It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
COVID-19 IS CLASS WAR
Online retail workers strike over coronavirus safety and wage concerns
Warehouse, delivery and retail gig workers in the United States went on strike on Monday to call attention to safety and wage concerns for people laboring through the coronavirus crisis.
Among the strikers were some of the roughly 200,000 workers at U.S. online grocery delivery company Instacart, according to strike organiser Gig Workers Collective, founded earlier this year by Instacart worker Vanessa Bain.
Fifteen workers at an Amazon.com Inc warehouse in Staten Island, New York, also walked off the job on Monday following reports of COVID-19 among the facility's staff.
Amazon said later it fired an employee who helped organise the action for alleged violations of his employment, including leaving a paid quarantine to participate in the demonstration.
New York's attorney general said her office was "considering all legal options" in response to the firing, citing the right to organise in the state.
Workers have also protested in other countries. Dozens of Amazon workers at a facility near Florence, Italy, went on strike on Monday.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said last week that pressure on Amazon employees to work despite inadequate protections was "unacceptable."
From delivery drivers to grocery store clerks, shelf stockers and fast-food employees, workers have kept food and essential goods flowing to people who have been told by their governments to stay home to stop the spread of coronavirus.
More than 738,500 people have been infected across the world and about 35,000 have died, according to a Reuters tally.
Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, said it has taken "extreme measures" to clean buildings and obtain safety gear and that "the vast majority of employees continue to show up and do the heroic work of delivering for customers every day." Less than half a percent of its more than 5,000-person workforce at the Staten Island site protested, it said.
In statements on Monday, Amazon disputed comments from one of the striking Staten Island employees, Christian Smalls, who had accused the company of mishandling warehouse operations after a confirmed case of coronavirus.
Amazon said Smalls was on a paid quarantine after having close contact with a diagnosed worker, and had "received multiple warnings for violating social distancing guidelines," leading to his dismissal.
Smalls responded in a statement distributed by Athena, a labour and activist coalition.
"I’m going to keep speaking up. My colleagues in New York and all around the country are going to keep speaking up. We won’t stop until Amazon provides real protections for our health and safety," he said.
Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, issued a statement calling the firing "disgraceful" and also asked the National Labor Relations Board to investigate. Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment on the attorney general's statement.
Hazard pay, sanitiser
San Francisco-based Instacart – which lets customers place online orders from grocers, retailers like Costco Wholesale Corp and CVS Health Corp's CVS Pharmacy – said in a statement that the strike of its contractors had "absolutely no impact to Instacart's operations."
On Monday, Instacart said it had 40% more shoppers on the platform than on the same day last week and sold more groceries in the last 72 hours than ever before.
"The health and safety of our entire community – shoppers, customers, and employees – is our first priority," it said in a statement.
It was not clear how many Instacart workers were participating in the strike, Bain told Reuters. Bain has created a Facebook group with 15,000 members. She said hundreds more have reached out to her in light of Monday's campaign.
In posts on social media, people who said they were Instacart workers demanded hazard pay to account for the dangers of working while most people stay home to comply with state, local and federal government guidance.
They also asked for the company to provide hand sanitiser, disinfectant wipes and soap to clean their cell phones, cars and shopping carts.
"We don't have to have 100 percent participation to ... force Instacart to maneuver on these issues," Bain said in a phone interview.
Instacart said on March 23 that it wanted to hire another 300,000 gig workers because of a surge in demand.
Staff in one supermarket of French retailer Carrefour will receive protective masks after some walked out over health risks, a union said on Monday.
Employees of McDonald's Corp, as well as people who said they worked at Walmart Inc, supermarket chain Harris Teeter, Waffle House, Family Dollar and Food Lion, boycotted work at North Carolina locations on Friday.
While the French public has been ordered to stay home amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic, the vast majority of supermarket cashiers, most of them women on meagre salaries, have continued to work the tills – performing a vital role even as their health is put at risk
By the time President Emmanuel Macron had declared France “at war” with coronavirus in a sombre address last Monday, 40-year-old Joanna, a cashier at a supermarket in Brittany, had already braved the “invisible enemy’s” first assaults.
In the hours preceding Macron’s March 16 address, as rumours of an impending lockdown swirled across the country, supermarkets like Joanna’s had been stormed by wave after wave of anxious shoppers on a panic-buying spree, stripping shelves of most supplies from toilet paper to rice and pasta.
“It was almost impossible to walk down the aisles, and then people had to queue for an hour before reaching the till,” she tells FRANCE 24, recalling a long queue that meandered along the full stretch of the store. “By the end of the day, most shelves had been completely emptied.”
Along with other colleagues, Joanna had volunteered to work that day, anticipating the rush. She worked longer hours, cut her lunch break to the bare minimum and then volunteered for the next day as well – even as Macron ordered a nationwide lockdown in an increasingly frantic effort to stave off a rapidly worsening pandemic.
Who’s essential now?
Although the French government has ordered the public to stay at home, stopping work is not an option for cashiers who generally live on the minimum wage – nor is it possible for them to work from home.
As is often the case in such crises, the strain and the risk fall disproportionately on those employees with the most precarious jobs –professions that are routinely belittled, until governments and the public realise they are in fact “essential”. In the case of supermarket cashiers, a sector that accounts for 150,000 full-time equivalent workers, 90 percent are women.
At Joanna’s workplace, a Super U located near the city of Rennes, workers with young children have been allowed to stay home and those with pre-existing conditions are on paid sick leave. But elsewhere in France, there have been reports of staff on short-term contracts being ordered to return to work no matter what.
“Our manager is conscious of the risks and has tried hard to get us protection,” says Joanna, whose children, aged 10 and 11, are old enough to stay alone at home while she and her husband are out working, though she has to get their home-schooling ready before setting off.
She notes that conditions at the store have changed significantly since that manic Monday. The store now closes an hour earlier and measures are in place to ease crowding. A security guard organises people in well-spaced queues outside the premises, with priority access given to the elderly, disabled and healthcare workers.
The day after Macron’s address, plexiglass shields were in place to protect Joanna and her colleagues. Gloves and hand gels were also available, but it would take another four days for the first supplies of face masks to arrive, amid a nationwide shortage that has also left doctors dangerously exposed.
“I’ve been making my masks from home because those handed out by the company are painful to wear,” says Joanna. “They only last two hours, but I keep a box with me so that I can change them when needed.”
Colleagues who restock shelves have also been handed protective gear, “but many don’t wear them because the gloves soon tear and the masks make it hard to breathe,” she adds. “This week they’ve been moved to evening shifts, so that they are no longer in contact with customers.”
