teachers will retire. The Baby Boomers are leaving behind a nation of more novice educators. In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. Less than three decades later, that number had fallen to just three years leading a classroom. The Atlantic’s “On Teaching” project is crisscrossing the country to talk to veteran educators. This story is the eleventh in our series.

About 25 years ago, a public school in the Baltimore suburbs invited Deborah Roffman to teach a class on puberty to fifth graders. Roffman, who was known as the “Sex Lady” at the private Park School of Baltimore, where she had been teaching for two decades, was flattered. But she was troubled by the restrictions that the public school’s vice principal had given her: She couldn’t use the words fertilization, intercourse, or sex. And she couldn’t answer any student questions related to those subjects. That wasn’t going to work for the Sex Lady.

Eventually, Roffman reached a compromise with the public school: Students would get parental permission to attend her talk, and Roffman could answer any question they asked, even if it meant using the S-word.

Roffman’s title of human-sexuality educator has not changed since she arrived at the Park School in 1975, but the dimensions of her role there have steadily grown. So, too, has her outside work in consulting and teacher training: Over the years, she has advised at nearly 400 schools, most of them private.

Initially, Roffman taught elective classes in sexuality to the juniors and seniors at Park, but within two years, she had expanded to seventh and eighth graders. In the 1980s, she added fourth and fifth graders to her roster. She also meets annually with the parents of students as young as kindergartners, to coach them on how to talk with their children about sexuality, and she leads summer training for the Park’s elementary-school teachers on incorporating sexuality instruction into their classrooms. “There is this knowledge that we keep in a box about sexuality, waiting until kids are ‘old enough,’” Roffman told me. “My job is to change that.”


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During her 45 years of teaching, Roffman has witnessed the evolution of the nation’s attitude toward sex education and, as her experience at the public school shows, how uneven that education can be.

Perhaps more than any other subject, sex education highlights the country’s fierce loyalty to local control of schools. Twenty-nine states require public schools to stress abstinence if they teach about sex, according to the latest count by the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., and New York that promotes reproductive rights. Some of the more outrageous abstinence lessons employ troubling metaphors, such as comparing sexually active, unmarried women to an old piece of tape: useless and unable to bond. Only 17 states require sex education to be medically accurate.

Most research has found that sex education for adolescents in the United States has declined in the past 20 years. Like art and music, the subject is typically not included on state standardized exams and, as the saying goes, “what gets tested gets taught.” In the case of sex education, waning fear about the spread of HIV and AIDS among heterosexual youths has contributed to the decline in instruction, says John Santelli, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.

But some bright spots do exist, says Jennifer Driver, the vice president of policy and strategic partnerships at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. For example, in some parts of Mississippi and Texas, there has been a shift away from "abstinence only" to "abstinence plus" curricula, with the latter permitting at least some information about contraception.

Roffman remembers her own sex education while growing up in Baltimore as being limited to a short film in fifth grade about periods and puberty. She began working in sex ed in 1971—when access to birth control was rapidly expanding amid the sexual revolution—helping Planned Parenthood train health-care professionals who were setting up family-planning clinics in the region, and doing broader community outreach.

Four years later, she followed her Planned Parenthood supervisor to the progressive Park School, where students often address teachers by their first name and current tuition runs about $30,000 a year. When she arrived that spring, she heard that the senior-class adviser had recently rushed into the upper-school principal’s office, exclaiming that something had to be done before the seniors’ graduation, because “we forgot to talk to them about sex.”

Read: The case for comprehensive sex ed

During the next several years, Roffman not only made sure the school remembered to talk to students about sex but steadily built up the curriculum. At Park, students learn about standard fare like birth control and sexually transmitted diseases but also delve into issues such as the history of abortion rights, changing conceptions of gender roles, and how to build respectful, intimate relationships.

Students start by learning about the reproductive systems, the importance of open communication, and the fundamentals of puberty in their first classes with Roffman, in the fourth and fifth grades. In seventh grade, they take a deep-dive course on human sexuality, covering everything from pornography to the use of sex in advertising to gender identity and sexual orientation. They see her again for a shorter, related course in eighth grade. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Roffman’s seventh graders spent most of a semester researching the candidates’ differing views on sex, gender, and reproduction. “In the process of doing that, I got to teach about every topic I wanted to teach about,” she said.

In high school, students take a required sexuality-studies seminar. The specific content varies year to year, but it’s always based on what Roffman calls the “eight characteristics of a sexually healthy adult,” which include staying healthy, enjoying pleasure, and relating to others in caring, nonexploitative ways.

The through line of her approach, at any age, is letting students’ queries guide her instruction. So she asks her students to submit anonymous questions at the start of the semester, and makes sure that she answers them as the course progresses.

Regardless of whether they grew up in the ’80s or the aughts, kids of certain ages always ask versions of the same questions, Roffman has found. For instance, middle-school students, she said, want to know if their bodies and behaviors are “normal.” Many older students ask her at what age it’s normal to start masturbating.

High schoolers routinely ask about romantic communication, relationships, and the right time for intimacy: “Who makes the first move?” “How do you know if you or the other person is ready for the ‘next level’?” “How can you let someone down easy when you want to break up?”

