COMMENTARY 

A special ‘birthday gift’ for Hong Kong 

BY BRAD GLOSSERMAN

China has forced a new national security law onto the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong. While the new law was anticipated, few thought it would be as draconian as it is, with unprecedented scope and reach. The legislation threatens fundamental freedoms that characterized life in Hong Kong and distinguished it from that on the mainland. The question today is whether imposition of this law signals the emergence of a new China, or whether Hong Kong is truly “special” and this legislation is merely an extension of Beijing’s authoritarianism to the former British-run enclave.

When Hong Kong reverted to China in 1997, Beijing adopted the “One country, two systems” formula to protect the “essence” of Hong Kong — a capitalist, democratic and independent legal system — as it incorporated the city into the mainland. “One country, two systems” was more than a device to convince Taiwanese that they too could reunite with China and maintain their essential freedoms; in the 1984 joint declaration with the United Kingdom, Beijing pledged that it would respect the city’s quasi-independence for 50 years.

The Basic Law (the Hong Kong constitution) mandated that the city government would pass national security legislation to safeguard it against foreign interference. Each time it tried, the effort was derailed by mass protests. Frustrated by the inaction, the Chinese government took matters into its own hands this year, wrote its own law and forced it onto Hong Kong. The text of the law was released hours before it went into effect just before July 1, the 23rd anniversary of Hong Kong’s reversion to China.

The 66 articles of the legislation are sweeping. It criminalizes “secession, subversion, organization and perpetration of terrorist activities, and collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security.” Those “crimes” aren’t well defined, but violations can result in life imprisonment for the most serious offenses.

Worryingly, the law not only applies to citizens of Hong Kong but can be used against anyone anywhere who speaks out in defense of the city or criticizes China’s actions there. It resembles the assertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction that the Beijing government has roundly criticized when practiced by the United States.

The law establishes a national security committee to oversee investigation and prosecution of violations. This body has no external oversight; it is not subject to Hong Kong law and is exempt from judicial review. Finally, judges on the Chinese mainland have the power to hear the most serious national security cases, making the law for all practical purposes an extradition bill — legislation that triggered mass protests last year and was eventually withdrawn.

The Committee for Safeguarding National Security of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, chaired by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, met for the first time Monday, and began to flesh out the new rules. Now, Hong Kong police can conduct searches without a warrant in “exceptional circumstances,” restrict suspects from leaving the city, and intercept communications.

Property can be frozen if there are “reasonable grounds” to suspect that the property is related to an offense endangering national security. Publishers and media platforms, including internet service providers, can be ordered to take down messages “likely to constitute an offense endangering national security or is likely to cause the occurrence of an offense endangering national security” or face substantial fines and jail time; the same applies to individuals who post those messages. Lam denied Tuesday that police power has been expanded.

In short, residents of Hong Kong are now subject to the same restrictions on expression that governs life in mainland China. In response, ordinary people are scrubbing social media accounts, bookstores and libraries are removing potentially “subversive” literature from their shelves, and social media companies have suspended cooperation with Hong Kong law enforcement authorities while they review the law. Foreign journalists have been warned that they can be expelled if the “cross the line” while reporting on demands for independence.

While many prodemocracy advocates confess to being cowed by the new law — some prodemocracy groups disbanded — many others have not. Several thousand protestors took to the streets to denounce the legislation, and over 300 were arrested, nearly a dozen of whom were charged with violating the new law, including one person who sported a T-shirt with the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong,” a widely used phrase that is now illegal.

International reaction has been mixed, with many Western governments condemning the action. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson accused China of a “serious breach” of the joint declaration and said that the U.K. would offer residency and a path to citizenship to eligible residents of Hong Kong; as many as 3 million people might qualify — if China lets them go.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement that “The United States will not stand idly by while China swallows Hong Kong into its authoritarian maw.” Washington has said that it will strip Hong Kong of its special trade status, will end exports of defense and technology products to the city, and will impose visa restrictions on Chinese Communist Party officials involved in “undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy.”

Japan’s response has hardened. The government first expressed “concern” but Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi later expressed Japan’s “regret,” adding that the law “undermines the trust” that is the foundation of ties with Hong Kong. The move is likely to harden opposition to a state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping, originally set for April, postponed because of the COVID-19 outbreak and yet to be rescheduled. The government is also reportedly exploring ways to entice individuals and businesses in Hong Kong’s financial sector to move to Japan to build up this country’s status as a regional financial center.

Beijing is not going to be deterred. Chinese officials insist that “One country, two systems” has not been abandoned and Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian argues it will be “further strengthened” by the new legislation. It no doubt is emboldened by the 53 countries that voted last week in support of the new law in a resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Council; only 27 criticized the legislation. Many observers believe that support reflects China’s readiness to provide economic assistance, as well as a natural affinity for such actions by other authoritarian governments.

It is a mistake to believe that external action will alter Chinese behavior in Hong Kong. China is becoming more powerful and the rest of the world is distracted by grappling with COVID-19. As Zhang Xiaoming, executive director of China’s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office, explained, “The era when the Chinese cared what others thought and looked up to others is in the past, never to return.”

But is Hong Kong special? It is part of Chinese territory, historically deemed a “core interest” that can brook no challenge. Taiwan is also considered a core interest and Beijing’s indifference to international considerations raises fears that the island may soon be the focus of mainland attention; some hardliners call the new law a critical step toward the liberation — read: absorption — of Taiwan.

Those ambitions rest on two assumptions. First, that the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan seek to and ultimately benefit from being reunited with the mainland. Zhang articulated this view when he called the new law a “birthday gift” for Hong Kong. Second, it assumes that the world will not intervene as it does so. That is an especially dangerous belief, since the U.S. has repeatedly emphasized that it remains committed to a peaceful resolution of the China-Taiwan dispute. Unilateral Chinese action, even if intended as a “gift,” will destabilize the region and could lead to conflict.

Brad Glosserman is deputy director of and visiting professor at the Center for Rule Making Strategies at Tama University as well as senior adviser (nonresident) at Pacific Forum. He is the author of “Peak Japan: The End of Great Ambitions.”