Cling-film barriers
Despite the protective measures, Joanna is well aware of the threat of contagion she and her colleagues are exposed to.
“Stopping certain habits, such as scratching my face or flicking aside unruly hair strands, hardly comes naturally,” she explains, noting that she now keeps her hair tied in a bun at all times. Developing such reflexes –known in France as “barrier gestures” – is especially hard when the work is both physically and mentally draining.
Respecting safe distances also involves a rethink of the way cashiers’ stations are aligned.
“One of my colleagues refused to work with staggered back-to-back stations, whereby customers walk just behind our backs,” Joanna says. “So we reduced the number of tills to ensure they are spaced out and all face the same way.”
At other supermarkets, where protective measures are dangerously lacking, cashiers have been forced to erect cardboard barriers or wrap their stations in cling film. Sometimes, mindless shoppers peer over the makeshift barriers to address staff, thereby defeating their very purpose.
Changing customers’ habits in the age of coronavirus is a whole different challenge, Joanna notes.
“There are clearly two types of customers. Those who are conscious of the risks and shop only once for the whole week and those who just come to spend time at the store,” she says. “Some come every day, or several times a day, each time for a trifle. I had someone buy just two sticks of butter this morning.”
She adds: “Who am I to tell them to stay home? What would really be effective is having police patrols who hand out fines to those who don’t buy food for several days.”
‘For months, doctors were teargassed in the streets. Today they are heroes'
Since the start of the lockdown, Joanna and her colleagues have received numerous words of encouragement and thanks from customers, a heartwarming change for a profession that is particularly exposed to indifference.
“Sometimes, through these exchanges, we get to know other people’s jobs and can thank them too,” she says, citing doctors, hauliers, street cleaners and “those who simply shop for a relative or a neighbour who is housebound”.
The Super U management has thanked staff in a Facebook post that was later printed out and taped on the supermarket’s walls, but has offered little else in terms of gratitude and appreciation.
Joanna, who has worked at the shop for 15 years and earns the minimum wage for a 30-hour working week, is waiting to hear whether she too will benefit from a €1,000 bonus announced by other supermarket chains, after the government encouraged companies to hand out one-off bonuses free of tax.
“When it comes to the government, I don’t feel like thanking them,” Joanna adds. “They knew what was coming and yet they failed to anticipate it. And, above all, they sent contradictory messages, like ‘stay at home, but don’t forget to go working’.”
Her thoughts go to the health workers whose struggle against the worsening pandemic is being saluted – “and rightly so” – across France.
“Only a few months ago they were teargassed for daring to rally in the streets,” she says, referring to recent strikes and protests by doctors at France’s cash-strapped hospitals. “But today they are our heroes.”
---30---
Will sky-high unemployment lead to authoritarianism or progress?
Does the huge surge in US unemployment claims announced on Thursday mean that we are doomed to endure the 30% unemployment of which the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis has warned?
The answer is no. How high unemployment rises will depend on how quickly we ramp up testing and the provision of protective equipment, enabling us to determine when and where it is safe to return to work.
But early evidence on the ability of countries like the US and UK to roll out tests and protective gear is not heartening. It’s not too early, therefore, to start worrying about how sky-high unemployment will affect our economies and societies.
In one scenario, the crisis will foster support for strong leaders who can issue strict directives and enforce them by any means necessary. We have seen how China, under President Xi Jinping, was able to lock down Wuhan, limit mobility and contain the coronavirus (for now). We have also seen how the crisis encourages identity politics – how President Trump uses it to justify his xenophobic tendencies. We have seen how the crisis breeds nationalism, as countries close their borders and prohibit exports of medical equipment, and as international groupings like the G20 blow hot air.
These same reactive instincts were evident in the 1930s, the last time unemployment approached 30%. The role of unemployment in the rise of authoritarian figures like Hitler is disputed, but the most recent research suggests a link. There was economic nationalism, in the form of trade wars, and the political nationalism of the American aviator and aspiring presidential candidate Charles Lindbergh, now conveniently visible on the small screen. There was Oswald Mosley’s antisemitism. There was the harassment and deportation of Mexican Americans, including even hospital patients, by the Los Angeles welfare department and US Department of Labor.
If ever there was a circumstance suited to rehabilitate experts and encourage respect for politicians who defer to them, this is it
But there is also a more hopeful scenario. Authoritarian leaders don’t like bad news, which they tend to suppress, sometimes at cost to themselves. One hears about rumblings of a backlash against Xi and his minions for having clamped down on news of the virus, thereby putting China at risk. Trump may similarly end up paying a price for having suppressed warnings from his own Department of Health and Human Services. If ever there was a circumstance suited to rehabilitate experts and encourage respect for politicians who defer to them, this is it.
In the extreme, one can imagine the crisis pounding the last nails into the coffin of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution. The idea that government should divest itself of its equity stake in essential infrastructure has already been abandoned, in Britain in the case of the railways and in the US, prospectively, the airlines. Old shibboleths about the need for budget balance and austerity have gone by the board. We are experiencing the most vivid possible reminder that the private sector, charitable bodies and local government alone can’t be relied on for essential services. They can’t even be relied on for an adequate supply of testing swabs, the Trump White House, no less, having organized a military airlift of these last week.
The transformation may not be as dramatic this time. Even if unemployment rises to Depression levels, it can come back down quickly with medical mitigation and support from fiscal and monetary policies. The latter have been primed much more rapidly than in the 1930s. Measures to prevent bankruptcies and bank failures are being rolled out faster. Basic support for households is being provided through direct payments to taxpayers, expanded unemployment benefits, and grants to employers who avoid layoffs. All this might be thought to diminish the likelihood of a radical social and political realignment.
Ultimately, it was national security that begat social security
But it was not just high unemployment that led to the welfare state, the mixed economy and more expansive government. In addition, it was the second world war and the realization that national security, even national survival, required shared sacrifice, and that public support for those who sacrificed was a necessary and appropriate quid pro quo. The Beveridge Report that created the British welfare state was a product of not just the 1930s but also of the second world war. The GI bill that expanded opportunities for education and homeownership for Americans was similarly a legacy of the war. Ultimately, it was national security that begat social security.
Boris Johnson has vowed that “we must act like a wartime government”. Donald Trump insists that he is a wartime president. If fighting the virus is indeed a battle tantamount to war, then the legacies of these politicians and the attitudes and values of their successors may turn out rather differently than they currently expect.