But some contemporary questions, Roffman said, are very different from those she heard earlier in her career. Sometimes the questions change when the news does. (More than 30 years ago, Roffman started reading two newspapers a day to keep up with the rapid pace of news about HIV and AIDS; she’s maintained the habit since.)

She said she received a flood of questions about sexual harassment after the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in the early 1990s. The same decade ended with a spike in student interest in oral sex and behaviors that had previously been considered more taboo, such as anal sex.

Sometimes changing student questions signal broader cultural shifts, like the recent surge in student queries about gender identities. “There would have been questions 20 years ago about sexual orientation, but not about gender diversity,” Roffman said. But one recent eighth-grade cohort submitted questions like “How many genders are there?” “What does ‘gender roles’ mean?” “What is the plus sign for in LGBTQIA+?” and “Why is ‘gay’ called ‘gay’?” She finds a way to answer them all.

Read: What schools should teach kids about sex

Roffman’s students appreciate her blunt and holistic approach. As a sixth grader at a charter school several years ago, Maeve Thistel took a brief unit in sex education. The teacher seemed uncomfortable and nervous, she remembers. The condoms the teacher brought for a demonstration were expired, and split when she took them out of the package. Thistel came away from the class with the impression that sex was both “icky and disturbing.”

Thistel, now a college freshman, transferred to Park for high school, where she found that Roffman presented some of the same material quite differently: Her very first step in the lesson on condoms was to point out that all of them have an expiration date that should be noted and heeded.

Under Roffman’s guidance, sexuality at Park has come to be treated as something closer to social studies, science, or other core subjects. Sex ed is “just another part of the curriculum, not carved out as its own special thing,” says David Sachs, a 1988 graduate who studied with Roffman and whose son, Sebastian, is now in 11th grade at the school and has her as a teacher as well.

Like all Park students, Sebastian Sachs had to complete an eighth-grade project wherein he examined the root cause of a social-justice issue. His team picked sexual assault and, with Roffman as their adviser, focused on consent education and how to introduce it in the youngest grades. Sachs and his teammates created a curriculum for preschoolers that, among other things, encourages them to ask permission before hugging a classmate, borrowing a pencil, or swooping in for a high five.

In Roffman’s ideal world, the school would implement lessons like these, and other age-appropriate sex and relationship education, from the earliest grades. Several of her co-workers agree. “Fourth grade might be too late for us” to begin this kind of education, says Alejandro Hurtado, Park’s Spanish teacher for the lower grades. Last summer, Hurtado participated in a voluntary two-week workshop led by Roffman that aimed to create a sexuality-education curriculum for Park’s elementary-age kids. “It will be subtly woven in,” he says, noting that he plans to talk more explicitly about traditional gender roles and expectations in some Latino cultures as part of his own class.

In her teacher training, Roffman encourages colleagues to be scientifically accurate and use age-appropriate language when answering even the youngest children’s questions. Four-year-olds are beginning to understand place and geography, so they will frequently ask where they came from. “The proper answer is that there’s a place inside a female body called the uterus, and that’s where they grew,” Roffman said.

Sarah Shelton, a Park third-grade teacher who also participated in the summer workshop, says Roffman inspired her to not dodge students’ questions about bodies and sex. In the past she’s deflected sex-related inquiries, such as when a student asked about birth control last year.

“I told her, ‘Great question. Ask your parents,’” Shelton recalls. “If that were to occur again, I would say something like ‘When reproduction happens in the body, there is medication that you can take to stop it so you can have sexual intercourse without creating a baby.’”

Sarah Huss, the director of human development and parent education at the private Campbell Hall school in Los Angeles, says Roffman helped her rethink her school’s sexuality education. Huss reached out to Roffman after reading her book Talk to Me First: Everything You Need to Know to Become Your Kids’ “Go-To” Person About Sex. The ensuing dialogue prompted Campbell Hall to begin sexuality education in third grade and to significantly shore up its middle-school programming. Prior to meeting Roffman, “I had taught sex education as ‘Don’t get hurt, don’t get pregnant, don’t get a disease,’” Huss says. “That wasn’t a hopeful message for the kids.”

Huss admires her colleague’s patient tenacity. “She’s walking into schools where there is so much emotional baggage around a subject,” Huss says. “To suggest doing it differently, you have to confront years and years and years of thinking that talking with young kids about sex is dangerous.”

After decades of striving for change both within and beyond Park’s walls, Roffman is optimistic about the future of sexuality education at progressive private schools like Campbell Hall and Park. “I’ve always believed that independent schools have the responsibility to give back to the larger educational community,” she told me. “It’s up to us to demonstrate that, yes, this can be done well and successfully.”

By contrast, “I see very limited movement in the public sector,” she said. And in a country where only a minority of states require medically accurate sex-education classes, her dream of seamlessly integrating the subject from kindergarten up may be a long way off. But Roffman has lived through one sexual revolution, and she holds out hope for a second, in education.

This article is part of our project "On Teaching," which is supported by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Panta Rhea Foundation.

