Meatless meat is going mainstream. Now Big Food wants in.

Companies are pledging to sell you more plant-based meat and dairy to fight climate change (and cash in on a growing trend).

By Brian Kateman  Dec 29, 2020

Packages of “Impossible Foods” burgers and Beyond Meat

 made from 

plant-based substitutes for meat products sit on a shelf for sale in  

New York City.

 Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

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In a year of splashy news for plant-based meat — skyrocketing sales! the new McPlant! —one of the biggest developments in the field went oddly underreported.

In the last three months of 2020, some of the biggest companies in the world announced major moves into the plant-based meat space.

In September, Tesco — the UK’s largest supermarket chain — announced plans to increase sales of plant-based products 300 percent by 2025. Last month, Unilever — the world’s 19th largest food and beverage manufacturer — set a new annual global sales target of $1.2 billion from plant-based meat and dairy within the next five to seven years, about five times what it forecasts it will make from plant-based sales in 2020. And a few days later, Ikea announced that half its restaurant meals and 80 percent of its packaged food offerings would be plant-based by 2025.

Those announcements were just the latest notable steps some major restaurant chains and food companies took in the last year or so toward plant-based products. This isn’t Big Food’s first foray into plant-based meat and dairy, though. Over the last few years, some food companies have acquired plant-based startups or launched their own meatless meat products. But these latest announcements — pledging to significantly increase plant-based sales by 2025 — represent a much bigger investment in the future of animal-free protein than we’ve seen in the past.

These moves have largely been made in response to growing consumer demand. The last few years have seen the new wave of meatless meat achieve something of mainstream status, and the pandemic has only added to the momentum. Concerns about the spread of the coronavirus at meatpacking facilities and supply-chain troubles at grocery stores early in the pandemic seemed to contribute to greater demand for meatless meat.

Some of these companies are touting their pledges as initiatives to help them meet their broader sustainability goals, which is a good bet. Meat, milk, and egg production accounts for 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and in numerous reports scientists have called on world leaders to use dietary change as a tool to curb emissions. Despite animal agriculture’s outsized impact on the environment, governments have been slow to enact policies to reduce animal product consumption, so these corporate pledges are meaningful steps in the fight against climate change and our hyper-industrialized farming system.

To be sure, these recent pledges are voluntary, and progress on corporate sustainability has been mixed. A recent Bloomberg analysis found that out of 187 companies that set climate pledges to be achieved by 2020 or earlier, three quarters of the companies met their goals — but some goals were quite modest, and a tenth of companies didn’t even report their progress.

So time will tell if companies make good on their word to significantly increase their plant-based offerings. For now, these moves are worth cautiously celebrating. Plant-based meats account for a tiny portion of US meat sales, but the upside seems obvious to the industry. Big Food isn’t composed of nonprofit organizations, and the largest among them have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize returns. A move to invest more in plant-based food suggests they think there’s a real market here.

Plant-based food enters the mainstream

Once a niche sector reserved for vegetarians, plant-based food has crept into the mainstream over the past few years. The percentage of vegetarians and vegans has remained low — about 5 percent and 3 percent respectively — but the number of “flexitarians,” people who often turn to plant-based foods instead of animal products, seems to be rising. (There is no standard measure of how much or how little meat is included in such diets, however.)

In 2018, more than one in three Brits said in a consumer survey that they had recently reduced their meat consumption, up from 28 percent in 2017. Similar trends have been reported in US consumer research, as 36 percent now say that they follow a part-time carnivorous lifestyle. During those years, the market for plant-based foods in the US grew to $3 billion, and today it’s at $5 billion.

So what happened? How did plant-based food go from niche to mainstream?

According to insiders, health and sustainability are the driving forces.

“We see several trends in plant-based food and beverage driving people to enter and explore the category,” says Domenic Borrelli, who oversees plant-based products for yogurt maker Danone, which in 2018 pledged to triple its worldwide plant-based sales to around $6 billion by 2025. “Some are following the latest wellness trends, incorporating plant-based alternatives into their diets as a step toward their personal health. … Some choose plant-based for dietary reasons, such as lactose intolerance. Consumers also opt for dairy alternatives to be mindful of our planet.”

Earlier this year, Panera Bread announced that it plans to make half of its menu items vegetarian or vegan by 2021, citing sustainability goals and its growing base of flexitarian customers, and Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, announced plans to open its first plant-based food production facility in China.

Sodexo, the third-largest foodservice company in the US, which provides food at hospital and university cafeterias, is also backing plant-based food. Last year, it committed to reduce carbon emissions by 34 percent by 2025, and anticipates that half of its carbon reduction target globally will be achieved through changes in its supply chain, including increasing plant-based purchases.

“In order to achieve this target,” says Lara Seng, who manages sustainability initiatives for Sodexo, “we must address the emissions related to our supply chain, of which 70 percent result from animal-based food purchases in the United States.”

Indeed, industrial animal agriculture is wreaking havoc on our planet. The rearing of livestock is not only a major driver of climate change; it’s also a leading cause of other environmental problems like soil degradation, water and nutrient pollution, and biodiversity loss. Raising animals for food is a resource intensive practice: One-third of the planet’s arable land is used to grow crops as farm animal feed, and those crops are responsible for nearly one-third of all the water used in agriculture.

“Of note, a half-gallon of Silk [the soy milk brand] takes significantly less water to produce than traditional dairy milk,” Borrelli says.

You might think that consumer awareness around the health and sustainability benefits of plant-based foods especially among millennials and Gen Z is the main driver of the trend. But that’s only a small part of the story.

Research suggests that people primarily choose food based on three factors — taste, price, and convenience. And for a long time, vegan food was — to put it kindly — gross, expensive, and hard to find. But that began to change when leveled-up versions of plant-based meat became available.

Startups like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods poured many years and many millions of dollars into research and development, innovating plant-based products that rivaled the taste, texture, and even the smell of their animal-based counterparts. Rather than market them to vegetarians, these startups appealed to flexitarians and meat-eaters, partnering with athletes like Kyrie Irving and Shaquille O’Neal and celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Kevin Hart, and Octavia Spencer to appear in their advertising.

At the same time, according to Julie Emmett of the Plant Based Foods Association, “new data-driven initiatives like placing plant-based meat in the meat department” drove sales even higher. And finally, plant-based burgers on Burger King and White Castle menus turned the plant-based trend into a food industry mainstay.

Then the pandemic hit.

Pandemic boosts plant-based sales

In the early months of the coronavirus crisis, a wave of meatpacking plants shuttered, as workers — who toil shoulder to shoulder — got sick. These closures created temporary meat shortages, which caused Wendy’s to run out of hamburgers and supermarkets like Kroger and Costco to place restrictions on the amount of meat that customers could buy. Where it was available, prices went up.

Amid slaughterhouse closures, plant-based food sales — including everything from vegan cheese to tofu — enjoyed a boost, increasing 90 percent in mid-March compared to sales during the same time last year. In the following month, plant-based food sales grew 27 percent faster than in 2019 and 35 percent faster than the food category in general.

