Friday, March 13, 2020
The real story of the birth of immigration controls in the UK is eerily familiar
David Glover,The Independent•March 13, 2020
Poor Jewish children playing in London's east end, 1900: Heritage Images/Getty Images
In our near-Brexit condition, it seems almost impossible to think of Britain as a nation-state without confronting the question of who has the authority to control its borders and how this can best be done.
Yet the modern practice of policing immigration is little more than a century old and can be dated very precisely: 1 January 1906. On that day, a new law was brought into operation which laid down the conditions of entry for any foreigner wishing to live and work in the UK and put the power to decide into the hands of an immigration officer, a state functionary that had never existed before.
According to the 1905 Aliens Act, those seeking admission could only apply at one of 14 named ports and an “alien immigrant” was legally defined as a person who travelled on a steerage-class ticket, someone unable to afford a cabin. As soon as they stepped ashore, migrants were required to queue for a complex assessment that determined whether they were entitled stay, sifting out “decent” from “undesirable aliens” according to the results of health checks (including signs of insanity or criminality), proof of financial support, the likelihood of finding a job, and access to accommodation.
Then, as now, the government could arrange for the deportation of “aliens” who committed crimes while in Britain. But, unlike today, it was first necessary for a judge to recommend this course of action during sentencing and the Home Office would only endorse his advice after having carefully considered such factors as the amount of time the guilty person had lived in the country and the hardship that expulsion might cause in each individual case.
Passed into law during the final days of a Conservative administration, but attacked and amended by the Liberal opposition, the 1905 Aliens Act satisfied no-one. Among those who were most disappointed were those on the far right of the Tory party who had championed immigration control and who saw their “anti-alien crusade” in starkly racial terms.
Conservative politicians like Major William Evans-Gordon, the then Stepney MP, had few qualms about joining with the grass-roots extra-parliamentary British Brothers’ League in January 1902 when it held its “Great Public Demonstration” against alien immigration at the People’s Palace on Mile End Road, where the air was thick with cries of “Down with them”, “Wipe them out”, and “Jews!”
These voices are a brutal reminder that the call to restrict “alien immigration” was never a neutral, racially-blind plea for fairness. And that xenophobic groups like the British Brothers’ League can be seen as precursors of a long tradition in British politics in which race and nationalism have served as the mainspring of a populist appeal to the interests of “real people.”
This was one of the Act’s most enduring, if unintended legacies – unintended, because its original supporters had thought to remove the question of race from the domestic political arena altogether by bringing immigration to an end.
In the language of contemporary populism, “real people” constantly see themselves as ignored, overlooked or, worse still, as subject to “betrayal” by the political establishment. And thus it was with the 1905 Aliens Act, which campaigners saw as a travesty of the law for which they had fought so hard.
The chief concession that the Liberal opposition had managed to snatch from the jaws of defeat was the inclusion of a clause that specifically allowed those fleeing persecution “on religious or political grounds” to remain in the UK, even if they lacked the means to support themselves or were likely to become a burden on the state.
In making this exception, the law was implicitly harking back to the 19th-century when, for over 80 years, no-one who came to Britain seeking sanctuary was ever refused entry or sent back, effectively setting new standards in freedom of speech and tolerance towards others. Nevertheless, the 1905 Act marked one crucial difference: if asylum had been granted a political safeguard, that protection was not identified as a right. For, after 1905, asylum was in reality dependent upon the discretion of the officer on the quay.
The bitter struggle to control immigration in the years before 1905 cast a long shadow over the very idea of asylum, a cloud that still hangs over us. To refer to someone as an “immigrant” or an “asylum-seeker” always carries a bad after-taste, the mark of the putatively undeserving pseudo-citizen, the intruder who deserves to be expelled from the body politic. When, in the 1930s, German Jews tried to escape from Nazi Germany, the British government insisted that they were to be classed as “immigrants”, not “refugees”, and could only enter the country on a temporary basis, before being moved on, driven elsewhere. The “hostile environments” we create for others might begin with words, shored up by legal definitions, but they rarely end there.
David Glover is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Southampton. His book: Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England explores the roots of the first modern immigration law in Britain
In our near-Brexit condition, it seems almost impossible to think of Britain as a nation-state without confronting the question of who has the authority to control its borders and how this can best be done.
Yet the modern practice of policing immigration is little more than a century old and can be dated very precisely: 1 January 1906. On that day, a new law was brought into operation which laid down the conditions of entry for any foreigner wishing to live and work in the UK and put the power to decide into the hands of an immigration officer, a state functionary that had never existed before.
According to the 1905 Aliens Act, those seeking admission could only apply at one of 14 named ports and an “alien immigrant” was legally defined as a person who travelled on a steerage-class ticket, someone unable to afford a cabin. As soon as they stepped ashore, migrants were required to queue for a complex assessment that determined whether they were entitled stay, sifting out “decent” from “undesirable aliens” according to the results of health checks (including signs of insanity or criminality), proof of financial support, the likelihood of finding a job, and access to accommodation.
Then, as now, the government could arrange for the deportation of “aliens” who committed crimes while in Britain. But, unlike today, it was first necessary for a judge to recommend this course of action during sentencing and the Home Office would only endorse his advice after having carefully considered such factors as the amount of time the guilty person had lived in the country and the hardship that expulsion might cause in each individual case.
Passed into law during the final days of a Conservative administration, but attacked and amended by the Liberal opposition, the 1905 Aliens Act satisfied no-one. Among those who were most disappointed were those on the far right of the Tory party who had championed immigration control and who saw their “anti-alien crusade” in starkly racial terms.
Conservative politicians like Major William Evans-Gordon, the then Stepney MP, had few qualms about joining with the grass-roots extra-parliamentary British Brothers’ League in January 1902 when it held its “Great Public Demonstration” against alien immigration at the People’s Palace on Mile End Road, where the air was thick with cries of “Down with them”, “Wipe them out”, and “Jews!”
These voices are a brutal reminder that the call to restrict “alien immigration” was never a neutral, racially-blind plea for fairness. And that xenophobic groups like the British Brothers’ League can be seen as precursors of a long tradition in British politics in which race and nationalism have served as the mainspring of a populist appeal to the interests of “real people.”
This was one of the Act’s most enduring, if unintended legacies – unintended, because its original supporters had thought to remove the question of race from the domestic political arena altogether by bringing immigration to an end.
In the language of contemporary populism, “real people” constantly see themselves as ignored, overlooked or, worse still, as subject to “betrayal” by the political establishment. And thus it was with the 1905 Aliens Act, which campaigners saw as a travesty of the law for which they had fought so hard.
The chief concession that the Liberal opposition had managed to snatch from the jaws of defeat was the inclusion of a clause that specifically allowed those fleeing persecution “on religious or political grounds” to remain in the UK, even if they lacked the means to support themselves or were likely to become a burden on the state.
In making this exception, the law was implicitly harking back to the 19th-century when, for over 80 years, no-one who came to Britain seeking sanctuary was ever refused entry or sent back, effectively setting new standards in freedom of speech and tolerance towards others. Nevertheless, the 1905 Act marked one crucial difference: if asylum had been granted a political safeguard, that protection was not identified as a right. For, after 1905, asylum was in reality dependent upon the discretion of the officer on the quay.