SARAH CARR leads an investigative education reporting team at the Boston Globe and is the author of Hope Against Hope, about New Orleans schools.

The Problem With Telling Sick Workers to Stay Home

Even with the coronavirus spreading, lax labor laws and little sivck leave mean that many people can’t afford to skip work.

AMANDA MULL

ROBERT NICKELSBERG / GETTY
As the coronavirus that has sickened tens of thousands in China spreads worldwide, it now seems like a virtual inevitability that millions of Americans are going to be infected with the flu-like illness known as COVID-19. Public-health officials in the United States have started preparing for what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is calling a “significant disruption” to daily life. Because more than 80 percent of cases are mild and many will show no symptoms at all, limiting the disease’s spread rests on the basics of prevention: Wash your hands well and frequently, cover your mouth when you cough, and stay home if you feel ill. But that last thing might prove to be among the biggest Achilles’ heels in efforts to stymie the spread of COVID-19. The culture of the American workplace puts everyone’s health at unnecessary risk.

For all but the independently wealthy in America, the best-case scenario for getting sick is being a person with good health insurance, paid time off, and a reasonable boss who won’t penalize you for taking a few sick days or working from home. For millions of the country’s workers, such a scenario is a nearly inconceivable luxury. “With more than a third of Americans in jobs that offer no sick leave at all, many unfortunately cannot afford to take any days off when they are feeling sick,” Robyn Gershon, an epidemiology professor at the NYU School of Global Public Health, wrote in an email. “People who do not (or cannot) stay home when ill do present a risk to others.” On this count, the United States is a global anomaly, one of only a handful of countries that doesn’t guarantee its workers paid leave of any kind. These jobs are also the kind least likely to supply workers with health insurance, making it difficult for millions of people to get medical proof that they can’t go to work.

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They’re also concentrated in the service industry or gig economy, in which workers have contact, directly or indirectly, with large numbers of people. These are the workers who are stocking the shelves of America’s stores, preparing and serving food in its restaurants, driving its Ubers, and manning its checkout counters. Their jobs tend to fall outside the bounds of paid-leave laws, even in states or cities that have them. Gershon emphasizes that having what feels like a head cold or mild flu—which COVID-19 will feel like to most healthy people—often isn’t considered a good reason to miss a shift by those who hold these workers’ livelihood in their hands.

Read: You’ll likely get the coronavirus

Even if a person in one of these jobs is severely ill—coughing, sneezing, blowing her nose, and propelling droplets of virus-containing bodily fluids into the air and onto the surfaces around her—asking for time off means missing an hourly wage that might be necessary to pay rent or buy groceries. And even asking can be a risk in jobs with few labor protections, because in many states, there’s nothing to stop a company from firing you for being too much trouble. So workers with no good options end up going into work, interacting with customers, swiping the debit cards that go back into their wallets, making the sandwiches they eat for lunch, unpacking the boxes of cereal they take home for their kids, or driving them home from happy hour.

Even for people who have paid sick leave, Gershon noted, the choices are often only marginally better; seven days of sick leave is the American average, but many people get as few as three or four. “Many are hesitant to use [sick days] for something they think is minor just in case they need the days later for something serious,” she wrote. “Parents or other caregivers are also hesitant to use them because their loved ones might need them to stay home and care for them if they become ill.”

For workers with ample sick leave, getting it approved may still be difficult. America’s office culture often rewards those who appear to go above and beyond, even if that requires coughing on an endless stream of people. Some managers believe leadership means forcing their employees into the office at all costs, or at least making it clear that taking a sick day or working from home will be met with suspicion or contempt. In other places, employees bring their bug to work of their own volition, brown-nosing at the expense of their co-workers’ health.

Read: The gig economy has never been tested by a pandemic

Either way, the result is the same, especially in businesses that serve the public or offices with open plans and lots of communal spaces, which combine to form the majority of American workplaces. Even if your server at dinner isn’t sick, she might share a touch-screen workstation with a server who is. Everyone on your side of the office might be hale and healthy, but you might use a tiny phone booth to take a call right after someone whose throat is starting to feel a little sore. “Doorknobs, coffee makers, toilets, common-use refrigerators, sinks, phones, keyboards [can all] be a source of transmission if contaminated with the agent,” Gershon wrote. She advised that workers stay at least three to six feet away from anyone coughing or sneezing, but in office layouts that put desks directly next to one another with no partition in between—often to save money by giving workers less personal space—that can be impossible. No one knows how long COVID-19 can live on a dry surface, but in the case of SARS, another novel coronavirus, Gershon said it was found to survive for up to a week on inanimate objects.

Work culture isn’t the only structure of American life that might make a COVID-19 outbreak worse than it has to be—the inaccessible, precarious, unpredictable nature of the country’s health-care system could also play an important role. But tasking the workers who make up so much of the infrastructure of daily American life, often for low wages and with few resources, with the lion’s share of prevention in an effort to save thousands of lives is bound to fail, maybe spectacularly. It will certainly exact a cost on them, both mentally and physically, that the country has given them no way to bear.



AMANDA MULL is a staff writer at The Atlantic.