Plant-based meat in particular boomed. Grocery store sales of meatless meat increased 264 percent during the first nine weeks of the pandemic.

“The pandemic disrupted consumer food purchase behavior, as out-of-home consumption in restaurants and non-commercial foodservice plummeted and consumers shifted to more in-home consumption sourced from retail and direct-to-consumer channels,” says Kyle Gaan, a researcher at the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit that promotes meat alternatives. (Disclosure: I worked at GFI for a year, beginning in 2015.)

“This shift in consumption seems to have led to new consumers trying plant-based meat and integrating it as a regular part of their diet,” Gaan notes.

Gaan cited research that found in the US, 18 percent of alternative protein buyers purchased their first plant-based protein during the pandemic. And in Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands, 80 percent of consumers said they were likely to continue eating plant-based meat alternatives beyond the pandemic.

This tracks with what some Vox readers are saying. Over the summer, Vox staff writer Sigal Samuel surveyed readers about what pandemic habits they want to continue once the pandemic is over, and eating less meat was one of them:

Specifically, people want to cook more vegetarian meals and lean away from meat-eating. The impulse seems to be coming not only from the fact that there are meat shortages in some US grocery stores, but also from the knowledge that a live-animal market in China may have given rise to the coronavirus and that the giant factory farms that supply 99 percent of America’s meat are a pandemic risk, too.

But advocates of flexitarianism should temper their excitement. Even as plant-based meat has surged, the appetite for animal-based meat has proven resilient. Some experts predicted the coronavirus could cause a record drop in meat consumption; now, the USDA predicts Americans will eat just one less pound of meat in 2021 than they did in 2020. US meat production bounced back in the fall.

How Big Food could get plant-based wrong

There is another reason for skepticism about the emergence of the new wave of meatless meat — and specifically the decision by Big Food companies to enter the market.

Despite major food companies betting big on plant-based, the vast majority of their sales will still come from foods they themselves admit are unsustainable. For example, last month Greenpeace and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism documented Tesco and other companies selling meat from chickens that had been fed soy that was grown on deforested land in the Amazon rainforest.

Kari Hamerschlag, deputy director of food and agriculture at Friends of the Earth, an environmental nonprofit, made a similar argument for Vice in September: “I actually think that these large company investments will do very little to cut the massive impact of the world’s largest meat companies,” she said, commenting on the rise of animal-based meat companies like Tyson and Perdue that had developed their own versions of familiar plant-based foods like burgers and chicken nuggets. “Unless these companies actually slash their emissions, then they are not doing what they need to do to address the climate crisis.”

Certainly the early entrants in the space have some mixed feelings. “Because our mission is so urgent we welcome any and all companies to this work,” says Jessica Appelgren, a spokesperson at Impossible Foods. “Issues arise, however, when market entrants create sub-par products that negatively influence a consumer’s experience of meat made from plants. ‘Plant-based anxiety’ is a real barrier to long-term adoption and we can only control the taste of our own products.”

The evidence backs up Appelgren’s concern. Despite enthusiasm for plant-based meat, not everyone has given it a try yet. A survey suggests that among those who have tried it, 18 percent of people associated plant-based meat with poor taste, though whether they didn’t like what they had in the distant past or what is available today is unclear. Mouthfeel — how well faux meat producers can imitate the texture and chewiness of meat — in particular may be lagging behind, as 31 percent of respondents in a separate survey said they found the texture of plant-based meat was not similar to animal-based meat. If the plant-based market is going to continue to grow, it’ll need to win over more customers, and have them come back again and again.

So there is much to be wary about. But there is also much here to be hopeful for. Unlike the young, smaller vegan startups, these titans of industry are swimming in capital and therefore are capable of not just meeting the demand for these plant-based options, but also increasing it. They have huge distribution channels that date back decades, as well as the resources to innovate on these existing products, manufacture large quantities of them at a cost-competitive price, and pay fancy PR and advertising firms to market them.

The reality is that we’re not on the verge of plant-based meat dominating the $1 trillion global meat market. Plant-based meat still makes up less than 1 percent of meat sales in the US — where the market is most developed — and even less globally. In fact, animal-based meat consumption is rapidly rising in much more populous countries like China and India, as people tend to eat more meat as they climb out of poverty. But the fact that big food companies are bullish on plant-based meat is, on the whole, good news in the fight for a more sustainable world.

“Meat is the largest segment of the food category globally, and we’ve just begun to scratch the surface,” a Beyond Meat spokesperson said, echoing an upbeat take on the matter. “It is really exciting to be in such an emerging space where there is a lot of energy and enthusiasm for the category we’ve created.”

If you can’t beat them, why not welcome them when they join you?

Brian Kateman is the co-founder of the Reducetarian Foundation, an organization advocating for the reduction of animal product consumption.

How military superiority made America less safe

America’s dominance wasn’t by happenstance. It was a choice.

By Alex Ward VOX Dec 29, 2020

US Army soldiers during a military exercise in Drawsko Pomorskie, Poland, on August 11, 2020. Maja Hitij/Getty Images


There’s a myth Americans tell themselves: After World War II, the United States had no choice but to be the world’s superpower and preeminent military force. No other countries were strong enough after years of fighting, and it was solely up to the US, by virtue of its position, to rebuild and reorder the world.

The reason that’s not true, says Stephen Wertheim, author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy, is because the US made a conscious decision to seek military dominance before World War II ended. Such a strategy, forged in the heat of battle, would help the US thwart totalitarian regimes — namely the Soviet Union in later years — while pursuing its own interests.

Wertheim argues the plan made some sense in the moment. After all, Nazi Germany was winning in Europe, and the US didn’t want to live in a world full of brutal dictatorships. But the problem is the US hasn’t shifted its strategy since — and it’s backfired greatly.

Instead of focusing on issues like climate change and pandemic disease, for example, the US has prioritized building and deploying a robust force that has made a plethora of unnecessary enemies. And despite some horrific outcomes like the Iraq War, the US refuses to rethink its game plan, even after the Cold War ended and as domestic appetite for adventurism dwindles.

“Far from contributing to American security, the plan of global military superiority has made America — and Americans — less safe,” Wertheim, who is the deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, DC, told me.

To better understand why Wertheim believes the US should focus less on military superiority, not more, I called him and asked him to expand on his argument in an interview. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Alex Ward

Your book makes the case that American leadership wasn’t preordained. It was a choice. Explain what that choice actually was.

Stephen Wertheim

I had a really basic question in mind: When was the choice made to install the United States as the dominant military power across the globe?


It is a consensus, an axiomatic view, that the United States, for its national security interests, needs to be the No. 1 military power in the world, and must have troops in bases in foreign countries to secure its own and global interests. That’s meant to nip any potential aggressors in the bud rather than wait for an attack, or to stop others from gaining dominance in their own regions.

It’s widely believed that this idea came about after World War II when the US was the only real global power left standing. But that’s not true. This idea of “primacy” was forged in the wake of the fall of France to Nazi Germany in 1940.

Alex Ward

Wait — US officials decided the country should strive to be the world’s dominant force before World War II ended?

Stephen Wertheim

That’s right.

