Bat 'super immunity' may explain how bats carry coronaviruses -- USask study

Bat-virus adaptation may explain species spillover, researchers say

UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN

 

IMAGE: USASK RESEARCHER VIKRAM MISRA (LEFT) AND FORMER PHD STUDENT ARINJAY BANERJEE POSING WITH A BAT FINGER PUPPET. view more 

CREDIT: DAVE STOBBE FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN.

A University of Saskatchewan (USask) research team has uncovered how bats can carry the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus without getting sick--research that could shed light on how coronaviruses make the jump to humans and other animals.

Coronaviruses such as MERS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and more recently the COVID19-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus, are thought to have originated in bats. While these viruses can cause serious and often fatal disease in people, for reasons not previously well understood, bats seem unharmed.

"The bats don't get rid of the virus and yet don't get sick. We wanted to understand why the MERS virus doesn't shut down the bat immune responses as it does in humans," said USask microbiologist Vikram Misra.

In research just published in Scientific Reports, the team has demonstrated for the first time that cells from an insect-eating brown bat can be persistently infected with MERS coronavirus for months, due to important adaptations from both the bat and the virus working together.

"Instead of killing bat cells as the virus does with human cells, the MERS coronavirus enters a long-term relationship with the host, maintained by the bat's unique 'super' immune system," said Misra, corresponding author on the paper. "SARS-CoV-2 is thought to operate in the same way."

Misra says the team's work suggests that stresses on bats--such as wet markets, other diseases, and possibly habitat loss--may have a role in coronavirus spilling over to other species.

"When a bat experiences stress to their immune system, it disrupts this immune system-virus balance and allows the virus to multiply," he said.

The research was carried out at USask's Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization--International Vaccine Centre (VIDO-InterVac), one of the world's largest containment level 3 research facilities, by a team of researchers from USask's Western College of Veterinary Medicine and VIDO-InterVac.

"We see that the MERS coronavirus can very quickly adapt itself to a particular niche, and although we do not completely understand what is going on, this demonstrates how coronaviruses are able to jump from species to species so effortlessly," said VIDO-InterVac scientist Darryl Falzarano, who co-led the bat study, developed the first potential treatment for MERS-CoV, and is leading VIDO-InterVac's efforts to develop a vaccine against COVID-19.

So far, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has infected more than 3.5 million people worldwide and killed seven per cent of those infected. In contrast, the MERS virus infected nearly 2,500 people in 2012 but killed one in every three people infected. There is no vaccine for either SARS-CoV-2 or MERS. While camels are the known intermediate hosts of MERS-CoV, bats are suspected to be the ancestral host.

Coronaviruses rapidly adapt to the species they infect, Misra said, but little is known on the molecular interactions of these viruses with their natural bat hosts. A 2017 USask-led study showed that bat coronaviruses can persist in their natural bat host for at least four months of hibernation.

When exposed to the MERS virus, bat cells adapt--not by producing inflammation-causing proteins that are hallmarks of getting sick, but rather by maintaining a natural antiviral response, a function which shuts down in other species, including humans. Simultaneously, the MERS virus also adapts to the bat host cells by very rapidly mutating one specific gene, he said.

Operating together, these adaptations result in the virus remaining long-term in the bat but being rendered harmless until something--such as disease or other stressors--upsets this delicate equilibrium.

Next, the team will turn its focus to understanding how the bat-borne MERS virus adapts to infection and replication in camelid (a group of even-toed ungulates that includes camels) and human cells.

"This information may be critical for predicting the next bat virus that will cause a pandemic," said Misra.

###

Lead researchers on the paper were Misra's former PhD students Arinjay Banerjee and Sonu Subudhi who are now at McMaster University and Massachusetts General Hospital respectively. Other team members included researchers Noreen Rapin and Jocelyne Lew, as well as summer student Richa Jain

There's No Such Thing as Independent Music in the Age of Coronavirus



IMAGE FROM SHUTTERSTOCK |ILLUSTRATION BY DREW MILLARD

America’s original gig workers are suddenly out of a job. Banding together as part of a broader labor movement may be the only move musicians have left.

By Emilie Friedlander Apr 23 2020

Ionce spent six months living in the mailroom of VICE's Brooklyn office. I'm actually not kidding: Back before my long-time employer took over the building, the brick-and-cinder-block warehouse on South Second and Kent was home to numerous artist lofts, along with various now-defunct underground music venues with filthy bathrooms and lax smoking policies, like Death by Audio, Glasslands, and 285 Kent.

Living inside that tunnel-like network of interconnected live/work spaces was probably a health hazard: For about $400 a month, I camped out in a stuffy, windowless crawlspace on the upper level of a two-tiered loft bedroom, pretty much exactly corresponding to where the VICE mailroom is right now. But I needed to get out of the spot where I was staying in Bushwick, and a musician friend, who slept on the bottom level, offered to split the rent with me on the room.

It was the first of a number of small acts of kindness I would experience as a broke, 20-something music writer during my long association with that building—all from music people who lived and practiced in that space, who played shows or built crazy-sounding guitar pedals there.

When the music site I was working for got shut down, a bandmate of mine who gigged there got me a job waiting tables up the street. After I started a publication with a friend who was working at a booker down the hall at 285 Kent, the venue's leaseholder let us set up a big plastic table so we could use it as our office. I returned the favor by letting another 285 Kent employee, who actually lived in the venue, pop over to our apartment in the morning to use our shower.

THE AUTHOR'S OLD APARTMENT ON S 1ST STREET, IN WHAT IS NOW THE VICE BUILDING.

Scenes can be awfully competitive, but if you've ever been a part of one, you probably also have a story about how music provided you with a support system at a time when you desperately needed one. And if you've been paying any attention to the music Internet as the coronavirus crisis grinds live music to a halt, you've likely noticed examples of this sort of mutuality in every corner of the independent music scene, from shuttered venues pivoting to livestreams to raise money for artists with canceled shows, to musicians circulating petitions demanding unemployment benefits, increased streaming royalty rates, and protections against digital copyright infringement. On Friday, March 20, fans spent $4.3 million on Bandcamp after the site declared it was waving its share of music sales for the day—and the NYC Low-Income Artist/Freelancer Relief fund, one of many artist-created fundraisers, has raised over $100,000 so far for BIPOC, Trans/GNC/NB/Queer artists and freelancers whose livelihoods have been cratered by the pandemic.

