This Earth Day, Stop the Money Pipeline
We’re cooked unless investors stop funding fossil fuel companies.

By Bill McKibbenTwitter
YESTERDAY 5:45 AM

Cyclist near 59th Street in Manhattan on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. (Bettmann / Getty Images)

This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

Nineteen-seventy was a simpler time. (February was a simpler time too, but for a moment let’s think outside the pandemic bubble.)

Simpler because our environmental troubles could be easily seen. The air above our cities was filthy, and the water in our lakes and streams was gross. There was nothing subtle about it. In New York City, the environmental lawyer Albert Butzel described a permanently yellow horizon: “I not only saw the pollution, I wiped it off my windowsills.” Or consider the testimony of a city medical examiner: “The person who spent his life in the Adirondacks has nice pink lungs. The city dweller’s are black as coal.” You’ve likely heard of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching fire, but here’s how New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller described the Hudson south of Albany: “one great septic tank that has been rendered nearly useless for water supply, for swimming, or to support the rich fish life that once abounded there.” Everything that people say about the air and water in China and India right now was said of America’s cities then.

It’s no wonder that people mobilized: 20 million Americans took to the streets for the first Earth Day in 1970—10 percent of America’s population at the time, perhaps the single greatest day of political protest in the country’s history. And it worked. Worked politically because Congress quickly passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and scientifically because those laws had the desired effect. In essence, they stuck enough filters on smokestacks, car exhausts, and factory effluent pipes that, before long, the air and water were unmistakably cleaner. The nascent Environmental Protection Agency commissioned a series of photos that showed just how filthy things were. Even for those of us who were alive then, it’s hard to imagine that we tolerated this.

But we should believe it, because now we face even greater challenges that we’re doing next to nothing about. And one reason is you can’t see them.

The carbon dioxide molecule is invisible; at today’s levels you can’t see it or smell it, and it doesn’t do anything to you. Carbon with one oxygen molecule? That’s what kills you in a closed garage if you leave the car running. But two oxygen molecules? All that does is trap heat in the atmosphere. Melt ice caps. Raise seas. Change weather patterns. But slowly enough that most of the time, we don’t quite see it.

And it’s a more complex moment for another reason. You can filter carbon monoxide easily. It’s a trace gas, a tiny percentage of what comes from a power plant. But carbon dioxide is the exact opposite. It’s most of what comes pouring out when you burn coal or gas or oil. There’s no catalytic converter for CO2, which means you have to take down the fossil fuel industry.

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That in turn means you have to take on not just the oil companies but also the banks, asset managers, and insurance companies that invest in them (and may even own them, in the wake of the current economic crash). You have to take on, that is, the heart of global capital.

And so we are. Stop the Money Pipeline, a coalition of environmental and climate justice groups running from the small and specialized to the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, formed last fall to try to tackle the biggest money on earth. Banks like Chase—the planet’s largest by market capitalization—which has funneled a quarter-trillion dollars to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris Agreement of 2015. Insurers like Liberty Mutual, still insuring tar sands projects even as pipeline builders endanger Native communities by trying to build the Keystone XL during a pandemic.

EARTH DAY 1970

APRIL 22, 1970: EARTH DAY IS CELEBRATED FOR THE FIRST TIME

Richard Kreitner and The Almanac

This campaign sounds quixotic, but it seemed to be getting traction until the coronavirus pandemic hit. In January, BlackRock announced that it was going to put climate at the heart of its investment analyses. Liberty Mutual, under similar pressure from activists, began to edge away from coal. And Chase—well, Earth Day would have seen activists engaging in civil disobedience in several thousand bank lobbies across America, sort of like the protest in January that helped launch the campaign (and sent me, among others, off in handcuffs). But we called that off; there’s no way we were going to risk carrying the microbe into jails, where the people already locked inside have little chance of social distancing.

Still, the pandemic may be causing as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as our campaign hoped to. With the demand for oil cratering, it’s clear that these companies have no future. The divestment campaign that, over a decade, has enlisted $14 trillion in endowments and portfolios in the climate fight has a new head of steam.

       RON COBB 1970

Our job—a more complex one than faced our Earth Day predecessors 50 years ago—is to force the spring. We need to speed the transition to the solar panels and wind turbines that engineers have worked so mightily to improve and are now the cheapest way to generate power. The only thing standing in the way is the political power of the fossil fuel companies, on clear display as President Trump does everything in his power to preserve their dominance. That’s hard to overcome. Hard but simple. Just as in 1970, it demands unrelenting pressure from citizens. That pressure is coming. Indigenous nations, frontline communities, faith groups, climate scientists, and savvy investors are joining together, and their voices are getting louder. Seven million of us were in the streets last September. That’s not 20 million, but it’s on the way.

We can’t be on the streets right now. So we’ll do what we can on the boulevards of the Internet. Join us for Earth Day Live, three days of digital activism beginning April 22. We’re in a race, and we’re gaining fast.