The bitter struggle to control immigration in the years before 1905 cast a long shadow over the very idea of asylum, a cloud that still hangs over us. To refer to someone as an “immigrant” or an “asylum-seeker” always carries a bad after-taste, the mark of the putatively undeserving pseudo-citizen, the intruder who deserves to be expelled from the body politic. When, in the 1930s, German Jews tried to escape from Nazi Germany, the British government insisted that they were to be classed as “immigrants”, not “refugees”, and could only enter the country on a temporary basis, before being moved on, driven elsewhere. The “hostile environments” we create for others might begin with words, shored up by legal definitions, but they rarely end there.
David Glover is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Southampton. His book: Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England explores the roots of the first modern immigration law in Britain
Journalist goes undercover at "wet markets",
where the Coronavirus started | 60 Minutes Australia
MK-ULTRA
Did the CIA's notorious mind control program create an infamous killer? (SHORT ANSWER, YES)
Michael Isikoff Chief Investigative Correspondent,
Yahoo News•March 2, 2020
MK-Ultra was the code name for a notorious government mind control program conducted in the 1950s and 1960s in which the CIA directed scientists to dose unsuspecting human guinea pigs with LSD and other drugs. The program was recently back in the news when a juror in the case of one of those guinea pigs — the late Boston mobster Whitey Bulger, whom the CIA had injected with LSD when he was a young prison inmate — said she wouldn’t have voted to convict him of 11 murders had she known what the U.S. government had done to him. Bulger, who was given LSD over 50 times, would go on to terrorize South Boston as the notoriously violent leader of the Winter Hill Gang.
In a new episode of “Buried Treasure,” a regular feature of the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery,” Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman interview historian and journalist Stephen Kinzer, the author of the new book “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.” It’s a biography of the man behind MK-Ultra, a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb, who also devised poisons the agency used to try to assassinate foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.Yahoo News: Let’s just start out by telling our listeners about Sidney Gottlieb. Who was he?
Stephen Kinzer: I’ve devoted a lot of my career to try to find out what happens behind the facade of public politics and public diplomacy that we can see. I’ve discovered a lot of things in the course of that research. ... This is the first time I’ve been shocked. I still can’t believe that this happened, that there was such a thing as MK-Ultra and that there was such a person as Sidney Gottlieb. He lived in total invisibility. So in a sense, my book is the biography of a man who wasn’t there.
You approached a former director of the CIA, who professed not to know who Sidney Gottlieb was.
Gottlieb has faded away almost entirely, and that was his desire. He was conducting the most extreme experiments on human beings that have ever been conducted by any agency or officer of the U.S. government. He had what was, in effect, a license to kill. ... Gottlieb was probably the most powerful unknown American of the 20th century.
Is it possible that one reason Sidney Gottlieb has escaped attention is because the CIA never confronted ... the awful things he was doing?
They ultimately have said, essentially, that Gottlieb was some kind of wacko. He was not supervised well, things got off the rails, the project got out of control, there were problems with supervision. ... It was all Sidney’s fault. This is a way of eliminating all institutional responsibility on the part of the CIA.
How did he fit in at the CIA?
Sidney Gottlieb joined the CIA in its early years, in 1951. ... Almost all of the senior officers of the CIA came from a particular social class. They were silver spoon products of the American aristocracy, who knew each other from prep school, and the same colleges, and investment banks, and law firms. Sidney Gottlieb was completely different ... from the rest of them. He was the son of Jewish immigrants. He grew up in the Bronx. He stuttered. He had a limp. So he was very much of an outsider. ... [Agency officials] knew that what he was doing was brutal, was bloody, and was causing an unknown number of deaths. They didn’t want to put somebody from their own social class in the position of having to oversee this project that they knew was very horrific.
What Sidney Gottlieb was running was a covert program aimed at mind control [and] experimenting with LSD on some of the most vulnerable Americans with no consent at all.
The idea behind MK-Ultra was to find a substance that would allow the CIA to control people’s minds and manipulate them and make them do things that they would never otherwise do. And then, if you were lucky, just forget that they had ever done them. … [Gottlieb] decided that before you could find a way to insert a new mind into somebody’s brain, you first had to find a way to blast away the mind that was in there.
... He used every kind of drug combination he could imagine, plus sensory deprivation, hypnosis, electroshock and all kinds of other techniques, all aimed at trying to find a way to destroy a human mind. ... Behind him, he left a trail of wounded and dead in numbers that nobody can even estimate because records were all destroyed as Gottlieb left the CIA.
Did the CIA's notorious mind control program create an infamous killer? (SHORT ANSWER, YES)
Michael Isikoff Chief Investigative Correspondent,
Yahoo News•March 2, 2020
Sidney Gottlieb. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photo: AP)
SKULLDUGGERY PODCAST http://aca.st/f26c27
MK-Ultra was the code name for a notorious government mind control program conducted in the 1950s and 1960s in which the CIA directed scientists to dose unsuspecting human guinea pigs with LSD and other drugs. The program was recently back in the news when a juror in the case of one of those guinea pigs — the late Boston mobster Whitey Bulger, whom the CIA had injected with LSD when he was a young prison inmate — said she wouldn’t have voted to convict him of 11 murders had she known what the U.S. government had done to him. Bulger, who was given LSD over 50 times, would go on to terrorize South Boston as the notoriously violent leader of the Winter Hill Gang.
In a new episode of “Buried Treasure,” a regular feature of the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery,” Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman interview historian and journalist Stephen Kinzer, the author of the new book “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.” It’s a biography of the man behind MK-Ultra, a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb, who also devised poisons the agency used to try to assassinate foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.Yahoo News: Let’s just start out by telling our listeners about Sidney Gottlieb. Who was he?
Stephen Kinzer: I’ve devoted a lot of my career to try to find out what happens behind the facade of public politics and public diplomacy that we can see. I’ve discovered a lot of things in the course of that research. ... This is the first time I’ve been shocked. I still can’t believe that this happened, that there was such a thing as MK-Ultra and that there was such a person as Sidney Gottlieb. He lived in total invisibility. So in a sense, my book is the biography of a man who wasn’t there.
You approached a former director of the CIA, who professed not to know who Sidney Gottlieb was.
Gottlieb has faded away almost entirely, and that was his desire. He was conducting the most extreme experiments on human beings that have ever been conducted by any agency or officer of the U.S. government. He had what was, in effect, a license to kill. ... Gottlieb was probably the most powerful unknown American of the 20th century.
Is it possible that one reason Sidney Gottlieb has escaped attention is because the CIA never confronted ... the awful things he was doing?
They ultimately have said, essentially, that Gottlieb was some kind of wacko. He was not supervised well, things got off the rails, the project got out of control, there were problems with supervision. ... It was all Sidney’s fault. This is a way of eliminating all institutional responsibility on the part of the CIA.
How did he fit in at the CIA?
