Bernie Sanders supporter ‘put in headlock’ after confronting MSNBC anchor over coverage

Andrew Naughtie,The Independent•March 11, 2020
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A podcaster and radio host who supports Bernie Sanders says he intends to press charges after a filmed confrontation with an MSNBC anchor, during which he claims he was put in a headlock.

Jack Allison, who co-hosts morning show JackAM and pop culture podcast Struggle Session, approached journalist Chris Jansing on 10 March while filming on his phone, asking her: “Why did your network not find it newsworthy to report on an anti-semitic attack at the Jewish candidate’s rally on Friday?”

In Mr Allison’s footage, Ms Jansing replies that she does not make those decisions, Mr Allison asks who does make those decisions, saying he’s texted a producer and “told him about this information”.

“It’s not credible that no-one in the building didn’t know [sic], so I wanna know why the network made that decision.”

As Ms Jansing continues to explain that she is not responsible for all decisions regarding newsworthiness, Mr Allison demands that she explain to him who does make it “because what you’re doing is crafting narrative”.

As Mr Allison continues asking Ms Jansing to explain the network’s decision-making process to him, she backs away, saying: “I don’t like your attitude, first of all, and I don’t appreciate you harassing me.”

At that point, a man’s voice is heard and a hand put over the camera before the clip ends. Mr Allison said on Twitter that he has filed a police report over the fracas.

The anti-semitic incident to which Mr Allison was referring took place at a rally in Arizona on 5 March. As Mr Sanders spoke, a man seated in an upper tier of the arena unfurled a Nazi flag and gave the Hitler salute. He was shortly ejected from the rally, and left shouting racial slurs at the supporters who turfed him out.

The man has since been identified by the Anti-Defamation League as Robert Sterkeson, a white supremacist “stunt activist” who has repeatedy targeted both Jewish and Muslim events.

Interviewed about the incident on CNN, Mr Sanders called it “disgusting”, saying “I’ve got to tell you, I never expected in my life as an American to see a swastika at a major political rally. It’s horrible”.

MSNBC recently ran into another row with supporters of Mr Sanders after host Chris Matthews compared the candidate’s victory in the Nevada caucuses to the fall of France in 1940. Mr Matthews subsequently left the network after allegations of sexual harassment surfaced against him.

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COVID-19 CONSPIRACY;
Iran’s Khamenei Says Virus Outbreak May Be ‘Biological Attack’

Yasna Haghdoost and Golnar Motevalli,Bloomberg•March 12, 2020

(Bloomberg) -- Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the country’s coronavirus outbreak could be part of a biological attack on the Islamic Republic, as he called on the armed forces to bolster the government’s fight against the disease, according to a statement published by the semi-official Fars News agency.

In a letter addressed to the Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, Khamenei said he wants the military to work closely with Iran’s health ministry and establish a base dedicated to countering the virus, which has already claimed 429 lives in the county.

“Given that there’s evidence that raises the possibility of this event being a biological attack, this initiative can also be an exercise in biological defense,” Khamenei said in the statement.

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Democratic lawmakers call on Republicans to apologize for 'bigoted' coronavirus language
Nicholas Wu, USA TODAY•March 11, 2020

WASHINGTON – Congressional Democrats called on Republicans on Tuesday to apologize for language about the coronavirus the Democratic lawmakers slammed as "bigoted."

On Monday evening, the House minority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., shared the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's page about the coronavirus, which has been named COVID-19, referring to it as the "Chinese coronavirus."

Condemnation came quickly from the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and House Democrats.

Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., who is the vice-chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, replied to McCarthy in a tweet, immediately calling his statement "hurtful," adding that Asian Americans were "getting attacked bc of this exact type of rhetoric."

Your words are so hurtful. We may be of different parties but people depend on all of us to be compassionate & effective leaders. Asian Americans - from kids to seniors are getting attacked bc of this exact type of rhetoric. Do better - please - i implore you. Lives are at stake.
— Grace Meng (@Grace4NY) March 10, 2020


Bigoted statements which spread misinformation and blame Asians and the Asian American community for #coronavirus make us all less safe. @GOPLeader must delete this tweet and apologize immediately. pic.twitter.com/twzCcVAWDH
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) March 10, 2020

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the statement "bigoted" and called on McCarthy to delete the tweet and apologize.

More: Asian American lawmakers denounce 'rumors' and 'xenophobia' about coronavirus

In a statement, the chair of the Congressional Asian Caucus, Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., said "insisting on identifying the virus by region, as Leader McCarthy and Rep. (Paul) Gosar have done, only creates fear and hostility."

Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., self-quarantined himself two days ago after announcing he had come in contact with a person who had been diagnosed with the "Wuhan Virus."

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., the co-chair of the Native American Caucus, all called on Gosar and McCarthy to apologize as well.

Tuesday evening, McCarthy responded to Democrats' criticism in a tweet, writing, "Democrats are trying to score political points by calling Republicans racist."

"Coronavirus is a China-born disease—made worse by a Communist Party that rejected America's help to contain it," he said, noting that some media outlets and Democrats had referred to the virus as a "Chinese coronavirus."