By October 1940, just months after imagining that the United States might be confined to an area no larger than a “quarter-sphere” partway down Brazil, postwar planners arrived at a startling conclusion: The United States had to hold “unquestioned power” globally, protecting by force as much of the non-German world as possible.

In his instantly famous essay announcing the arrival of the “American Century” in February 1941 — 10 months before Pearl Harbor — the publishing mogul Henry Luce wrote: “The big, important point to be made here is simply that the complete opportunity of leadership is ours.”  

Henry Robinson Luce, editor and publisher Time, Fortune, and Life, lived from 1898 to 1967. Picture Post/Getty Images

Luce urged his fellow Americans to “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

“As we see fit.” The America Firsters were not the only ones who put America first.

Alex Ward

Okay, I wanted to make sure I had that clear since that’s not usually the story Americans tell themselves.

Provocatively, your book is basically a lament of the idea that the US is the world’s foremost power, underwritten by its strong military. In your view, why shouldn’t the US be the world’s preeminent force? After all, it’s helped us get to this place of unprecedented strength.
Stephen Wertheim

Far from contributing to American security, the plan of global military superiority has made America — and Americans — less safe.

I have a great deal of sympathy for the architects of US military dominance. I think they faced difficult circumstances. How could I not sympathize with wanting to rid the Axis powers from the Earth and make sure nothing like that happened again? I have complete sympathy with that goal.

But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reason that brought forth US global supremacy has ceased to exist. There was an original argument for the United States shouldering the immense burdens of global military dominance: Without it, totalitarian powers would conquer much of the Earth. That would be terrible for the world, the thinking went, and it could be bad for the United States.

The problem, though, is the pursuit of military dominance since then has created a lot of enemies of the US that didn’t need to be enemies of the US. We’ve engaged in bad behavior ourselves and stimulated it in others.

I worry that — in a world where the foremost threats to the American people are pandemic disease and climate change — America will continue to define its biggest threats in military terms, even if they aren’t.

Alex Ward

Part of what undergirds that sentiment these days, though, was the notion that the US had arrived at a “unipolar moment” — the US was the unquestioned power and global leader with no clear rival. Implicit in what you’re saying is that that moment is truly and forever gone.

Stephen Wertheim

We’re never going to get the unipolar moment back. It was rightly called a moment at the time in the 1990s. But since then, the United States caused a lot of destruction and grief for itself and for others. I really worry about where this goes as the world gets more challenging.

Alex Ward

Some will read this interview or your book and conclude that what you’re really angry about is high defense budgets. But if I understand your argument correctly, you’re saying that the strategy envisioned before World War II ended may have had some logic then, but it has none now, especially since it’s had the unintended effect of weakening US national security.

Stephen Wertheim

Precisely. Look, I am going to make the hardest possible case for my position: World War II. If there was ever a good argument to be made for the best use of American military power, my God, it’s exactly what my book is about. I’m actually trying to focus us on what I think is the best argument in favor of American military hegemony.

Flight of US Army BT-13A Valiant aircraft before World War II in 1939. 

Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

And what I find in that history is that the roots of our current problems are bound up with the best thing we’ve ever done as a nation. I think that’s why we have this problem. I’m trying to understand why military dominance looked attractive to begin with.

But I think if those postwar planners — had they been around today or even in the 1990s — they would say, “Wait a minute.” They would’ve realized how fraught it is to take on a world-ordering role by force, akin to what we understood the British Empire had done in the previous century. After all, they worried to themselves that what they were planning contained a measure of imperialism in it. But at the time, they felt it was better than the alternative, and understandably so.

Alex Ward

You make a case that the focus on military superiority led the US to care less about other elements of power, namely economic well-being. That’s not to say America didn’t care about having lots of money and a strong economy — it did — but your point is that America’s actions have caused widespread harm at home and abroad.

Stephen Wertheim

Since 1991, I think almost everybody has lost out, aside from the major defense firms and some ruling elites. America’s strategy has been incredibly destructive for people throughout the greater Middle East, and of course, the Iraq War resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

And I don’t think the American people have won out, either. I think that we have gotten less safe and more fearful as a society as a result of constantly being told by leaders of both parties that the whole world is out to kill us and that that’s why we’ve got to go to war to kill them first.

Look, the argument that US military power contributed to world order was very real. The Bretton Woods system played an important role in stabilizing global capitalism. But since the 1970s, and especially the 1990s, I think it’s hard to argue that US military dominance somehow underpins everything else.

It’s very difficult to see how applying sanctions on dozens of countries and waging continual warfare in the greater Middle East somehow serves the general interest of capitalism. Maybe it serves the interests of particular firms, but not the system of capitalism

.
Alex Ward

The US has clearly made some horrible, deadly mistakes. No one is denying that. How can you say confidently, though, that the world wouldn’t be worse if the US didn’t play such an active role?

Stephen Wertheim

It’s now been three decades since the Soviet Union collapsed. Why haven’t we been able to do everything we want to effectively? It turns out that the enemies are skeptical of working with us to address shared challenges.

Now, it’s true sometimes that the use of hard power can back up diplomacy and make other endeavors more effective. But we have so overshot the mark that it’s more often the case that military dominance gets in the way of the kinds of constructive engagements in the world that I think many people in Washington want to see.

What I’m opposed to, first and foremost, is military dominance as an end in itself. That’s what I think it has become in our own time, and I don’t think it began that way. That doesn’t prohibit the US from being a robust power: It’s going to be a great power and it’s going to have a strong military. We should absolutely be able to defend ourselves. I’m not even closing the door on things like humanitarian intervention, either.

What we have to ask, though, is if the US has used all this power wisely and judiciously. It’s clear that we haven’t, and it’s making all of us in America and around the world less safe. Just think of this: Roughly 80 percent of all US military interventions have occurred after 1991. Can we really say the millions at home and abroad have had their lives improved by that? I don’t think so

.

A paratrooper with the US 82nd Airborne Division during Operation Desert Shield in 1991. 

Sgt. Roman/US Army/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

Alex Ward

So if there’s a President Wertheim in the future, how do you change America’s approach to the world?

Stephen Wertheim

I certainly agree with those who would say you don’t undo things in a hurry. You have to act responsibly, but boldly. We do have to break the perpetual war logic of the war on terror. And strangely enough, we’re kind of coming as a society to that view already.

I’d lead a systematic policy of disentangling the US from regions where its interests are either not vital, as in the Middle East, or not really imperiled, like Europe. I absolutely believe in the capacity of Europeans to manage their own affairs. The United States does not need to be the protector of Europe.

Alex Ward

What about China? Would it be wise to wind down America’s military strength while it rises?

Stephen Wertheim

China is a difficult challenge, but I would try to set priorities and act on them. Climate change and pandemic disease are the issues where Chinese behavior is terribly important to the US. They’re threats the American people face where they live and work, and so I would really prioritize those issues and improve the relationship around tackling them. Those issues are not well served by the United States pursuing perpetual military dominance in the Indo-Pacific.