Sidney Gottlieb joined the CIA in its early years, in 1951. ... Almost all of the senior officers of the CIA came from a particular social class. They were silver spoon products of the American aristocracy, who knew each other from prep school, and the same colleges, and investment banks, and law firms. Sidney Gottlieb was completely different ... from the rest of them. He was the son of Jewish immigrants. He grew up in the Bronx. He stuttered. He had a limp. So he was very much of an outsider. ... [Agency officials] knew that what he was doing was brutal, was bloody, and was causing an unknown number of deaths. They didn’t want to put somebody from their own social class in the position of having to oversee this project that they knew was very horrific.
What Sidney Gottlieb was running was a covert program aimed at mind control [and] experimenting with LSD on some of the most vulnerable Americans with no consent at all.
The idea behind MK-Ultra was to find a substance that would allow the CIA to control people’s minds and manipulate them and make them do things that they would never otherwise do. And then, if you were lucky, just forget that they had ever done them. … [Gottlieb] decided that before you could find a way to insert a new mind into somebody’s brain, you first had to find a way to blast away the mind that was in there.
... He used every kind of drug combination he could imagine, plus sensory deprivation, hypnosis, electroshock and all kinds of other techniques, all aimed at trying to find a way to destroy a human mind. ... Behind him, he left a trail of wounded and dead in numbers that nobody can even estimate because records were all destroyed as Gottlieb left the CIA.
Gottlieb, left, a former CIA scientific chief, talks with his attorney, Terry Lenzner, before testifying to a Senate health subcommittee on Sept. 21, 1977. (AP)
So this was a Cold War program started in the early 1950s. And like much else from the Cold War era, it arose out of fears that the Soviets and international communism were doing something like this, and therefore we couldn’t have a mind control gap, as it were. What do we know about what the Soviets were up to and what U.S. intelligence thought the Soviets were up to?
Now those are two very different things: what the Soviets were doing and what we thought the Soviets were doing. So I asked myself the same question. ... What led the early directors of the CIA, and in particular, Allen Dulles, and then the person he hired to run this MK-Ultra project, Sidney Gottlieb, to believe that there was such a thing as mind control? In the end, after 10 years, Sidney Gottlieb finally concluded that there is no such thing as mind control. ... But what made them think that it was possible? ... I think it has to do with the cultural conditioning with which they were brought up. Think of all the books, and the stories, and the movies, about mind control. ... There are Edgar Allan Poe stories, and Sherlock Holmes stories, and movies like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and “Gaslight.” Those guys grew up watching those movies, and reading those stories, and I think they believed that since fiction could imagine it, there probably was an element of truth to it. That also fed their desire to plunge into this project.
There was “The Manchurian Candidate,” a novel and then a movie, that came out in the early 1960s, which was about Korean mind control programming an American to assassinate a presidential candidate. And ironically, it was the book “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate,” by John Marks, in the 1970s, that I believe first revealed the existence of MK-Ultra?
You’re right. When Sidney Gottlieb left the CIA in 1973, along with his longtime mentor, Richard Helms, who was at that time the director of the CIA, the two of them sat down and quickly decided that all the files from MK-Ultra should be destroyed. Gottlieb actually had to go out to the CIA records center in Wharton, Va., and oversee the destruction of seven crates of documents. ... A priceless archive was lost.
Later on, in the mid-1970s, this researcher, John Marks, decided to file a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA, asking if there were any other documents. ... This request landed at a time when the CIA was under orders from a new president, Jimmy Carter, to open up and be more honest. … [A] search turned up ... a set of records that listed expense accounts for many of the people involved in MK-Ultra. From those records, we have been able to develop an idea of what were these 149 sub-projects. ... “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate” is the foundation for later research that has deepened our understanding of this project.
The CIA and Sidney Gottlieb’s experiments using LSD on unsuspecting people, in a way, that seeped in and helped ... is it overstated to say helped create the counterculture in the 1960s, particularly in San Francisco? [Were] people like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey ... experimenting and using LSD because of this program?
Sidney Gottlieb was fascinated by LSD. It was a newly discovered drug. It had only been discovered in the 1940s. It was colorless, odorless, and had amazing effects in very small quantities. Gottlieb himself used LSD, by his own estimate, at least 200 times.
He and the people around him began to feel that perhaps this drug could be what one of them called “the key that could unlock the universe.” In other words, it might be the answer to what’s the substance that can open up people’s minds to outside control? So in 1953, Gottlieb persuaded the CIA to buy the entire world supply of LSD. It was then being manufactured ... by one company in Switzerland, the Sandoz company. All of that LSD came to the United States, and came to the CIA. Gottlieb used it for two kinds of experiments. Some were horrifically brutal, carried out in prisons in the United States and in safe houses around Europe and East Asia. Many people were fed overdoses without being told what they were being given.
... One experiment at the federal prison in Lexington, Ky. ... Seven African-American inmates were given triple doses of LSD every day for 77 days while locked in a padded room. So if the object of that experiment was to find out whether such an overdose could destroy a human mind. The answer is obviously yes.
... [But] who were among the first people who signed up to take LSD in those benign LSD experiments? Well, one of them was Ken Kesey, who went on to write “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” that became a great bible of the counterculture. Another was the poet Allen Ginsberg, who listened to “Tristan and Isolde” on his headphones while taking LSD. Another was Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. These guys all took LSD home with them. They turned on all their friends. This is how the Grateful Dead got its LSD.
It sounds like we have a lot to be thankful to Sidney Gottlieb for…
Later in life, all these people came to realize that their LSD had come from the CIA. I found an interview with John Lennon in which he was asked about LSD, and he said, “We must always remember to thank the CIA.” ... And of course, the irony is ... the drug that Gottlieb hoped would give the CIA the tool to control people’s minds actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was aimed at destroying everything the CIA believed in.
One of the most fascinating stories from your book is that of Whitey Bulger. Tell us how he became a subject of MK-Ultra.
Whitey Bulger fits very much into the category that I was just discussing. So under Gottlieb’s supervision, a number of federal prisons began experiments with LSD using inmates. And, of course, that’s an ideal population because those people are totally dependent on the prison doctor and the prison warden.
During the mid-1950s when MK-Ultra was at its peak, Whitey Bulger, the famous Boston gangster, was in prison as a truck hijacker in Atlanta, Ga. He was approached by the prison doctor, who told him that the prison was going to be participating in a major project aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. And if Bulger would agree to take a certain drug that they were investigating, he might have some considerations [such as] shorter time in prison and better conditions.
So he was given LSD for months, at least 50 times, without being told what it was. He later wrote what a nightmarish experience this was and how ... for his whole life, he never recovered from it. Years later, when he found out that this doctor was actually working on a CIA project and not trying to cure schizophrenia, he told other members of his gang, “I’m going back to Atlanta. I’m going to find that guy, and I’m going to kill him.”
He didn’t find that doctor, who died of apparently natural causes soon thereafter, but definitely Bulger is interesting because he’s one of the few MK-Ultra subjects who later came out and explained what had happened to him.
Gottlieb was involved in another very high priority operation of the CIA’s in the 1960s and that was the plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Tell us that story.