Bill McKibben is the founder of climate change campaign 350.org, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and the author of the new book Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?.
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Polluted US areas are among worst-hit by coronavirus – putting people of color even more at risk

Emily Holden in Washington and Nina Lakhani in New York, The Guardian•April 14, 2020

Photograph: Loren Elliott/Reuters

The coronavirus pandemic is hitting hard in America’s most vulnerable communities already burdened by toxic industries and environmental pollution. Experts warn that this elevates the risk of developing complications from Covid-19.

Polluted neighbourhoods in cities such as Los Angeles, Houston, Newark, and Detroit, as well as the Navajo Nation are among the country’s worst virus hotspots, a Guardian analysis found. It follows a preliminary US study published last week indicating that even small exposure to pollution in the years before the virus outbreak is associated with a 15% higher risk of death from coronavirus.

As the virus sweeps across the US, major risk factors include poverty, pollution, pre-existing medical conditions, substandard housing and inadequate health care, running water and nutrition. These are issues that most commonly afflict poor people of color.

“Environmental justice communities were already the most vulnerable, marginalized, uninsured and sickest, with high rates of asthma, respiratory illness, diabetes and heart disease,” said Robert Bullard, professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University.

The Guardian researched deaths per capita, and speed of spread of the virus in a number of US cities and communities and found:

Los Angeles, California. There have been at least 296 deaths from Covid-19 in Los Angeles county, which includes the city of Los Angeles, and where the death rate was three per 100,000 people on Monday – 50% higher than the statewide average. The county has some of the worst air quality in the US.

Detroit, Michigan. Wayne county – which includes Detroit – has had more than 700 Covid-19 deaths, and its death rate of 40 per 100,000 people, is more than 250% higher than the statewide average. Detroit had the country’s 12th worst soot pollution in 2019, according to the American Lung Association (ALA) and thousands of households lack running water.

Houston, Texas. Harris county, which includes metropolitan Houston, had 79 confirmed coronavirus cases per 100,000 people by Monday – 61% higher than the state average. Last week, officials confirmed that African Americans accounted for two-thirds of the early Covid-19 deaths in the city – home to widespread heavy polluting industries – despite accounting for only 22.5% of the total population.

The Navajo Nation. Navajo county has the highest virus rate in Arizona with 317 cases per 100,000, compared with 53 per 100,000 statewide. The Nation has longstanding environmental and health inequalities.

Already struggling communities

Pre-existing medical conditions such as hypertension, diabetes and heart disease alongside older age, obesity and compromised immune systems from cancer treatment or smoking, increase the risk of developing Covid-19 complications requiring critical care, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Many such health problems are more common among lower-income neighbourhoods, data on Native Americans and people of color from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) shows.

In addition, polluting heavy industries such as power plants, manufacturing facilities and toxic chemical sites are much more likely to be built near these communities, described as “sacrifice zones” by environmental justice advocates.

“The sacrifice zones are where the virus definitely is taking hold, because you’ve got all these pre-existing conditions,” said Mustafa Ali, formerly an environmental justice official at the EPA in the Obama era.

The pandemic is hitting already struggling communities, just as the Trump administration advances sweeping regulatory rollbacks of protections for the environment and public health. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has told companies they don’t need to monitor and report pollution – if they can argue they have been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Detroit

Detroit, Michigan: ‘Now comes Covid-19, so of course our numbers are going to escalate, because our community is so vulnerable already.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Age-adjusted death rates from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, pneumonia and influenza are all higher in Detroit, where almost 80% of the population is black, than the US average

About 300 out of every 100,000 Detroit residents died from heart disease compared with 165 in the US at large, according to the CDC and Michigan health department.

“That’s where we begin, and then there has been another really dangerous overlay of diseases as a result of the [mass] water shutoffs,” said Gloria House, an activist with We the People of Detroit. “Now comes Covid-19, so of course our numbers are going to escalate, because our community is so vulnerable already.”

Nearly a quarter of Wayne county, more than double the national rate, lives in poverty, which has been exacerbated by factory shutdowns over several decades.

Houston

The annual town Christmas parade takes place in the Manchester neighbourhood in industrial east Houston, Texas. Photograph: Loren Elliott/Reuters

EPA rollbacks could have devastating consequences around Houston – a massive industrial region with more than 500 petrochemical facilities, a busy shipping channel, sprawling highways and commercial railroads. “By anyone’s standards, Houston has one of the highest densities of polluting industries in the country, if not the world,” said Elena Craft, senior director at the Environmental Defence Fund (EDF), which coordinates a local project tracking air quality.

Located on the pollution-heavy east side is Pleasantville, a community of 3,000 people, which is 75% African American and 25% Latino, and is close to the port, a freeway and metal recycling plants. Forty per cent of the population is over 50, and most families do not have private medical insurance. The closest county hospital is 10 miles away, since the local one was permanently closed after flooding during Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

“There’s a lot of sick and vulnerable people in our community and we’re absolutely worried. But the disparities existed before Covid, and will still be there after unless action is taken to improve the quality of life for all citizens,” said Brigitte Murray, a retired nurse and activist.