Barry Eichengreen is the George C Pardee and Helen N Pardee professor of economics and professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley
Ex-evangelical rains hellfire on ‘moronic monster’ Trump for becoming the ‘pro-death’ president
Appearing on MSNBC’s “Am Joy,” former evangelical Frank Schaeffer harshly condemned Donald Trump and his supporters for standing by while people are dying.
Speaking with host Joy Reid, the former evangelist launched an impassioned diatribe about the president, calling him a “moronic monster.”
“We’re at a time now when the naked lickspittle enablement of Donald Trump by his evangelical followers is more horrifying than ever,” the MSNBC guest began.
“When we come to this time of COVID-19 overtaking our country, a literal life and death issue, we see two things very clearly,” he continued. “One is the utter moral bankruptcy of this leader who pits himself against governors trying to save their people, and the second is the utter moral bankruptcy of evangelical, the white evangelical voter, having been rented out to this moronic monster who in this time of crisis, is far from being our Winston Churchill leading us to freedom against the Nazis in Germany.”
Addressing Trump’s battles with the nation’s governors over much-needed ventilators, he added that the president is essentially saying, “We’re not going to make respirators, especially for governors we don’t like, go off and die so the stock exchange numbers go up and I look good.”
“We have a Republican lieutenant governor, we have people who are in positions of power and Donald Trump trying to push a business as usual agenda. instead of evangelicals standing up and saying, wait a minute, we bought into your candidacy because you’re supposed to be the, quote/unquote, pro-life president,” he continued. “We now have a pro-death president who would rather have his economic numbers go up chasing a 2020 election than save lives.”
Watch below:
CNN’s Sanjay Gupta thrashes Trump for ‘insulting’ conspiracy theory about doctors hoarding masks
Two medical experts on Monday called President Donald Trump’s insinuation that doctors are intentionally hoarding masks to be an “insulting” conspiracy theory.
Appearing on CNN, emergency room physician Dr. Leana Wen was asked by host Alisyn Camerota about the president’s statements about hospitals lying about the amount of equipment they need — and she replied that it bore no relationship to reality.
“We need to be preparing for months or years, and frankly, it’s insulting to suggest that hospitals are somehow keeping equipment away from health care workers, and jeopardizing their lives,” Wen said. “Actually, all of us should be doing everything we can to supply the basic equipment that front line health care workers need to protect themselves and protect all of us.”
CNN health care analyst Dr. Sanjay Gupta offered a similar take.
“The idea they’re being told they’re hoarding this stuff is a little insulting,” he said. “They are showing up to work, not sure they’ll have the personal protective gear, they’re risking their lives, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that, and then they’re going home and potentially exposing their families to this… To suggest they’re hoarding it, stealing it, taking out the back door, I think that was the rest of that quote, I think that is insulting.”
When President Donald Trump took the podium to deliver his daily press briefing on the coronavirus pandemic, one of the businessmen pledging to help make masks was an unusual choice: Mike Lindell, the founder and CEO of My Pillow.
It is unclear why Lindell, a frequent Fox News advertiser and Trump supporter who has faced a series of lawsuits over deceptive marketing and unsupported health claims for his product, would be a key fighter in the epidemic — and commenters on social media promptly weighed in.
So my Tiger King binge was interrupted by a text saying the CEO of MyPillow is now part of the presidential briefings on COVID19 … please tell me this is a prank. — Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) March 30, 2020
Well, imagine my relief that the My Pillow guy is on the job — Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) March 30, 2020
Trump has the MyPillow guy in a pandemic press conference and that is a sentence that proves we are in the most asinine assholes of fucking timelines. That or the simulation is glitching HARD. A clown car filled with Fredos on fire, off the cliff. — Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) March 30, 2020
Two days ago, I tweeted this. Right now, Trump has the My Pillow guy speaking in the Rose Garden. https://t.co/tGYtidILaM — Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) March 30, 2020
And now the My Pillow guy is urging us all to return to God and read our Bibles at home, as we realize how amazing Trump's glorious leadership has been, and no, I am absolutely not kidding, and my God, we are all going to die. — Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) March 30, 2020
Trump just had the My Pillow guy speak. The My Pillow Guy. These aren't press conferences to calm the American people. They're infomercials for Trump and his friends.#StopAiringTrump — Nick Jack Pappas (@Pappiness) March 30, 2020
Once the Trump-aligned My Pillow guy came on to give a free infomercial from the Rose Garden, CNN cuts away– good on them for not giving oxygen to this partisan corporate bullshit.pic.twitter.com/QKsMif8YEu — Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) March 30, 2020 ‘Read our Bibles’: Coronavirus press briefing goes off the rails as My Pillow founder showers religious praise on Trump
For weeks President Donald Trump has been holding daily campaign and pep rallies masquerading as public service coronavirus press briefings, but Monday’s event went even further off the rails as the President invited business leaders to push their products and efforts to address the nation’s dire medical and supply shortages and virus mitigation efforts.
One of the president’s invited guests, the 58-year old Christian conservative founder of the My Pillow company, took full advantage of the presidential podium in the Rose Garden to advance his religious and political agenda.
“God gave us grace on November 8, 2016, to change the course we were on,” Mike Lindell, declaring Trump’s election as being from God, said to the nation during the nationally-televised program. “God had been taken out of our schools and lives, a nation had turned its back on God. I encourage you to use this time at home to get back in the word. Read our Bibles and spend time with our families.”
“Our president gave us so much hope just a few short months ago we had the best economy, the lowest unemployment, and wages going up. It was amazing. With our great president, vice president, and this administration and all the great people in the country praying daily, we will get through this and back to a place that’s stronger and safer than ever,” Lindell declared.
Trump told reporters he did not know Lindell was going to do that “but he’s a friend of mine.”
The President also praised Lindell, saying: “Boy do you sell those pillows.”
The My Pillow guy Mike Lindell says this: “God gave us grace on November 8, 2016, to change the course we were on. God had been taken out of our schools & lives, a nation had turned its back on God. I encourage you to use this time at home to get back in the word. Read our Bible” pic.twitter.com/tRdlubE08u — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 30, 2020
How my dad survived the 1918 flu — and predicted the decline of America Published on March 30, 2020 By TomDispatch
by William Astore
My dad was born in 1917. Somehow, he survived the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, but an outbreak of whooping cough in 1923 claimed his baby sister, Clementina. One of my dad’s first memories was seeing his sister’s tiny white casket. Another sister was permanently marked by scarlet fever. In 1923, my dad was hit by a car and spent two weeks in a hospital with a fractured skull as well as a lacerated thumb. His immigrant parents had no medical insurance, but the driver of the car gave his father $50 toward the medical bills. The only lasting effect was the scar my father carried for the rest of his life on his right thumb.