At the same time, I do think we have to be cautious in observing how China continues to rise and how it behaves. It has not had a record of territorial conquest with anything like the record of past US adversaries, like the Axis powers or the Soviet Union. That’s a good thing, though you wouldn’t know it from all the cries about China’s desire to dominate the world emanating from Washington, DC.

A President Wertheim — and please let your readers know I’m rolling my eyes as I say that — would recognize the US has an opportunity to cautiously retrench its position militarily in certain regions as it ramps up cooperation on the issues that really matter. I’d encourage allies and partners in the region to step up to counterbalance China. We still have time to allow that process to happen, and that’d be a good thing since it takes two great powers to make a great-power war.

Alex Ward

Do you really think retrenchment is likely in the near future?

Stephen Wertheim

No. What I am fearful of right now is that it’s almost impossible for many people in the foreign policy community to envision circumstances in which the United States could ever pull back from a region. I worry about the United States putting itself on the front lines of any potential conflict, which could mean a great-power war. We should avoid being in that situation in the first place if we possibly can.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY (plawiuk.blogspot.com)

More Use of Blockchain Technology 

Could Bring Benefits to Africa

Relatively recent experience in containing outbreaks of Ebola in Africa has allowed its nations to effectively contain the spread of coronavirus. Many African countries have quickly deployed effective track, trace, and quarantine measures of the kind that have been remarkably absent in the US and Europe. However, the economic impact of the virus is hitting parts of Africa in other more indirect ways.

The World Bank projects that the value of remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa will decline by around 9% in 2020 due to the global recession caused by the pandemic. In a region where many families depend on remittances from members abroad, the fall is likely to result in an increase in food insecurity and poverty.

Furthermore, the World Bank has found that the cost of sending $200 worth of remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa is around 8.5% – among the most expensive in the world. However, it also identifies that developing digital technology is an area that can help alleviate the cost of remittances. Reducing the cost would help boost the value of payments from abroad, helping offset some of the negative economic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. 

Lowering Remittance Fees Using Blockchain

Given the low cost of sending payments via a blockchain, it seems likely that the technology could have a significant role to play in reducing the cost of remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s one area that blockchain development firm Jelurida has identified where blockchain could make a significant difference in the lives of people living in Africa.

Through its African branch, Jelurida Africa DLT, the company works with local enterprises to help them implement its blockchain-based solutions into their businesses. Jelurida operates the Ardor multichain platform, which has an innovative parent and child chain structure. Anyone can use Ardor to set up their own child chain for any use case.

Bitswift is one such example. It has been operating for the last six years and made the decision to move its blockchain architecture onto Ardor in 2017. Bitswift is a combination of companies and an online community that works together to promote healthy digital lifestyles. Its Bitswift.cash branch allows anyone to participate in the blockchain-based token economy, providing a low-cost means for any two parties to transact value. It’s designed to appeal to even non-technical users who want to reap the benefits of token markets, making it a workable solution to the challenge of high remittance costs. 

Unlocking the Potential of Sustainable Energy

Blockchain also offers significant potential in other areas, beyond pure payments, that could help innovators looking to solve challenges in African nations. For example, many African countries remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels, which may be hampering investment in renewable energy sources, according to the United Nations. Nigeria alone subsidizes the production of fossil fuels by up to $2.5 billion each year.

Therefore, it’s essential to remove barriers to more sustainable means of energy production. Through its Swiss entity, Jelurida has been working with a project collaborating with the Austrian government and aimed at recycling waste heat energy. The project is called “Hot City,” and it uses gamification to crowdsource waste heat that can be recycled back into the energy grid. Citizens can be rewarded for their efforts in identifying these sources using blockchain-based tokens, which are secured using the Ardor platform. Although it’s currently operating in Vienna, such an initiative could be even more valuable in a city like Lagos, which has around seven times the population. It could reduce the dependence on fossil fuels, helping to save costs, and also combat the effects of climate change. 

Supporting New Innovation

Jelurida Africa supports the development of a new generation of blockchain innovators via the Africa Blockchain Institute. The institute offers several industry-leading programs helping would-be developers establish their blockchain credentials.

Jelurida has also recently been a key participant in the Africa Blockchain Developers Call series, showcasing various applications built on the Ardor platform, including a Smart Voting Bot application and GiveSafely, a secure system for charitable donations.

In a continent as vast and diverse as Africa, there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to any issue. However, blockchain technology is versatile enough to address many of the specific challenges faced by African countries. Jelurida Africa is putting the focus on education and innovation to help businesses and entrepreneurs to unlock the true benefits of blockchain.

More Use of Blockchain Technology Could Bring Benefits to Africa (coingape.com)

THIRD WORLD USA

America Has Not Fixed Its Deadliest Pandemic Errors

Robinson Meyer 1/1/2021

As the pandemic enters its second year, the coronavirus has remade everyday life in the United States. More than 19 million Americans have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since March, and at least 330,000 Americans have died of it, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. Yesterday, 3,903 Americans were reported to have died of the virus, the highest death toll since the pandemic began.

© Getty / Paul Spella / The Atlantic

Yet the U.S. is still making the same two deadly mistakes that have defined its response since the pandemic began, our ongoing investigation has found. The nation still does not have enough tests to combat the pandemic. And it is still allowing the virus to rampage through nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities

After an early failure in February left the country with growing caseloads and too few COVID-19 tests to track the outbreak, the U.S. has never caught up. By the middle of December, the country tested about 1.8 million people a day for the virus, which was close to an all-time high. But to begin fighting the virus through testing—by, for instance, identifying infected people before they pass the virus to others—the U.S. must test at least 4.4 million people a day, according to the Harvard Global Health Institute. Ideally, given the scale of the pandemic, the country would run 14 million tests a day, the institute posits.

By our count, the U.S. has conducted more than 248 million tests since the pandemic began, a staggering total. But the virus is now so widespread that if America were meeting that ideal testing target, it would run about that many tests every two and a half weeks.

© Provided by The Atlantic A line chart of US reported tests per day, from March 1 to December 31

The U.S. has never tested as many people as it needs to in order to keep the pandemic in check. It has gone weeks at a time—from late July to mid-September, most strikingly—without increasing the number of people tested every day. At moments when infection has been especially widespread, companies have taken days or even weeks to process test results. Federal regulators have been slow to approve rapid virus tests that could be used at home without a prescription, similar to pregnancy tests.

This has compounded a second crucial failure. In the spring, the country learned that the virus is deadliest in long-term-care facilities such as nursing homes. Though these facilities house less than 1 percent of America’s population, they have seen at least 38 percent of the nation’s COVID-19 deaths, our data show. (Some states report incomplete data for these facilities, meaning that this number likely undercounts the true toll originating in these settings.)

The Trump administration has claimed that saving lives at such facilities is core to its pandemic strategy. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist who advised Donald Trump on virus policy for much of the summer and fall, argued that there was little risk in allowing the virus to spread through the general population as long as officials focused on “protection of the vulnerable” in nursing homes.

Yet the country has never succeeded at protecting the vulnerable, our data show. In December alone, at least 20,455 people have died in long-term-care facilities and nursing homes, the greatest toll since the COVID Tracking Project began collecting long-term-care data in late May. And in every region of the country but the Northeast, more people died in long-term-care facilities in the summer and fall than in the spring.