Here we go again.→ Democrats are trying to score political points by calling Republicans racist. Coronavirus is a China-born disease—made worse by a Communist Party that rejected America's help to contain it.
Which is why Dems & media called it "Chinese coronavirus" for weeks. pic.twitter.com/Km1rdn1R47
— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) March 11, 2020

Experts have advised against referring to the new coronavirus with a location-specific name. The World Health Organization issued guidance in 2015 calling on media outlets, scientists and national authorities to avoid naming infectious diseases for locations to avoid stigmatizing groups of people.

"This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected." Dr. Keiji Fukuda, WHO assistant director general for health security, said at the time, citing how "certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities" or have other serious consequences.

More: From 'great' to 'blindsided': How Trump changed his coronavirus message amid fear, confusion in the White House

In response to a question from a Democratic lawmaker, CDC Director Robert Redfield said in testimony before a House appropriations panel Tuesday morning it was incorrect to describe the virus with a location,

"It's absolutely wrong and inappropriate to call this the Chinese coronavirus – I assume you would agree with that," asked Rep. Lois Frankel, D-Fla., to which Redfield replied "yes," adding the virus had spread through Iran, Italy, and South Korea as well.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Coronavirus: Democrats slam 'bigoted' language from Republicans

Trump officials emphasize that coronavirus 'Made in China'
COVID-19 CONSPIRACY THEORIES; XENOPHOBIC, BIGOTED AND RACIST

DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press•March 11, 2020

WASHINGTON (AP) — There's one thing the Trump administration wants Americans to remember about the coronavirus pandemic: It carries the "Made in China” label.

Trump administration officials, on the defensive about their own handling of the virus, have repeatedly reminded people that the virus started in Wuhan, a city in China's Hubei province, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referring to it as the “Wuhan coronavirus.”

President Donald Trump's national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, went even further on Wednesday.

“Unfortunately, rather than using best practices, this outbreak in Wuhan was covered up," O'Brien said at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington. "There's lots of open-source reporting from China, from Chinese nationals, that the doctors involved were either silenced or put in isolation, or that sort of thing, so that the word of this virus could not get out. It probably cost the world community two months."

O'Brien said that if experts would have had those two months to get ahead of the spread of the virus, "I think we could have dramatically curtailed what happened both in China and what's now happening across the world."

O'Brien's remarks seemed to be aimed at countering a disinformation campaign that Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., says China's Communist Party is waging to blame the U.S. for the virus so it can dampen discontent in China, distract from true infection rates and “save face internationally.”

“The Chinese military portal Xilu.com recently published an article baselessly claiming that the virus is ‘a biochemical weapon produced by the U.S. to target China,’" Rubio wrote.

China, however, says it is helping the international community battle the virus. U.N. Ambassador Zhang Jun told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York that Beijing is working closely with other countries and have provided medical supplies to nations, including Korea, Japan and Italy.

“We are sending medical teams to countries that need that, and we will do whatever to join the international community to fight this virus ... because we have only one world, we need to join hands, we need to show solidarity.”

Rubio claims that besides China, disinformation is coming from Russia and Iran, the hardest-hit country in the Middle East.

“In Qom, ground zero of Iran’s coronavirus outbreak, a prominent cleric accused the United States of introducing the virus ‘to damage (the city’s) culture and honor,’” Rubio wrote.

While Trump has lauded Chinese President Xi Jinping's work to respond to the virus, Trump himself has referred to “China’s Coronavirus situation." Trump has been criticized for playing down the virus, contradicting his own public health officials and concentrating more on the economic fallout from the outbreak. In a speech to the nation Wednesday night he referred to the “foreign virus” that “started in China.” (He also worked in some digs at Europe for letting it spiral out of control there.)

For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. The vast majority of people recover from the new virus. According to the World Health Organization, people with mild illness recover in about two weeks, while those with more severe illness may take three to six weeks to recover. In mainland China, where the virus first exploded, more than 80,000 people have been diagnosed and more than 58,000 have so far recovered.

Health professionals, who depend on China for access to the country, have publicly praised Beijing for its response, noting that it is difficult to spot a new virus during flu season when there are numerous alerts about atypical pneumonia and other respiratory problems.

On Capitol Hill, Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, praised China's work to control the spread of coronavirus. "They really have now got control of their outbreak," Redfield told the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Wednesday.

Chinese health officials informed the WHO about the new virus on Dec. 31. By Jan. 8, it had been identified as a new coronavirus, a large family that causes the common cold and more serious illnesses including SARS, which also began in China. By Jan. 12, Chinese scientists had sequenced the virus’ genetic makeup and shared it with WHO, drawing praise for their transparency and swift action.

O'Brien is right, however, in noting some missteps in China.

The local Wuhan heath commission reported no new cases from Jan. 5-10 and again from Jan. 12-16. China’s Lunar New Year rush — the world’s largest annual human migration — began to get underway, with millions of people passing through Wuhan, a major transit hub. A recently submitted complaint to the country's National Health Commission alleged that during this period, officials with the Wuhan health commission told doctors they were not allowed to report about the new virus, letting patients wander around freely instead of being isolated.

China's foreign ministry has taken offense at people blaming China. After Pompeo called it the “Wuhan coronavirus,” the ministry's spokesman said the description was “despicable," disrespected science and stigmatized China.

Other Republicans also have specifically pointed how the outbreak was first reported in China.

Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., a dentist who is self-quarantined after coming into contact with an infected individual, called it “Wuhan virus" and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called it the “Chinese coronavirus."