The year 1929 brought the Great Depression and lean times. My father’s father had left the family, so my dad, then 12, had to pitch in. He got a newspaper route, which he kept for four years, quitting high school after tenth grade so he could earn money for the family. In 1935, like millions of other young men of that era, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a creation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal that offered work on environmental projects of many kinds. He battled forest fires in Oregon for two years before returning to his family and factory work. In 1942, he was drafted into the Army, going back to a factory job when World War II ended. Times grew a little less lean in 1951 when he became a firefighter, after which he felt he could afford to buy a house and start a family.
I’m offering all this personal history as the context for a prediction of my dad’s that, for obvious reasons, came to my mind again recently. When I was a teenager, he liked to tell me: “I had it tough in the beginning and easy in the end. You, Willy, have had it easy in the beginning, but will likely have it tough in the end.” His prophecy stayed with me, perhaps because even then, somewhere deep down, I already suspected that my dad was right.
The COVID-19 pandemic is now grabbing the headlines, all of them, and a global recession, if not a depression, seems like a near-certainty. The stock market has been tanking and people’s lives are being disrupted in fundamental and scary ways. My dad knew the experience of losing a loved one to disease, of working hard to make ends meet during times of great scarcity, of sacrificing for the good of one’s family. Compared to him, it’s true that, so far, I’ve had an easier life as an officer in the Air Force and then a college teacher and historian. But at age 57, am I finally ready for the hard times to come? Are any of us?
And keep in mind that this is just the beginning. Climate change (recall Australia’s recent and massive wildfires) promises yet more upheavals, more chaos, more diseases. America’s wanton militarism and lying politicians promise more wars. What’s to be done to avert or at least attenuate the tough times to come, assuming my dad’s prediction is indeed now coming true? What can we do?
It’s Time to Reimagine America
Here’s the one thing about major disruptions to normalcy: they can create opportunities for dramatic change. (Disaster capitalists know this, too, unfortunately.) President Franklin Roosevelt recognized this in the 1930s and orchestrated his New Deal to revive the economy and put Americans like my dad back to work.
In 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney capitalized on the shock-and-awe disruption of the 9/11 attacks to inflict on the world their vision of a Pax Americana, effectively a militarized imperium justified (falsely) as enabling greater freedom for all. The inherent contradiction in such a dreamscape was so absurd as to make future calamity inevitable. Recall what an aide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scribbled down, only hours after the attack on the Pentagon and the collapse of the Twin Towers, as his boss’s instructions (especially when it came to looking for evidence of Iraqi involvement): “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.” And indeed they would do just that, with an emphasis on the “not,” including, of course, the calamitous invasion of Iraq in 2003.
To progressive-minded people thinking about this moment of crisis, what kind of opportunities might open to us when (or rather if) Donald Trump is gone from the White House? Perhaps this coronaviral moment is the perfect time to consider what it would mean for us to go truly big, but without the usual hubris or those disastrous invasions of foreign countries. To respond to COVID-19, climate change, and the staggering wealth inequities in this country that, when combined, will cause unbelievable levels of needless suffering, what’s needed is a drastic reordering of our national priorities.
Remember, the Fed’s first move was to inject $1.5 trillion into the stock market. (That would have been enough to forgive all current student debt.) The Trump administration has also promised to help airlines, hotels, and above all oil companies and the fracking industry, a perfect storm when it comes to trying to sustain and enrich those upholding a kleptocratic and amoral status quo.
This should be a time for a genuinely new approach, one fit for a world of rising disruption and disaster, one that would define a new, more democratic, less bellicose America. To that end, here are seven suggestions, focusing — since I’m a retired military officer — mainly on the U.S. military, a subject that continues to preoccupy me, especially since, at present, that military and the rest of the national security state swallow up roughly 60% of federal discretionary spending:
1. If ever there was a time to reduce our massive and wasteful military spending, this is it. There was never, for example, any sense in investing up to $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years to “modernize” America’s nuclear arsenal. (Why are new weapons needed to exterminate humanity when the “old” ones still work just fine?) Hundreds of stealth fighters and bombers — it’s estimated that Lockheed Martin’s disappointing F-35 jet fighter alone will cost $1.5 trillion over its life span — do nothing to secure us from pandemics, the devastating effects of climate change, or other all-too-pressing threats. Such weaponry only emboldens a militaristic and chauvinistic foreign policy that will facilitate yet more wars and blowback problems of every sort. And speaking of wars, isn’t it finally time to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan? More than $6 trillion has already been wasted on those wars and, in this time of global peril, even more is being wasted on this country’s forever conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. (Roughly $4 billion a month continues to be spent on Afghanistan alone, despite all the talk about “peace” there.)
2. Along with ending profligate weapons programs and quagmire wars, isn’t it time for the U.S. to begin dramatically reducing its military “footprint” on this planet? Roughly 800 U.S. military bases circle the globe in a historically unprecedented fashion at a yearly cost somewhere north of $100 billion. Cutting such numbers in half over the next decade would be a more than achievable goal. Permanently cutting provocative “war games” in South Korea, Europe, and elsewhere would be no less sensible. Are North Korea and Russia truly deterred by such dramatic displays of destructive military might?
3. Come to think of it, why does the U.S. need the immediate military capacity to fight two major foreign wars simultaneously, as the Pentagon continues to insist we do and plan for, in the name of “defending” our country? Here’s a radical proposal: if you add 70,000 Special Operations forces to 186,000 Marine Corps personnel, the U.S. already possesses a potent quick-strike force of roughly 250,000 troops. Now, add in the Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions and the 10th Mountain Division. What you have is more than enough military power to provide for America’s actual national security. All other Army divisions could be reduced to cadres, expandable only if our borders are directly threatened by war. Similarly, restructure the Air Force and Navy to de-emphasize the present “global strike” vision of those services, while getting rid of Donald Trump’s newest service, the Space Force, and the absurdist idea of taking war into low earth orbit. Doesn’t America already have enough war here on this small planet of ours?