© Provided by The Atlantic the covid tracking project

These two debacles have preyed on the effectiveness of the American pandemic response from the start. At the end of the year, the U.S. has more diagnosed COVID-19 cases than any other country, and it ranks fourth worldwide in COVID-19 deaths per capita. And December has been the deadliest month of the pandemic so far, our data show. Its death toll has exceeded that of April by 29 percent.

These data were collected by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. For each of the past 299 days, a team of volunteers and project members has watched press conferences, tracked social-media posts, and combed through dozens of government websites to compile the COVID-19 data that each U.S. state and territory provides. The project now records nearly 800 individual statistics.

The resulting database is a patchwork, built from the individual components that each state’s data systems capture and from the numbers that local political leaders allow to be published. Fusing together 56 state and territorial data sets can be a fraught, complex process, and the project publishes exhaustive documentation of what the numbers mean, how they compare to one another, and what we still don’t know, because of the variability of state reporting.

One of the most obvious elisions is the toll that the pandemic has taken on Black, Latino, and Indigenous people. The pandemic has disproportionately killed people in these communities, our data show. At least one in every 800 Black Americans has died of COVID-19, and Black people have died of COVID-19 at 1.7 times the rate of white people. Nationwide, Indigenous people and Alaska Natives have died of COVID-19 at 1.4 times the rate of white people.

Yet the full scale of this damage is not quantifiable, because many states still do not track enough data by race and ethnicity for us to identify the full, disparate impact. Texas, for instance, reports race and ethnicity data for only 4 percent of cases. New York has never reported race and ethnicity case data, which obscures our understanding of the first surge in particular, when New York’s numbers dominated every national statistic.

Only seven states report the racial breakdown of testing data, an important tool in detecting how large outbreaks are overall, because knowing the fraction of a population that has been tested can indicate the breadth of the virus’s spread.

Because of such inconsistencies and gaps, the COVID Tracking Project team has also communicated with state and federal officials hundreds of times over the past 10 months to clarify the meaning of specific numbers and to push for higher data quality and more public transparency.

This effort meant that, for months, the COVID Tracking Project published the only public database of testing and hospitalization data. Today, it is the only data set detailing each state’s and territory’s daily case, testing, hospitalization, and death numbers since the pandemic began. The federal government, including the White House Coronavirus Task Force, has used data from our investigation because it has had no alternative. The CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has repeatedly cited our data on long-term-care facilities in the course of deciding that residents of those places should get vaccinated first.

Today, the federal government publishes data on many of the same metrics we began tracking in March. But for many of these metrics, our data remain the only independent check on that federal data.

The COVID Tracking Project has repeatedly identified issues with the data shared at the state and federal level. For instance, in the spring the CDC made the state of the pandemic less clear by lumping together two different types of tests—antibody tests, which detect past infection, and diagnostic tests, which detect present illness. Test-positivity statistics, widely used to make decisions about pandemic restrictions, still show massive variability, we have found, which make them extremely difficult to use when setting interstate policy. Now the millions of inexpensive, rapid tests that the Trump administration purchased and directed to vulnerable populations are not being reported at either the state or federal level.

Over the past 10 months, we have seen the federal government struggle to acquire, present, and analyze the data necessary to understand the pandemic. This could change in the coming weeks: The incoming Biden administration has said that it plans to make a National Pandemic Dashboard. What will matter, then, is not only having the data, but using them to save lives.

WSJ Editorial Board Blasts Trump’s Election ‘Hustle’: 

Republicans ‘Should Be Embarrassed’

by This

By Josh Feldman Jan 1st, 2021,


ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP / Getty Images

The New York Post received a fair amount of attention after its editorial board begged President Donald Trump to end his “dark charade” trying to overturn the election — even going so far as to say he’s “cheering for an undemocratic coup.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board followed suit this week and said there is absolutely no justification for throwing out electors from states Joe Biden won when there is simply no evidence of the fraud the Trump team is alleging.

Some Republicans, especially Louie Gohmert, are convinced Vice President Mike Pence could save the day, but the Journal questions how exactly the vice president can have “unilateral authority to set aside electors.”

They note that there were similar objections raised by Democrats, but add that one key difference is that in 2004, John Kerry conceded. And the editorial board asks, “Does Mr. Trump want to depart by making people pine for the statesmanship of John Kerry?”

They write that Republicans “should be embarrassed” and concerned about how Trump is not only hurting his own legacy, but “giving Democrats license to do the same in the future.”

mediaite.com

After Trump Blocked UN Inquiry of Racist Violence, NGOs Are Conducting Their Own

Portland police disperse a crowd of protesters past a mural of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor on September 26, 2020, in Portland, Oregon.

NATHAN HOWARD / GETTY IMAGES

Marjorie Cohn, Truthout

PUBLISHED December 22, 2020


PART OF THE SERIES
Human Rights and Global Wrongs

Shortly after the public lynching of George Floyd, the U.S. Human Rights Network and the ACLU organized an international coalition of more than 600 organizations and individuals to urge the United Nations Human Rights Council to convene a commission of inquiry to investigate systemic racism and police brutality in the United States. George Floyd’s brother, Philonise Floyd, addressed the Council by video, stating, “You in the United Nations are your brothers’ and sisters’ keepers in America.” He implored the UN, “I’m asking you to help us — Black people in America.”

However, the Trump administration lobbied heavily against this investigation, objecting to limiting the inquiry to the U.S. The Council subsequently declined a request by a group of African countries within the Council to establish the inquiry commission. “The outcome is a result of the pressure, the bullying that the United States did, assisted by many of its allies,” said Jamil Dakwar, the ACLU’s human rights program director.

But the Council did task the High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet with preparing a report by June 2021 on “systemic racism, violations of international human rights law against Africans and people of African descent by law enforcement agencies, especially those incidents that resulted in the death of George Floyd and other Africans and people of African descent, to contribute to accountability and redress for victims.” In Resolution 43/1, the Council did not limit the subject matter of the report to violations in the United States.

To assist in the preparation of Bachelet’s report, the Council called for input from several entities, including nongovernmental organizations.

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers, National Conference of Black Lawyers and National Lawyers Guild responded to that call by establishing their own International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States.

Rutgers University law professor emeritus Lennox Hinds, who conceived of the idea for the commission, told Truthout, “This International Commission of Inquiry is an attempt to give voice to the international outrage resulting from the public lynching of George Floyd and to expose the racist and systemic nature of police violence against people of African descent in the United States and to hold the U.S. government accountable before the international community.”

Twelve commissioners, including prominent judges, lawyers, professors, advocates and UN special rapporteurs from Pakistan, South Africa, Japan, India, Nigeria, France, Costa Rica, the United Kingdom and the West Indies will hold public hearings from January 18 to February 6.

The commission will hear evidence in 50 cases of police violence that occurred throughout the United States from 2010-2020, including the killings of George Floyd, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor and Tamir Rice. Many resulted in the deaths of unarmed or nonthreatening African Americans.