On Thursday, leaders of the Asian Pacific American, Hispanic, Black and Native American congressional caucuses called on McCarthy and Gosar to apologize and noted that the CDC's chief medical officer, Dr. Mitch Wolfe, has said, “Stigma is the enemy of public health.”

Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington and Edith Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.



National security adviser O'Brien blames China for coronavirus spread

Sean D. Naylor National Security Correspondent,Yahoo News•March 11, 2020

National security adviser Robert O’Brien defended President Trump’s response to the coronavirus and blamed the Chinese government for covering up the initial outbreak of an illness the World Health Organization declared Wednesday is now a pandemic.

“Unfortunately, rather than using best practices, this outbreak in Wuhan was covered up,” O’Brien said, pointing to “lots of open-source reporting from China” that the doctors who first identified the virus “were either silenced or put in isolation … so the word of this virus could not get out.”

By taking those actions, the Chinese government “probably cost the world community two months,” O’Brien told an audience Wednesday at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. If Beijing had adopted a more cooperative stance and allowed teams from the World Health Organization and the U.S. government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to bring their expertise to bear in China, “we could have dramatically curtailed both what happened in China and what’s now happening across the world,” he added.

By contrast, O’Brien defended the Trump administration’s actions to cope with the coronavirus outbreak. “I think we’ve done a good job responding to it,” he said.
National security adviser Robert O'Brien. (Michael Sohn/AP)

The president has been roundly criticized for playing down the threat of the virus by comparing it to the flu, for saying he would prefer to keep the Americans who caught the virus on the Grand Princess cruise liner from disembarking so they didn’t increase the official tally of those infected in the United States, and for appearing to suggest, against all expert advice, that it was fine for people with the virus to go to work “and get better.”

But O’Brien credited the president for doing his best to keep Americans safe from the virus. “The president took very bold action when we realized the extent of what was happening,” he said, citing Trump’s decision to stop visitors from China from entering the country. “That bought the United States six to eight weeks to prepare for the virus,” O’Brien said.

Critics say the administration has wasted that time by failing to establish widespread testing for the virus.

O’Brien also noted that Trump had placed Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the administration’s coronavirus task force, which he said has been meeting “sometimes twice a day.”

However, unlike the president, O’Brien made no effort to underplay the spread of the virus or the risks it poses. “It’s a very serious situation that we’re facing,” he said, before adding that “Americans always rise to the occasion".

There is hard data that shows ‘Bernie Bros’ are a myth

BERNIE TOVARICH BOTS

March 11, 2020 By Keith A. Spencer, Salon- Commentary


Mainstream pundits and politicians continue to obsess over the stereotype of the “Bernie Bro,” a perfer vid horde of Bernie Sanders supporters who supposedly stop at nothing to harass his opponents online. Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens have all helped perpetuate the idea that Sanders’ supporters are somehow uniquely cruel, despite Sanders’ platform and policy proposal being the most humane of all the candidates.


The only problem? The evidence that Sanders supporters are uniquely cruel online, compared to any other candidates’ supporters, is scant; much of the discourse around Bernie Bros seems to rely on skewed anecdotes that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Many Sanders supporters suspect that the stereotype is perpetuated in bad faith to help torpedo his candidacy.

A few weeks ago I penned a story for Salon attempting to qualitatively disprove the Bernie Bro myth by pulling from psychological theory and the nature of online behavior. To summarize my conclusions: First, there is a general tendency for online behavior to be negative, known as the online disinhibition effect — but it affects all people equally, not merely Sanders’ supporters. Second, pundits systematically ignore when other candidates’ supporters are mean online, perhaps because of the aforementioned established stereotype; in this sense, the Bernie Bro is not dissimilar from other political canards like the “welfare queen.” Third, Twitter is not a representative sample size of the population, and is so prone to harboring propaganda outfits and bots such that it is not a reliable way of gauging public opinion.

Now, to add to this qualitative assessment, there is quantitative evidence, too — reaped from studying hundreds of thousands of interactions online — that reveals the Bernie Bro myth as, well, a myth. Jeff Winchell, a computational social scientist and graduate student at Harvard University, crunched the numbers on tweet data and found that Sanders’ supporters online behave the same as everyone else. Winchell used what is called a sentiment analysis, a technique used both in the digital humanities and in e-commerce, to gauge emotional intent from social media data.

“Bernie followers act pretty much the same on Twitter as any other follower,” Winchell says of his results. “There is one key difference that Twitter users and media don’t seem to be aware of…. Bernie has a lot more Twitter followers than Twitter followers of other Democrat’s campaigns,” he added, noting that this may be partly what helps perpetuate the myth.

I interviewed him about his work and his results over email; as usual, this interview has been condensed and edited for print.

First, for those who haven’t heard of this technique, what is a sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis summarizes human expression into various scores. Most commonly the score is how negative or positive it is. But it can also be used to evaluate subjectivity (for instance, is a politician’s statement factual or mostly opinionated?). Even taking the simpler text analysis, there are multiple challenges due to sarcasm, negations (e.g “I don’t like their service”, “After what he did, this will be his last project”), ambiguity (words that are negative or positive depending on their context), and [the fact that] texts can contain both positive and negative parts.

How are sentiment analyses used? What are other examples of this technique being used?

The overwhelming application of sentiment analysis is in e-commerce (for instance, scoring how positive/negative customer feedback is). Customer service surveys are often analyzed this way. Marketing uses sentiment analysis to test product acceptance.