Independent musicians aren't typically the people who come to mind when you think of the U.S. labor movement. Fans secretly envy them as a class of professional seekers with the luxury of sleeping in on Mondays, traveling the globe, and spending hours just feeling their feelings as the rest of us grind our teeth at a desk. And though their 20th-century counterparts had a proud history of union organizing, we tend to celebrate them less for their civic-mindedness than for the ways they embody a kind of irreverent, outsider approach to life. We love them because they're unashamedly themselves—and, often, for their insistence on quite literally doing it themselves, relying on talent and hustle to build a counter-narrative to an industry that has historically excluded them.

But as the coronavirus obliterates one of the last reliable sources of income that most musicians had left, logging on to music Twitter can feel like watching indie music's conception of itself shatter in slow motion—and something new rising in its place. As writer Liz Pelly has astutely observed, the very notion of "independent music" was already starting to feel pretty hollow in an era where artists are all beholden to streaming services that pay pennies-on-the-dollar per stream. Now, for the first time in our lifetime, and partly because they've been forced to, musicians are collectively voicing the fact that they are not merely exquisite souls, but workers—workers who are now out of a job, and who deserve the same protections that all workers do.


***

Musicians were already in a precarious position before the crisis hit: America's original gig workers, they've been cobbling together a living from touring, music and merch sales, music lessons, and sporadic licensing deals and label advances since long before Silicon Valley repurposed the term to make economic precarity seem desirable.

Like Uber drivers, Instacart workers, and others who subsist primarily on 1099 income, musicians don't typically qualify for unemployment in most states; employer-sponsored health coverage and paid sick leave are for the most part off the table, which is frightening when you consider how little money many of them are making in the first place. In 2018, a survey by the Music Industry Research Association found that the median income for musicians in the U.S. was between $20,000 and $25,000 per year, with 61 percent reporting that the income they made from music was not enough to meet their living expenses.

"Anyone fully dependent on music or mostly dependent on music was completely fucked by this," said Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, a Rhode Island-based musician and organizer probably best known as the guitarist for the punk band Downtown Boys. "You were increasingly only making money via performing, and all of a sudden that one revenue stream is completely and utterly destroyed."

Like most independent musicians in the streaming era, DeFrancesco says the majority of his income comes from touring and playing festivals; in 2019, he estimates, gigging comprised 90 percent. Not surprisingly, once he noticed venue performances and festivals being canceled across the country last month, he found himself logging onto the website for the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training, trying to file for unemployment.

"I spent hours and hours trying to fill out this application, getting on the phone with them, getting weird error messages," he says. "Of course, to finally get to the point where it was like, 'Oh, I still can't apply for unemployment with 1099 income.'"

As the Senate deliberated over a historic $2.2 trillion stimulus package in Washington, he started emailing with other musicians. The group came to a spur-of-the-moment decision to launch an open letter to Congress, demanding an expansion of unemployment and other benefits for musicians, crew members, and other independent contractors. Before long, hundreds of musicians were signing the petition every day; after legacy indie artists like Bikini Kill, Fugazi, and Neutral Milk Hotel jumped on, the music press picked up the story.

Fortunately for millions of people in this country, when the bill passed, it included a provision expanding some unemployment benefits to freelancers and other self-employed people, along with benefits like paid sick leave and paid family leave. While it's hard to say how much of an impact the letter made (DeFrancesco says he did receive a letter from Nancy Pelosi's office, acknowledging receipt and expressing their appreciation), it was a striking show of solidarity from a group of artists who, on the whole, aren't exactly accustomed to openly identifying as part of the working class.

"This group was a group of workers who were not yet organized but who were angry, who were out of work, and suddenly had time," said DeFrancesco, who cut his teeth as an organizer while working in the hotel business. On the day that we spoke, he and a group of Rhode Island-based musicians had launched a similar open letter demanding that the state government distribute federal funding for artists and other gig economy workers "immediately and without undue burden on applicants," along with implementing a rent freeze and the creation of an artist relief fund. (So far, he says, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts has already begun making emergency grant funding available).

***
As the live music shutdown magnifies the damage wrought by a decade-long decline in album sales and a streaming economy that largely benefits artists who are already very successful to begin with (or who happen to land a coveted playlist placement), other musicians have been focusing on putting pressure on platforms to demand a fairer payout.

When a show she was slated to play opening for Anti-Flag in mid-March got canceled, Boston-based singer-songwriter Evan Greer wasn't necessarily fretting over the lost work. She had a day job as the deputy director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights organization, but she started worrying about how her friends in the queer music community were going to get by. "All of the income they had planned for the next three months just evaporated in a week," she remembers.

When she thought back to the last streaming royalties check she'd received from her label—the amount, she said, was "totally laughable"—she started to get angry. "If we're building a music industry where you can only make a living if you either create music that's designed to game a specific company's algorithm, rather than the music that you want to make—or you tour 300 days a year—then we're creating a music industry that leaves a lot of people out," she said.

On a whim, she logged onto the Action Network and drafted a petition demanding that Spotify immediately—and permanently—triple the amount they pay artists per stream, in addition to donating $500,000 to music charity Sweet Relief. (In 2019, according to one analysis, the company paid artists an average of $0.00318 per stream, which means that in order to make $3180, your song would need to be streamed a million times). The petition has 2001 signatures and counting.

On March 25, about a week after the petition started circulating, Spotify went wide with an announcement: The company was unveiling a new project called Spotify COVID-19 Music Relief, donating funds to five music-related charities and matching outside donations dollar-for-dollar, for a total contribution of $10 million. It also unveiled plans to introduce a controversial new feature that would enable musicians to raise money directly from their artist profile pages, by linking out to a fundraising page of their choice. (When it debuted this week alongside a charitable partnership with CashApp, musicians compared the feature to a "tip jar," with one writer describing it as a "tacit admission that artists are not being paid enough.")

Greer doesn't know what effect, if any, the petition had on Spotify's internal calculus, but she's glad to have contributed to the chorus of voices demanding that Spotify do something in response to the crisis, even if its focus on charitable donations felt a bit like an attempt to paper over the problem. "This is kind of the version of the boss sending everyone a nice fruit basket instead of just like paying you," she said. It didn't help that just a few weeks before, Spotify announced it was teaming with Amazon, Google, and Pandora to appeal a U.S. Copyright Royalty Board ruling mandating that streaming services increase its royalty payments to songwriters by 44%.