President Donald J. Trump: Stone Cold Racist

OPINION » COLUMNISTS JOHN STANTON  PRAVDA.RU 08.07.2020 

"I am not a racist, and I do not subscribe to any of the tenets of racism. But the seed of racism has been firmly planted in the hearts of most American whites ever since the beginning of that country. This seed of racism has rooted itself so deeply in the subconsciousness of many American whites that they themselves ofttimes are not even aware of its existence, but it can be easily detected in their thoughts, their words, and in their deeds." Malcom X , August 25, 1964



"America's conscience is bankrupt. She lost all conscience a long time ago. Uncle Sam has no conscience. They don't know what morals are. They don't try and eliminate an evil because its evil, or because its illegal, or because it's immoral; they eliminate it only when it threatens their existence. So you're wasting your time appealing to the moral conscience of a bankrupt man like Uncle Sam. If he had a conscience, he'd straighten this thing out with no more pressure being put upon him..." Malcolm X, Oxford Union, 1964
Don't think that the President of the United States is a racist, catering to the worst elements in American society. Trump's racism is a matter of record and every supporter, business tycoon and apologist knows this is a fact. He is a close to an American dictator that the United States has had in modern history; Benito Mussolini, to be exact, mixed with a with a sprinkling of the Adolf Hitler's philosophy. Trump's racism extends to corporate boardrooms, financiers and others who have gotten rich of his tax cuts and the trillions doled out by the Federal Reserve to salvage US business during the Pandemic of 2020.

What do you call letting 130,000 people die, a disproportionate number Black, Latino and the elderly? Is that some form of Democide or Collateral Damage in an effort to keep the economy limping along?

Dave Chapelle's 846 and Finton O'Toole's Unpresidented are essential viewing and reading. There are no better voices or insights commenting on the matters of the day.
Trump: Insane in the Membrane

"It was and is the Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland," Hitler wrote, "always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization." Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925

"President Donald Trump called out driver Bubba Wallace on Monday, alleging that a noose found in his garage at Talladega Superspeedway last month was a hoax and questioning NASCAR's decision to ban the Confederate flag from the sport. Trump tweeted: "Has @BubbaWallace apologized to all of those great NASCAR drivers & officials who came to his aid, stood by his side, & were willing to sacrifice everything for him, only to find out that the whole thing was just another HOAX? That & Flag decision has caused lowest ratings EVER!" ESPN, July 6, 2020

President Donald Trump on Sunday morning widely shared a video he said is from the Villages, a retirement community in Florida, in which a man driving a golf cart with Trump campaign posters is seen chanting "white power." The President retweeted the video that showed the community's Trump supporters and anti-Trump protesters arguing with one another. The President thanked the "great people" shown in the video. "Thank you to the great people of The Villages. The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!!" he wrote in the tweet." CNN, June 29, 2020

"The company founded by a man named Henry Ford," Trump's prepared text appeared to say, "teamed up with the company founded by Thomas Edison - that's General Electric." But when Trump came to Ford's name, he looked up from the text and observed: "good bloodlines, good bloodlines - if you believe in that stuff, you got good blood." Trump also suggested on Thursday that Ford and Edison were both in heaven, "looking down right now." The president's belief that Ford, the only American singled out for praise in Hitler's "Mein Kampf," should be in heaven was a stark contrast to his sarcastic comment during a visit to Michigan in December that the late Democratic congressman, John Dingell, might be "looking up" from hell." The Intercept: Trump Hails "Good Bloodlines" of Henry Ford, Whose Anti-Semitism Inspired Hitler. May 22, 2020

"...when asked, on NBC, if he [Trump} wanted to associate himself with Mussolini, he said that he wanted "to be associated with interesting quotes." He added, "Mussolini was Mussolini. . . . What difference does it make?" New Yorker article Donald Trump and the Ku Klux Klan: A History Donald Trump and the Ku Klux Klan: A History , February 29, 2016
Trump the Bigot: 20th and 21st Centuries

Excerpts/quotes below taken from interviews, books and news report by the authors of an Atlantic Magazine article titled An Oral History of Trump's Bigotry, June 2019.

"He's got a very Aryan view of people and race."

"You know, you don't want to live with them [Blacks] either."

"I was stunned by the openness of Trump's anger toward anyone who would compete with him-and particularly if they were people of color."

"Trump mentioned Native Americans who had recently opened casinos and said to George Miller, "They don't look like Indians to me." He said that. It was so outrageous."

"Trump and Stone-purchased ads that portrayed the Mohawks as criminals, drug dealers, etc. The Mohawks regarded the ads as racist."

"We met with the architect to go over the elevator-cab interiors at Trump Tower, and there were little dots next to the numbers. Trump asked what the dots were, and the architect said, "It's braille." Trump was upset by that. He said, "Get rid of it." The architect said, "I'm sorry; it's the law." This was before the Americans With Disabilities Act, but New York City had a law. Trump's exact words were: "No blind people are going to live in this building."

"Blacks were lazy, and Jews were good with money, and Italians were good with their hands-and Germans were clean."

"He said he didn't think that Native Americans deserved the legislation, because there was a lot of corruption around Native American casinos. I remember asking him after the hearing, "Well, what's the evidence?" He said, "The FBI has it." I said, "You're making the accusation; why don't you bring the evidence?" He said, "No, you should ask the FBI." I said, "You're making the charge of corruption and you're not backing it up-that is unacceptable."

"Richard Spencer and David Duke spent time attacking me {Mike Signer, Mayor of Charlottesville, VA] and talking about the Jewish mayor of the city. There was a threat against a synagogue saying, "It's time to torch those jewish monsters lets go 3pm." There was an intensity in the anti-Semitism that previously was unthinkable in American political life. I grew up five blocks from the headquarters of the American Nazi Party, in Arlington, Virginia. It was above what is now a coffee shop, in a ramshackle house, and we laughed at this lonely, pathetic old man who would come in and out of that building. Now you're seeing something different. I was infuriated that you weren't seeing a condemnation of this coming from the [Trump} White House."


Читайте больше на https://www.pravdareport.com/opinion/144742-trump_racist/

MONOPOLY STATE CAPITALISM

The fight over a coronavirus vaccine will get ugly

BY ANDREAS KLUTH BLOOMBERG JUL 8, 2020

BERLIN – For most people, a vaccine against the new coronavirus can’t come soon enough, as it will be the only tolerable way to achieve herd immunity. So it’s encouraging that more than 100 drug candidates in 12 countries are in development, and eight are already entering clinical trials. To accelerate the process, some people are heroically volunteering to expose themselves to infection. With luck, some of us can get our shots next year.

And yet, there’s still a danger that humanity will fail in its quest to control COVID-19. The culprit wouldn’t necessarily be the medical complexity, fiendish as it is, of engineering a vaccine. It could also be the ensuing politics surrounding inoculation. The fights will be intense, irrational and sometimes nasty.