MK-Ultra didn’t have a firm ending, but it kind of petered out towards end of the late ’50s and into the early ’60s. Gottlieb, as I said earlier, had come to realize ... these drugs like LSD were too unreliable to be used as tools for mind control. ... But then Gottlieb went on to a completely new phase in his career. He was the CIA’s chief chemist. So when President Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Fidel Castro in the summer of 1960 and the CIA decided to use poison, it was quite logical that Sidney Gottlieb would get the assignment. He knew more about poisons than anyone in the CIA, anyone in the United States, and I’m going to guess more than anybody in the world. He was obsessed with finding all sorts of natural poisons, and he was getting the gallbladders of crocodiles from Africa and poison barks from Southeast Asia and shrubs from Central America. Anything that could be seen as poison he assembled.
So it was Gottlieb who concocted all the poisons that were intended to kill Fidel Castro. One that was supposed to make his beard fall out, and one that would make him seem disoriented in public, but also ones that were supposed to be fatal. It was Gottlieb who made the L-pills — I learned a whole new vocabulary while writing this book— that means lethal. Those other fatal pills, when you drop it into someone’s tea they die. Gottlieb made those, and they were delivered to Cuba for use in killing Castro. Gottlieb made a poison wet suit, which was tainted with a virus inside that would eat away Castro’s skin if he put it on. Gottlieb made a poison pen with a hypodermic needle that was superthin so that if it was stuck into Castro’s thigh from behind, he wouldn’t even feel it.
Is there any indication at all that Gottlieb was held accountable?
Towards the end of his life, Gottlieb was facing two different situations. One was internal, the people around him in his final years have all said that he was obviously haunted by something that he wouldn’t talk about. One person who visited him in that period said he was haunted by guilt. Uh, he was a destroyed man, if he had been Catholic, he would have gone to a monastery. So he was obviously deeply troubled, but he would never speak about it. Then another factor that added to his anxiety was that after many, many years, a couple of lawsuits seemed to be getting closer to him.
What were these lawsuits?
One involved a case that stemmed from the poisoning by LSD of a young American who had met a guy with a limp in a bar in Paris and whose life was destroyed thereafter. So evidently this guy had been poisoned by Gottlieb. It took 20 years for this case to begin working its way through the judicial system. And finally, a trial date was set for the beginning of 1999. ... Just as the case was about to come to trial, Gottlieb died. The cause of death was never announced. ... I did find a few people who truly suspect that he might have killed himself to avoid having to testify, that he basically fell on his sword rather than be put in a position where he’d have to betray secrets that he had sworn to keep. Nobody knows if that’s true, but it’s a very intriguing footnote to Gottlieb’s death in 1999.
So this was a Cold War program started in the early 1950s. And like much else from the Cold War era, it arose out of fears that the Soviets and international communism were doing something like this, and therefore we couldn’t have a mind control gap, as it were. What do we know about what the Soviets were up to and what U.S. intelligence thought the Soviets were up to?
Now those are two very different things: what the Soviets were doing and what we thought the Soviets were doing. So I asked myself the same question. ... What led the early directors of the CIA, and in particular, Allen Dulles, and then the person he hired to run this MK-Ultra project, Sidney Gottlieb, to believe that there was such a thing as mind control? In the end, after 10 years, Sidney Gottlieb finally concluded that there is no such thing as mind control. ... But what made them think that it was possible? ... I think it has to do with the cultural conditioning with which they were brought up. Think of all the books, and the stories, and the movies, about mind control. ... There are Edgar Allan Poe stories, and Sherlock Holmes stories, and movies like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and “Gaslight.” Those guys grew up watching those movies, and reading those stories, and I think they believed that since fiction could imagine it, there probably was an element of truth to it. That also fed their desire to plunge into this project.
There was “The Manchurian Candidate,” a novel and then a movie, that came out in the early 1960s, which was about Korean mind control programming an American to assassinate a presidential candidate. And ironically, it was the book “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate,” by John Marks, in the 1970s, that I believe first revealed the existence of MK-Ultra?
You’re right. When Sidney Gottlieb left the CIA in 1973, along with his longtime mentor, Richard Helms, who was at that time the director of the CIA, the two of them sat down and quickly decided that all the files from MK-Ultra should be destroyed. Gottlieb actually had to go out to the CIA records center in Wharton, Va., and oversee the destruction of seven crates of documents. ... A priceless archive was lost.
Later on, in the mid-1970s, this researcher, John Marks, decided to file a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA, asking if there were any other documents. ... This request landed at a time when the CIA was under orders from a new president, Jimmy Carter, to open up and be more honest. … [A] search turned up ... a set of records that listed expense accounts for many of the people involved in MK-Ultra. From those records, we have been able to develop an idea of what were these 149 sub-projects. ... “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate” is the foundation for later research that has deepened our understanding of this project.
The CIA and Sidney Gottlieb’s experiments using LSD on unsuspecting people, in a way, that seeped in and helped ... is it overstated to say helped create the counterculture in the 1960s, particularly in San Francisco? [Were] people like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey ... experimenting and using LSD because of this program?
Sidney Gottlieb was fascinated by LSD. It was a newly discovered drug. It had only been discovered in the 1940s. It was colorless, odorless, and had amazing effects in very small quantities. Gottlieb himself used LSD, by his own estimate, at least 200 times.
He and the people around him began to feel that perhaps this drug could be what one of them called “the key that could unlock the universe.” In other words, it might be the answer to what’s the substance that can open up people’s minds to outside control? So in 1953, Gottlieb persuaded the CIA to buy the entire world supply of LSD. It was then being manufactured ... by one company in Switzerland, the Sandoz company. All of that LSD came to the United States, and came to the CIA. Gottlieb used it for two kinds of experiments. Some were horrifically brutal, carried out in prisons in the United States and in safe houses around Europe and East Asia. Many people were fed overdoses without being told what they were being given.
... One experiment at the federal prison in Lexington, Ky. ... Seven African-American inmates were given triple doses of LSD every day for 77 days while locked in a padded room. So if the object of that experiment was to find out whether such an overdose could destroy a human mind. The answer is obviously yes.
... [But] who were among the first people who signed up to take LSD in those benign LSD experiments? Well, one of them was Ken Kesey, who went on to write “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” that became a great bible of the counterculture. Another was the poet Allen Ginsberg, who listened to “Tristan and Isolde” on his headphones while taking LSD. Another was Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. These guys all took LSD home with them. They turned on all their friends. This is how the Grateful Dead got its LSD.
It sounds like we have a lot to be thankful to Sidney Gottlieb for…
Later in life, all these people came to realize that their LSD had come from the CIA. I found an interview with John Lennon in which he was asked about LSD, and he said, “We must always remember to thank the CIA.” ... And of course, the irony is ... the drug that Gottlieb hoped would give the CIA the tool to control people’s minds actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was aimed at destroying everything the CIA believed in.
One of the most fascinating stories from your book is that of Whitey Bulger. Tell us how he became a subject of MK-Ultra.
Whitey Bulger fits very much into the category that I was just discussing. So under Gottlieb’s supervision, a number of federal prisons began experiments with LSD using inmates. And, of course, that’s an ideal population because those people are totally dependent on the prison doctor and the prison warden.