Los Angeles

People swim in the Pacific Ocean next to the Huntington beach pier in front of an offshore oil rig in Huntington Beach, California. Photograph: Étienne Laurent/EPA

“Los Angeles has some of the worst air pollution in the country and there is very good epidemiological evidence that particle and gaseous pollutants exacerbate both asthma and COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease],” said Dr John Balmes, a pulmonary critical care doctor at Zuckerberg San Francisco general hospital.

Both conditions increase the risk of bad Covid-19 outcomes. Before this pandemic, air pollution was believed to cause around 30,000 deaths annually in the US.

Despite significant improvements over the last two decades, the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area topped the latest list for the highest number of smog days and ranked among the worst places for soot pollution, according to the ALA’s most recent air quality index, which analyzes annual and short-term spikes in contaminants.

In 2017, 38 per 100,000 adults in LA county were admitted to hospital for asthma – one of the highest rates in the state.

“It doesn’t surprise me that LA county and environmental justice communities across the country are suffering a disproportionate burden of Covid-19,” added Balmes. “Health disparities always come down to economic disparities which is shameful in the United States.”

Almost 49% of the county identifies as Latino or Hispanic, 15% as Asian and 9% as African American. Just under 84% are US citizens; one in six residents lives in poverty.

The Navajo Nation

The Navajo Nation was quick to ramp up prevention and mitigation measures after reporting its first case on 17 March. But it’s struggling to contain the spread on its vast territory through Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, with 813 confirmed cases including 28 deaths as of 13 April.

In Coconino county, where Navajo people account for about 60% of cases, the death rate is eight times the state average.

Chronic environmental and health inequalities could be significant: the Navajo Nation is an extreme food desert with just 13 stores for 180,000 people on the reservation. In addition, about a third of people lack indoor plumbing and electricity. As a result, many Navajo struggle to access affordable fresh produce and clean drinking water – essential for a strong immune system.

One consequence is higher rates of diabetes, which affects one in five Navajo, compared with one in 11 in the general population. The evidence suggests diabetics face a higher chance of serious complications including death from Covid-19.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=NAVAJO

New Jersey

Just west of the US focus of the coronavirus in New York City, 10 New Jersey counties are among the country’s 50 hotspots with the highest rate of cases.

This includes Essex county, home to the city of Newark, which is surrounded by heavy polluting industries, including “the state’s largest incinerator, the country’s longest Superfund site, fat-rendering plants, plastic plants, natural gas plants – you name it,” said Maria Lopez-Nunez, director of environmental justice and community development at the Ironbound Community Corporation.

Almost half of Newark residents are African American, and 36% are Latinos.

Mustafa Ali said the coronavirus crisis represented a crossroads for vulnerable populations. “We can either continue down the path that we’ve been following, or begin to build a real medical infrastructure in our country … and tie it to the [pollution hotspots] that have been unseen and unheard.”

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AOC Says Reopening the Economy Shouldn't Mean Returning to 70-Hour Workweeks

“Only in America ... when the president tweets about ‘liberation,’ does he mean ‘Go back to work."

By Emma Ockerman Apr 22 2020


Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it’s not all that “liberating” to open up the economy during a global pandemic so people can return to grueling 70-hour workweeks, in the debut installment of VICE TV’s political talk show “Seat at the Table with Anand Giridharadas,” which aired Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET. VIDEO BELOW

The New York Democrat slammed President Trump’s encouragement of the protesters calling to “liberate” various states from their lockdown orders. The sweeping stay-at-home mandates are meant to protect people from the coronavirus and keep hospitals from collapse, but they've also contributed to widespread job loss.

“Only in America, does the president, when the president tweets about liberation, does he mean ‘Go back to work,’” the progressive legislator said. “We have this discussion about ‘going back’ or ‘reopening’ — I think a lot of people should just say, ‘No, we’re not going back to that. We’re not going back to working 70-hour weeks just so that we can put food on the table and not feel any sort of semblance of security in our lives.”

Separately, Ocasio-Cortez spoke of the virus’ devastation in her district, which encompasses hard-hit neighborhoods in the Queens and the Bronx. New York City alone has recorded nearly 140,000 cases of COVID-19, and almost 15,000 deaths.

“I have to call family members, congregations, and people in our community offering condolences day in and day out.”

“I have to call family members, congregations and people in our community offering condolences day in and day out. I have to talk to teenage kids who have lost their parents. I have to talk to spouses that have lost their husband or wife of several decades,” Ocasio- Cortez said. “I have to talk to people who have lost their pastor or who have lost their imam or who have lost their spiritual leader of their community, and you know, I have to talk to people who say, 'Where am I going to get my next meal,' or 'Am I going to be evicted from my apartment next month?'”

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=AOC

 PAKISTAN IS A SECULAR STATE
Doctors Are Begging Pakistan to Close Mosques or Risk a Coronavirus Catastrophe

Doctors say it was a huge mistake to bow to religious clerics, who demanded an end to government restrictions right before Ramadan.