Other commercial applications are in recommendations. While a system may have the user given an overall rating, analyzing the comments they provide can identify the sentiment on subtopics within.

So tell me about the sentiment analysis script that you wrote to study online behavior among different politicians’ followers. How did this work?

I downloaded all the followers of the Twitter accounts of the nine most popular Democratic presidential candidates and the president ([around] 100 million Twitter accounts). I then randomly chose followers from them and downloaded all their tweets from 2015 to the present.

I have run two different sentiment analysis algorithms on these tweets. So far, nearly 6.8 million tweets from 280,000 Twitter accounts have been analyzed out of the 100 million-plus tweets I currently have downloaded (I continue downloading more).

One sentiment analysis algorithm uses a well-regarded example of grammar/word dictionary sentiment rules that were popular 5 to 10 years ago before deep learning became popular. This one is identified by the Python libary’s name, Textblob.

The other algorithm is Microsoft’s supervised deep learning-based algorithm with default parameters. To those unfamiliar with deep learning, the number of parameters in this model is in the millions, and no human can be expected to understand them. The deep learning model learns/generalizes from examples of text given sentiment ratings by humans through millions of trials, each time evaluating how well it predicts the results and passing that model and accuracy to the next iteration.

The categories of negative and very negative are based on ranges of values in the two algorithm’s outputs. Textblob generates a number from most negative (-1) to most positive (+1). I classified scores of [below] -0.75 as very negative and -.75 to -.5 as negative. Microsoft’s algorithm predicts the chance that some text is classified as positive. Based on the frequencies of a specific chance, I separated the lowest 1.5 percent of tweet ratings as very negative and the lowest 1.5 percent to 5 percent of all tweet ratings as negative.

What did your results find?

The chance that some tweet is negative when it comes from a follower of candidate X is pretty much the same as if it came from a follower of candidate Y.

This uses two different algorithms, once very sophisticated (Microsoft’s supervised Deep Learning-based model), the other a good algorithm based on the algorithm standards of 5 to 10 years ago (Textblob’s grammar/dictionary-based rules). Microsoft’s algorithm calculates the chance a tweet is positive. Textblob’s rates the tweet from most negative (-1) to most positive (+1). But the variation of these measures changes little among tweets from followers from different candidates.

I deliberately round my numbers to 1 digit for smaller samples (negative or very negative percentage) or 2 digits if it’s about an average over all the tweets. I don’t like false accuracy and it is rampant in the political media. Any NLP [Natural Language Processing] expert will tell you that reducing a tweet to a single number denoting its negativity/positivity is not an exact science. So the rounding reflects that uncertainty.

Given this data, what do you think of the “Bernie Bro” narrative about his online supporters?

Bernie followers act pretty much the same on Twitter as any other follower. There is one key difference that Twitter users and media don’t seem to be aware of. Bernie has a lot more Twitter followers than Twitter followers of other Democrat’s campaigns.




People responding to hundreds of millions of people online tend to dehumanize others. They remember that someone is female/male or follows some candidate or is of some race, but they frequently don’t pay attention to differentiate actions of one member of that group versus another. So rather than consider how frequently an individual of some group acts, they think of how frequently the group acts as a whole. If they interact with many more members of one group than another, that perception of the group is magnified by the number of members they see.

Interesting. Did your opinion change after doing this little analysis?
Yes. I believed that Bernie’s followers are more likely to like him because they are more likely to experience the very negative life circumstances that Bernie Sanders wants to fix. People in a negative situation are more likely to interact negatively with people, particularly those anonymous online people that they have no in-person relationship with. So I had anticipated that Bernie’s followers on average would have a much higher chance to be negative. This does not appear to be the case or at least not as much as the claims I read on Twitter, political media reports or on TV.

Is there actually any difference between different candidates’ supporters online behavior, based on this?

As a data scientist, I am usually skeptical of any result. So I’ll say maybe not or at least much less than claimed.

I still would like to dig deeper into this. This analysis looks at all tweets. I would like to look just at twitter interactions between candidate’s supporters, look at tweets responding or mentioning media professionals. I want to use some algorithms in the research that evaluate hate speech, racism, sexism. I’d like to look at specific topics of discussion, and possibly evaluate the influence of negative tweets (eg. retweets and number of followers who could see a tweet/retweet).

What is your academic background?

I have a bachelor’s degree in math from Northwestern. I then worked in healthcare analytics with very large databases, branched into other applications of large scale data analysis before recently returning to grad school at Harvard to study data science. While there my interest in psychology and sociology has led me to pursue applications of data science in the social sciences to help people.

This story was updated on March 10 with additional interview questions to add context.

COVID-19 CONSPIRACY;

If Sean Hannity Thinks Coronavirus Panic Is a 'Hoax,' How Many Millions of His Listeners/VIEWERS Do Too?

Jeremy W. Peters and Michael M. Grynbaum, The New York Times•March 12, 2020

Rush Limbaugh takes the stage during a campaign rally with President Donald Trump at the Show Me Center in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Nov. 5, 2018. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

Sean Hannity used his syndicated talk-radio program Wednesday to share a prediction he had found on Twitter about what is really happening with the coronavirus: It’s a “fraud” by the deep state to spread panic in the populace, manipulate the economy and suppress dissent.

“May be true,” Hannity declared to millions of listeners around the country.