That artists aren't simply pulling their catalogs en masse speaks to a truth they know as well as their digital overlords do: Musicians aren't really in a position to opt out of a system that reduces their songs (not to mention the behavior and moods of the people who stream them) to widgets in an ad-revenue machine. As record stores shutter and a formerly robust music journalism scrapes by as a corpse of its former self, listeners looking to discover new music will continue turning to platforms that are designed for that express purpose, especially when that means they can consume nearly every album in the world for less than ten bucks a month. In an industry where attention is everything, there's no fate worse than becoming invisible.

***

Like many gig-economy workers, today's musicians are beholden to the cold logic of invisible algorithms that determine when they will get paid and how much, forgoing the stability that comes with traditional employment for the freedom that comes with being able to make one's own hours and decide how much one will work.

Whether they agree to this arrangement because they find it appealing, or because they feel they have no other choice, they're participants in a system that diminishes the cost of their labor while benefiting the wealthy few. Lest we forget, streaming is an extraordinarily lucrative business: According to the RIAA, last year, the U.S. record industry generated $8.8 billion from streaming alone, more than the total revenue of the entire recorded-music sector in 2017. And as your average independent musician struggles to pay rent, major labels Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group, also known as the "big three," are doing pretty well; in Q4 of 2019, they jointly generated nearly $1 million an hour in streaming, according to a Music Business News analysis of the companies' quarterly financial reports.

Technically speaking, though, most musicians don't actually work for these services; unlike the Instacart shoppers who went on strike earlier this month to demand hazard pay, sick leave, and hand sanitizer, they don't even boast a common employer to rise up against. Instead, they're disconnected actors in an attention economy that operates according to a survival-of-the-fittest logic, forced to compete with each other for each fraction of a penny they receive.

Partly owing to this uncomfortable marriage between counterculture and hustle culture, Mat Dryhurst, an artist and researcher who works as a lecturer at the New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, has spent the past few years arguing that the term "independent music" is no longer fit for purpose. For one thing, the cultural context it describes—that of an alternative musical economy arising out of the indie rock label system of the 1980s and 1990s—no longer applies in a world where underground musicians and pop stars are all competing for attention on the same publicly traded platforms.


Over the phone, Dryhurst was quick to credit that spirit of "irreverent individualism" for powering some of the greatest counter-cultural moments of the 20th century (think: the hippie movement, punk rock and hip-hop and early DJ culture, 1990s "do-it-yourself"). But in the era of platform capitalism, he fears, it may simply have the effect of dividing us.


In an April 2019 editorial for the Guardian, Dryhurst suggested the term "interdependence" as a more appropriate descriptor for what a genuine 21st-century alternative might look like. "[When] people think romantically about the independent music industry, most of the things that they actually like about it can be described as the interdependent components of it," he told me. "Even though the singer is the most prominent person in the press shot, they're going out there in the world, and as a result of them getting paid, the band members get paid, and then the label gets paid, and then the person who made the artwork gets paid, and then the mixing engineer gets paid. That infrastructure, to me, presents an interesting hard contrast [with] the general march toward isolation."

It's tempting to say that the coronavirus will be the thing that pushes music out of the era of independence and into a more interdependent one—though there were signs of this even before the virus ground the entire industry to a halt.

DeFrancesco and Greer are part of an informal network of musicians from across the country who have staged a handful of organizing campaigns over the past few years. (DeFrancesco estimates the group of participating musicians to be about a thousand strong.) In 2017, they convinced SXSW to remove a clause in its artist contract saying that it would work with ICE to deport foreign artists who violated the terms of the agreement. In 2019, they got 40 major music festivals to agree to a ban on facial recognition technology. They've since staged a number of digital direct actions focused on Amazon's ties to U.S. immigration enforcement, working under the banner No Music for Ice.

You could see a similar impulse at work during the first few months of this year, when, for a brief moment, it felt like artists from all over the musical spectrum—from Soccer Mommy and Vampire Weekend to Public Enemy and Cardi B—were collectively leveraging their influence in support of former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, culminating in an eclectic, oddly scene-agnostic traveling music festival the campaign dubbed "BerniePalooza."

The Vermont senator is out of the race and musicians' hope for a self-proclaimed "arts president" has been dashed, but it's hard to imagine musicians losing that taste for collective action any time soon. DeFrancesco sees increased public arts funding as something high on his list of priorities as an organizer, along with musicians lending their support to other causes that support all members of the working class during this time of crisis, such a rent freeze and Medicare for All.

But along with demanding more from our government and large music companies, DeFrancesco, Greer, and Dryhurst expect to see musicians using the crisis as an opportunity to experiment with alternative forms of economic support, from homegrown wealth-sharing initiatives to novel platforms that offer a glimpse of what an independent world without Big Streaming might look like.

In March, musicians Zola Jesus and Devon Welsh unveiled Koir TV, a site that aims to streamline the process for musicians looking to collect revenue while they livestream performances from home. Ampled, a project incubated at the New Museum, is a Patreon-like, artist and worker-owned cooperative that enables musicians to share original audio and other content with fans for a monthly donation. "In today's platform economy, musicians are digital sharecroppers," co-founder Austin Robey told me in an email. "They generate all the value for platforms, yet capture none of it. Our mission is to make music more equitable for artists, and to provide an alternative to extractive investor-owned platforms."

Relying on the goodwill of one's community is no substitute for fair wages and a public safety net, but at times like these, that mutual support system—our fundamental interdependence—may be the only thing we have left. After New York City enacted a moratorium on public gatherings, workers at venues and booking companies all over the city, including the company I co-founded, organized GoFundMe campaigns to offset some of the financial consequences they were facing as a result of their schedule of shows being interrupted.

Watching the names of people I hadn't seen in almost a decade pop up on the GoFundMe dashboard—people I used to party with at 285 Kent, the sort of life-long music lovers I know still buy records as often as they can—I felt a sense of community I hadn't known I had been missing. Somehow, it was the tersest comment that finally caused me to cry: "Thanks for all the list spots."

These Artists Are Organizing a Musicians' Union to Demand COVID-19 Aid

The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers sent a letter of demands to Congress signed by members of Fugazi, Downtown Boys, Speedy Ortiz, and many more.

By Josh Terry May 4 2020

DOWNTOWN BOYS AND SPEEDY ORTIZ ARE TWO OF THE HUNDREDS OF BANDS TO SIGN UMAW'S LETTER. (PHOTO CREDIT: LEFT, FARRAH SHEIKY AND RIGHT, SHERVIN LAINEZ)

A long list of independent artists has formed the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) to respond to the devastating effects the coronavirus pandemic has had on touring musicians and the industry as a whole. On top of efforts to secure more aid for struggling musicians during the crisis, the union will also "address issues facing musicians such as streaming payments, mechanical royalties, relationships between musicians and venues and record labels and more."