4. Bring back the draft, just not for military purposes. Make it part of a national service program for improving America. It’s time for a new Civilian Conservation Corps focused on fostering a Green New Deal. It’s time for a new Works Progress Administration to rebuild America’s infrastructure and reinvigorate our culture, as that organization did in the Great Depression years. It’s time to engage young people in service to this country. Tackling COVID-19 or future pandemics would be far easier if there were quickly trained medical aides who could help free doctors and nurses to focus on the more difficult cases. Tackling climate change will likely require more young men and women fighting forest fires on the west coast, as my dad did while in the CCC — and in a climate-changing world there will be no shortage of other necessary projects to save our planet. Isn’t it time America’s youth answered a call to service? Better yet, isn’t it time we offered them the opportunity to truly put America, rather than themselves, first?
5. And speaking of “America First,” that eternal Trumpian catch-phrase, isn’t it time for all Americans to recognize that global pandemics and climate change make a mockery of walls and go-it-alone nationalism, not to speak of politics that divide, distract, and keep so many down? President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said that only Americans can truly hurt America, but there’s a corollary to that: only Americans can truly save America — by uniting, focusing on our common problems, and uplifting one another. To do so, it’s vitally necessary to put an end to fear-mongering (and warmongering). As President Roosevelt famously said in his first inaugural address in the depths of the Great Depression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear inhibits our ability to think clearly, to cooperate fully, to change things radically as a community.
6. To cite Yoda, the Jedi master, we must unlearn what we have learned. For example, America’s real heroes shouldn’t be “warriors” who kill or sports stars who throw footballs and dunk basketballs. We’re witnessing our true heroes in action right now: our doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel, together with our first responders, and those workers who stay in grocery stores, pharmacies, and the like and continue to serve us all despite the danger of contracting the coronavirus from customers. They are all selflessly resisting a threat too many of us either didn’t foresee or refused to treat seriously, most notably, of course, President Donald Trump: a pandemic that transcends borders and boundaries. But can Americans transcend the increasingly harsh and divisive borders and boundaries of our own minds? Can we come to work selflessly to save and improve the lives of others? Can we become, in a sense, lovers of humanity?
7. Finally, we must extend our love to encompass nature, our planet. For if we keep treating our lands, our waters, and our skies like a set of trash cans and garbage bins, our children and their children will inherit far harder times than the present moment, hard as it may be.
What these seven suggestions really amount to is rejecting a militarized mindset of aggression and a corporate mindset of exploitation for one that sees humanity and this planet more holistically. Isn’t it time to regain that vision of the earth we shared collectively during the Apollo moon missions: a fragile blue sanctuary floating in the velvety darkness of space, an irreplaceable home to be cared for and respected since there’s no other place for us to go? Otherwise, I fear that my father’s prediction will come true not just for me, but for generations to come and in ways that even he couldn’t have imagined.
A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, William Astore is a TomDispatch regular. His personal blog is Bracing Views.
Coronavirus truthers caught in epic lies and distorted stories about hospitals crisis
Coronavirus trutherism is the latest byproduct of the COVID-19 outbreak. Conservative conspiracy theorists have posted strategically angled photos and videos to prove the coronavirus crisis is fake. Some are even taking photos of hospitals in areas of the country where the crisis hasn’t even surfaced yet to prove that there isn’t a problem.
Sara Carter, a frequent guest on Fox News with Sean Hannity, saw a video from a known-conspiracy theorist showing a quiet Los Angeles hospital.
Here's Fox News contributor and Hannity regular Sara Carter flirting with covid trutherism last night. pic.twitter.com/1HI9pRTw0V — Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 30, 2020
She joined the chorus of those asking for photos and videos of the Torrance Memorial Medical Center in Torrance, California, just south of Los Angeles. The city had 9 cases of coronavirus 4 days ago. The conspiracy theorist claimed that it was an LA hospital that reporters said were “overrun” with coronavirus cases.
Just went to 2 hospitals in LA to check out these “War Zones” the MSM keeps telling us about.
They are very quiet & EMPTY. We are not being told the truth. Why?? Let’s get #FilmYourHospital trending. We ARE the news now. We can’t trust the news. Post pics of ur hospital here! pic.twitter.com/5AJ5L588lQ — DeAnna Lorraine
Pop-up emergency tents are being set up As part of our global response to #COVID19, we've set up our emergency field hospital to support @yourMLKCH in Los Angeles, which serves more than a million people.
Our equipment will help frontline health providers at MLKCH manage patient flow and treatment. pic.twitter.com/LgXVAHWCn7 — International Medical Corps (@IMC_Worldwide) March 30, 2020
Patients without coronavirus are being moved to the USNS Mercy so local hospitals can focus on the COVID-19 patients.
The U.S. Navy has released photos of the USNS Mercy taking in non-coronavirus patients in Los Angeles so shore-based hospitals can focus on treating COVID-19 cases.
Cpl. Alexa Hernandez/Petty Officer 2nd Class Abigayle Lutz/Petty Officer 2nd Class Erwin Jacob Miciano pic.twitter.com/u6FST7hzWI — Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) March 29, 2020
Other conspiracy theorists have followed with their own photos. One person taking photos of Baylor Scott & White Medical Center, in Grapevine, Texas. The country has 15 reported cases of coronavirus.
I am starting a thread on the “war zone” and overrun hospitals. Please add your pics or videos here of your local hospital if you happen to be near one. First Up – Baylor Grapevine, supposedly has 15 cases and being overrun. Ghost town. pic.twitter.com/iWrvFZu7wo
Another person replied to the tweet with their own photos of an unnamed hospital the person said was in Los Angeles. Other photos from the person’s account show the person north of Pasadena, California, which is far northwest of Los Angeles.
3 hospitals in Los Angeles area
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This was taken yesterday afternoon. I will go back this week again & check them out again. pic.twitter.com/bh3Sn5V6VH — Peace98
Conservative Todd Sterns reported from a Brooklyn hospital where he said the media reported a “war zone.” He didn’t go inside or show the cones blocking the entrances, but he walked around on the sidewalk outside of the hospital. He didn’t approach the tents that were visible in the video nor did he walk around the other side of the building.
Right-wing commentator Candace Owens tweeted it asking if “this is what New York hospitals looked and sounded like on 9/11.
The NYT has been reporting that conditions at NY hospitals are an “apocalyptic war zone”. Today they reported that ambulances are as overwhelmed as they were on 9/11.
Watch this video, taken yesterday. Do you believe this is what NY hospitals looked & sounded like on 9/11? https://t.co/TCYnAiDoVZ — Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) March 29, 2020
As a fact-check, the hospitals in New York on Sept. 11 were not chaotic nor were there floods of people, according to one doctor. When the buildings fell, there weren’t survivors unless they’d already escaped.