As the coronavirus spreads around the globe, denial and disinformation about the risks are proliferating on media outlets popular with conservatives.

“This coronavirus?” Rush Limbaugh asked skeptically during his Wednesday program. “All of this panic is just not warranted.”

The Fox Business anchor Trish Regan told viewers Monday that the worry over coronavirus “is yet another attempt to impeach the president.”

Where doctors and scientists see a public health crisis, President Donald Trump and his media allies see a political coup afoot.

Even on Wednesday night, after Trump gave an unusually somber address to the nation in which he announced he was suspending all travel from Europe for 30 days, Hannity criticized Democrats and vigorously defended the president’s response to the crisis, saying that when he instituted travel restrictions on China more than a month ago, “no president had ever acted that fast.”

Distorted realities and discarded facts are now such a part of everyday life that the way they shape events like impeachment, a mass shooting or a presidential address often goes unmentioned.

But when partisan news meets a pandemic, the information silos where people shelter themselves can become not just deluded but also dangerous, according to those who criticize conservative commentators for shedding any semblance of objectivity when it comes to covering the president.

“This sort of media spin poses a clear and present danger to public health,” said Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative host and author who published a book, “How the Right Lost Its Mind,” in 2018. “If you have people out there who feel all of this is overblown, and feel the need to act out their lack of concern by not taking precautions, it could be exceptionally dangerous.

“That’s not just a problem for the right wing, that becomes a real threat to the general population,” added Sykes, who is also a contributor to MSNBC. “When people start dying, the entertainment value wears off.”

In the case of Fox News viewers and talk radio listeners, who tend to be older than the general population, the danger of playing down the threat is potentially far worse. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has specifically identified older people as being at higher risk from serious complications if they contract the virus. Nielsen, the TV ratings agency, lists the average age of a Fox News viewer as 65 years old.

Despite Hannity’s own skeptical commentary, his Tuesday show featured Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a guest. He told Hannity that he wanted to “make sure” viewers knew that the coronavirus “is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu — you got to make sure that people understand that.”

It was not difficult to see why Fauci would think Hannity’s roughly 4 million viewers — the biggest audience in cable news — might not understand. On Tuesday, the star anchor told his viewers, effectively, to relax.

“Sadly, these viruses pop up time to time,” Hannity said, with the certitude of a medical professional. “Pandemics happen, time to time.”

Limbaugh has offered clinical advice of his own. Recently he defended his widely criticized comparison of the coronavirus to the common cold and suggested the timing of the coverage of the outbreak raised “a gigantic series of question marks and red flags.”

And not all the prominent players in conservative opinion are denying the seriousness of the threat. Disagreement on the right has spilled into public view in a way that is unusual, given how swiftly dissent is often punished by Trump and his media loyalists.

“It’s a matter of public health. How can these shills face their followers after all the lies and deceit?” asked Michael Savage, the radio host and author who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters in conservative media and urged him to run for president in 2011.

“Are these mouthpieces without any social conscience?” added Savage, who called the words of Limbaugh and others “criminal negligence.”

Speaking on his Monday Fox News show, Tucker Carlson seemed to speak directly to skeptics like the president and Hannity, whose prime-time program follows his. “People you trust, people you probably voted for, have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem,” Carlson said, adding: “People you know will get sick, some may die. This is real.”

Trump pays close attention to Carlson’s show, and the two are in regular contact by phone. Earlier this year, the anchor was credited with helping persuade the president to dial back his hawkish approach on Iran — and Carlson’s words on the virus this week were interpreted as a message aimed at the White House.

There are also signs that political views affect how seriously someone takes the public health risk posed by the virus.

A Reuters poll last week found that roughly 4 in 10 Democrats believed the coronavirus was an imminent threat — but only 2 in 10 Republicans felt the same way. And Americans who approve of the way the president is handling his job are far more likely to believe that the government can stop a nationwide epidemic from occurring than those who disapprove, the poll said.

Seventy-nine percent of those who gave Trump high job approval ratings said they were very or somewhat confident in the government’s ability to prevent the outbreak from becoming much worse, compared with only 39% of those who disapprove of him, according to a CNN poll conducted last week.

At times, there has been a jarring split screen between the president’s nonchalance and the sober warnings of the nation’s top health officials, who have been more aggressive about warning certain vulnerable populations not to travel.

Asked Wednesday at the White House what he had to say to those concerned he is not taking the situation seriously enough, Trump offered a tart, terse reply: “Fake news,” the president snapped, before dismissing reporters from the room.

The fallout from the president’s handling of the crisis might have been more easily dismissed as liberal, anti-Trump paranoia if not for an improbable twist of events. A person infected with the coronavirus attended one of the conservative world’s biggest annual gatherings last week, the Conservative Political Action Conference, leading some politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to voluntarily quarantine themselves.

Before this person’s status was made public — he was a VIP attendee who purchased a $5,750 “gold” package that granted him access to backstage reception rooms where members of Congress and other high-profile figures mingled — conservatives at the conference were accusing the president’s enemies of inflating the seriousness of the outbreak.

The former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, speaking from the conference stage last Friday, insisted falsely that the media had only just started paying attention to the coronavirus after the impeachment trial ended. And the reason, he added, was “they think this is going to be what brings down the president.”

But over the next few days, CPAC’s organizers were pelted with questions from fellow conservatives, some of whom said they shook the infected guest’s hand, about why they had been left in the dark.