In its first action, the UMAW has sent a detailed letter to Congress with a list of demands for extended benefits in the next congressional relief package. "Musicians and all gig workers are struggling hard right now. Rent is due, bills are due, debt is piling up, and many of us still haven’t gotten any financial support. We need more immediately if we’re going to survive," co-organizer and Downtown Boys' Joey La Neve DeFrancesco said in a statement.

As of press time, over 278 artists have signed a letter of demands including members of Fugazi, Speedy Ortiz, Downtown Boys, Diet Cig, Torres, Alice Bag, Sonic Youth, Frankie Cosmos, Eve 6, Mannequin Pussy, Charly Bliss, of Montreal, Half Waif, DIIV, Thursday, La Dispute, and dozens more.



"Many of us have been out of work since early March," the letter reads."Even when we receive the promised benefits, it will be too little and too late to survive the catastrophe facing our industry."

To mitigate the economic catastrophe facing music workers, the UMAW letter lists six demands including an extension of CARES act benefits until the end of 2020, an expansion of Medicare, a national rent and mortgage cancellation, and more funding to the National Endowment of the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the U.S. Postal Service.

"The above include the bare minimum needed to ensure that musicians, self-employed people, and all workers are able to survive the COVID crisis and its devastating economic aftermath with dignity," the letter continues. "Musicians and artists perform labor that provides entertainment, comfort, and meaning, for countless Americans, particularly during quarantine. If we are to continue producing through this crisis and afterward, we must have rights, respect, and immediate economic relief."

You can read the letter in full at UMAW's just-launched website, and if you're a musician, DJ, producer, road crew, or any in any gig related to music, you can sign the letter and join the group. To celebrate its launch, the UMAW will host a livestream concert featuring sets from Algiers, DIIV, and more. 

Wildlife Traffickers Are Setting Up Fake Zoos On Facebook To Sell The Scales Of Endangered Pangolins

The pages are as easy to find as searching the word “pangolin" in Vietnamese.

Ryan BroderickBuzzFeed News Reporter May 6, 2020

Facebook

Wildlife traffickers are openly selling critically endangered pangolins and their scales on Facebook, setting up profiles for fake petting zoos that direct potential buyers to private WhatsApp numbers where deals are made.

In an investigation published Wednesday, the Tech Transparency Project found half a dozen public posts selling pangolin scales simply by searching for the name of the animal written in Vietnamese. Many of the pages offered pangolin scales, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine. The Tech Transparency Project is a research initiative by the Campaign for Accountability, a nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog organization.

“The pangolin is the world's most trafficked animal,” the Tech Transparency Project’s executive director, Daniel Stevens, told BuzzFeed News. “And it's still easy to find these animals to buy on Facebook.”

Two of the pages discovered by the Tech Transparency Report were taken down by Facebook after BuzzFeed News contacted the platform for comment.

Facebook said it doesn't tolerate the illegal trading of endangered wildlife and their parts on our platforms and will take down pages or events and associated accounts when they are found to violate these policies. The site's moderators use a combination of technology, reports from NGO partners, reports from our community, and human review to detect and remove violating content.

“We prohibit the trading of endangered wildlife or their parts," a spokesperson for Facebook told BuzzFeed News. "It's illegal, it's wrong, and we have teams devoted to stopping activity like this."

The main way traffickers sell pangolins on Facebook is by creating fake listings for zoos. On three pages viewed by BuzzFeed News, the moderator had listed the profile as a zoo or animal rescue service, even though the pages had titles like “Pangolin Scales for Sale in Vietnam" and “Rhino Horns and Pangolin scales for sale in China.” Many of the pages also direct potential buyers toward WhatsApp numbers.

“We discretely hunt and sell Rhino Horn and pangolin scales contact us for more information on purchase, WhatsApp me,” one page read.

Sarah Uhlemann, international program director and senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, told BuzzFeed News she wasn’t surprised that the Tech Transparency Project’s researchers were able to find pangolins on Facebook. Uhlemann said she was able to find online vendors the same way that the Tech Transparency Project team did: by googling the word “pangolin" in simplified Mandarin.

“It's not that hard to find,” she said. “I would say that the Vietnamese link is not surprising to me.”

“We discretely hunt and sell Rhino Horn and pangolin scales contact us for more information on purchase, WhatsApp me,” one page read.

Uhlemann said that the Vietnamese Facebook users selling pangolin scales are probably connected to a larger network that traffics African pangolins from countries like Nigeria to Vietnam and then into China. “We're seeing a lot of scales coming out of Nigeria and usually shipped with ivory,” she said. According to Uhlemann, the pangolin scales are typically powdered, combined with other Chinese herbal medicines, and then sold in a mixture that can be consumed in a pill; it is touted for a variety of uses, including lactation, skin disease, and palsy.

And demand for pangolins has not diminished despite the animal's population being decimated in China and are labeled as endangered or critically endangered around the world. According to an April report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, seizures of illegally hunted pangolins from Africa and intended for Asian markets have increased tenfold since 2014.

“One operation last April seized 25 tons of African pangolin scales — representing an estimated 50,000 dead pangolins — with a market value of some $7 million,” the UN office's executive director, Ghada Waly, said in the report. “Between 2014 and 2018, the equivalent of 370,000 pangolins were seized globally.”


Facebook

The Tech Transparency Project discovered another pangolin trafficker who created a Facebook event page in South Africa. The event, which was viewed by BuzzFeed News, was titled, “Sandawana and Pangolin Animals on Sale Worls [sic] Wide.” The event included a WhatsApp number and advertised a “love spell using Pangolin oil.”

Because pangolin trafficking pages are directing potential clients to encrypted WhatsApp channels, it’s hard to estimate the size of these operations. The most popular of these pages had 336 followers as of Wednesday. The Tech Transparency Project also found a still-active public post that advertised pangolin shells, which a Vietnamese herbal medicine retailer published last June. It had 100 comments from interested buyers.

According to Richard Thomas, a spokesperson for Traffic, a nongovernmental organization that tracks the global trade of wild animals, Facebook isn’t the most common way to traffic pangolins, but it can be used to advertise the animals’ scales.

“Most pangolin trafficking tends to be large shipments of scales, mainly moving between Africa and Asia,” Thomas told BuzzFeed News. “Social media platforms aren't a common means used for pangolin trafficking, but if someone has got a pangolin or pangolin parts for sale, it might be one of the ways they use to advertise that.”