Although the commission won’t have the money and resources a UN investigation would have commanded (were it not for Trump’s obstruction), the scope of this inquiry will go beyond the Council’s resolution by giving voice to the families of Black victims of police brutality.

Testimony of victims’ lawyers and family members, community representatives and acknowledged experts will occur in 25 cities via Zoom. The commissioners will prepare a report for submission to the UN high commissioner and the public by the end of March. They will be assisted in the hearings and preparation of their report by a team of four rapporteurs, including this writer. Students and faculty from Rutgers Law School will provide research support.

The commissioners will ask the UN high commissioner to use our report to inform her report to the Council. We will also publicize our report widely in the United States and throughout the world for people to use in litigation and advocacy.

This will be a thorough investigation of anti-Black violence perpetrated by police in the United States. It will examine: 1) Cases of victims of police violence, extrajudicial killings and maiming of people of African descent and entrenched structural racism in police practices throughout the U.S.; and 2) The structural racism and bias in the criminal “justice” system that results in the impunity of law enforcement officers for violations of U.S. and international law.

The commission will analyze whether several instances of police violence against African Americans violated international law. A 2020 study of the 20 largest cities in the United States found none whose lethal force policies complied with international human rights law and standards.

Finally, the commission will consider the lack of accountability for violations of human rights, and recommend effective measures to end impunity in the future.

Treaties the United States ratifies become part of U.S. law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. They are the “supreme law of the land.” The U.S. has ratified three human rights treaties that enshrine the right to life, the right to be free from torture and the right to be free from discrimination. All three require effective measures be taken for violations of the rights protected by those treaties.

During the hearings, the testimony will describe instances of police violence that deprived African Americans of the right to life, and the rights to be free from torture and discrimination.

“We want the [UN] high commissioner [Michelle Bachelet] to actually use this report,” said Kerry McLean, a member of the steering committee that is establishing the commission. “She’s not doing hearings, so we’re doing hearings.”

The hearings will be accessible to the public. The report and findings of the commission will be published in English.

USA
2020’s Legislative Attacks on Gig Workers Will Change Labor Forever

BY Robert R. Raymond, Truthout

PUBLISHED January 1, 2021

Rideshare driver Jorge Vargas raises his "No on 22" sign in support as app-based gig workers hold a driving demonstration with 60-70 vehicles blocking Spring Street in front of Los Angeles City Hall on October 8, 2020, in Los Angeles, California.AL SEIB / LOS ANGELES TIMES

In 2020, we saw perhaps the largest protest movement in U.S. history, a presidential election whose outcome could have changed the nature of U.S. democracy, a global pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands and has completely transformed everyday life, and a recession that has left millions unemployed.

Buried in all of these momentous events, something happened which could take labor laws in the United States down a dangerous road. California’s Proposition 22 was the most expensive ballot initiative in the country’s history — and it passed overwhelmingly in November. Bought and purchased by app companies such as Uber, Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash and Postmates — who spent more than $220 million on the campaign — Proposition 22 exempts so-called gig workers from many basic labor rights and seeks to create a new subclass of workers.

The passage of Proposition 22 means that roughly 8.5 percent of the workforce in California will not be guaranteed a minimum wage, won’t have access to unemployment insurance or overtime pay, will not get paid sick leave or family leave, and will have no protection from discrimination based on immigration status or historical traits tied to race. This is especially concerning as we now know that 78 percent of gig workers are people of color, according to a recent study conducted by San Francisco’s Local Agency Formation Commission and led by University of California, Santa Cruz professor Chris Benner.

Another issue of concern is that Proposition 22 eliminates required sexual assault training, as well as the obligations of Uber and Lyft to investigate both customers’ and drivers’ harassment claims.

Further, “the Proposition overrides any local ordinances,” Cherri Murphy, a former Lyft driver and current social justice minister, told Truthout. “During COVID, there were ordinances that were instituted to provide sick leave for workers like me in San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego and L.A. — and now they will be wiped away.”

One of the most concerning things about this ballot measure is that it prevents legislators from amending the law, requiring a seven-eighths majority to make any changes, while also preventing local policy making to expand rights for workers.

Although perhaps one of the most significant setbacks to labor rights in recent history, Proposition 22 is just one in a long line of attacks waged by ride-hailing and delivery start-ups against workers in recent years.

“2020 marks an evolution of what the companies have been doing really for the better part of the last decade,” Brian Chen, staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project, told Truthout. “Gig companies have been on the front lines of carving their workers out of employee status across state legislatures.”By codifying and locking in a new subclass of workers, what companies like Uber and Lyft are doing could just be the beginning of a much broader attack on workers in general.

Many states have already passed regulations that classify rideshare drivers as independent contractors, but those laws differ somewhat from Proposition 22, which ultimately seeks to expand these laws to other sectors, such as delivery companies, and could in fact create space for companies like Amazon or FedEx to adopt similar models that lower wages for their existing workforce.

Another reason that Proposition 22 is so pernicious is that it serves as a blueprint for similar laws to be enacted across the country. With California setting the stage, attacks on gig labor are now popping up in places like Illinois and New York, where these companies have very large numbers of workers.

But ultimately, these app companies are hoping to roll out these new labor models on a federal level. Their aim is to create an entirely new worker classification that goes beyond independent contractor or employee, further eroding any safety nets that are currently maintained at the federal level and directly attacking our most basic ideas of what work is and what work ought to provide for people.

“It’s a really dangerous proposition that these companies are advancing,” Chen said. “They are fundamentally saying their workers aren’t really workers — that they’re independent businesses and therefore they don’t need the usual basic protections that [almost] all workers have had since the New Deal.”

If these strategies are successful, the nature of work in the United States could be radically transformed. And by codifying and locking in a new subclass of workers, what companies like Uber and Lyft are doing could just be the beginning of a much broader attack on workers in general.

“There are already examples of different kinds of employers in health care, retail and hospitality that have experimented with managing their workers through a digital app so that they can escape their employer obligations,” Chen said. “And as this model continues, it’s just going to incentivize entire industries to gig out jobs that once used to provide middle-class stability.”

Although Proposition 22 was a huge win for these app companies, they are likely to face many challenges as they seek to expand to the federal level. “The federal landscape is likely to change: It could be incrementally, it could be drastically, depending on a number of factors,” Steve Smith, communications director at the California Labor Federation, told Truthout. “But under Joe Biden’s administration, we’re going to see a different posture toward gig work than we’ve seen under Trump. And so that’s the first thing that I think these companies are going to have to overcome.”

It’s difficult to predict exactly how the incoming Biden administration will handle all of this. Publicly, the administration has already decried the efforts of app companies to misclassify workers, stating that, “[a]s president, Biden will put a stop to employers intentionally misclassifying their employees as independent contractors. He will enact legislation that makes worker misclassification a substantive violation of law under all federal labor, employment, and tax laws with additional penalties beyond those imposed for other violations.”

And yet at the same time, the Biden administration has appointed Jake Sullivan to national security adviser — a previous Uber and Lyft adviser. Further, incoming Vice President Kamala Harris’s sister is married to Uber executive Tony West, who may be running for a role in the new administration. It’s been reported that West has been a longtime political adviser to Harris since she first ran for public office.