The first problem is that even after we become confident that a particular vaccine is effective and safe, there won’t be enough for everyone. So we’ll have to decide: Who should get the shots first? Who won’t get any? These questions will come up between countries, and within them.

Given the right leadership, the world would overcome these difficulties with dignity and wisdom. Forty years ago, for example, as the world shivered in a Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, humanity nonetheless managed to unite and eradicate smallpox.

Today, however, the odds for health care multilateralism are bad. A new cold war is underway between the U.S. and China. And a "My Country First” nationalism is infecting ever more countries, including several of those working on vaccines.

Rich nations will try to outbid poor ones in securing supplies of the vaccine. And someone like U.S. President Donald Trump may not necessarily "share” a scarce vaccine invented and made in America with other countries. German officials were outraged earlier this year after reports — never confirmed — that Trump tried to buy CureVac, a German company working on a vaccine, in order to get exclusive access.

Ethical problems of triage will also haunt domestic politics. Most people will agree that health care workers on the front lines should get first dibs on jabs. But, after that, nothing is clear. Should pregnant women get priority? What about the elderly? They’re in greatest danger of dying if infected, but they respond much less to vaccination than younger people do. So if herd immunity is the goal, inoculating the old may not make sense.

On it goes, with increasingly charged decisions. What about "essential workers,” and who are they anyway? Migrant workers and prisoners live in cramped conditions. Should they jump the queue? Not least, in this time of Black Lives Matter, there’s the question of whether ethnicity should in some cases confer priority. In the U.S., Black and Latino people are suffering disproportionately from COVID-19. Should they get shots before whites?

If these dilemmas are political dynamite, they may end up looking trivial next to what’s sure to be the biggest showdown: The standoff between scientific rationality and conspiracy theories. Early in the pandemic, there were hopes that the balderdash of anti-vaxxers would become untenable and their movement would atrophy. Instead, it’s booming.

Humans have always spun conspiracy theories, especially at times of calamity. The anxiety that comes with loss of control primes people to seek simple explanations with compelling story lines and an obvious culprit. Unsurprisingly, the COVID-19 epidemic has been accompanied all along by an "infodemic.”

For example, a fake-news video called "Plandemic,” claiming that the new coronavirus was hype and that a vaccine would kill millions, was viewed more than 7 million times on YouTube before it was taken down. Demonstrators from Germany to the U.S. have been spreading bizarre fantasies that Bill Gates, one of the world’s great philanthropists, conspired with "Big Pharma” to engineer SARS-CoV-2 so he could establish a global health dictatorship. He’ll police this with microchips implanted under your skin. There’s no end to this bilge available on the internet.

None of this is funny. Conspiracy theories have already led to anti-vaxxers refusing to get shots against measles, thus compromising the already-achieved herd immunity and causing new outbreaks of this deadly disease. The same could happen when a coronavirus vaccine becomes available. The threshold for herd immunity against COVID-19 is estimated at between 55 percent and 82 percent of a given population. But only about 50 percent of Americans say they’d get vaccinated.

So the time for corona statecraft and education is now, before the vaccine arrives. Internationally, countries are likely to be most open to multilateral solutions before it’s clear which nation will first develop a vaccine. Domestically, the debate about who has priority has the best chance of staying scientific before people are clamoring for jabs. Above all, educating people to distinguish facts from fake news is effective only before they become exposed to, and infected by, conspiracy theories. We have to win the struggle against disinformation this year, or lose the fight against COVID-19 in 2021.

Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

‘WELCOME TO CHECHNYA’ SPOTLIGHTS AN LGBTQ GENOCIDE — AND THE BRAVE ACTIVISTS TRYING TO STOP ITDocumentarian David France was embedded in the Russian republic for nearly two years chronicling the underground railroad of volunteers risking their lives to rescue Chechnya’s queer victims

David France has devoted his life to chronicling the struggles of queer activists in a world openly hostile to their very existence. An investigative reporter with bylines in The New York Times and Newsweek, he made his first film in 2012, the Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague, which celebrated ACT UP, the bare-knuckled grassroots organization that started up in the late 1980s, fearlessly fighting to be heard at a time when AIDS was devastating the LGBTQ community. (It’s an inspiring portrait of take-no-prisoners social activism that’s gained newfound relevance in the midst of our current pandemic and Black Lives Matter.) He followed it up with The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, a moving salute to the groundbreaking transgender icon whose murder, ruled at the time a suicide, shined a light on transphobia even within the LGBTQ movement.

Now comes Welcome to Chechnya, which has been positioned as the final installment of this trilogy of documentaries honoring everyday heroes in the battle for equal rights. In some ways, it’s France’s most harrowing film yet. We travel to the titular Russian republic, ruled by the brutal Ramzan Kadyrov, who’s been in power for more than a decade but, starting in 2016, began ratcheting up his cruelty, targeting LGBTQ Chechens for torture and execution. (He’s denied existence of this program but has said that the country should “cleanse our blood” of its gay citizens.) This deadly purge has prompted no condemnation from Vladimir Putin, a loyal supporter of Kadyrov, and received little news coverage. But when France read a 2017 piece in The New Yorker detailing underground railroads designed to help the targeted flee Chechnya, he knew he had the subject for his next film.

Soon, he convinced these undercover activists to let him embed with them, learning how they help LGBTQ individuals escape certain death by seeking asylum in other lands. (One of Welcome to Chechnya’s most nerve-wracking moments involves a refugee anxiously sitting on the tarmac hoping his flight will take off.) In total, France spent 20 months with these groups — which include the Russian LGBT Network and the Moscow Community Center for LGBTI+ Initiatives — and, remarkably, he utilized a newish technology that allowed him to digitally alter the faces of those on the run. Rather than having their visage blurred or covered with a black box, France superimposed another person’s face on top. It’s a marvelous, relatively seamless effect that ensures that these victims, though their identities are protected, never lose their sense of humanity. As a result, we feel like we’re on this terrifying odyssey alongside the refugees, who have had to say goodbye to everyone (including their families, who are often working with the government to track them down) in search of freedom.

Speaking from New York, France, who’s in his early 60s, reflected on his journey to make Welcome to Chechnya and bring it to audiences. (The documentary premieres on HBO on June 30th.) We talked about some of the technical logistics of such a dangerous project, but I was more interested in the film’s larger implications — specifically, what it says about America’s diminished global leadership in regards to LGBTQ rights and why the world knows so little about the genocide occurring in Chechnya. But France wants to be sure we widen our lens beyond just the atrocities in Russia, seeing them as symptomatic of larger global ills. “It’s really a dangerous time to be gay,” he tells me. “That’s why this story is so important.”