Facebook

Facebook is an active member of the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, which brings together companies from across the world in partnership with wildlife groups like Traffic, the World Wide Fund for Nature, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Coalition members have removed or blocked over 3 million listings for endangered and threatened species and associated products from their online platforms.

However, in a secret complaint filed in 2018 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, a group of wildlife advocates accused the platform of serving advertisements on pages selling body parts of endangered animals, including elephant ivory, rhino horns, and tiger teeth.

“It's really only public shaming that will make a difference to them.”

One of the biggest debates in the world right now — which animal the novel coronavirus originated from — also happens to implicate pangolins.

COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, is thought to be zoonotic, originating in animals and jumping to humans. COVID-19’s genetic similarity to RaTG13, a virus discovered in 2013 in bats in China’s Yunnan province, has led many scientists to suggest COVID-19 started in bats and passed to an intermediary animal before infecting humans. What makes the scaly animals an intermediary suspect is the similarity between proteins in a coronavirus found in Malayan pangolins’ lungs and the proteins in COVID-19

Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University and host of the podcast This Week in Virology, told BuzzFeed News he doubted pangolins were the host.

“These viruses originated in bats. How they got into people, we don’t know,” he said. “The remaining question is how it got to people, but that will require more wildlife sampling.”

Before delving into pangolin trafficking, the Tech Transparency Project published a report last month exposing private Facebook Groups belonging to dangerous extremists who were using anti–coronavirus lockdown protests to recruit new members.

“Our goal here is to show how big of a problem this is,” Stevens said. “It's really only public shaming that will make a difference to them.”

---30---

The Coronavirus Is Killing People Of Color At Outsized Rates. 

Local Lawmakers Want The Justice Department To Investigate Who Is To Blame.

Nearly three dozen local lawmakers are sending a letter asking DOJ to look at possible civil rights violations in how governments have responded to the coronavirus.

Kadia GobaBuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From Washington, DC  May 6, 2020

Drew Angerer / Getty Images The Department of Justice

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers in the hardest-hit communities across the country are calling on the Justice Department to investigate potential civil rights violations in the disproportionate impact the coronavirus pandemic has had on communities of color.

Nearly three dozen lawmakers from all over the country, including New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Austin, and Detroit, signed onto a letter requesting the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division investigate the actions of executive branches, at all levels of government, and their responses to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

In cities across the country, black and Latinx people are dying at higher rates, the letter notes. BuzzFeed News has reported on a system of comorbidities and structural racism that have contributed to the disproportionate numbers.

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who signed the letter obtained in advance by BuzzFeed News, said Tuesday that while the disparity “is built upon historical inequities that existed beforehand that we have to address, [it was] exacerbated by terrible decisions that were made as the virus came into play.”

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, another signatory, told BuzzFeed News, “It could not have been a coincidence that from the Southside of Chicago to South Jamaica, Queens, you get the same outcome. There was information that was known beforehand so you have to believe there were conscious decisions made in the deployment of resources, assets, and instructions.”

The letter goes on to ask DOJ to investigate, among other things, an uneven distribution of testing sites and inadequate protection for essential workers, who are disproportionately people of color.

“Primarily people who are getting it, dying from it, are in the very communities that they just sent out to work without protection,” Williams said. “These are intentional decisions that were made by local executives in the state.”

The group hopes the DOJ will expedite an investigation and offer subsequent policy recommendations ahead of a possible “second wave” of coronavirus cases that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said could happen this fall and winter.

“We need some systems in place, so we’re hoping there’s a preliminary finding and then a longer-term finding,” said Adams.

Access to testing is also an issue local lawmakers hope the DOJ will help address. In mid-April, the New York Post reported that most residents living in zip codes with the highest per capita testing rates in New York City were whiter and wealthier. And in Detroit, where blacks make up 78.6% of the population, city councilmember Mary Sheffield told BuzzFeed News there have been reports that some residents did not have access to testing.

“There’ve been some concerning news reports of individuals who are denied treatment, denied testing, and then, unfortunately, passed away and bus drivers not having personal protective equipment when they’re on their jobs,” Sheffield, who also signed onto the letter, told BuzzFeed News Tuesday.

Federal lawmakers have made their own calls for better oversight into how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting people of color. Democrats in Congress pushed last month for the CDC to publish race and ethnicity data for COVID-19. And this week, Sen. Kamala Harris will introduce legislation that would create a federally appointed task force to oversee the distribution of coronavirus-related resources and funding in communities of color.

“We can’t make the same errors or intentional decisions that affected black and brown communities, like the ones we just did,” said Williams. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Oh this has happened, let’s move forward.”

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Kadia Goba is a political reporter for BuzzFeed News andased in Washington, DC.

What We Know About The Wuhan Lab That Trump Blames For COVID-19

The Wuhan Institute of Virology previously conducted controversial experiments to test what could make coronaviruses more dangerous to humans, but scientists have ruled out that SARS-CoV-2 is a product of genetic engineering.

Peter Aldhous BuzzFeed News Reporter May 6, 2020

Johannes Eisele / Getty Images
Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli (left) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have been beating a drumbeat of blame for COVID-19: Both claim that the novel coronavirus behind the pandemic came from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Asked on April 30 by a reporter if he had seen evidence that the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Trump responded: “Yes, I have. Yes, I have,” going on to accuse the World Health Organization of being “like the public relations agency for China.”

On May 3, Pompeo said on ABC News that there was “enormous evidence” that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab. Both men claimed they were “not allowed” to reveal what this evidence was, suggesting their information came from classified intelligence.

Before being seized on by Trump and Pompeo, the theory that the virus came from a Wuhan lab had been promoted by right-wing media outlets including Fox News and the Washington Examiner, as well as the Epoch Times, a publication linked to the Chinese dissident religious group Falun Gong.

While scientists can’t eliminate the possibility of a lab escape entirely, the evidence suggests that the virus most likely evolved naturally, probably spreading to people in a seafood market in Wuhan where live animals were also on sale. Anonymous briefings from international intelligence officials have also suggested that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is unlikely to be the source of COVID-19.

Despite the questions and rumors, there’s quite a bit we do know about the research that was done at the Wuhan lab and why it’s unlikely to be the origin of the new coronavirus. Here’s what we know:




The Wuhan lab began studying bat coronaviruses in 2004 after SARS.

The head of the lab, which is operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is virologist Shi Zhengli. (Shi did not immediately respond to queries about her work from BuzzFeed News; a representative said by email that they would seek permission from the Chinese Academy of Sciences for her to be interviewed.)