During the mid-1950s when MK-Ultra was at its peak, Whitey Bulger, the famous Boston gangster, was in prison as a truck hijacker in Atlanta, Ga. He was approached by the prison doctor, who told him that the prison was going to be participating in a major project aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. And if Bulger would agree to take a certain drug that they were investigating, he might have some considerations [such as] shorter time in prison and better conditions.
So he was given LSD for months, at least 50 times, without being told what it was. He later wrote what a nightmarish experience this was and how ... for his whole life, he never recovered from it. Years later, when he found out that this doctor was actually working on a CIA project and not trying to cure schizophrenia, he told other members of his gang, “I’m going back to Atlanta. I’m going to find that guy, and I’m going to kill him.”
He didn’t find that doctor, who died of apparently natural causes soon thereafter, but definitely Bulger is interesting because he’s one of the few MK-Ultra subjects who later came out and explained what had happened to him.
Gottlieb was involved in another very high priority operation of the CIA’s in the 1960s and that was the plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Tell us that story.
MK-Ultra didn’t have a firm ending, but it kind of petered out towards end of the late ’50s and into the early ’60s. Gottlieb, as I said earlier, had come to realize ... these drugs like LSD were too unreliable to be used as tools for mind control. ... But then Gottlieb went on to a completely new phase in his career. He was the CIA’s chief chemist. So when President Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Fidel Castro in the summer of 1960 and the CIA decided to use poison, it was quite logical that Sidney Gottlieb would get the assignment. He knew more about poisons than anyone in the CIA, anyone in the United States, and I’m going to guess more than anybody in the world. He was obsessed with finding all sorts of natural poisons, and he was getting the gallbladders of crocodiles from Africa and poison barks from Southeast Asia and shrubs from Central America. Anything that could be seen as poison he assembled.
So it was Gottlieb who concocted all the poisons that were intended to kill Fidel Castro. One that was supposed to make his beard fall out, and one that would make him seem disoriented in public, but also ones that were supposed to be fatal. It was Gottlieb who made the L-pills — I learned a whole new vocabulary while writing this book— that means lethal. Those other fatal pills, when you drop it into someone’s tea they die. Gottlieb made those, and they were delivered to Cuba for use in killing Castro. Gottlieb made a poison wet suit, which was tainted with a virus inside that would eat away Castro’s skin if he put it on. Gottlieb made a poison pen with a hypodermic needle that was superthin so that if it was stuck into Castro’s thigh from behind, he wouldn’t even feel it.
Is there any indication at all that Gottlieb was held accountable?
Towards the end of his life, Gottlieb was facing two different situations. One was internal, the people around him in his final years have all said that he was obviously haunted by something that he wouldn’t talk about. One person who visited him in that period said he was haunted by guilt. Uh, he was a destroyed man, if he had been Catholic, he would have gone to a monastery. So he was obviously deeply troubled, but he would never speak about it. Then another factor that added to his anxiety was that after many, many years, a couple of lawsuits seemed to be getting closer to him.
What were these lawsuits?
One involved a case that stemmed from the poisoning by LSD of a young American who had met a guy with a limp in a bar in Paris and whose life was destroyed thereafter. So evidently this guy had been poisoned by Gottlieb. It took 20 years for this case to begin working its way through the judicial system. And finally, a trial date was set for the beginning of 1999. ... Just as the case was about to come to trial, Gottlieb died. The cause of death was never announced. ... I did find a few people who truly suspect that he might have killed himself to avoid having to testify, that he basically fell on his sword rather than be put in a position where he’d have to betray secrets that he had sworn to keep. Nobody knows if that’s true, but it’s a very intriguing footnote to Gottlieb’s death in 1999.
Brown University professor Stephen Kinzer in his office in Providence, R.I., on Jan. 30. (David Goldman/AP)
SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=MKULTRA
SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=LSD
SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CIA
SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=MKULTRA
SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=LSD
SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CIA
GRETA WAS RIGHT
Climate emergency: global action is ‘way off track’ says UN head
Deadly heatwaves, floods and rising hunger far greater threat to world than coronavirus, scientists say
Damian Carrington Environment editor THE GUARDIAN Tue 10 Mar 2020
In 2019 the oceans were at the hottest on record, with at least 84% of the seas experiencing one or more marine heatwaves. Surface air temperatures around the world were the hottest ever recorded, after a natural El Niño event boosted figures in 2016.
The report says results from the World Glacier Monitoring Service indicate 2018-19 was the 32nd year in a row in which more ice was lost than gained. The melting of land ice combined with thermal expansion of water pushed sea levels up to the highest mark since records began.
The long-term decline of Arctic sea ice also continued in 2019, with the September average extent – usually the lowest of the year – the third worst on record.
He added: “We need more ambition on [emission cuts], adaptation and finance in time for the climate conference, Cop26, in Glasgow, UK, in November. That is the only way to ensure a safer, more prosperous and sustainable future for all people on a healthy planet.”
Prof Brian Hoskins, of Imperial College London, said: “The report is a catalogue of weather in 2019 made more extreme by climate change, and the human misery that went with it. It points to a threat that is greater to our species than any known virus – we must not be diverted from the urgency of tackling it by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to zero as soon as possible.”
Half a century of dither and denial – a climate crisis timeline
The WMO said its report provided authoritative information for policymakers on the need for climate action and showed the impacts of extreme weather.
A heatwave in Europe was made five times more likely by global heating, and the scorching summer led to 20,000 emergency hospital admissions and 1,462 premature deaths in France alone. India and Japan also sweltered and Australia started and ended the year with severe heat and had its driest year on record. Australia had “an exceptionally prolonged and severe fire season”, the WMO noted.
Floods and storms contributed most to displacing people from their homes, particularly Cyclone Idai in Mozambique and its neighbours, Cyclone Fani in south Asia, Hurricane Dorian in the Caribbean, and flooding in Iran, the Philippines and Ethiopia. The number of internal displacements from such disasters is estimated to have been close to 22 million people in 2019, up from 17 million in 2018.
The US saw heavy rains, with the total from July 2018 to June 2019 being the highest on record. Total economic losses in the US for the year were estimated at $20bn, the WMO said.
Unpredictable climate and extreme weather was a factor in 26 of the 33 nations that were hit by food crises in 2019, and was the main driver in 12 of the countries. “After a decade of steady decline, hunger is on the rise again – over 820 million suffered from hunger in 2018, the latest global data available,” the report says.
The WMO said unusually heavy precipitation in late 2019 was also a factor in the severe desert locust outbreak in the Horn of Africa, which is the worst for decades and expected to spread further by June 2020 in a severe threat to food security.
Prof Dave Reay, of the University of Edinburgh, said: “This annual litany of climate change impacts and inadequate global responses makes for a gut-wrenching read. Writ large is the ‘threat multiplier’ effect that is climate change on the biggest challenges faced by humanity and the world’s ecosystems in the 21st century.”