Kadyrov was in power long before he began this sadistic campaign. What emboldened him to start targeting LGBTQ Chechens?

He was cracking down on drug use and drug dealing in the country — it was a violent, vicious crackdown — and one of the people who fell into his snare happened to be gay who had on his telephone intimate photographs that revealed his sexual orientation. The photographs were of numerous other men, and [the government] began to torture him into revealing the identities of those other men. They then did the same with those men and created the first campaign to round them up.

There were previous instances where gay people have been persecuted in the region, but never like this. I think what Kadyrov and his people felt they had discovered was a “sleeper cell” of some sort — they realized that there was a gay community that was interconnected in the republic. It’s anybody’s guess what motivated them, but it was that discovery that gave them the impetus to announce this official liquidation campaign.

Because of Trump’s cozy relationship with Putin, I can understand why we don’t hear more about this liquidation in our country. But have other nations been more vocal in condemning this?

There have been expressions of outrage and demands for justice by a handful of world leaders, including Angela Merkel from Germany and Justin Trudeau from Canada, who were among the most powerful voices and have been in defense of the LGBTQ community in Russia generally and in Chechnya in specific. But those voices haven’t united in an effective way yet to really force the Russian court system to open up to the allegations that have been brought to it — and for the human rights advocates to be able to bring forward that evidence so that justice can prevail.

That only got worse when the pandemic hit. Obviously, everyone is scrambling in so many different ways, but it’s meant terrible things for the LGBTQ people in Chechnya. They’ve been locked into the region. The border around Chechnya is solidly closed, and the ability for people to escape has been almost entirely thwarted.



This brings me to your film. On the one hand, I can see why these activists would want you there to raise awareness. On the other, they risk making themselves more visible and endangering their lives.

It was an ongoing struggle between those two goals. They needed to defend the security of their organization and the safety of the people they were helping, and they needed the cover of darkness to do that. But they also need the world to know what they’re doing — what they’re forced to do, essentially, in the absence of the political pressure that we were just talking about. Only by opening up to me — and I was the only person who asked, I guess — do they see the possibility of bringing the story to the larger world.

Sometimes they were warmer than other times to my desire to follow along with them, depending on what the security situations were like. And sometimes they had me with them because they felt that it would be important to have a video record of what they were doing in case they were arrested and charged with something altogether different, as often happens in Chechnya. Drugs are planted on human rights advocates all the time and on journalists all the time — they’re brought up on these false charges and thrown in prison for long stretches. They felt that [my] video evidence would allow them some sort of defense in case they were seized. So we served various purposes for them as we spent these 20 months together.

You’re a journalist reporting a story — and therefore supposedly “objective” — but you’re also an advocate for the cause. Did those two sides ever conflict? Did you ever disagree with how these activists went about their work?

No, I stood in admiration of them and their work the entire time. They don’t have to do this work — they never were trained to do this work. They came from all sorts of ordinary walks of life and pulled together in early 2017 to ask themselves, “What can we do?” And the only answer they came up with was this kind of James Bond-like rescue mission.

They’ve been at this now for three years, and they’re just remarkable human beings doing superhuman work. I have no criticism of them. I was embedded there, as you say, but always as a journalist. I brought back the story that I saw, and that’s the story that I’m sharing with you.

We tend not to think of documentaries as being on the forefront of special effects, but Welcome to Chechnya utilizes this incredible technology where you inserted a digital face over the actual face of the people fleeing the country. It’s not “deepfake,” but it seems similar. How did that decision come about?

I promised the people who were fleeing that I wouldn’t reveal their identities. But I asked them to let me film their faces anyway, so that I could be informed about their emotional journey as they dealt with recovering from the torture that they’d been through, and as they reckoned with the violence that their family represented, and the threats they were feeling from all sides.

When I brought the footage back [to America], I experimented with all the tools that documentary filmmakers and others have used over the years to protect identities, and I found that they all distracted from the humanity of the people who were being disguised. That’s when we started experimenting with AI and deep-machine learning. It’s not deepfake — it’s just the opposite. The actions and dialogue and facial expressions in the film are all true, just expressed beneath a different skin.



Where did you find the “actors” who supplied the faces?

They’re mostly New Yorkers, mostly LGBTQ activists, and they’re not acting. Here’s the process: We filmed them from all angles and in all lighting situations, and we used that data to inform this algorithm that then took their face and digitally mapped it over the face of the people who are in the film. So, it’s not a performance, per se. It’s like blending DNA in a way — only, in this case, it was their faces and myriad expressions.

We had them smile so that the camera would know what they looked like smiling. And we had them close their eyes and open their eyes. It was just giving as much data as possible to the computers to be able to do this work faithfully. And by “faithfully,” I mean literally what it’s doing is giving back the power to these individuals through this digital face transplantation to tell their own stories, to regain their own narrative. That was all done with deep-machine learning and mapping programs. It’s a phenomenal new approach to how to handle something like this.

At the end of the documentary, you mention that the U.S. has permitted none of these refugees to enter our country. Obviously, that’s because of Trump, but before he was in office, was our track record significantly better in terms of welcoming LGBTQ refugees?
Our track record for everything has been better in the past, but certainly on this question. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at the very beginning of the Obama administration, aligned the State Department foreign policy around human rights assessments, including the treatment of LGBTQ people in other countries around the world. It put the U.S., for the first time, in an activist position around the globe in defense of queer folks. And that was eliminated on Day One of this new administration. The Obama administration wasn’t super-liberal on the question of granting asylum or refugee status, but they did consider those applications on a case-by-case basis.

The other thing is that the folks coming from Chechnya — that’s a largely Muslim region of Russia, and that’s another reason the Trump administration uses to keep those folks out.

There are myriad refugee crises around the world, not just for LGBTQ people but others fleeing their homeland for other reasons…
…So where do queer people rank?

Exactly.

Well, the European Union is very welcoming to migrants — or has been in the past — and that’s slowly eroding in places, but it has a long tradition. As does Canada. Canada prides itself on its ability to open its arms to refugees of all sorts and to help integrate them into Canadian life. There are many examples of countries that do the right thing, but it’s hard for queer refugees in general, because often if they go to refugee camps or are forced into camps — as the Trump administration has at the Southern border — they experience violence at the hands of other refugees. So they’re often confronting an even more concentrated form of prejudice in the refugee camps.