Popularly known as China’s “bat woman,” Shi studies the many different coronaviruses circulating in bats across China and beyond, trying to assess the risk that they could jump into people and cause a pandemic like COVID-19.

That became a priority after SARS, a respiratory illness caused by another coronavirus, which appeared in China in 2002 and spread to more than two dozen countries, killing 774 people. MERS, a similar disease caused by yet another coronavirus, emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012, spread to 27 countries, and has killed 858 people.

Both SARS and MERS are thought to have spread to people from animals — civets in the case of SARS and dromedary camels for MERS. But bats are believed to be the natural reservoir for these and other potentially pandemic coronaviruses, circulating the viruses in their populations and occasionally passing them to other species. And so from 2004 onward, Shi searched caves across China for colonies of roosting bats, taking swabs from the animals and collecting their droppings to examine the coronaviruses they carry.

Shi’s team has since identified dozens of coronavirus variants in bats, constructing an evolutionary tree of how they are related to one another based on the sequences of the RNA that makes up their genetic material, and showing that viruses from distinct branches of this tree seem to be found in different parts of China. In 2013, Shi’s group identified two coronavirus strains from horseshoe bats that were 95% genetically similar to the virus that caused SARS, providing the strongest evidence that, while the virus likely jumped to humans via a civet, bats were the ultimate origin of the virus.

Shi’s team has also studied the genetic mutations that seem to make bat coronaviruses more likely to cross over into people, focusing in particular on the gene that encodes its “spike protein.” The halo of spikes on the surface of coronaviruses gives them their signature crownlike appearance when viewed through an electron microscope. The ability of bat coronaviruses to infect human cells seems to depend on the interaction between the spike protein and a receptor called ACE2 on the surface of cells in the lungs.



Menahem Kahana / Getty Images
A horseshoe bat

The lab previously conducted controversial experiments to test what could make coronaviruses more dangerous to humans.

Most controversially, Shi’s research on the spike protein has involved experiments that some scientists view as unacceptably risky: deliberately genetically engineering viruses to study what makes them more dangerous.

In 2015, Shi and Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, described experiments in which they engineered the spike protein from one of Shi’s SARS-like horseshoe bat coronaviruses into another coronavirus that had already been adapted to infect mice. The engineered virus replicated easily in human cells, and antibodies and vaccines developed against the SARS virus were relatively ineffective in protecting mice from infection.

Shortly after these experiments were run, the US government placed a moratorium on so-called gain-of-function research to make pathogens more dangerous. The ban was eventually lifted in December 2017, but the research remains controversial. “As the world reels from the impacts of the present pandemic, it should be clear to anyone without a conflict of interest that creating new potential pandemic pathogens is unwise,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told BuzzFeed News by email.

Baric did not respond to requests from BuzzFeed News to discuss his work with Shi. BuzzFeed News could find no evidence that Shi has performed gain-of-function studies since.
Scientists are certain that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was not genetically engineered.

In March, an international team of virologists led by Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, published an analysis of the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. They concluded: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

If the virus had been deliberately engineered, scientists would expect to see sequences that are suspected to make coronaviruses more dangerous spliced into the backbone of a viral strain commonly used for experiments of this type. Instead of this smoking gun, SARS-CoV-2 has mutations all along its genetic sequence that experts would have had no prior reason to guess would be associated with a potentially pandemic virus. This result is what they would expect to see if the virus had evolved naturally.

“I am quite sure SARS-CoV-2 was not lab-synthesized, judging by the sequence,” Susan Weiss, a coronavirus expert at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in Andersen’s study, told BuzzFeed News by email. “It seems impossible that someone could figure out how to make a virus with these properties.”
It’s also highly unlikely the virus escaped the Wuhan lab by accident — though we can’t rule out the possibility.

Such “lab escape” accidents are not unknown. They happened several times during the SARS epidemic, with accidental infections occurring at labs in Singapore, Taiwan, and China. The most serious incidents were at the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing, where the virus escaped and infected people on several occasions.

Scientists also now think that the 1977 reemergence of the H1N1 flu was the result of a laboratory accident. H1N1, the subtype of flu that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, hadn’t been seen in the wild since 1957. But in 1977, an H1N1 virus turned up in China and Russia. It spread across the world, but fortunately only affected younger people who had not been exposed to similar viruses before and proved less deadly than regular seasonal flu.

The 1977 pandemic H1N1 was very similar to viruses sampled from flu patients around 1950. Because viruses typically accumulate genetic mutations as they replicate, making them slowly change over time, the explanation for this uncanny similarity was that the virus had been kept frozen for years in a laboratory. “We and others estimated that it was 27 years in the freezer,” Joel Wertheim of the University of California, San Diego, who has studied the origins of the 1977 flu pandemic, told BuzzFeed News


The closest known virus to SARS-CoV-2 is called RaTG13. Isolated by Shi’s team from a horseshoe bat in Yunnan province in southern China, hundreds of miles away from Wuhan, RaTG13 has a genetic sequence that is 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. While that might sound like a close match, it means the two viruses are probably separated by “decades of evolution,” according to Wertheim.

Andersen’s team also considered the possibility that the particular combination of mutations seen in SARS-CoV-2 arose as a result of growing it in cell cultures in the lab. But they decided this was unlikely. Some of the mutations, they noted, seemed to be the result of interacting with an animal’s immune system, while the part of the spike protein that binds to human cells via the ACE2 receptor was similar to sequences found in coronaviruses in pangolins. Together, this evidence suggested a natural origin, they concluded.

Shi has said that she initially worried that the virus might have escaped from her lab, but found no close match among her samples. “That really took a load off my mind,” she told Scientific American. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

Proponents of the lab-origin theory have also pointed out that only 27 of 41 patients described in a study of the initial outbreak in Wuhan had a direct connection to the seafood market that has been blamed for the emergence of COVID-19. But unlike the accidents with SARS, there is no evidence that anyone connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was among the early patients.


While highly unlikely, scientists can’t rule out that SARS-CoV-2 was secretly studied in a lab and accidentally released. The brief appearance in mid-April of online notices and a Chinese government directive suggesting that research in China on the origins of COVID-19 must be “strictly and tightly managed,” first reported by CNN, has added to suspicion of a cover-up by Chinese authorities.


NIAID / Via Flickr: nihgov
SARS-CoV-2

US intelligence is looking into whether the virus escaped from the lab, but the international intelligence community suggests that’s “highly unlikely.”