By Tim Hume Apr 23 2020

People MEN attend evening prayers while maintaining a level of social distancing to help avoid the spread of the coronavirus, at a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, Wednesday, April 22, 2020. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's government bowed to demands by religious leaders and agreed to keep mosques open during the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan. (AP Photo/Fareed Khan)

Pakistan’s leading doctors are begging the government to close mosques during Ramadan, fearing a catastrophic spike in coronavirus infections during the Muslim holy month.

On Saturday, Pakistan's leaders caved to demands from top religious clerics to lift lockdown measures that had restricted gatherings in mosques to five people or fewer. But doctors say that was a huge mistake, warning that high attendance at mosques — which are typically crowded during Ramadan — is likely to fuel a devastating outbreak.

At a news conference late Wednesday, doctors from the Pakistani Medical Association urged the government to rethink its decision to allow mosques to open during Ramadan, which is expected to begin on Friday in Pakistan.

“Unfortunately, our rulers have made a wrong decision; our clerics have shown a non-serious attitude,” Qaiser Sajjad, secretary-general of the Pakistani Medical Association, told the news conference.

Earlier this month, Pakistan’s government restricted gatherings in mosques as part of efforts to prevent a wider coronavirus outbreak. But many mosques openly flouted the rules, and last week, an influential group of clerics — who wield considerable influence in the devoutly Islamic country — announced that they would no longer observe the restrictions.

READ: Pakistan has banned large prayer services to prevent a coronavirus catastrophe. Clerics are holding them anyway

The government swiftly acquiesced to most of their demands, and on Saturday lifted the restrictions on group prayers as long as worshipers adhered to a 20-point list of standard operating procedures. These include wearing face masks, bringing prayer mats from home, banning the elderly and vulnerable from attending, and maintaining social distancing.

“I urge people to pray at home, but if they want to go to mosques, they will have to follow these 20 points,” Prime Minister Imran Khan said in a televised address, warning that the ban would be reimposed of there was a viral outbreak at a mosque.

Doctors have been alarmed by that approach, saying the guidelines will be impossible to implement, and are already being widely breached. Already, they said, mosques are being heavily attended by people in their 60s and 70s, meaning that the advice for vulnerable groups to stay away is not being followed.

Saad Niaz, a doctor speaking at the conference, warned ICU beds and isolation facilities in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, were already at capacity from a recent surge in coronavirus cases, and would be overwhelmed in a few days unless drastic measures were taken.

Pakistan has confirmed more than 10,000 cases of coronavirus, including 212 deaths, but experts warn the peak isn’t expected to hit until May. Many of the cases so far have been linked to religious gatherings.

READ: A prayer meeting has created huge coronavirus clusters in India and Pakistan

Ammar Rashid, an Islamabad-based public health researcher for research center Heartfile, told VICE News that the doctors’ appeal was “remarkable” for how directly it called out the clerics for being irresponsible.

“It is rare to hear such direct criticism of the ulema [a body of religious scholars] from any professional organization, which tend to stay out of religious matters,” he said.

“But the doctors did not hold back and basically told them they were directly jeopardizing lives.”

Despite the stark warning, he said, it wasn’t clear whether the government would heed the doctors’ advice. It has previously dismissed similar calls from provincial officials for tougher lockdown measures, dismissing them as attempts to politicize the outbreak, and several pro-government channels cut away from the doctors’ press conference as it aired, he said.

“The next couple of days will be crucial. If cases surge, as is likely, it may push them to reconsider.”

US Federal Prison Staff Say the Government Is ‘Getting Hustled’ with Bogus Coronavirus Masks

“The quality is terrible,” said one federal prison staffer of the KN95 he received. “I don’t even know where they got ’em from.”

By Keegan Hamilton and Daniel Newhauser Apr 21 2020

Packaging from the KN95 mask supplied to Ray Coleman. Courtesy of Coleman.

Ray Coleman was incredulous when a manager ordered him to throw away his N95 respirator moments after he was fitted to wear it. Coleman, a literacy coordinator at FCI Tallahassee, a low-security federal prison with about 900 inmates in the Florida Panhandle, says he was told that his respirator had expired but replacements would be arriving soon.

Coleman knew there was a national shortage of N95 respirators, which are the best-known protection against inhaling the coronavirus. With demand soaring, some front-line healthcare workers have resorted to wearing cloth coverings over their faces because they’re unable to obtain N95s.

“I’m reading in the news about how hard N95s are to come by,” Coleman, who is also the president of the prison’s union for correctional officers and staff, told VICE News. “We only had like 60 left on hand. Then all of a sudden they said, ‘We’re getting thousands of masks in.’ I’m like, where are we getting these? I think y’all getting hustled.”

When Coleman got a look at the new masks last week, he didn’t like what he saw. They were KN95s, a controversial Chinese-made version of the N95. While KN95s can be a suitable alternative, the U.S. market has been flooded by knockoff versions made from low-quality materials that aren’t certified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA has created a special process to verify KN95 masks and updates a list of permitted manufacturers almost daily. But Coleman said his mask resembles one on a different list: a list of suspected fakes, maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“This is a counterfeit mask,” Coleman recalled thinking. “This mask is from China. It’s not approved. This is what they're sending our law enforcement officers? They’re using us to test masks? That’s not good.”