Welcome to Chechnya illustrates how LGBTQ people aren’t just fleeing the government but also their own families, which is terrifying.

It’s a rare experience for the family members to stand up [for] their queer children. Chechens are an ethnic minority, and it’s a clan-based society, so one family is very, very, very large and they operate under ancient traditions. If it’s known that you have a queer relative in your family, it impacts your entire family’s social status in Chechen life. And the directive from Ramzan Kadyrov to eliminate these folks is a directive that includes instructions to family members to carry out a so-called honor killing.

Honor killings can be carried out without legal charge, without criminal charge, by any male member of your family. And because the families are so large and intertwined, it’s very likely that somebody, if not your father or brother [then] some distant cousin [will have the] motivation to kill you. If nobody in your family does carry that out, the entire family finds itself under intense pressure from the government. It looks like this: Family members, fathers, brothers, they’re all called in on a regular basis to the security offices to explain why they haven’t yet carried out the so-called honor killing. These things are inescapable.

That’s why the people in the film wouldn’t allow me to use their faces, because if it were known that they were alive, their family members would fall under that same sort of ongoing pressure to do something, to help “cleanse,” as they call it, the Chechen bloodline of gay and lesbian people.



It can be tempting for some Americans to watch your film and think, “Yes, that’s terrible, but that’s happening over there. It would never happen in America.” But do you see parallels between Chechnya and here?
What’s happening here these days has surprised me entirely. The gains that the LGBTQ movement has scored over the last 40, 50 years are amazing — it was unimaginable for my generation when we were coming up that we would be this integrated, this connected to our cultural life. With the arrival of Trump and the arrival of this rightward movement in the country, we’ve seen an assault on those gains — especially against our transgender sisters and brothers.

And this is happening not just here, by the way. In Poland, over the last year, various regions of the country have declared themselves “gay-free” zones. And that’s right in the heart of Europe. And this move rightward — this new assault, this new front against our achievements — is very worrisome, even with the Supreme Court sometimes making a remarkable and unpredicted salvo in our favor. We’re losing ground here and around the globe, and it’s a reminder: You can never rest. This is a struggle that will never end.

I’ve thought of How to Survive a Plague many times this year because of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement. You’ve been talking about that film a lot lately, too, so clearly you see some similarities between that story and what’s happening today.
How to Survive a Plague is a story about people who are entirely without power finding a way to seize control and make social change. It’s a story about how to succeed. And I think that’s why people are turning to it now, because it’s an example of, and a blueprint for, successful social justice activism.

That’s why I think it’s used as an inspiration by, for example, the movement for Black Lives that’s doing very similar work now — and with a track record already that has moved the needle on racial justice in the country. That movement, which is so exciting, has the potential to also be as triumphant as the AIDS movement was. That’s where they’re tied together — this notion that, as powerless as you feel, there are still ways to get to victory.

But that film also reminds viewers that politeness doesn’t bring about change. ACT UP needed to be angry and be willing to have sharp elbows to make a difference.
Well, they couldn’t afford to lose, right? Because if they lost, they would be dead. I think that’s the same motivation. ACT UP wasn’t afraid of frightening people. And they felt that the potential for creating that sort of fear amongst researchers and politicians gave them the power to enter into those rooms and begin a really productive conversation about how to chart a course to a better future.

Do you consider what’s happening in Chechnya to be genocide?
It is but, formally, it cannot be described as a genocide, because gay people aren’t included in the formal definition of genocide. But it’s the same practice and the same net effect, and it should generate the same kind of global outrage and cry for justice that any genocide does. The fact that it hasn’t, I think, says something really damning about our political leadership in the West and on the global front. It says something damning about the United Nations and other international bodies. It should be calling them to action.

Why is it not, technically, genocide?

Genocide is considered an attempt to eliminate political, racial or religious minorities, and queer people are defined as a cultural or a social minority. And that’s what exempts us from that definition.

That seems unconscionable. Has there been any attempt to expand the legal definition?
No, I don’t think so because, frankly, this hasn’t happened since Hitler. This is the first time since Hitler that a government-controlled, top-down policy is put in place to round up and eliminate queer people. That’s not to say that it’s a happy world elsewhere for the LGBTQ community. There are eight countries where it’s a capital offense to be gay. There are 70 countries in the world where it’s illegal to be gay, which would get you jail time. And places like Russia, where it’s totally legal to be gay and there are certain guarantees for gay rights, people are being assaulted and murdered all through the country.

It’s really a dangerous time to be gay. That’s why this story is so important. This story is about this kind of government campaign. It really is a genocide. It’s an ethnic cleansing from within. We don’t really have a word to say what it is, except that it’s a horror.

This is Pride Month, but Black Lives Matter has generated so much attention recently because of the killing of George Floyd and others. It almost feels like we as a country don’t have the bandwidth to also acknowledge that other groups are being persecuted and marginalized.

Well, the movement for Black Lives has taken up that cause. [Recently] we saw that massive mobilization around the country of people in defense of Black and brown transgender Americans. It’s a part of the movement for racial justice, and it should be. We all are joining our voices in that call.

I think the movement right now is an American movement and doesn’t have the bandwidth to take on the rest of the globe. I don’t hold the movement responsible for not telling us more about what’s going on in Russia, and in Egypt, and in Tanzania, and in Jamaica, and parts of the world where gay people are being slaughtered left and right. I think it’s up to journalists to be taking up those stories. And I really fault the American and world media for not investigating this when the news of it first broke, and for not keeping it on the agenda.

Why aren’t those stories covered? Are they somehow not considered “exciting” or “sexy” enough?

I don’t know if I’m smart enough to give you an answer to that. Trump comes to office in January of 2017. This [Chechnya] story broke in April of 2017. In that period, and since then, the media has been overly fascinated by Trump’s tweet cycles — and, I believe, overly entertained by them in ways that draw them to want to see the newest outrage out of Washington. That has created a really shallow news cycle and has left very little room for reporting on these other issues. There are very few news operations that have global footprints, and they haven’t been reserving the space for these really urgent and necessary stories from around the globe.

We’re so inundated with Trump’s constant insanity we don’t have the mental space for any other news.
Like the other day, he announced that we had an AIDS vaccine, which we don’t have. So then, we get two, three, four stories running simultaneously about the AIDS vaccine, and he’s just misdirected us over to something else. We’re being led around by our noses.