Speculation that COVID-19 may have been released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology grew after Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin reported on April 14 that he had seen a 2018 US diplomatic cable warning about “inadequate safety” at the facility.

However, Dennis Carroll, a virologist and former official with the US Agency for International Development, which has funded Shi’s work, has questioned the importance of the cables, which he saw while working in Beijing. “I didn’t place an enormous amount of weight on the observations that were made because they were not part of a critical, standardized evaluation,” Carroll told Science.

On April 30, after Trump started to blame the Wuhan lab for COVID-19, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement saying that “the entire intelligence community” agreed with the scientific consensus that the virus was not genetically modified, but was leaving open the possibility that it had been accidentally released from a lab.

“The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan,” the statement went on.

The same day, the New York Times reported that senior Trump administration officials had been applying pressure to US intelligence agencies to hunt for evidence to support the unsubstantiated theory.

Australian officials told the Sydney Morning Herald that a dossier shared among political leaders in the Five Eyes coalition — the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — linking the coronavirus to a Wuhan laboratory was mostly based on news reports and contained no original intelligence.

Anonymous officials from the Five Eyes coalition told CNN that an intelligence assessment shared in the network suggests the lab-release theory is “highly unlikely.”
Nevertheless, the fight over the Wuhan lab has dealt a blow to research into COVID-19 and other potentially pandemic viruses.

The most obvious casualty is a grant to Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance in New York City from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), given to understand the risks of coronaviruses spreading from bats to people.

Daszak has worked with Shi to study China’s bat coronaviruses, including the 2013 paper on the two horseshoe bat viruses similar to the SARS virus. But on April 24, the grant to Daszak was abruptly terminated, as first reported by Politico. That happened just one week after Trump was asked a question about the funding for the Wuhan lab at a press conference and said: “We will end that grant very quickly.”

In 2016, Shi and Daszak also described a “fast and cost-effective method” for genetically engineering coronaviruses, funded in part by the NIAID grant. But it’s unclear that this aspect of the work had anything to do with the termination of the grant. Instead, emails obtained by Science from the National Institute of Health’s deputy director for extramural research suggested that the decision to terminate the grant was made because of safety issues at the lab, though no evidence was given to support that claim.

Other scientists have described the termination of the grant as a “horrible precedent” that will hamper efforts to understand the threat of future pandemics.

“Our work on the NIAID funding was to assess the risk of bat-origin coronaviruses getting into people, causing sickness and emerging globally,” Daszak told BuzzFeed News by email. “The real risk is out in nature, not in the lab.”


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 Peter Aldhous is a Science Reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.

PRIVATIZED FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE
Hospitals Expect To Lose More Than $200 Billion Because Of The Coronavirus

In the first three months of the coronavirus pandemic, tens of thousands of health care workers have lost their jobs. Hospitals expect to lose $202.6 billion.

Venessa Wong BuzzFeed News Reporter May 6, 2020

Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters
Health care workers gather for lunch purchased by members of the New York City Police Department outside the Brooklyn Hospital Center.

The United States' health care industry is losing billions of dollars every week during the coronavirus pandemic, resulting in widespread layoffs and furloughs as waiting rooms lie paradoxically empty during an unprecedented health crisis.

The country’s hospitals and health systems are expected to lose $202.6 billion from March 1 to June 30, according to a new report from the American Hospital Association, which is advocating for federal relief funds for hospitals.

“It is a catastrophic number,” Aaron Wesolowski, the AHA’s vice president of policy research, analytics, and strategy, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s clear there are going to be serious financial consequences for hospitals and health systems.”

“It is a catastrophic number.”

Other than treating the coronavirus, hospitals have come to a virtual standstill during the outbreak. Governors around the country have asked hospitals to cancel nonessential procedures and elective surgeries, operations that account for a significant share of hospital revenues. Meanwhile, stay-at-home orders have discouraged people from making doctors’ visits.

As a consequence, hospitals around the country have announced layoffs, reduced hours, and furloughs of doctors, nurses, technicians, administrative staffers, and other workers to offset the losses. The AHA said hospitals are also racking up expenses, such as purchasing personal protective equipment and supporting frontline workers' childcare, transportation, housing, and screening and treatment for COVID-19.

Those impacts are being felt in other parts of the health care sector, not just hospitals. Across the industry, employment declined by 43,000 jobs during February and March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, including large job losses in offices of dentists (17,000) and physicians (12,000).

“It’s been pretty devastating to nurse practitioners. Many have been furloughed,” Sophia Thomas, president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, who also works as a nurse practitioner in New Orleans, told BuzzFeed News. “Most nurse practitioners work in the outpatient setting, and those clinics are very slow right now. They’re trying to switch to telehealth, but in certain places it’s been very slow on the uptake primarily due to the technological limitation of patients.”

Federal stimulus money could prop up the industry and stanch the bleeding but might not be able to do more. The bills passed in the wake of the pandemic allocated $175 billion to hospitals and other health care providers, but the losses have “exceed[ed] the funds hospitals have received in relief payments to date, and are larger than the total amount of potential relief payments for them as well,” said Wesolowski.

A report released Tuesday by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security drew a similar conclusion: “Until there is a vaccine, there will be ongoing public fear of contagion at healthcare settings, which may result in sustained decreases in patient volume beyond the immediate response and recovery to the pandemic. It is not clear that the funds authorized so far are enough to cover all the losses incurred to date, much less the ongoing losses that the health sector will continue to experience.”

Wesolowski said: “I think it’s reasonable to expect that it’s going to take a while to rebound. When hospitals start offering elective surgeries again, all of that volume won’t come back in at once. And it depends on whether there are subsequent waves [of the coronavirus].”

Like the pandemic, the financial toll has not been evenly distributed across the country. Rural hospitals, which had been struggling financially for decades, lost up to 80% of their revenue when they suspended elective procedures and outpatient care. Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association, told BuzzFeed News that the federal stimulus money was helping, but only barely. “Rural hospitals nationwide now are able to keep their doors open through the end of June," he said.


It's still unclear how the pandemic will play out in the rest of 2020; there could be sustained small outbreaks or a large second wave. Health systems may take a different approach at that time due to increased availability of testing.

Eric Toner, senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told BuzzFeed News hospitals could make more informed decisions about if and when to cancel nonessential and elective procedures.

“The problem was in, say, rural Texas, you canceled elective surgeries and for two months the hospitals were empty," he said. "There was nothing for their staff to do, so they ended up furloughing them." With increased testing capacity, “they could wait until they saw evidence of COVID in their communities before they cancel those surgeries.”