Staff and union officials are furious at the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ leadership, alleging that the lack of preparation and disjointed response has led to dangerous working conditions and allowed the coronavirus outbreak to spiral out of control in prisons. Nearly 500 inmates and more than 300 staff have tested positive for COVID-19 at 59 BOP facilities across the country. Twenty-two inmates have died.

Initially, BOP staff allege, some staff were ordered not to wear any masks at all. Then when masks became required, there weren’t enough to go around. Now, workers claim, staff have been given dubious KN95s rather than trusted N95s.

Even “hotspot” prisons still don’t have enough respirators — even KN95s — and other PPE, said Joe Rojas, the Southeast regional vice president for the Council of Prison Locals C-33, a branch of the American Federation of Government Employees that represents more than 30,000 unionized federal prison staffers.

At FCC Yazoo City in Mississippi, where at least 71 inmates and four staff members are infected, Rojas said some correctional officers are still being issued regular surgical masks, which offer nowhere near the same level of protection as respirators.

“It’s an F-rated failure,” Rojas said of the BOP’s coronavirus response. “It’s disgusting, it’s reckless, and it’s a failure.”

Do you know something about the Bureau of Prisons? We'd love to hear from you. Contact the reporter at keegan.hamilton@vice.com or keegan.hamilton@protonmail.com.

Government contracting records show the BOP began shopping for KN95s in early April, shortly after the FDA cleared KN95s for use in healthcare settings — if the manufacturer provides verification that the respirators are functional.

Coleman shared photos of his mask with VICE News, including a label that says it was manufactured in March by Hunan Royal Crown Medical Products Co. Ltd. That company does not appear on the FDA’s list of Chinese companies that have authenticated their KN95s. Coleman says the KN95 he was given resembles one listed by the CDC as fake, but Hunan Royal Crown is not listed among the CDC’s suspected counterfeit respirator manufacturers.

“The quality is terrible,” Coleman said. “You can just feel it. I don’t even know where they got ’em from.”

LEFT: THE MASK GIVEN TO RAY COLEMAN. RIGHT: THE LABEL ON COLEMAN'S MASK.

There’s virtually no information available online about Hunan Royal Crown, and Chinese corporate registry information reviewed by VICE News indicates the company was created barely a month ago for the sole purpose of manufacturing masks. The CDC and FDA did not immediately respond to questions about whether the Hunan Royal Crown mask appears on the CDC's counterfeit list, and the company was not reachable for comment.

Many similar manufacturers have sprung up across China to fill the demand, and U.S. buyers have struggled to confirm the quality of their products.

Some 48,000 KN95s sent to first responders in Missouri were recalled earlier this month after testing proved they didn't meet safety standards. And in Illinois, officials reversed course after buying $17 million worth of KN95s, warning that KN95 masks “may not meet performance standards” and counterfeits are “flooding the marketplace.” The state’s health department is now recommending agencies stop distributing KN95s that are not explicitly FDA-approved.

READ: Trump blacklisted this Chinese company. Now it’s making coronavirus masks for U.S. hospitals.

Coleman filed a complaint against FCI Tallahassee with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on April 14 stating that employees had been sounding the alarm about PPE shortages for over a month. The complaint alleges that staff transporting sick inmates to the hospital were not provided with N95 masks. One staff member at FCI Tallahassee has tested positive for COVID-19, according to the BOP.

“Masks have not been issued to employees who are charged with the 24/7 monitoring of the quarantine and isolation of nearly 70 inmates,” Coleman wrote. “Instead the agency is forcing staff to dispose of N95s after fit-testing.”

The national president of the union for BOP staff filed a separate OSHA complaint on March 31, also alleging that the agency “failed to provide the proper N95 masks to staff,” including instances when officers were around sick inmates. Three employees at FCI Oakdale in Louisiana, where seven inmates have died from COVID-19, have joined a class-action lawsuit against the federal government, alleging they were exposed to the virus because they lacked proper gear. One Oakdale officer alleges he was only issued gloves — no mask — when transporting a sick prisoner to the hospital for testing. That prisoner later died from COVID-19.

With N95s in short supply, several federal prisons turned to KN95 masks. Yazoo City bought 30,000 “KN95 disposable facemasks, one-size fits all,” for $98,700 from a company named ML Click Marketing on April 6. Aaron Tucker, the Phoenix-based company’s vice president, told VICE News he also sold KN95 masks to Coleman’s prison in Tallahassee.

But Tucker isn’t sure the masks he sold the prisons are the same ones employees are complaining about. That’s because Tucker has never actually seen the masks. His company serves as a middleman, sending stock directly from manufacturers to the prisons, he said.

Tucker's company, which also goes by the trade name True Uniform, usually sells items like T-shirts, boxer shorts, socks, and soap to federal prisons and other government entities. But as the coronavirus crisis worsened, he said, his customers started asking for masks just as his trusted suppliers told him they could source KN95s from manufacturers in China.