Suddenly the “hoax,” as Hannity and others have called the response to the virus, hit home.

Raheem Kassam, a former Breitbart News editor, was one of several conservative activists who attended CPAC and expressed frustration about how the group handled the incident. Kassam, who said he felt sick over the weekend and on social media chronicled his frustrated attempts to obtain a coronavirus test, knew that he might have been exposed only after someone who works in the office of a member of Congress who was also exposed contacted him.

“I think there’s a grown-up conversation to be had about what happened,” Kassam said in an interview, adding that he did not believe that some conservatives wanted to have that conversation now. “Imagine being that sick, and then finding out why I might be that sick in a thirdhand way. I was angry. I was frustrated. I was scared,” he added.

But the president’s allies have attacked Kassam, accusing him of sowing panic when there are no other known cases to come out of the conference.

Matt Schlapp, president of CPAC, who has sequestered himself at home because he also shook the infected attendee’s hand, appeared on Fox News in recent days to malign the media for exaggerating the threat.

And though he acknowledged in a subsequent interview that he had no medical training, he has made claims about the coronavirus and its apparent lack of contagiousness.

“It’s actually hard to get,” he said on Fox News on Wednesday, speaking via Skype from his home, where he still has a few days left in his self-imposed quarantine.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

Fox News guest and pro-Trump leader claims coronavirus is 'actually hard to get' by pointing to himselfDavid Choi,Business Insider•March 11, 2020
President Donald Trump is greeted by Matt Schlapp, Chairman of the American Conservative Union, as the president arrives to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2020, at National Harbor, in Oxon Hill, Md., Saturday Feb. 29, 2020.More

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

A Fox News guest who visited CPAC downplayed the coronavirus's efficacy by referring to his own symptoms.

Matt Schlapp, the husband of former White House strategic communications director Mercedes Schlapp and the chairman of a pro-Trump group, said he personally "never had a symptom."

"People become near hysterical when they feel like they could get this virus very easily," Schlapp said. "And what the CPAC experience has taught the whole country ... is that it's actually hard to get it."

The World Health Organization on Wednesday classified the COVID-19 disease as a global pandemic, after over 110,000 people were infected and 4,200 died, the majority of cases in China.

A Fox News guest who visited the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where an attendee tested positive for the coronavirus, downplayed the virus's efficacy by referring to his own nonexistent symptoms.

Matt Schlapp, the husband of former White House strategic communications director Mercedes Schlapp and the chairman of the pro-Trump American Conservative Union, said he personally "never had a symptom" from the coronavirus, and brushed aside worries after at least one attendee tested positive.

"One thing we've learned is, even when there's an infected person amongst thousands ... it's very, very difficult to contract this virus," Schlapp said on Fox News on Wednesday morning.

"People become near hysterical when they feel like they could get this virus very easily," Schlapp added. "And what the CPAC experience has taught the whole country ... is that it's actually hard to get it."At least five Republican congressional lawmakers have self-quarantined themselves after attending CPAC, which was held between February 26-29 in Maryland. One of the Republicans, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, said he would still undergo a 14-day self-quarantine, despite testing negative for the coronavirus, "under doctor's usual precautionary recommendations."

President Donald Trump, left, standing with Vice President Mike Pence and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, right, talks to reporters about the coronavirus outbreak, March 10, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Associated Press

Schlapp downplayed the warnings raised by scientists on the coronavirus's propensity to spread through human hosts, and contradicted their advice.

"What we can't do is get people thinking that the test is what matters," Schlapp said on Fox News. "What matters is your symptoms. I don't have any. The president doesn't have any."

Although US-based scientists from the Johns Hopkins University reportedly warned that most people who contract the virus show symptoms by the fifth day, they added that the virus can still be transferred through a carrier up to 27 days after their infection.

Schlapp's portrayal of the virus mimicked that of other Fox News opinion hosts in recent weeks. Several of these hosts, including Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, have portrayed concerns over the virus as one that was overhyped by news organizations.

His comments also come as the White House ordered health officials to secretly classify top-level meetings on the coronavirus, according to four Trump administration officials in a Reuters report.

The World Health Organization on Wednesday classified the COVID-19 disease as a global pandemic, after over 110,000 people were infected and 4,200 died, the majority of cases in China. So far, around 30 people in the US have died and over 1,000 people were infected.

President Donald Trump and other senior officials have been criticized after similarly downplaying the coronavirus's spread in the US.

"A lot people will have this and it's very mild," Trump said last week. "They'll get better very rapidly. They don't even see a doctor. They don't even call a doctor."

Read the original article on Business Insider

Coronavirus update: Italy's death toll tops 1,000 as US official acknowledges strategy is 'failing'

Javier E. DavidandAnjalee Khemlani•March 12, 2020

The world’s battle to manage the coronavirus’ spread entered a delicate phase on Thursday, as Italy’s death toll passed a grim milestone and U.S. officials acknowledged that the world’s largest economy was “failing” in its effort to identify and prevent new infections.

The World Health Organization’s decision on Wednesday to formally declare a pandemic has underscored the growing severity of the crisis, with global infections nearing 130,000 across more than 100 countries — with cases outside of China having multiplied rapidly.

“Let me be clear: describing this as a pandemic does not mean that countries should give up,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director general, said on Thursday.