When you made The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, you received some criticism that it wasn’t your place as a cisgender man to tell the story of a transgender icon. It’s been a few years since that documentary came out: What did you take away from that criticism?
Well, part of that argument just misunderstands the role of journalists and the role of historians. It’s our job to tell the under-told stories. It’s our job not to be corralled by a distraction but to lift up stories as we find them — especially of people who aren’t like us.

My job isn’t to report on and make films about middle-aged, white, cisgender gay guys from the Midwest. With the Chechnya film, I went to another country and told the story about people in that world, also not my own. I try to bring my training as an historian and journalist to the task to make sure that I understood it in its own context — and that I portray it faithfully.

The important subtext around the Marsha film was how hard it was for anybody else to tell that story, so I could make the argument that I told it because it hadn’t been told. What I would miss if I stood on that argument is that others were trying to tell it — and weren’t empowered to tell it the same way I was empowered to tell it. They didn’t have the support of the Sundance Institute, for example, and the Ford Foundation and the various funding sources that make it possible to tell social-justice stories in documentary form.

And that’s really a question about access and one that’s a serious and ongoing one, and it certainly ties right into the movement that we’re seeing form so promisingly across the country today: How do you find and dismantle the walls that have been put up against people of color, whether they’re transgender or not in the U.S.?

We’re in a moment now where people are starting to actually see those walls and find ways to help lift up those voices — that’s what I’ve been trying to do since then. That’s certainly the lesson that I took away from the people who looked at my accomplishments with The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson and really, really, really wanted those accomplishments to also belong to transgender filmmakers and filmmakers of color. We’ve made some progress over the last couple of years. I think that in every walk of life now, we’re being asked to make much more progress. I’m hoping that the people who keep those gates in filmmaking, in storytelling, in news-gathering are opening them up now in effective and transformative ways.



Tim Grierson  is a contributing editor at MEL. He writes about film and pop culture for Screen International, Rolling Stone and Vulture.

Sweden Stayed Open And More People Died Of Covid-19, But The Real Reason May Be Something Darker

A woman wears a face mask as she waits at a bus stop with an information sign asking people to keep ... [+] TT NEWS AGENCY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

While much of the world has been in various states of coronavirus lock-down over the past few months, many have been keeping an eye on Sweden.

Unlike its neighbors, the Scandinavian nation chose to forego the mandatory shuttering of entire segments of its economy and society to beat back Covid-19, relying instead on voluntary measures and personal responsibility.

Now a new analysis of this approach finds it resulted in more deaths as predicted, but the overall picture is more nuanced and surprising.
Most Popular In: ScienceavirusAs governments around the world were ordering citizens to stay home beginning in March through the end of April, the Swedish approach was far more muted. High schools and universities closed, but younger children stayed in school, shops stayed open and Swedes were encouraged to socially isolate and stay a few feet away from each other, but to do so voluntarily.

For weeks, headlines in the English-speaking world called out Sweden and its outlier approach. Sweden stayed open, and as a result, many Swedes died. That was, and has been, the basic narrative.

The new analysis from researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden and the University of Virginia School of Medicine confirms this simplistic storyline, but also finds both silver linings and a potentially darker explanation for the pandemic’s death toll in the country.

While more people have died of Covid-19 per capita in Sweden than in many other countries, the outbreak of the disease did not crush the nation’s health care system and overload its intensive care units as predicted.

“Analyzed by categorical age group, older Swedish patients with confirmed COVID-19 were more likely to die than to be admitted to the ICU, suggesting that predicted prognosis may have been a factor in ICU admission,” the researchers write in a study published online for the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. “This likely reduced ICU load at the cost of more high-risk patients dying outside the ICU.”

The implication here is that Sweden chose to emphasize personal responsibility, but when the choice led to increased infections among the elderly, medical professionals seem to have taken on the responsibility of choosing who likely lives and dies.

Given that the analysis finds not all the nation’s ICU beds were occupied, it’s not even clear that this was necessary.

There were also some bright spots in the analysis, however.

“Our study shows that individually driven infection-control measures can have a substantial effect on national outcomes, and we see Sweden as a good example of this case,” said co-auth0r Peter Kasson from the University of Virginia School of Medicine and Uppsala University. “Higher levels of individual action would further suppress the infection, while a complete lack of individual action would likely have led to runaway infection, which, fortunately, hasn’t happened.”

The analysis finds that nearly a third of Swedish residents voluntarily self-isolated.

The result of the unique approach was less catastrophic than many predicted, despite the increased death rate. The country had three times as many deaths per capita compared to Denmark, Finland and Norway as of May 15, but it fared better than the United Kingdom and Spain while also lessening the economic impact of the pandemic.

(It’s worth noting that the gap between Sweden and its neighboring countries has grown significantly since May 15, to between 10 and 20 times as many deaths per 100,000 population compared to Denmark, Finland and Norway.)

The researchers say that the Swedish strategy provides key data that will continue to be analyzed and can help inform new strategies going forward.

“The key finding is that individual actions matter,” Kasson said. “If enough individuals stay home and take precautions when in the community, it can really change the infection curve. And we can’t let up now.”

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Eric Mack





I've covered science, technology, the environment and politics for outlets including CNET, PC World, BYTE, Wired, AOL and NPR. I've written e-books on Android and Alaska.

French Bus driver left brain dead ‘by group who refused masks’ was married dad-of-three

 Joe Roberts Wednesday 8 Jul 2020 

A bus driver has been left brain dead after he was savagely beaten by five passengers who reportedly refused to wear face masks. Philippe Monguillot, 58, confronted the group as they boarded without tickets and masks in Bayonne, France, at around 7pm on Sunday, Le Parisien reported. 

He was then dragged off the bus and kicked and beaten before the thugs ran away, according to the reports. Monguillot was left unconscious and taken to hospital, where he fell into a deep coma. The suspects are all in custody and facing murder charges, but have not yet been identified. 

Masks are compulsory on all public transport in France, with this attack the latest to be linked to strict measures aimed at stopping the spread of coronavirus. 

His wife Veronique Monguillot, 52, said she is ‘living in a nightmare’ after her husband was declared brain dead following the vicious assault. She said the gang of five were known to her husband, having had an argument over unpaid fares earlier in the day. Mrs Monguillot said: ‘He can’t leave us like this, he was going to be 59 years old soon. No, you don’t do this over a bus ticket. You don’t kill for free like this.’ 