“We'd never sold masks until this thing came out,” Tucker said. “People started asking around whether or not we could get them, and the answer was yes.”

Tucker’s suppliers provided him with FDA certification documents for mask manufacturers that bear a name different than “Hunan Royal Crown.”( He declined to provide that name, the certificates, or contact information for his supplier.) But Tucker now wonders whether he’s fallen victim to a “bait and switch” — or if the prisons got these KN95 masks elsewhere.

“We're kind of learning this as we go,” he said. “It was just the Wild West out there for the first, you know, couple of weeks. People were scrambling to find anything. I plan on reaching out to the representatives at Tallahassee to ask if we have a problem.”

Federal contracting records show ML Click selling around $311,000 worth of “COVID-19 PPE” to the BOP’s Northeast Regional Office on April 1, but a union official told VICE News that staff in that region has not yet reported receiving KN95 masks.

ML Click also received a contract worth nearly $49,000 to supply “hand sanitizer and KN95 face masks” to the BOP’s Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, which is a hub for inmates being moved around the country. The staff union president at the facility was not aware of the purchase and said workers have not been issued KN95 masks and were instead wearing another type of respirator when interacting with sick inmates.

The U.S. Marshals Service, which transports federal prisoners, placed an order for around $1,000 worth of KN95s on April 1 from a company called Buy Smart LLC, which advertises office supplies and cleaning products on its website. The company did not respond to multiple calls from VICE News.

The Department of Justice did not respond to an inquiry from VICE News asking whether any steps had been taken to verify the authenticity of KN95 supplied to federal law enforcement agencies, and whether other agencies beyond the BOP and Marshals Service had bought them.

BOP spokesperson Sue Allison responded to a detailed list of questions about the KN95 purchases and other issues with the agency’s PPE supply by saying the agency “began issuing masks/face coverings to all institution staff and fit-testing for use of N-95 masks” on April 4, after the CDC recommended wearing masks in public.

“Let me assure you, we have a sufficient quantity of personal protective equipment,” Allison said. “Staff have been advised to follow procedures and be responsible in how and when we use it. We are monitoring the inventory closely.” She added, “Our contracting staff continue to make purchases daily to ensure we maintain our inventories.”

As Chinese manufacturers have ramped up production of respirator masks, U.S. regulators have struggled to keep pace. As previously reported by VICE News, the first KN95 manufacturer certified by the FDA was BYD, a Chinese electric-vehicle company with a history of supplying allegedly defective products to U.S. taxpayers, as well as possible links to forced labor, though BYD denies both claims and is not linked to the masks sent to U.S. prisons. VICE News also documented how Chinese drug traffickers are getting into the mask game by using phony FDA certificates to dupe would-be customers.

“It was just the Wild West out there for the first, you know, couple of weeks. People were scrambling to find anything.”

Matthew Solomon, an FBI special agent who supervises a task force that investigates fraud and other economic crimes, said the agency has received over a thousand complaints about bogus PPE and other coronavirus-related scams since the outbreak began.

When VICE News described the situation with ML Click and the KN95s supplied to the BOP, Solomon replied, “If there was some sort of ‘bait and switch’ where perpetrators were offering a mask or PPE that was certified by one of the major providers that are based in the U.S. and it turned out not to be that, of course the FBI would be interested.”

The DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General is reportedly investigating the BOP’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, and U.S. lawmakers are also demanding answers. In an April 13 letter to Attorney General William Barr and BOP Director Michael Carvajal, Florida Reps. Val Demings and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell said they had received “alarming reports” about federal prisons not providing PPE to staff and “ignoring basic guidance” from the CDC.

“Employees at correctional institutions in Florida have conveyed that there is a shortage of gloves and the supply of available masks severely lacking,” Demings and Mucarsel-Powell wrote, noting that Congress recently allocated $100 million to the BOP specifically to buy PPE and respond to the outbreak.

Rep. Karen Bass, a California Democrat who has criticized the BOP’s handling of the outbreak, said that without Congress in session, “we're having a real problem with oversight right now.”

“I'm worried that after having worked so many years on criminal justice reform, that we're getting ready to reduce our prison population, but we're going to reduce our prison population through death,” Bass said. “And I just think that is just completely unacceptable.”

Some BOP staffers say they were under orders not to wear any masks at all until early April. VICE News obtained a letter sent from a correctional officer to the warden of U.S. Penitentiary Coleman, part of a large federal prison complex in Florida, in which the officer says his captain told him not to wear an N95 on duty. The officer expressed concern about contracting the virus and bringing it home to family members with underlying medical conditions.

“I’m only doing what any responsible person would do,” the officer wrote. “I’m taking extra precautions not to bring anything in or out of the facility. I was told I could not work while wearing the mask. Being proactive should not be a punishment.”

At least one inmate and three staff members at the Coleman complex have tested positive for COVID-19 and 1,000 inmates at the low-security facility there are currently under quarantine after possible virus exposure, according to an email to prison staff obtained by VICE News.