Venessa Wong is a technology and business reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

Amazon Didn’t Pay This Worker Who Tested Positive For The Coronavirus Until A Reporter Asked Questions

Amazon has publicly promised to pay workers who test positive for or are quarantined because of the coronavirus, but some say they haven’t received that money.

“Don’t risk your life for $15 an hour. It’s not worth it. They don’t care." 

Caroline O'Donovan BuzzFeed News Reporter
Last updated on May 5, 2020

Thomas Pausuan SUPPLIED

Thomas Pausuan, a father of two who works at an Amazon warehouse outside Philadelphia, tested positive for the novel coronavirus in early April.

Under Amazon policy, Pausuan was eligible for paid sick leave. But Amazon stopped paying him the day after he got home from urgent care with a fever of 104, labored breathing, and a diagnosis of a potentially fatal disease.

It is the latest example of Amazon failing to promptly follow through on its promise to pay two weeks of wages to employees who are sick or quarantined. In some cases, workers have said they have consequently missed payments on their bills or had to borrow money from family or friends.

“We are working with employees on an individual basis and gathering the information we need to approve extra time off with pay for quarantine and/or diagnosis of COVID,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “With over 1,000 sites around the world, and so many measures and precautions rapidly rolled out over the past several weeks across safety, pay, benefits and operational processes, there may be instances where we don’t get it perfect, but can assure you that’s just what they are — exceptions.”


Amazon said it would deposit the money in Pausuan’s bank account after BuzzFeed News requested information about his case.

Amazon employees have complained that the department that handles sick leave payments was understaffed even before the coronavirus pandemic, and it has since been overwhelmed by the upswing in cases.



Pausuan started feeling sick in late March. He worried it could be the coronavirus, especially because he knew some of his coworkers at the Amazon warehouse where he worked had already tested positive.

He immediately isolated from his wife and children, but in their small apartment in South Philadelphia it was hard to maintain social distance. Before long, his family was sick too — although not as sick as he was.

“I had a fever of 104, and then the next day I started losing all smell and taste,” Pausuan said. “I felt very weak, and the whole body aches. It’s very hard to breathe. That’s the worst thing.”

On April 8, his test results confirmed what he’d known was almost certainly true: He had COVID-19.

As soon as Pausuan received his diagnosis, he sent documentation to Amazon human resources. The company had previously announced in early March that any employee who tested positive for the novel coronavirus would get up to two weeks of pay.

He expected to be paid as usual on his April 17 payday. After all, Amazon had repeatedly promised that workers who got sick would be paid. In fact, Jay Carney, senior vice president of global corporate affairs, said as much on CNN on April 17, the same day Pausuan was waiting in vain for the money to land in his account.

“We’re focusing our resources on helping our workers, giving them protective gear, giving them paid time off, increasing their pay,” Carney told CNN anchor Brianna Keilar.

"The only answer I got was 'Your case manager isn’t available right now.' How can someone be unavailable for a whole month?"

But the money never came.

"They gave me my case manager's extension, but whenever I tried to call that extension, the only answer I got was 'Your case manager isn’t available right now.' How can someone be unavailable for a whole month? It doesn't make sense,” Pausuan said on May 1.

He shared some of the correspondence between him and Amazon with BuzzFeed News.

“My name is Thomas T Pausuan I work for AcY1 amazon warehouse,” he emailed an HR associate on April 13. After testing positive for COVID-19, Pausuan explained, he requested paid medical leave, but his request wasn’t approved. “I hope I get all help fast because I’m test positive my wife also have to quarantine herself[. N]o one can go to work and there is no paycheck.”

Pausuan said this email and subsequent ones went unanswered.

Four days later, he wrote to Amazon’s disability and leave team: “According to Amazon Covid-19 policy I was tested positive and never get paid sick leave why? It’s been 2 weeks I stay home isolate myself. I didn’t get paid why?”

And on May 1, he wrote again: “I still didn’t hear nothing from my case manager. [...] I need money[.] I have a family to feed. I hope some one hear my voice.”

Pausuan said he received a federal stimulus check in April, which helped him cover credit card payments, car payments, car insurance, and rent. “That’s how we survive until now,” he said on Friday.

Like other Amazon employees who spoke with BuzzFeed News, Pausuan said when he called the employee resource center he was told he’d hear back within a few days. They never called.

“Almost every day, I call them to prove my case and escalate my case so I can get paid. I tried so many times. Believe me,” he said. “The only answer I get is ‘someone will call you in two business days.’ And then, [after] two business days, they don’t call you. For one month.”

Finally, last week, Pausuan reached out to BuzzFeed News, which has repeatedly written about workers who are not being paid despite having symptoms of COVID-19 or being instructed to quarantine by a doctor.

In April, BuzzFeed News reported that at least eight employees who had been told to stay home by doctors hadn’t received payment as promised.

When asked about those cases, the company publicly promised employees who had been quarantined by a doctor would eventually be paid.

Nearly four weeks later, four of those employees, most of whom asked not to be named out of fear of retribution, said they’ve since received some payment from Amazon, though most said they had received less money than they thought they were owed. An employee on short-term disability leave receives just 60% of their usual paychecks.

Two more could not be reached this week by BuzzFeed News.

And two said they have still received nothing.

“Don’t risk your life for $15 an hour. It’s not worth it. They don’t care."

One of those workers, a single mother in Missouri who requested anonymity to protect her job, said Amazon HR told her she was eligible for two weeks of pay and could apply for short-term disability thereafter. She was eventually diagnosed with pneumonia but tested negative for the coronavirus. She has not been paid.

“I’m just lucky I live in a very generous community who has stepped forward and helped feed me and my family,” she said.

During the pandemic, Amazon sales have soared as people stay home and avoid shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. On an earnings call last week, executives said the company is spending that additional revenue on its response to the coronavirus, including protections and higher wages for its warehouse staff. The company also said it’s hired 175,000 new staffers in its logistics and delivery network since March. Many of those new hires, said Brian T. Olsavsky, Amazon's chief financial officer, during the call, “were displaced from other jobs in the economy.”

Pausuan said the way he has been treated has made him feel like a worn-out part that can easily be replaced by a newer model.

“Don’t risk your life for $15 an hour. It’s not worth it. They don’t care,” he continued. “Once someone’s sick, they hire two people. They don’t care about the sick one, because they can hire back as many as they want.”

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Caroline O'Donovan  is a senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.