Regardless of how the Biden administration moves forward, it’s unlikely that app companies will end their attacks on regulation. They have been fighting against any attempt to rein them in for years and we will most likely continue to see this fight unfold at the local, state and federal levels for years to come.

There have already been many attempts to regulate companies like Uber and Lyft at both the state and local levels. Last year’s passage of Assembly Bill (AB) 5 in California was a major attempt to end the misclassification of workers. Unfortunately, much of the bill is going to be undone by Proposition 22.

Additionally, earlier this year, California’s attorney general, along with city attorneys from Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, filed a lawsuit against Uber and Lyft, claiming the companies gain “an unfair and unlawful competitive advantage by misclassifying workers as independent contractors.”“… these companies can spend their way out of a ballot measure, but it’s a lot harder to spend their way out of worker organizing.”

But the battle doesn’t only exist in the legislatures or at the ballot box — gig workers are taking to the streets and organizing themselves as they continue to be exploited by their employers.

“Any time a group of workers is exploited over the long term, organizing is inevitable,” Smith said. “And that’s what we’re seeing in the gig economy right now, which makes us incredibly optimistic about the future, because these companies can spend their way out of a ballot measure, but it’s a lot harder to spend their way out of worker organizing.”

Drivers have organized many demonstrations and caravans to bring awareness and build their base of support, perhaps most notably in a three-day caravan that traveled from Los Angeles to Sacramento.

“The most robust on the ground organizing is done by a group of workers called the Rideshare Drivers United,” Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, told Truthout. According to Dubal, the group has about 50 statewide leaders and somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000 members. “They now see their fight on the ground as bargaining directly with these companies, since they cannot use regulations to push the state for better working conditions.”

The group has focused on building worker power to use direct actions and things like strikes and protests to put pressure on the companies to better their working conditions.

“People are still working in these jobs and it’s even more precarious than they have been,” said Nicole Moore, a Lyft driver and labor organizer with Rideshare Drivers United. “Basic labor law is non-negotiable — we see the direction this is going and we want to protect workers. We are gonna fight back.”

Despite being a huge blow to labor rights in the United States, Proposition 22 might serve as a catalyst for a new kind of labor organizing. The nature of gig-work is often quite atomizing, but the coming together of these workers to join in a collective struggle demonstrates that they aren’t going to take it sitting down.

“I think that’s probably one of the most inspiring things that happened during Prop 22,” Chen said. “The direct, on-the-ground organizing and building worker power up to and including going on strike — the fight back is only going to continue.”

Colonization Fueled Ebola: Dr. Paul Farmer on “Fevers, Feuds & Diamonds” & Lessons from West Africa

STORYJANUARY 01, 2021

GUESTS
Paul Farmer
infectious diseases doctor and medical anthropologist. He is a professor of medicine at Harvard University, chair of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, co-founder and chief strategist of Partners in Health.


We continue our conversation with medical anthropologist Dr. Paul Farmer, whose new book, “Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds,” tells the story of his efforts to fight Ebola in 2014 and how the history of slavery, colonialism and violence in West Africa exacerbated the outbreak. “Care for Ebola is not rocket science,” says Dr. Farmer, who notes that doctors know how to treat sick patients. But the public health response was overwhelmingly focused not on care but containment, Dr. Farmer says, which “generated very painful echoes from colonial rule.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.


AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with Dr. Paul Farmer, infectious disease doctor, renowned medical anthropologist, co-founder and chief strategist of Partners in Health, author of the new book Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History. Between 2014 and ’16, Ebola killed more than 11,000 people, most in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. I asked Dr. Farmer to talk about his new book and his work in West Africa during the Ebola crisis.


DR. PAUL FARMER: Well, you know, I wrote the book, a lot of it, in Sierra Leone. And as chance would have it — and I think we talked about this in 2014 — I was in Sierra Leone in June of 2014, but for an unrelated matter. I was there for a surgical conference, which I was involved, in part, in organizing. And I remember folks coming to the conference saying, “You know, there’s already Ebola in the neighboring countries. Should we really have it? Is it a safe venue?” And my response was that you don’t get Ebola through medical conferences, but through caregiving — that is, nursing the sick and burying the dead — and that we would be OK.


Shortly after that, I left, went back home to Rwanda. And as you will recall, my colleague, Humarr Khan, Sierra Leone’s leading infectious disease doctor, died of the disease on July 29th. And I began lobbying my own friends and co-workers to join in on the fight. And so, I will add, Amy, that we were very tardy to get there, in my view, and arrived in October. And what I saw then, in both Liberia and Sierra Leone, was just terrifying. It’s not like there’s a terror with a respiratory virus that’s invisible. That terror comes when someone is sickened and fell ill. But there, in the midst of this clinical desert, there were times when we saw people collapse in the street, and knew that it was likely or possibly from Ebola and, with some shame, you know, waited for those fully masked and gowned to come and help people. Now, that was not during the time which would follow in a couple of weeks in the Ebola treatment units and community care centers and abandoned public hospitals. We’re still doing a lot of that work today.


But the reason I wrote the book was I got to know a number of patients quite well. And as they recovered, we became, very often, friends, that initial group that I met in October and some that I met in Ebola treatment units in the course of the worst weeks of the epidemic. And one of them, a young man named Ibrahim, on the night that I met him, told me that he had lost more than 20 members of his family to Ebola, and asked me to interview him. And even though, as you point out, I’m an anthropologist as well as a physician, that was a very unusual kind of experience to have someone who just experienced such loss and was still recovering to make such a request. And that kind of convinced me that these stories from West Africa and the history of the place would be an important thing for me to learn about. And that was the genesis of the book.


AMY GOODMAN: And so, talk about Ebola, the outbreak and then how it was contained. You talk about it as the “caregivers’ disease.”


DR. PAUL FARMER: Well, Ebola, like the coronavirus, is an RNA virus. And also, likely, both are zoonoses. That is, they come from other species, animal species, and then leap into humans. And if you look, stand back and look, a lot of the diseases that cause the highest number of deaths among humans have these zoonotic roots. And Ebola is one of those. Its natural host is still disputed. It may be a bat. You know, that seems plausible. But in the midst of all that, its origins, in what species it came from, was not really the task at hand. The task at hand there was stopping transmission from person to person, because once introduced into the human family, Ebola spreads easily through contact.


And the two main sources of exposure are caregiving — first, you know, nursing the sick, cleaning up after them, and, second, the last act of caregiving, in most parts of the world and in most religious traditions, is burying the dead. And those were causing the transmission. Now, the problem there, unlike the United States, is that there were not professional caregivers, and there were not professional undertakers or morticians, so, of course, family members and traditional healers had to fill in that gap. And that’s why so many people got sick and so many traditional healers got sick.


And then, of course, the professional caregivers also experienced enormous risk. It wasn’t just Dr. Khan. It was thousands and thousands of nurses, laboratory technicians, ambulance drivers and doctors. And of the thousand or so that got sick during that time, probably more than half of them died. So, that’s, again, another huge loss for any country, but if you’re living in a medical desert and don’t have a lot of physicians and nurses and lab techs and ambulance drivers, it’s really something. Going back to the U.N. secretary-general’s comments about COVID, the effects of that will be felt for years and decades, if we don’t step in and work to build those health systems again.