Half a century of dither and denial – a climate crisis timeline
Climate emergency: global action is ‘way off track’ says UN head
Deadly heatwaves, floods and rising hunger far greater threat to world than coronavirus, scientists say
Damian Carrington Environment editor THE GUARDIAN Tue 10 Mar 2020
Fire and rescue personal run to move their truck as a bushfire burns next to a major road and homes on the outskirts of the town of Bilpin in Sydney, Australia, December 2019. Photograph: David Gray/Getty Images
The world is “way off track” in dealing with the climate emergency and time is fast running out, the UN secretary general has said.
António Guterres sounded the alarm at the launch of the UN’s assessment of the global climate in 2019. The report concludes it was a record-breaking year for heat, and there was rising hunger, displacement and loss of life owing to extreme temperatures and floods around the world.
Scientists said the threat was greater than that from the coronavirus, and world leaders must not be diverted away from climate action.
The climate assessment is led by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), with input from the UN’s agencies for environment, food, health, disasters, migration and refugees, as well as scientific centres.
The world is “way off track” in dealing with the climate emergency and time is fast running out, the UN secretary general has said.
António Guterres sounded the alarm at the launch of the UN’s assessment of the global climate in 2019. The report concludes it was a record-breaking year for heat, and there was rising hunger, displacement and loss of life owing to extreme temperatures and floods around the world.
Scientists said the threat was greater than that from the coronavirus, and world leaders must not be diverted away from climate action.
The climate assessment is led by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), with input from the UN’s agencies for environment, food, health, disasters, migration and refugees, as well as scientific centres.
In 2019 the oceans were at the hottest on record, with at least 84% of the seas experiencing one or more marine heatwaves. Surface air temperatures around the world were the hottest ever recorded, after a natural El Niño event boosted figures in 2016.
The report says results from the World Glacier Monitoring Service indicate 2018-19 was the 32nd year in a row in which more ice was lost than gained. The melting of land ice combined with thermal expansion of water pushed sea levels up to the highest mark since records began.
The long-term decline of Arctic sea ice also continued in 2019, with the September average extent – usually the lowest of the year – the third worst on record.
“Climate change is the defining challenge of our time. We are currently way off track to meeting either the 1.5C or 2C targets that the Paris agreement calls for,” said Guterres. 2019 ended with a global average temperature of 1.1C above pre-industrial levels. “Time is fast running out for us to avert the worst impacts of climate disruption and protect our societies.”
He added: “We need more ambition on [emission cuts], adaptation and finance in time for the climate conference, Cop26, in Glasgow, UK, in November. That is the only way to ensure a safer, more prosperous and sustainable future for all people on a healthy planet.”
Prof Brian Hoskins, of Imperial College London, said: “The report is a catalogue of weather in 2019 made more extreme by climate change, and the human misery that went with it. It points to a threat that is greater to our species than any known virus – we must not be diverted from the urgency of tackling it by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to zero as soon as possible.”
Half a century of dither and denial – a climate crisis timeline
The WMO said its report provided authoritative information for policymakers on the need for climate action and showed the impacts of extreme weather.
A heatwave in Europe was made five times more likely by global heating, and the scorching summer led to 20,000 emergency hospital admissions and 1,462 premature deaths in France alone. India and Japan also sweltered and Australia started and ended the year with severe heat and had its driest year on record. Australia had “an exceptionally prolonged and severe fire season”, the WMO noted.
Floods and storms contributed most to displacing people from their homes, particularly Cyclone Idai in Mozambique and its neighbours, Cyclone Fani in south Asia, Hurricane Dorian in the Caribbean, and flooding in Iran, the Philippines and Ethiopia. The number of internal displacements from such disasters is estimated to have been close to 22 million people in 2019, up from 17 million in 2018.
The US saw heavy rains, with the total from July 2018 to June 2019 being the highest on record. Total economic losses in the US for the year were estimated at $20bn, the WMO said.
Unpredictable climate and extreme weather was a factor in 26 of the 33 nations that were hit by food crises in 2019, and was the main driver in 12 of the countries. “After a decade of steady decline, hunger is on the rise again – over 820 million suffered from hunger in 2018, the latest global data available,” the report says.
The WMO said unusually heavy precipitation in late 2019 was also a factor in the severe desert locust outbreak in the Horn of Africa, which is the worst for decades and expected to spread further by June 2020 in a severe threat to food security.
Prof Dave Reay, of the University of Edinburgh, said: “This annual litany of climate change impacts and inadequate global responses makes for a gut-wrenching read. Writ large is the ‘threat multiplier’ effect that is climate change on the biggest challenges faced by humanity and the world’s ecosystems in the 21st century.”
Timeline
Fossil fuel companies have been aware of their impact on the planet since at least the 1950s
The physicist Edward Teller tells the American Petroleum Institute (API) a 10% increase in CO2 will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. “I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”
Lyndon Johnson’s President’s Science Advisory Committee states that “pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air”, with effects that “could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings”. Summarising the findings, the head of the API warned the industry: “Time is running out.”
Shell and BP begin funding scientific research in Britain this decade to examine climate impacts from greenhouse gases.
A recently filed lawsuit claims Exxon scientists told management in 1977 there was an “overwhelming” consensus that fossil fuels were responsible for atmospheric carbon dioxide increases.
An internal Exxon memo warns “it is distinctly possible” that CO2 emissions from the company’s 50-year plan “will later produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the Earth’s population)”.
The Nasa scientist James Hansen testifies to the US Senate that “the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now”. In the US presidential campaign, George Bush Sr says: “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the White House effect … As president, I intend to do something about it.”
A confidential report prepared for Shell’s environmental conservation committee finds CO2 could raise temperatures by 1C to 2C over the next 40 years with changes that may be “the greatest in recorded history”. It urges rapid action by the energy industry. “By the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even stabilise the situation,” it states.
Exxon, Shell, BP and other fossil fuel companies establish the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a lobbying group that challenges the science on global warming and delays action to reduce emissions.
Exxon funds two researchers, Dr Fred Seitz and Dr Fred Singer, who dispute the mainstream consensus on climate science. Seitz and Singer were previously paid by the tobacco industry and questioned the hazards of smoking. Singer, who has denied being on the payroll of the tobacco or energy industry, has said his financial relationships do not influence his research.
Shell’s public information film Climate of Concern acknowledges there is a “possibility of change faster than at any time since the end of the ice age, change too fast, perhaps, for life to adapt without severe dislocation”.
At the Rio Earth summit, countries sign up to the world’s first international agreement to stabilise greenhouse gases and prevent dangerous manmade interference with the climate system. This establishes the UN framework convention on climate change. Bush Sr says: “The US fully intends to be the pre-eminent world leader in protecting the global environment.”
Two month’s before the Kyoto climate conference, Mobil (later merged with Exxon) takes out an ad in The New York Times titled Reset the Alarm, which says: “Let’s face it: the science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil.”
The US refuses to ratify the Kyoto protocol after intense opposition from oil companies and the GCC.
The US senator Jim Inhofe, whose main donors are in the oil and gas industry, leads the “Climategate” misinformation attack on scientists on the opening day of the crucial UN climate conference in Copenhagen, which ends in disarray.