But when CNN investigative reporter Andrew Kaczynsky saw the video from Starnes, he started looking for other areas of the hospital the conservative claimed to be.
The video @toddstarnes took of Brooklyn Hospital's parking lot to claim "what's really going on" is nothing at New York City hospitals has 4 million views and 134K shares on Facebook.
It's the same hospital in the viral video of bodies being loaded into a refrigerated truck. pic.twitter.com/j0FO7Gr5Ey — andrew kaczynski
Photos show what was going on outside on the other side of the hospital:
JUST NOW: Refrigerated truck still parked at Brooklyn Hospital + material being unloaded. People waiting in line to be tested. pic.twitter.com/n4sPVOGZ1b — Marcus Baram (@mbaram) March 30, 2020
According to actor Jeffrey Wright, Starnes was offered an opportunity to investigate the makeshift morgue. He hasn’t indicated if he intends to go and film his experience.
Here’s why conservatives really oppose federal aid for the ‘undeserving’
There is a singular and profound question that tugs at the sleeve of even the most sober analyst pondering the federal response to coronavirus. To wit, what the hell is it with these people? Although he’s since backed off the proposal Michael Gerson couldn’t figure out why Trump would decide to re-open the nation on Easter:
To be sacrilegious requires some recognition of what is actually sacred — a type of knowledge Trump has never displayed. To him, choosing Easter must have been like selecting Independence Day or Arbor Day or Groundhog Day — a useful date on which to hang a plo
Likewise, Paul Waldman is baffled by Lindsey Graham’s attacks on nurses: “You know, the ones who right now are risking their lives to treat coronavirus patients, and are in some cases forced to wear trash bags because their hospitals have run out of protective gear.”
John Stoehr is equally befuddled by Graham, who was joined by Rick Scott, Tom Scott, and Ben Sasse in attacking the third coronavirus relief bill because it had the audacity to toss in a measly $600 extra in unemployment compensation. John has a theory about conservative ideology behind the senators’ performative opposition:
That interpretation is this: The rich can be trusted with public money, but not so everyone else. It’s OK to give Boeing tens of billions of dollars in relief aid. It’s OK to give corporations access to unlimited and cheap money from the Federal Reserve. But it’s not OK to give normal people an extra $600 a week, people who are at the same time being coaxed by billionaires into going back to work even at the risk of death.
It goes almost without saying that there’s more than a little connection between conservative economic ideology and conservative racial ideology. Part of the performance in modern conservatism is opposition to the undeserving receiving federal largesse, with “undeserving” being more or less explicitly defined by skin tone, depending on who’s talking at the moment.
It’s possible to read the senators’ rear-guard action as nothing more than an attempt to signal to the Trump-hoodooed base that their white bona fides were all in place, despite their inability to limit the bill’s direct relief to white working-class domestic automobile-driving Red Man chewers. You can’t win ’em all, sometimes you gotta help those big city folks too, you know.
As deep as the scar of racism runs in American society, though, there’s something even deeper at work here. Stoehr is right to point out the economic hierarchicalism that pervades this attitude. Somewhere along the way, Republicans went from Reagan’s belief that maybe the government should step off the necks of the wealthy a little, to Trump’s brag that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, to the more up-to-date proclamation that the economy should reopen to save the stock market, even if it meant potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths. Some of them really seem to believe that rich people are better than everybody else.
I suppose the “to be fair” part of this is to say that Congressional Republicans believe it’s important to fuel industries that employ thousands directly or provide the economic underpinnings of those who do, but this is a paper-thin rationalization. The trade-off for taking care of average working people was always going to be shoveling large stacks of cash at the rich. It doesn’t take much to work that out.
But where does the instinct for class warfare come from? I think Stoehr is right to frame his argument in religious terms: heavenly import, sacrilege, faith and ideology, which is faith’s steely cousin
A number of years ago, I was chatting with the theologian Walter Brueggemann’s then-wife Mary on a Sunday morning. She told me she’d been bemoaning some bit of racial egregiousness or another to her husband, and asked him why he thought people had to be this way. “There are two kinds of people in the world,” he replied. “Those who don’t see an order to the universe, and those who really want to see one.”
That’s about the size of it. Some people just want to know the names of all those they’re better than, to paraphrase a singer. And some of them, like the current occupant of the Oval Office, see the world as a profoundly zero-sum game: either you’re on top, or you’re a loser. There are no alternatives
This kind of domination play runs counter to the stated teachings of most of the religions Americans subscribe to, but let’s not kid ourselves. You can find elements of social and economic hierarchalism in all the major faiths, despite their loving concern for the neighbor. For as long as humans have pondered God or gods, there have been those who have been willing to invoke the sacred to justify their position at the top of the social heap.
In fact, as Brueggemann points out in his most famous book, faith in a god who doesn’t guarantee the social order is forever an anomaly. This is where religion turns the corner into ideology, just at the cusp of moving from gratitude for the blessings one has received to thinking the less fortunate deserve to be that way.
I’ll leave it to readers to decide if this is a necessary development of faith, or a form of idolatry. The truly interesting thing about it is how naked it is. Graham, the two Scotts, and Sasse have simply abandoned anything but the thinnest fig leaf of moral justification, and a mighty incoherent fig leaf at that. It’s as if the good Lord found them in the garden chomping away on an apple and without bothering to stop chewing they responded, “Buzz off, old man. We’re worried about our donor base.”
What is wrong with these people? God knows.
American Taxpayers paid millions for a low-cost ventilator for pandemics — which are now being sold overseas March 30, 2020 Pro Publica Five years ago, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tried to plug a crucial hole in its preparations for a global pandemic, signing a $13.8 million contract with a Pennsylvania manufacturer to create a low-cost, portable, easy-to-use ventilator that could be stockpiled for emergencies. This past September, with the design of the new Trilogy Evo Universal finally cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, HHS ordered 10,000 of the ventilators for the Strategic National Stockpile at a cost of $3,280 each.
But as the pandemic continues to spread across the globe, there is still not a single Trilogy Evo Universal in the stockpile.
Instead last summer, soon after the FDA’s approval, the Pennsylvania company that designed the device — a subsidiary of the Dutch appliance and technology giant Royal Philips N.V. — began selling two higher-priced commercial versions of the same ventilator around the world.
“We sell to whoever calls,” said a saleswoman at a small medical-supply company on Staten Island that bought 50 Trilogy Evo ventilators from Philips in early March and last week hiked its online price from $12,495 to $17,154. “We have hundreds of orders to fill. I think America didn’t take this seriously at first, and now everyone’s frantic.”