AMY GOODMAN: Certainly —


DR. PAUL FARMER: I don’t know if that’s a — sorry.


AMY GOODMAN: Certainly, as we’ve learned, dealing with health, with epidemics, with pandemics, if people have any questions about whether altruism is a motivation, we just understand we are all connected. You, Dr. Farmer, talk in your book about colonization, the slave trade, the catastrophic consequences on African nations. Talk about — though this is not usually talked about in health terms, you put the two together.


DR. PAUL FARMER: Yeah. Well, let me just start, Amy, by saying that during the epidemic, the great majority of our attention, and certainly mine, was on the clinical response — that is, trying to make sure that Ebola treatment units, at least the ones with which we were affiliated, were not only places for isolation, but places for care.


And care for Ebola is not rocket science, even without what are called specific therapies, like an antiviral, like remdesivir, for example, for COVID. Even without specific therapies, the interventions that are required to save the lives of the majority of Ebola patients are to replace the fluids that they’ve lost through nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, sweating — right? — the torrid heat of the area. All those losses of fluids and electrolytes are what really imperil the lives of those sickened with Ebola in the short term. And we have therapies for that. They’ve been around for a hundred years. They’ve been improved over time. You know, these oral rehydration salts, what you probably call Pedialyte, are important. And for those who cannot take oral medications, because they’re nauseated or vomiting or in a coma, there are IV solutions that can save lives in that manner.


And even that was not happening across the region. And there were reasons for that, right? People were frightened. And anything that involved a sharp — that is, a needle, to put in an IV, for example, or a blood draw — poses some risk to healthcare workers, right? But it would have been better just to say, “Hey, we’re frightened,” because anyone in their right mind would be frightened. But instead, we started having arguments about what kind of care was the appropriate care. And the arguments, I mean, especially within what are called the international actors — which doesn’t mean Academy Award-winning actors, but the NGOs and humanitarian groups that had flooded this region after the civil wars that afflicted it for some time, and then returned, obviously sometimes a different cast of characters, including ones that we know well, like the CDC — came back, just a decade after this conflict ended, to be involved in the Ebola response.


And I made the argument in the book that the response was hampered by the fact that the attention was largely to containment, not to care. And, of course, this generated very painful echoes from colonial rule, which in that part of the world was largely a 20th century phenomenon. This is not remote history, as you know. So, in order to improve the quality of containment efforts, we should have focused more on the quality of care. And, you know, we’re going to face that when the next epidemic of Ebola comes along.


AMY GOODMAN: Your description of people, the life histories of the Ebola survivors, is deeply moving. Can you talk about Ibrahim Kamara and Yabom Koroma, some of the people that you dedicate this book to?


DR. PAUL FARMER: Well, you know, it’s not always been easy to talk about them, because they endured such losses, and they were not easy to hear about. Of course, having been involved in their care, I thought I knew something about their losses, but it turns out there were many more. And I had an epiphany, which I’m embarrassed to share. But, of course, it wasn’t long before we understood that every adult patient that we cared for who survived Ebola — or didn’t — had also survived a brutal civil war.


And when I started talking with Ibrahim, who is the very man I mentioned earlier, who’s the person, really, in a way, who inspired me to write this book, I couldn’t believe the details, and spent many, many months — and in the case of Yabom, years — interviewing and learning about them. And, of course, this happens over time. But Yabom’s story was different. If I could just go back and say, Ibrahim was probably 26 when he fell ill with Ebola, and did not have children of his own. His most grievous losses were his mother, his siblings, family members, grandparents, aunts, uncles. Yabom, on the other hand, was 39, and she lost, in addition to her husband, some of her children, her mother also, and other family members.


And what I learned about these two was that they moved between villages and the capital city during the war, after the war and even during the epidemic, because, very often, they were called to perform those caregiving services for afflicted members of their family. And again, in the case of those who perish, who was going to bury them at the time that they fell ill? And this was in August of 2014. So, they faced these impossible choices — another reason it was difficult and painful to write about them — choices that I’ve never faced, like: Do we respect our mother’s dying wish to be buried in her home village? And, of course, that was also against the recommendations of public health authorities. But there wasn’t enough in the way of assistance with caregiving or with respectful burial of the dead until later in the epidemic. And so, their compassion led to their own infections and to infections among other members of their families.


Now, I will add, Amy, that, of course, I still am friends with these people, and they’ve recovered, to varying extents. Yabom almost lost her eyesight, as well, because, as I think we discussed when we were together in August of 2014 to talk about Ebola, one of the complications is a blinding inflammation, that can be readily treated with steroids and eyedrops that cost pennies or a dollar to save someone’s vision. So there were lots of complications, to say nothing of grief and psychological and emotional complications. There were lots of complications that endured in the months after the epidemic was declared brought under control.


AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Farmer, you write that every American and most Europeans who fell ill with Ebola in West Africa survived. “Different mortality outcomes emerged from the same strain of Ebola, depending on care that was or wasn’t available depending on your country of origin.” If you can explain this, and then expand that to what we are seeing today in this country, for example, also on the issue of racial differentials and disparities?


DR. PAUL FARMER: Well, you know, this is something that I encourage my students to grapple with or our trainees in clinical medicine, you know, which is case fatality rate, because case fatality rate is a report card on the quality of the medical system, right? And there are many parts to that — referral to a clinical facility able to manage complications.


And we’re going to be facing the same challenge in the coming weeks. If hospitals become saturated, if we don’t flatten the curve, then they become overwhelmed. And not only do they perform more poorly in terms of caring for those sickened by the pandemic — or, in the case of Ebola, the epidemic — they also fail to provide the services that people need for other problems, other illnesses and injuries. And we saw a lot of that during Ebola, but we’ve also seen it in the United States once our hospitals in New England and New York became overwhelmed. And that’s, of course, exactly what happened in West Africa, as well. It just happened earlier and more devastatingly.


But that’s just the first part of the equation. You know, case fatality rate is a marker, a report card, on what happens after you get infected, right? We also have racial disparities and other social disparities, as you’ve noted, in risk of infection. So, all along that noxious path, we have to make interventions that lessen the risk for infection, but also that lessen the risk for a bad outcome once infected. And I think that is the goal before us with COVID-19, just as it was a goal during Ebola.


Now, why am I bringing this up as a controversial matter? Because if the report card is only about disease control — that is, stopping the epidemic — and not about survival once infected, why is it that people would go to an Ebola treatment unit to be isolated, if they fear they will not receive care? And the answer is, they won’t. Right? And this was not new. Treatment centers and treatment units that were really isolation and quarantine facilities proliferated across the continent of Africa during — under colonial rule and remained a feature there even after the end of colonial rule. And that pathology of focusing on disease control over care, I think, really weakened the epidemic.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Paul Farmer, author of the new book Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History. He’s chair of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, co-founder and chief strategist of Partners in Health, also featured in the documentary Bending the Arc.