One staff member at FCC Coleman told VICE News they were instructed last month by the complex warden to remove their mask while working at the facility. A regional BOP official said the policy against wearing masks came from “Central Office” or agency headquarters in Washington, according to a text message exchange obtained by VICE News.

The FCC Coleman staff member, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, said the deputy attorney general sent a memo to DOJ employees last week reversing the policy and mandating the use of masks, but the change came too late.

“It could have been prevented,” the FCC Coleman staffer said. “If they would have let us wear masks when we wanted to, the inmates wouldn’t have gotten sick. The inmates didn't get it from visitors. We’re the ones going to stores. We're not socializing, but we're out in society.”

FCC Coleman recently received a shipment of 4,000 KN95 masks, the source said, but could not offer any details about cost or model.

Charles Jones, a correctional officer at FCI Marianna, a medium-security prison in Florida, said his facility also received KN95 masks in recent weeks. A photo he sent of the packaging indicates the masks were made by a company not listed by the FDA as a certified manufacturer of KN95 respirators.

Jones, who serves as the local union president, does fit-testing of staff for respirators and expressed concern about the new masks. “They’re saying they’re FDA-approved, but it’s got this Chinese label on it, and we don’t know what the standard is,” he said. “They say it’s OK, but there's no real way to verify what the quality is of these respirators.”

Jones said the BOP isn’t providing proper PPE to staff being sent to “hot zones,” which he worries will cause the virus to spread into new prisons and ultimately into neighboring communities. He said those who are issued respirators are being told to wear the same mask for an entire workweek, which is longer than recommended safety standards. There weren’t even enough N95s for all staff members to undergo the mandatory fit-testing, he said, so he’d started fit-testing with the one-size-fits-all KN95s instead.

“They’re saying they've been preparing for this since December or January, but I just don't understand how we don’t still have masks,” Jones said. “They weren't even trying to get masks back then. They're saying there was a plan, but obviously there isn’t one if we still don't have enough N95s in stock.”

A day after VICE News sent an inquiry to the BOP about the use of KN95 masks, staff at Marianna received an email from prison officials saying that respirator fit-testing had been halted. On a subsequent conference call, Jones said, staff were told not to wear the masks until further notice.

At FCI Tallahassee, Coleman said his warden told him he “didn’t know who authorized the purchases” of the KN95s, and that the matter was being investigated. In the meantime, Tallahassee acquired new N95s from another federal prison in Florida. Coleman still wishes he’d kept the expired N95 that he was forced to throw away after fit-testing, though. He knows the new stash isn't going to last forever, and worries KN95s are going to be back on the table.

“I’d rather give somebody a decent mask that’s expired than one of these masks,” he said.

---30---

Nearly 50% of Twitter Accounts Talking about Coronavirus Might Be Bots

Twitter is dealing with a pandemic of bots jamming the platform with misinformation about COVID-19.

By Tess Owen Apr 23 2020

Nearly half the “people” talking about the coronavirus pandemic on Twitter are not actually people, but bots, according to new research from Carnegie Mellon University.

And many of those bots are rapidly feeding Twitter with harmful, false story lines about the pandemic, including some inspiring real-world activity, such as the theory that 5G towers cause COVID-19, or state-sponsored propaganda from Russia and China that falsely claims the U.S. developed the coronavirus as a bioweapon or that American politicians are issuing “mandatory” lockdowns.

“We do see that a lot of bots are acting in ways that are consistent with the story lines that are coming out of Russia or China,” said Kathleen Carley, professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science’s Institute for Software Research.

Researchers there found that 45.5% of users tweeting about the coronavirus have the characteristics of bots, such as tweeting more frequently than is humanly possible, or appearing to be in one country and then another a few hours later.

Carley says that’s a massive jump from the 20% she’d expected based on previous analyses of bot activity around other major global news events and national disasters.

The Carnegie Mellon team identified more than 100 false narratives relating to coronavirus worldwide, which they divided into six different categories: cures or preventative measures, weaponization of the virus, emergency responses, the nature of the virus (like children being immune to it), self-diagnosis methods, and feel-good stories, like dolphins returning to Venice’s canals.

They found the largest number of different narratives in the cures or preventative measures category — 77 in total. Carley said those ranged from the downright silly, like Corona beer cures coronavirus, to the downright deadly, like drinking bleach cures coronavirus (this was touted by the pro-Trump group QAnon). Disinformation in this category was the most likely to travel internationally, Carley said.




Disinformation about the coronavirus erodes trust in institutions and makes the public less likely to comply with scientifically informed government measures needed to curb the spread of the virus, like lockdowns and social distancing.

"The real goal of those running these disinformation campaigns is about creating distrust in the overall ecosystem and institutions. It’s not so much about picking a side as it is about creating confusion and doubt and distrust of authority,” said Jevin West, who runs the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington.
Bot or not?

Carley and her team rely on a “bot hunter” tool that they developed, which uses artificial intelligence to process account information from users on Twitter to determine who is or who isn’t a bot.

The bot hunter looks at information like number of followers, the things they tweet about, the frequency of tweeting, language, the types of accounts they retweet, and their mentions network.