A study by Richard Heede, published in the journal Climatic Change, reveals 90 companies are responsible for producing two-thirds of the carbon that has entered the atmosphere since the start of the industrial age in the mid-18th century.
The API removes a claim on its website that the human contribution to climate change is “uncertain”, after an outcry.
Exxon, Chevron and BP each donate at least $500,000 for the inauguration of Donald Trump as president.
Mohammed Barkindo, secretary general of Opec, which represents Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Algeria, Iran and several other oil states, says climate campaigners are the biggest threat to the industry and claims they are misleading the public with unscientific warnings about global warming.
The first known US coronavirus case is nearly two months old — and it's still 'pretty complicated' to be tested
Dennis Wagner USA TODAY
How many Americans are infected by coronavirus? How many have been tested?
Nearly two months after the first known case of the respiratory disease was reported in the United States, and a day after the World Health Organization declared it as a pandemic, federal agencies remain short on answers.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not respond to questions from USA TODAY on Thursday about the nation's detection program, which has been plagued by a shortage of test kits, flawed science and dubious data.
Tracking the outbreak:US coronavirus map
There were 1,215 confirmed or presumptive positive cases of COVID-19, with 36 fatalities in the United States as of Thursday, according to the CDC's website. The agency is no longer issuing data on the number of tests taken.
Infectious disease experts, however, say the official tally is only a fraction of the reality, because it does not contain data from some states, and the lack of test kits has prevented diagnosis for thousands who may be ill.
A Johns Hopkins University data dashboard, which, unlike the CDC's website, is updated throughout each day, counted 40 deaths and 1,663 confirmed U.S. cases as of late Thursday night.
Sen. Lindsey Graham was immediately tested. What about the rest of us?
In late February, as the viral insurgency bloomed in the U.S. about a month after the first identified case in Washington state on Jan. 21,, epidemiologists at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles calculated that up to 9,000 Americans would be infected by March 1.
Their study noted that contagious diseases spread in a geometric progression, and "the opportunity window to contain the epidemic of COVID-19 in its early stages is closing."
More recent developments place that prediction in a stark, personal context: Americans are under quarantine or self-monitoring, stock markets have plunged, workers are telecommuting and major events are canceling.
Consider Kyle Edgar, 20, who spent his spring break last week with thousands of people at bars and fraternity parties at University of Maryland in College Park, and at a gathering for modified car aficionados in nearby Montgomery County.
Afterward, Edgar developed a sore throat, congestion, chills and a cough. Due to remission from bone cancer, he didn’t want to take any chances with his immune system.
Edgar said his regular physicians declined to test for coronavirus, but directed him to another healthcare facility, which sent him to a third location. There, an employee suggested he visit a nearby clinic for sexually transmitted diseases, where a doctor in a mask and bodysuit took nose and throat swabs.
The process took three hours, said Edgar, a freshman at University of South Carolina. His results are expected by Monday.
“It was pretty complicated going through all those hoops,” he added. “But I wanted to get it done.”
Counting the people:We're 'equipped' to count nation's population amid coronavirus crisis, census officials say. Lawmakers aren't so sure.
In a nationwide patchwork, Americans have reported similar troubles from New York state to Washington state. And their experiences raise hackles when compared to politicians and celebrities who sometimes are tested without delay.
Get the The Backstory newsletter in your inbox.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, who was at Mar-a-Lago recently for an event attended by an infected Brazilian official, reportedly secured a test despite having no recollection of contact with the individual.
Similarly, Utah Jazz players apparently underwent prompt testing after All-NBA center Rudy Gobert was diagnosed with the virus, even though the teammates apparently were a-symptomatic. His positive test prompted the NBA's decision on Wednesday night to suspend its season.
Testing is 'No. 1 issue' to resolve as US combats coronavirus pandemic
The national coronavirus picture, meanwhile, remains opaque.
In the absence of clear CDC tracking, some states are divulging numbers for COVID-19 testing, but with limited transparency.
California, for example, reported 177 positive cases out of 8,227 tests as of Wednesday , with about roughly 11,000 people self-monitoring due to possible exposure. But it is unclear whether the totals include testing done by private facilities.
California asks the state's 18 public health labs to report positive testing, but does not require it. State officials declined to be interviewed by USA TODAY.
So did authorities in Florida, which announced 35 presumed coronavirus cases as of Thursday, with 301 negative tests and 142 pending.
You asked us tons of questions about the coronavirus:We're answering them.
Testing for the virus uses reagents that extract, purify and stabilize genetic materials, or RNA, that are identified with COVID-19. Some protocols require two tests per individual, and it is unclear how states tally the results.
More significantly, because the CDC neither publishes nor collects comprehensive data, no one knows how many Americans have been tested or are infected.
Joseph Eisenberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan, said testing is "the No. 1 issue that needs to be resolved right now" if the nation hopes to staunch the viral spread.
"It is really hard to understand why they haven't been prepared," he added.
In a void of federal leadership, he noted, universities and private businesses have begun taking "positive steps" to combat the disease even though they are "flying blind."
"We're really hampered by not having these tests to do something more systematic," Eisenberg said. "You can't target intervention … you're taking away a really valuable tool.
"This may be here to stay," he warned.
'Failing' of US healthcare system to test for coronavirus leads to political fallout
For Jessica Mason, who became sick after a Jan. 8 visit to Walt Disney World in Florida, illness is compounded by uncertainty.
Mason said she needed holes punctured in her ear drums to regulate the pressure and drain fluid. Then her congestion and upper respiratory symptoms returned. She said the Ohio Department of Health couldn’t tell her where to get tested for coronavirus, and urged her to self-quarantine.
“I’m worried and confused as to what the government wants me to do,” said Mason.
The turgid testing program in a nation renowned for advanced medical care and transparency has prompted comparisons to countries like South Korea, which reportedly tested 66,000 people in a single week.
The facts on coronavirus aren't all scary:So why so much fear?
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the testing logjam constitutes a "failing" of the nation's healthcare system.
When compared with other countries that have rigorous programs, Fauci said, "We're not set up for that. Do I think we should be? Yes. But we're not."
That testimony came this week before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, where the chair, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-New York, delivered a scathing monologue.
"We are now in the middle of a global health crisis," Maloney said. "Unfortunately, when we look at the last three months objectively, it is clear that strategic errors and a failure of leadership impaired our nation's ability to respond to this outbreak."
Last week, Maloney noted, President Donald Trump described COVID-19 tests as "beautiful" and said anyone who needs an exam can get one.
"He was absolutely wrong," the congresswoman said. "My constituents are telling me they can't get tested … The president and his aides may think they are helping with political spin and happy talk, but the American people want the truth."
Opinion:I'm an epidemiologist. Here's what I told my friends about the coronavirus and COVID-19.
In Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, on Thursday called on the federal government to give states the authority to test for COVID-19 at more hospitals and private and public labs.
While the Bay State had finally received more kits, Baker said agencies were strapped to process test specimens because the only approved testing center is in Boston.
“We need the federal government … to give hospitals and testing facilities here in Massachusetts that have the capacity to test, the material and then the approval that they need to actually begin to test," Baker said.