Last Friday, President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to compel General Motors to begin mass-producing another company’s ventilator under a federal contract. But neither Trump nor other senior officials made any mention of the Trilogy Evo Universal. Nor did HHS officials explain why they did not force Philips to accelerate delivery of these ventilators earlier this year, when it became clear that the virus was overwhelming medical facilities around the world.
An HHS spokeswoman told ProPublica that Philips had agreed to make the Trilogy Evo Universal ventilator “as soon as possible.” However, a Philips spokesman said the company has no plan to even begin production anytime this year.
Instead, Philips is negotiating with a White House team led by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to build 43,000 more complex and expensive hospital ventilators for Americans stricken by the virus.
Some experts said the nature of the current crisis — in which the federal government is scrambling to set up field hospitals in New York’s Central Park and the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center — underscores the urgent need for simpler, lower-cost ventilators. The story of the Trilogy Evo Universal, described here for the first time, also raises questions about the government’s reliance on public-private partnerships that public health officials have used to piece together important parts of their disaster safety net.
“That’s the problem of leaving any kind of disaster preparedness up to the market and market forces — it will never work,” said Dr. John Hick, an emergency medicine specialist in Minnesota who has advised HHS on pandemic preparedness since 2002. “The market is not going to give priority to a relatively no-frills but dependable ventilator that’s not expensive.”
The lack of ventilators has quickly become the most critical challenge to keeping alive many of the people most seriously sickened by the virus. Ventilators not only help people breathe but also can provide pressure that holds the lungs open so the air sacs don’t collapse.
Neither HHS nor Philips would provide a copy of their contract, citing proprietary technical information that would have to be redacted under a Freedom of Information Act request. But from public documents and interviews with current and former government officials, it appears that HHS has at times been remarkably deferential to Philips — and never more so than in the current pandemic.
From the start of its long effort to produce a low-cost, portable ventilator, the small HHS office in charge of the project, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, knew that it might need to move quickly to increase production in an emergency and insisted that potential partners be able to ramp up quickly in the event of a pandemic.
But the contract HHS signed in September 2019 gave Philips almost a year before it had to produce a single Trilogy Evo Universal, and two more years to fulfill the order of 10,000 ventilators.
On the same day in July that the FDA cleared the stockpile version of the ventilator, it granted the application of Philips’ U.S. subsidiary, Respironics, to sell commercial versions of the Trilogy Evo. Philips quickly began shipping the commercial models overseas from its Murrysville, Pennsylvania, factory.
Steve Klink, the company’s Amsterdam-based spokesman, said Philips was within its rights under the HHS contract to prioritize the commercial versions of the Trilogy Evo. An HHS spokeswoman — who insisted she could not be identified by name, despite speaking for the agency — did not disagree.
“Keep in mind that companies are always free to develop other products based on technology developed in collaboration with the government,” she said in a statement to ProPublica. “This approach often reduces development costs and ensures the product the government needs is available for many years.”
Just last month, HHS gave a very different impression to Congress, hailing the Trilogy Evo it funded as a breakthrough in its campaign for pandemic preparedness.
“This game-changing device, considered a pipedream just a few years ago, is now available at affordable prices to improve stockpiling and deployment” in an emergency, the agency told Congress in a budget document delivered on Feb 10.
But less than two weeks later, officials overseeing the Strategic National Stockpile approached Philips with an urgent appeal: Start making our ventilators. On March 10, Philips agreed to a modification of the HHS contract — one that called for the company to produce the Trilogy Evo Universal “as soon as possible,” a spokesperson said.
However, in a subsequent statement, the HHS spokeswoman said Philips is only required to deliver the ventilators “as they are completed.” Klink, the company spokesman, said Philips was only committed to meeting the original contract deadline of 10,000 ventilators by September 2022.
Had government officials insisted that Philips first produce the ventilators that taxpayers paid to design, the government could conceivably be distributing all 10,000 to hospitals now. Last year, Philips plants in Pennsylvania and California produced 500 ventilators of various models per week; they sped up to 1,000 per week earlier this year, Klink said. At that pace, the stockpile ventilators could have been completed even if Philips devoted only part of its lines to their production.
Klink said the reason the company is not producing the stockpile ventilator is because it has not yet been mass-produced and would require time-consuming trial runs. In the current crisis, it’s faster and more efficient to continue producing the versions it is already making, he said.
Asked if Philips could hand over its Trilogy Evo Universal design to another manufacturer, he argued that the fundamental constraint on production is not the company’s assembly lines but its dependence on more than 100 smaller companies around the world that make the 650 parts needed for a hospital ventilator.
“We cannot sell a ventilator with only 649 parts,” he said. “It needs to be the whole 650.”
It is difficult to assess how much profit motives might be driving Philips’ decisions about which ventilators to produce because the company does not disclose how much it charges different clients for commercial models.
The commercial version of the Trilogy Evo has had its own problems. Not long after it began selling the ventilators last summer, Philips sent out recall notices to customers in Europe and the U.S., alerting them to a software glitch that prompted the devices to shut down without sounding their alarm. The software has since been updated and the problem solved, the company said.
Klink said Philips hopes to be making 4,000 ventilators of all types each week in the U.S. by October, and that it would prioritize “those communities and countries that need it the most.”
But as the pandemic spreads, desperate global demand for the commercial models of the Trilogy Evo is driving up prices sharply, and evidence from the chaotic open market for the devices raises questions about Philips’ stated commitment to prioritize the neediest.
On Staten Island, a saleswoman at No Insurance Medical Supplies, who would give her name only as Jeanette, said the company was selling to “anyone who calls,” including doctors and individuals. The company’s first shipment of 50 devices sold out quickly, but an additional five ventilators arrived on Friday. The company requested 148 more, but Philips Respironics said it could only provide 11 ventilators by April 6, she said. The company’s prices are determined by what the manufacturer charges, she said.
The competition abroad is also intense. On March 12, the regional government of Madrid, one of the cities hardest hit by the virus, bought 10 Trilogy Evo ventilators from a Spanish medical supply company for about $11,000 each. In Budapest, Hungary, the Uzsoki Street Hospital announced that a local property development company had donated two “ultra-modern” Philips Trilogy Evo ventilators on March 18.
The struggle has grown so fierce that last week, a trade group representing ventilator manufacturers asked the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to decide for the manufacturers whom they should sell to first.