Bus drivers in Bayonne come together yesterday after the shocking attack on their colleague Philippe Monguillot (Picture: Getty/AFP)

 Police in France said the suspects are are all in custody and facing murder charges (Picture: AP) 

The Monguillots are the parents of three daughters aged 18, 21 and 24, and they are being supported by friends and colleagues who have set up a support group. ‘Philippe was going to retire in a year and we thought we were going to buy a motorhome in September,’ said Mrs Monguillot, who added that their lives ‘were destroyed in a couple of seconds. We were destroyed, yes.’

 Describing the attack on Mr Monguillot, an investigating source said: ‘They got on the bus without masks, and also refused to show a ticket. ‘The first to get on had a dog with him – they just assumed they could all get on and do what they want, but the driver had to do his job. 

‘When he stood up to them, a very unpleasant argument developed, and voices were raised and then the driver was attacked when everybody spilled out on to the bus platform. 

French Junior Transports Minister Jean-Baptise Djebbari addresses the press after meeting bus drivers in Bayonne (Picture: AFP) ‘Philippe was punched and kicked repeatedly and then left with serious injuries, before the gang escaped.’

 A colleague of Mr Monguillot described him as a ‘decent and hardworking man who always looked after passengers.’ He added: ‘There has been a lot of tension over masks, because they are the law, but bus staff are not police, and we should not have to enforce the law.’

Read more: https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/08/bus-driver-left-brain-dead-group-who-refused-masks-was-married-dad-three-12960535/?ito=cbshare

The Republicans Take America on a Death March

Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Betsy DeVos are willing to sacrifice thousands of American lives for nothing more than political points.

MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Trump see eye to eye on letting people die from Covid-19.

Adam Weinstein/July 8, 2020

Late last month, Carsyn Leigh Davis turned 17 in an intensive care unit bed in Naples, Florida. Two days later, at 1:06 p.m. on June 23, she died at a children’s hospital across the state, in Miami, where she’d been transferred for last-ditch “heroic efforts” at saving her life. She was the latest of 3,281 deaths in the state from Covid-19 at the time; as I write this, less than two weeks later, the toll is now 3,841.

Davis—an honors student and Special Olympics volunteer with multiple lifelong medical conditions, whose parents were “a nurse and physician’s assistant”—had attended a large Pentecostal church party “with 100 other children” 13 days before her death, according to the Miami-Dade County medical examiner’s report. “She did not wear a mask. Social distancing was not followed.”

Several days after that party, when she turned gray and exhibited life-threatening blood-oxygen levels, Davis’s parents put her on her grandfather’s oxygen tank and dosed her with hydroxychloroquine, the dubious drug that President Trump pushed (and claimed to be taking) to stave off Covid-19. On the strength of the president’s endorsement, millions of his supporters, including adherents to QAnon conspiracy theories, have made runs on hydroxychloroquine. In fact, after rushing her dying daughter to the hospital, Davis’s mother grew furious when the doctors refused to give the girl more hydroxychloroquine. Davis’s mother also refused to let the doctors put her daughter on a ventilator, according to the medical examiner’s report. Three days later, as Davis flagged, the doctors declared the ventilator a necessity, but even after intubation, “her best O2 saturation was low 70s”; the concentration of oxygen in her blood remained fatally low, and she never recovered.

Keeping churches open—as well as beaches, restaurants, and dividend-yielding commerce—has been a big priority for Ron DeSantis, who, as Florida’s fourth consecutive Republican governor, serves two key constituencies: rich people in general, and one aged West Palm Beach snowbird heir in particular. In that spirit, DeSantis has resisted calls from medical experts and Florida residents to return to quarantine measures or shutdowns of nonessential businesses.

Like most of his fellow Republicans, DeSantis has spent the last few months in search of a communications strategy that might make people stop asking him things. There was the libertarian-dreamer gambit: “If everyone is, you know, enjoying life, but doing it responsibly, you know, we’re going to be fine,” he stammered in a July 2 press conference with Vice President Mike Pence. (People just need to exercise some lifesaving restraint, said the man who could actually mandate lifesaving restraint.) There’s been the denialist refrain: Theme parks are “safe” to open, he’s insisted over the protests of workers at those parks and in spite of rampant infections among Major League Soccer athletes at a Disney park. Then there was the fatalist who’d noted four days earlier that the median age of coronavirus carriers had plummeted to 40. “You can’t control … younger people,” he said. “They’re going to do what they’re going to do.”

But on Monday, Florida’s Republican leadership pivoted into coronavirus-era big government by, well, controlling kids. Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran—handpicked for the job by DeSantis after serving as the Republican speaker of the statehouse—ordered “All school boards and charter school governing boards” to “open brick and mortar schools in August at least five days per week for all students.” The order was written to give local districts the power to shut schools if public health demanded it, but the Politburo is making clear it doesn’t want any rogue commissars: “Logically, I don’t think they could say schools aren’t safe if they are allowing people to be out in public,” a Florida education department spokeswoman said.

As Politico’s Florida Playbook noted Tuesday, DeSantis had promised residents a “data-driven” approach to reopening state functions, but the schools order was “issued as all the data showed increases in coronavirus 1) cases, 2) hospitalizations and 3) deaths.” It’s also worth knowing that only a few hours before Florida’s school order came down, this tweet happened:

SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 6, 2020

DeSantis and Florida’s Republicans were merely acting as provincial boyars, carrying out their tsar-batushka’s demands. This is the GOP now, as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—who is surprisingly obsequious for a billionaire heiress—made clear, hours after Trump’s tweet:
Absolutely right, @POTUS! Learning must continue for all students. American education must be fully open and fully operational this fall! https://t.co/1tmyfKpj2o— Secretary Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) July 7, 2020

By Tuesday, the White House had mobilized an entire roomful of mostly unmasked, mostly white people to discuss carrying out Trump’s edict:

“We want to reopen the schools,” Trump says in the East Room. “It’s time to do it.” pic.twitter.com/2Iiiy0nbgJ— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) July 7, 2020

The reasoning is pretty easy to grasp here; it has to be, since Trump appears to appreciate it: Give parents the chance to return their kids to school five days a week, and their parents can work full shifts those days. Though it would not improve most families’ personal economies—many jobs lost in the past quarter aren’t coming back—opening schools will improve aggregate productivity, making state and national economies appear stronger in October than they appear now. In the brain of a very cynical, very depraved person, this could appear to be a pre–Election Day win.My first thought was that my child would not be able to hug his immunocompromised grandparents for the foreseeable future. My second was that I am immunocompromised.