To analyze bot activity around the pandemic, the tool examined all tweets discussing coronavirus or COVID-19 — that ended up being about 67 million tweets between January 29 and March 4, and after that about 4 million tweets on average each day, from more than 12 million users.

Carley’s findings, which will be laid out in an upcoming paper, are in keeping with reports that China and Russia have launched massive disinformation campaigns around the coronavirus pandemic directed at the U.S.

Reuters got their hands on a European Union document last month alleging that the Kremlin had mounted a “significant disinformation campaign” against the West with the goal of sowing panic and distrust.

In mid-March, the White House’s National Security Council had to put out an announcement via Twitter denying social media reports that President Donald Trump was about to lock down the entirety of the U.S. According to the New York Times, that narrative was pushed by Chinese agents. And earlier this month, the Justice Department said it was investigating coronavirus disinformation campaigns originating from China and Russia.

While some bots fit the profile of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, Carley said it’s hard to say definitively where they came from or who made them. “We can’t prove attribution,” she said.
Removing tweets

A spokesperson for Twitter told VICE News that they’re “prioritizing the removal of COVID-19 content when it has a call to action that could potentially cause harm,” a policy that they adopted on March 18. Since then, they’ve removed more than 2,200 tweets.

“As we’ve said previously, we will not take enforcement action on every tweet that contains incomplete or disputed information about COVID-19,” the spokesperson said. “As we’ve doubled down on tech, our automated systems have challenged more than 3.4 million accounts that were targeting discussions around COVID-19 with spammy or manipulative behaviors.”

Carley has described bot detection as a game of cat-and-mouse: Bots are constantly becoming more sophisticated to evade social media crackdowns, and so the software needed to catch them has to be regularly updated.


At the moment, Twitter says they’re not seeing any kind of coordinated platform-manipulation effort with regards to coronavirus. They also cautioned that not all bots are created equal — and not all bots are bad. If they were, Twitter says, they’d be in violation of their company policy.

#KAKISTOCRACY
'Don't You Have a Bat to Eat?' New HHS Spokesman Made Racist Remarks About Chinese People on Twitter

Michael Caputo deleted the comments on Twitter before he was named assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS last week.

By Emma Ockerman -VICE-Apr 23 2020

MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
Cover: Newly-appointed spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services Michael Caputo arrives at the Hart Senate Office building to be interviewed by Senate Intelligence Committee staffers, on May 1, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The Department of Health and Human Services’ new spokesman tweeted — and then deleted — racist comments about Chinese people in March, and accused reporters critical of President Trump’s labeling of COVID-19 as the “the Chinese Virus” of “carrying water for the Chinese Community Party.”

Michael Caputo’s since-deleted tweets, archived online and first reported by CNN, came before he was appointed as the assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS last week. (HHS hasn’t commented on Caputo’s tweets to CNN, and did not respond to a VICE News request for comment.)

HHS is among the agencies currently attempting to fight off the coronavirus pandemic. Caputo previously worked for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

In early March — just as COVID-19 was starting to sweep across the U.S., and shelter-in-place orders were being issued — Caputo responded to a tweet about the conspiracy theory that the U.S. government brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, where the outbreak first emerged.

Foreign Ministry spokesman and Chinese diplomat Zhao Lijian tweeted the conspiracy theory, saying “US owe us an explanation!”

“This virus originated in Wuhan. You own it, and you know why. Nobody believes your bullshit. Take your lumps and clean up your act so you don’t kill the world,” Caputo responded.

When another Twitter user asked how Caputo knew the virus originated in Wuhan, Caputo responded: “Sure, millions of Chinese suck the blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters, but some foreigner snuck in a bottle of the good stuff. That's it.”

He responded to other people critical of him, too, saying to one user: “Don’t you have a bat to eat?” And another: “You’re very convincing, Wang.”



Caputo was apparently referencing the fact that researchers believe coronavirus was transmitted from bats to other wild animals possibly sold to humans at a wet market in Wuhan.

And as Trump was being criticized for labeling COVID-19 as “the China Virus” — saying it wasn’t racist — Caputo tweeted “#ChineseVirus” 20 times in a row on March 17. He also tweeted that Democrats and members of the Media were acting too favorably to Beijing.

“The Chinese Communist Party has always been adept at lying to cover their murders. What's remarkable here is the US Democrats and their conjugal media repeating CCP propaganda because they hate Trump more than they love America. The Wuhan virus has exposed them,” Caputo tweeted.

The next day, March 18, Caputo said on Twitter that “leftists lost the true meaning of ‘racism’ long ago,” suggesting that people “double down on #ChineseVirus.” He then said that reporters were “carrying water for the Chinese Communist party.”

Separately, Caputo suggested several times that Democrats would celebrate coronavirus deaths and an economic collapse, because it would look as if Trump had failed to handle the crisis.

"How many Americans must die to feed Democrat powerlust? 100K? 1M? More??," Caputo said in a tweet March 22. "How much economic destruction is the Democrat goal? 100% unemployment?'"