“We would appreciate the Administration’s leadership and the advice of clinical and other experts within the Administration in deciding how to allocate these products in the most effective way,” the Advanced Medical Technology Association wrote in a letter to FEMA Administrator Peter Gaynor.
Medical experts and public health officials have believed for nearly two decades that they needed a less-expensive and simpler-to-operate portable ventilator that could be made and distributed quickly in an emergency.
“This is not a new problem,” said W. Craig Vanderwagen, a former senior HHS official who oversaw studies that led to the government’s early efforts to design and build a low-cost portable ventilator for such eventualities. “We knew back in the 2000s that ventilators were going to be critical in pandemic preparedness. That was a clear gap that we identified.”
In the early 2000s, American public health experts and government officials were gripped by a sense of urgency they had not felt before. The 9/11 attacks and the anthrax scare that followed underscored the need for sweeping new actions to keep the country safe. Outbreaks of Avian influenza — first reported in Hong Kong in 1997 — exposed the public health system’s vulnerability to new, highly fatal pathogens from overseas. The George W. Bush administration’s disastrously slow and inept response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 prompted widespread calls for the government to strengthen its ability to deal with a growing array of emergencies, from new, highly contagious diseases to previously unthinkable terrorist attacks.
One obvious vulnerability was to a viral pandemic or a chemical or biological attack that would ravage the lungs of its victims, setting off a cascade of cases of what doctors call Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, or ARDS.
“None of us expected an event on the scale of what we’re going through now,” said Dr. Lewis Rubinson, a pulmonologist who participated in several of the early government-sponsored medical studies. “We had to guess: What would the patients look like? What we predicted correctly was that we could face massive cases of ARDS.”
By the early 2000s, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had already begun working to stockpile a few thousand ventilators for such an eventuality, former officials said. But studies by medical experts and government scientists — including sophisticated models of what might occur in the event of various disasters, outbreaks or attacks — suggested a bigger problem. Hospitals could be crippled not only by shortages of complex and costly ventilators, but also by a lack of the trained respiratory technicians who are generally required to operate the machines.
The experts envisioned one important solution: a portable ventilator that was less complex than hospital machines and could be more quickly produced, safely stockpiled and widely distributed in emergencies. They envisioned a device that could be deployed in field hospitals like the ones that authorities are now rushing to create in Central Park and elsewhere.
The job of bringing such a device to life fell to BARDA, an innovative office of HHS that was established in 2006 to help the country prepare for pandemic influenza, new types of infectious diseases or an attack or accident involving chemical, biological or radiological weapons.
Much of BARDA’s work has been focused on developing potentially critical vaccines and other medicines that are not necessarily profitable for big pharmaceutical companies. The agency often works with medical researchers at the National Institutes of Health and elsewhere, identifying promising therapies and other innovations, and then forms partnerships with private biotechnology or other companies to create the drugs and move them through various stages of regulation.
In 2008, BARDA began trying to find a company that could make a ventilator that would be inexpensive — ideally, less than $2,000 each — and could be simple enough to use that “inexperienced health care providers with limited or no respiratory support training” could operate the devices during a pandemic, according to the agency’s solicitation for bids.
BARDA also anticipated the shortage of parts and competing priorities that the ventilator industry now faces. Companies bidding for the contract had to show they could secure the parts needed to “ramp up production to supply at least” 1,700 ventilators per month and 10,000 in six months’ time. The companies also had to pledge that government “contracts will be honored during a pandemic,” the initial solicitation said.
With only a couple of bids, BARDA settled on a small, privately held ventilator company in Costa Mesa, California, Newport Medical Instruments Inc. BARDA and Newport signed a $6.4 million contract in September 2010, specifying that the money would be doled out incrementally as the company met various milestones.
But in May 2012, Newport was purchased by a larger Irish medical device company, Covidien, for $108 million. Covidien quickly downsized and asked Rick Crawford, Newport’s former head of research and development and the lead designer of the BARDA ventilator, to finish up the project without any staff assigned to him. Crawford said he took a job with another company.
“I don’t know how you finish a project when nobody reports to you,” he recalled thinking.
A former BARDA official who worked on the project said that Covidien began raising issue after issue and demanded more money. BARDA agreed, eventually tacking on almost $2 million more to the price tag, records show. Even so, Covidien abandoned the project.
A spokesman for the still-larger firm that acquired Covidien in 2015, Medtronic, said that the prototype ventilator created by Newport Medical “would not have been able to meet the specifications required by the government, nor at the price required.” In a statement responding to a story in The New York Times, Medtronic said it left the federal government with all the designs and equipment created in the project.
Several former BARDA officials said such outcomes come with their territory. Like big pharmaceutical companies, they had to take chances, especially in the development of vaccines.
“There are going to be risks like that when you partner with businesses,” said one former senior BARDA official, who, like others, asked for anonymity because she was not authorized to speak for the agency. “It’s a problem that we at BARDA had encountered before, where a company changed hands and changed priorities.”
In March 2016, less than two years after signing its ventilator contract with BARDA, Philips Respironics agreed to pay $34.8 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit under the False Claims Act and the Anti-Kickback Statute. Justice lawyers accused the manufacturer of effectively paying kickbacks to medical suppliers to buy its masks for sleep apnea. The company also agreed to abide by a five-year Corporate Integrity Agreement with HHS inspector general that imposed a series of oversight measures on the company’s operations.
With BARDA’s continuing support, Philips finally won FDA approval for the Trilogy Evo Universal ventilator in July 2019. Klink, the Philips spokesman, said the $13.8 million from HHS covered only a portion of the design and development costs for the ventilator and that the company invested more.
Rubinson, now the chief medical officer of Morristown Medical Center in Morristown, New Jersey, praised the BARDA effort as essential, adding that if 10,000 ventilators seems like a small number in the COVID-19 crisis, it had to be understood in the context of government officials’ typical unwillingness to buy equipment it might only need in an emergency.
“They could have bought a million ventilators,” he said. “And then you would be writing about the boondoggle of all these devices that never got used.”
Today, the government’s failure to obtain the Trilogy Evo Universal is seen by some experts as the real game changer.
“Even if a few months ago we had taken dramatic action to develop these kinds of ventilators, it would have been better,” said Hick, the emergency medicine specialist in Minnesota. “If I had a ventilator that cost $4,000 rather than $16,000, I’d be in better shape. We can buy a lot more of them.”
A cashier wearing a face mask and protected by a plastic tarp pictured in a supermarket in Strasbourg, eastern France, on March 19, 2020. © Frederick Florin, AFP
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