Despite the “speed and scale” of new COVID-19 transmissions, Ghebreyesus stated that the coronavirus was “controllable” if governments got themselves ready. “The idea that countries should shift from containment to mitigation is wrong and dangerous. On the contrary, we have to double down.”

The financial and economic toll also grew, with investors hammering major benchmarks deeper into correction territory. Fears also grew inside the world’s largest economy, after President Donald Trump announced narrow travel restrictions on Europe that failed to ease an angst-ridden market.

Multiple professional and college sports leagues moved to suspend their schedules, while numerous businesses encouraged employees to work from home in order to prevent more community spreading of the disease. March Madness — college basketball’s marquee event — was canceled after days of speculation, as schools and other public institutions across the country shut their doors.

In New York — which is now the second largest coronavirus hot zone in the U.S. behind Washington State — Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a ban on gatherings of 500 people or more amid a state of emergency. New York City also declared an emergency.

While containment efforts in China and South Korea have been encouraging, Italy and the U.S. are now locked in a race against time as new cases skyrocket in both countries. Italy — which on Thursday saw its death toll hit 1,000 in the wake of implementing a rigid quarantine protocol — now has the distinction of having Europe’s worst cluster of infections, and the second-highest outside of China.

The global toll is closing in on 130,000, with deaths near 5,000.More

In America, new cases are surfacing rapidly amid concerns that testing and treatment for the disease aren’t up to the growing challenge. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. official on infectious diseases, said as much in a sobering assessment of the state of play to Congress.

"The system is not really geared to what we need right now... That is a failing. Let's admit it," Fauci said.

While faulty testing kits from the Centers for Disease Control slowed down the U.S. response, Quest Diagnostics (DGX) and Labcorp (LH) have begun offering tests for doctor’s offices. The country’s top health officials anticipate a clearer picture of where the virus has spread as more tests are completed.

"The idea of anybody getting it easily the way people in other countries are doing it, we're not set up for that,” he added. “Do I think we should be? Yes. But we're not."
‘We have to assume the worst’

The COVID-19 pandemic is growing, with over 1,000 infected domestically and more than 120,000 worldwide.More

U.S. stocks tumbled by more than 7%, with Wall Street locked in a wave of panicky selling as the virus’ human and economic toll widened.

The New York Federal Reserve stepped in midday Thursday and announced a major asset purchase program, offering $500 billion in a three-month repo operation that will repeat tomorrow. The New York Fed also said its securities purchases would be along a range of maturities, to match the composition of the Treasury market.

However, few analysts believe the problem will be resolved with more Fed easing — especially as the jitters lay waste to specific sectors like travel, leisure and entertainment. And social distancing and self-quarantine efforts being encouraged by governments to prevent more spreading are a drag on companies that rely on consumer traffic, like Starbucks (SBUX) and Uber (UBER).

Carnival Cruises (CCL) announced it would halt its Princess Cruises globally for 60 days. The cruise line has seen multiple ships affected by the outbreak, including widespread infection from the Diamond Princess quarantined in Japan for two weeks with 3,700 on board.

As global diffusion of the virus goes unchecked, hopes have been pinned on the development of treatment and vaccine regimens that can ameliorate the crisis — yet drugs currently in development are unlikely to be publicly available for months, if not years.

Gregory Glenn, president of clinical-stage pharmaceutical company Novavax (NVAX), told Yahoo Finance on Thursday that the normal time frame for developing vaccines can be as high as a decade. However, Glenn added there were exceptions to that rule.

“We know from Ebola that [timeline] was shortened quite a bit,” Glenn told “On the Move” — especially as the federal government put pressure on pharma firms to speed up operations in the coronavirus fight.

“It’s my expectation that we can shorten some time, so we’re a little bit in unknown territory” he said — adding that testing could begin this spring and a vaccine could be ready within 18 months.

Yet Glenn warned that countries “have to assume the worst” about the virus’ ability to be controlled.

“The more worrisome thing for me is not today, but what we call a ‘second wave’ where the virus has now gotten into the community...and comes back,” he told Yahoo Finance. “We want to try to be ready and able to address that, if at all possible.”

Coronavirus hits ‘somebody who is living pay check to pay check' harder, says Square Co-Founder 

Yahoo Finance Video March 12, 2020 
Author of ‘The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time’ and Co-founder of Square Jim McKelvey joins The Final Round to discuss how the coronavirus has impacted the business sector.

World’s Richest Nearing $1 Trillion Wipeout in 2020 Rout

Devon Pendleton

BloombergMarch 12, 2020

(Bloomberg) -- From New York to Paris, Sao Paulo to Hong Kong the losses are unprecedented for the world’s wealthiest.

The world’s 500 richest people collectively lost $331 billion on Thursday, the biggest one-day drop in the eight-year history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That pushed the group’s year-to-date losses to $950 billion.

This week’s collapse marks the end of a decade of soaring markets and cheap money that helped the planet’s wealthiest people amass a record $6.1 trillion less than two months ago. Those gains were obliterated over the past four days as pandemic fears and plunging oil prices sent markets into a nosedive.

Since the first of the year the world’s richest have lost 16% of their collective net worth, according to the index. The market meltdown has slammed billionaires from every part of the globe and every industry.

“People right now are afraid,” said Charles Doraine, president of Doraine Insurance Group and a former wealth manager. “Things are being introduced to the world of investing that have never been there before -- health risks. This is stuff beyond the market’s normal fears and concerns.”