When the virus’s spread appeared to be brought under control during the initial quarantines, the idea of “reopening” schools seemed an optimistic goal. Today, if you care about public health and can read a bar graph, you know that the school order is insane. I say this as a freelancing single parent with a child in Florida public schools, who has lost some income and energy along with the rest of America in attempting to balance daily work and parenting through the spring semester. My first thought on reading the Florida school-opening order was that my child would not be able to hug his immunocompromised grandparents for the foreseeable future. My second was that I am immunocompromised.

But the next morning, on reading about the life and death of Carsyn Davis, I could only think of this: Republicans know they’re killing people, lots of people—by spreading disinformation, by encouraging noncompliance, by refusing to act, and now, by actively assuring contagion. DeSantis has suggested over and again that the skyrocketing coronavirus cases among young Floridians are fine. “What the hospitals are seeing is a different class of patient than what they saw in March and April,” he said. “You’re seeing people that are skewing a little younger, and I think the clinical outcomes are going to be better.” They sure as hell weren’t better for Davis.

DeSantis and many Republicans continue to give lip service to “protecting the most vulnerable,” but they know some young people do die; some get sick and stay sick, possibly for life; and some spread the disease to older people, who will die or be maimed. They don’t give a shit. “I think we overreacted,” Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said last week. “We closed too much of our economy down.” One White House official told reporters last week that Trump would have a new, election-optimized P.R. strategy for dealing with the Covid-19 threat: “The virus is with us, but we need to live with it.” This is the message of the Dear Leader who told us in March that “the problem goes away in April.”

As I write this, the virus has killed 44 times more Americans than died on 9/11. Eventually, many of our political leaders will be seen for what they are in this: witting accomplices to homicide on a scale that Republicans might call genocide, if they watched it unfold in another country. Who says exceptionalism is dead?
Adam Weinstein @adamweinstein

Adam Weinstein is the national security editor for The New Republic. He previously edited for Task & Purpose, Mother Jones, and The Wall Street Journal.

Coronavirus Found Before China Outbreak

An Oxford University expert believes coronavirus may have come into existence before its outbreak in China.

8th July 2020Jamie Slagel

Image Description: Graphic of the virus with “COVID-19” text overlay

A senior associate tutor at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) at Oxford, Dr Tom Jefferson, stated that the virus was found to have existed elsewhere long before surfacing in China. Dr Jefferson, as well as Professor Carl Henegham, director of the CEBM, have suggested that “these outbreaks need to be investigated properly.” Such calls come amid growing concern that COVID-19 was a global threat waiting for favourable conditions before emerging.

This comes as AstraZeneca announces it has signed agreements with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and Gavi the Vaccine Alliance. The agreement will boost its production to 2 billion doses of the vaccine Oxford University is producing. Manufacture, procurement and distribution of 300 million of these doses will be supported by CEPI and Gavi, both of which are charities supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

AstraZeneca… will boost its production to 2 billion doses of the vaccine Oxford University is producing.

Nevertheless, AstraZeneca will only know by August at the earliest whether the vaccine, AZD1222, will work. Chief executive of CEPI, Richard Hatchett, admitted that investing in a product that may fail involved “substantial risk”. The current Phase II/III trials are being tested on about 10,000 adult volunteers in the UK, according to AstraZeneca.

Recently, Spanish experts announced that they had found traces of coronavirus in samples of waste water from March 2019, well before the outbreak in Wuhan. In November traces were found in Brazil and Italian scientists found similar evidence in Turin and Milan in mid-December—weeks before the first case was detected there.

In 2018, Afelt et al. presciently suggested that “the risk of emergence of a novel bat-CoV disease can therefore be envisioned.” It noted that “there were already several CoV transmission events between bats, civets and humans before the 2002 SARS outbreak [link added]”. They added that “the probability of occurrence of the risk is increasing owing to environmental change and higher environmental pressure.”

Similarly, Dr Jefferson suggested that, across the globe, viruses lie dormant and are activated when environmental conditions are favourable. Rhetorically asking where Sars 1 went, he said “It’s just disappeared. So we have to think about these things. We need to start researching the ecology of the virus, understanding how it originates and mutates.”

In 2018, Afelt et al. presciently suggested that “the risk of emergence of a novel bat-CoV disease can therefore be envisioned.”

Dr Jefferson also pointed to a case in the Falkland Islands in early February, suggesting coronavirus might have been in prepared food and activated when the food was defrosted.

“I think the virus was already here, here meaning everywhere,” he said. “We may be seeing a dormant virus that has been activated by environmental conditions.”

Dr Jefferson also gave evidence from when almost a third of Western Samoa’s population died from the Spanish Flu in 1918 despite having no contact “with the outside world”.

“The explanation for this could only be that these agents don’t come or go anywhere. They are always here and something ignites them, maybe human density or environmental conditions, and this is what we should be looking for.” This is in line with Reuter et al., 2016’s suggestion that bat populations are establishing themselves closer to human dwellings following evolving land-use, especially in South-East Asia where deforestation and population growth are high.

Dr Jefferson believes coronavirus may be transmitted through the sewage system or shared toilet facilities as well as through the air. He also pointed to the number of outbreaks at food factories and meatpacking plants. In the UK COVID-19 clusters have been found at meat processing factories in England and Wales. Similar outbreaks have occurred in Germany and France. In the US, an estimated 5,000 people working in meat-processing plants have been tested positive.

“We may be seeing a dormant virus that has been activated by environmental conditions.”

“There is quite a lot of evidence that huge amounts of the virus in sewage all over the place, and an increasing amount of evidence there is faecal transmission,” he said. “There is a high concentration where sewage is four degrees, which is the ideal temperature for it to be stabled and presumably activated. And meatpacking plants are often at four degrees.

“These meat packing clusters and isolated outbreaks don’t fit with respiratory theory, they fit with people who haven’t washed their hands properly.”

Afelt et al.’s 2018 study also suggested that “the risk of transmission of viruses through direct contact, domestic animal infection, or contamination by urine or f[a]eces” is increased by deforestation.

Dr Jefferson argued that “[t]hese outbreaks need to be investigated properly with people on the ground one by one. You need to do what John Snow did. You question people, and you start constructing hypotheses that fit the facts, not the other way around.”

These suggestions raise more questions about coronavirus, failure to introduce precautionary measures, and environmental concerns.