The anxieties of the super rich are evidenced by a spike in demand for private jets, canceled charity galas and an exodus to secluded second homes. Global measures to limit the spread of Covid-19 have introduced restrictions rarely experienced by a globe-trotting elite for whom access and services are seldom constrained. On Thursday, wealthy travelers scrambled to book private flights to the U.S. from Europe ahead of President Donald Trump’s recently-announced travel restrictions.

Trump’s rhetoric-laden address to the nation on Wednesday evening did little to calm investors, contributing to a further slide in stocks and trimming the wealth of some of his major supporters.

Oklahoma fracking mogul Harold Hamm dropped off the index Monday after losing almost half his net worth, squeezed by the tumbling price of oil. Sheldon Adelson, majority owner of Las Vegas Sands Corp., the world’s largest casino operator, has lost $11.7 billion since the start of the year as gaming floors emptied and trade shows were canceled. That’s more than a quarter of his net worth.

Carnival Corp. Chairman Micky Arison dropped six spots on the billionaires index Thursday after shares of the world’s biggest cruise operator plunged 31% to a 23-year low. The company announced it was suspending all voyages by its Princess Cruises line for two months.

Individuals higher up the ranks sustained staggering one-day losses. Luxury titan Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, lost $9.5 billion and Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos’s net worth fell by $8.1 billion. A total of 53 billionaires saw their fortunes drop to the lowest since joining the index.

Brazil’s fortunes were particularly hard hit, both by plunging stock prices and a weakening real. Guilherme Benchimol, founder of XP Inc., ceased to be a billionaire after shares of the Sao Paulo-based brokerage fell 34% below its December initial public offering price.

Meanwhile, Russia’s wealthiest two dozen people are down $65 billion this year, partly because of President Vladimir Putin’s oil price war with Saudi Arabia.

Investors Flee Canada’s Stock Market on Worst Day in 80 Years

Divya Balji and Michael Bellusci

BloombergMar. 12, 2020

(Bloomberg) --Canadian stocks suffered a stunning 12% drop, the largest in eight decades, as investors size up the likelihood of a global recession because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Investors Flee Canada’s Stock Market on Worst Day in 80 Years

The S&P/TSX Composite Index had its biggest one-day decline since May 1940, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The 230 companies in the benchmark collectively lost at least C$265 billion ($190 billion) in market value. Trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange was halted minutes after the market opened as a wave of selling tripped the circuit-breaker rule.

The spread of a global pandemic that has killed more than 4,700 people has shocked financial markets and forced policy makers into emergency measures. The Federal Reserve said it is prepared to inject a total of $5 trillion into funding markets over the next month.

The Bank of Canada also took steps to smooth the flow of credit. Late Thursday afternoon, the central bank said it will broaden the scope of a government bond buyback program and temporarily add repo operations with terms of six and 12 months “to proactively support interbank funding.”

In equity markets, the selling was indiscriminate. One of the country’s largest pipeline operators, TC Energy Corp., saw its market cap fall almost C$13 billion. Shares of the Calgary-based company fell 22%, the most since 1984. Only one stock in the composite went up: auto parts maker Linamar Corp.

“We’ve had a bull market which had to result in some relief at some point,” said Michael Smedley, chief investment officer at Morgan Meighen & Associates. “The situation at the moment is still for me ‘sitting on your hands’ rather than ‘catching the knife.’”

A growing number of economists believe Canada is on the brink of recession as the economy takes a double hit from the coronavirus and tanking oil prices, ramping up pressure on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to come up with a sizable fiscal stimulus package. In the meantime, investors were left perplexed.

“The most important thing right now is to focus on liquidity, focus on safe yields and non-cyclical parts of market,” including Canadian banks, David Rosenberg, founder of Rosenberg Research and Associates Inc., said in a phone interview. He’s “nibbling back into the market” and advising clients to look for stocks where dividends are safe.

Rosenberg, the former North American chief economist for Merrill Lynch who has been forecasting a recession, thinks one has already begun in Canada and the U.S. “This is an absolutely horrible situation, at every level,” he said.

Don’t bank on a quick bounce, said one analyst at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. “The caveat here is that we do not believe there is a V-shape recovery given the magnitude of the recent technical damage in market internals,” the bank’s technical analyst Sid Mokhtari said in a note to clients.

Oil is headed for the biggest weekly decline since 2008 after Saudi Arabia set off a price war over the weekend and President Donald Trump said the U.S. would restrict travel from Europe for the next 30 days in an attempt to contain the coronavirus, pummeling fuel demand.

Trudeau himself is in self-isolation and working from home while his wife awaits the results of a Covid-19 test. Sophie Gregoire Trudeau had been exhibiting flu-like symptoms after recently returning from a speaking engagement in London, the prime minister’s office said in a statement. While her symptoms have subsided, she’s self-isolating at home as she awaits the test results.

The prime minister isn’t exhibiting any symptoms.

Meanwhile, provincial governments took further steps to try to slow the coronavirus outbreak. Quebec asked residents to quarantine themselves after any foreign trip and made a 14-day self-isolation mandatory for government workers. Ontario said public schools will close through April 5 and Alberta urged the cancellation of all gatherings of more than 250 people.

(Updates with additional details on market drop, government and central bank response, and new chart)