"I think there are probably a lot of people all over the country who are engaged in similar kinds of conversations. This is a critical issue for us.”
Contributing: Jayne O'Donnell, Joey Garrison and Kevin McCoy, USA TODAY.
115 MORE PHOTOS HERE
https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/world/2020/01/22/deadly-coronavirus-spreading-across-china-reaches-u-s/4536705002/
Task force health expert contradicts Trump about coronavirus vaccine timing
By Maegan Vazquez, CNN Tue March 3, 2020
Dennis Wagner USA TODAY
How many Americans are infected by coronavirus? How many have been tested?
Nearly two months after the first known case of the respiratory disease was reported in the United States, and a day after the World Health Organization declared it as a pandemic, federal agencies remain short on answers.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not respond to questions from USA TODAY on Thursday about the nation's detection program, which has been plagued by a shortage of test kits, flawed science and dubious data.
Tracking the outbreak:US coronavirus map
There were 1,215 confirmed or presumptive positive cases of COVID-19, with 36 fatalities in the United States as of Thursday, according to the CDC's website. The agency is no longer issuing data on the number of tests taken.
Infectious disease experts, however, say the official tally is only a fraction of the reality, because it does not contain data from some states, and the lack of test kits has prevented diagnosis for thousands who may be ill.
A Johns Hopkins University data dashboard, which, unlike the CDC's website, is updated throughout each day, counted 40 deaths and 1,663 confirmed U.S. cases as of late Thursday night.
Sen. Lindsey Graham was immediately tested. What about the rest of us?
In late February, as the viral insurgency bloomed in the U.S. about a month after the first identified case in Washington state on Jan. 21,, epidemiologists at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles calculated that up to 9,000 Americans would be infected by March 1.
Their study noted that contagious diseases spread in a geometric progression, and "the opportunity window to contain the epidemic of COVID-19 in its early stages is closing."
More recent developments place that prediction in a stark, personal context: Americans are under quarantine or self-monitoring, stock markets have plunged, workers are telecommuting and major events are canceling.
Consider Kyle Edgar, 20, who spent his spring break last week with thousands of people at bars and fraternity parties at University of Maryland in College Park, and at a gathering for modified car aficionados in nearby Montgomery County.
Afterward, Edgar developed a sore throat, congestion, chills and a cough. Due to remission from bone cancer, he didn’t want to take any chances with his immune system.
Edgar said his regular physicians declined to test for coronavirus, but directed him to another healthcare facility, which sent him to a third location. There, an employee suggested he visit a nearby clinic for sexually transmitted diseases, where a doctor in a mask and bodysuit took nose and throat swabs.
The process took three hours, said Edgar, a freshman at University of South Carolina. His results are expected by Monday.
“It was pretty complicated going through all those hoops,” he added. “But I wanted to get it done.”
Counting the people:We're 'equipped' to count nation's population amid coronavirus crisis, census officials say. Lawmakers aren't so sure.
In a nationwide patchwork, Americans have reported similar troubles from New York state to Washington state. And their experiences raise hackles when compared to politicians and celebrities who sometimes are tested without delay.
Get the The Backstory newsletter in your inbox.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, who was at Mar-a-Lago recently for an event attended by an infected Brazilian official, reportedly secured a test despite having no recollection of contact with the individual.
Similarly, Utah Jazz players apparently underwent prompt testing after All-NBA center Rudy Gobert was diagnosed with the virus, even though the teammates apparently were a-symptomatic. His positive test prompted the NBA's decision on Wednesday night to suspend its season.
Testing is 'No. 1 issue' to resolve as US combats coronavirus pandemic
The national coronavirus picture, meanwhile, remains opaque.
In the absence of clear CDC tracking, some states are divulging numbers for COVID-19 testing, but with limited transparency.
California, for example, reported 177 positive cases out of 8,227 tests as of Wednesday , with about roughly 11,000 people self-monitoring due to possible exposure. But it is unclear whether the totals include testing done by private facilities.
California asks the state's 18 public health labs to report positive testing, but does not require it. State officials declined to be interviewed by USA TODAY.
So did authorities in Florida, which announced 35 presumed coronavirus cases as of Thursday, with 301 negative tests and 142 pending.
You asked us tons of questions about the coronavirus:We're answering them.
Testing for the virus uses reagents that extract, purify and stabilize genetic materials, or RNA, that are identified with COVID-19. Some protocols require two tests per individual, and it is unclear how states tally the results.
More significantly, because the CDC neither publishes nor collects comprehensive data, no one knows how many Americans have been tested or are infected.
Joseph Eisenberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan, said testing is "the No. 1 issue that needs to be resolved right now" if the nation hopes to staunch the viral spread.
"It is really hard to understand why they haven't been prepared," he added.
In a void of federal leadership, he noted, universities and private businesses have begun taking "positive steps" to combat the disease even though they are "flying blind."
"We're really hampered by not having these tests to do something more systematic," Eisenberg said. "You can't target intervention … you're taking away a really valuable tool.
"This may be here to stay," he warned.
'Failing' of US healthcare system to test for coronavirus leads to political fallout
For Jessica Mason, who became sick after a Jan. 8 visit to Walt Disney World in Florida, illness is compounded by uncertainty.
Mason said she needed holes punctured in her ear drums to regulate the pressure and drain fluid. Then her congestion and upper respiratory symptoms returned. She said the Ohio Department of Health couldn’t tell her where to get tested for coronavirus, and urged her to self-quarantine.
“I’m worried and confused as to what the government wants me to do,” said Mason.
The turgid testing program in a nation renowned for advanced medical care and transparency has prompted comparisons to countries like South Korea, which reportedly tested 66,000 people in a single week.
The facts on coronavirus aren't all scary:So why so much fear?
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the testing logjam constitutes a "failing" of the nation's healthcare system.
When compared with other countries that have rigorous programs, Fauci said, "We're not set up for that. Do I think we should be? Yes. But we're not."
That testimony came this week before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, where the chair, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-New York, delivered a scathing monologue.
"We are now in the middle of a global health crisis," Maloney said. "Unfortunately, when we look at the last three months objectively, it is clear that strategic errors and a failure of leadership impaired our nation's ability to respond to this outbreak."
Last week, Maloney noted, President Donald Trump described COVID-19 tests as "beautiful" and said anyone who needs an exam can get one.
"He was absolutely wrong," the congresswoman said. "My constituents are telling me they can't get tested … The president and his aides may think they are helping with political spin and happy talk, but the American people want the truth."
Opinion:I'm an epidemiologist. Here's what I told my friends about the coronavirus and COVID-19.
In Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, on Thursday called on the federal government to give states the authority to test for COVID-19 at more hospitals and private and public labs.
While the Bay State had finally received more kits, Baker said agencies were strapped to process test specimens because the only approved testing center is in Boston.
“We need the federal government … to give hospitals and testing facilities here in Massachusetts that have the capacity to test, the material and then the approval that they need to actually begin to test," Baker said.
"I think there are probably a lot of people all over the country who are engaged in similar kinds of conversations. This is a critical issue for us.”
Contributing: Jayne O'Donnell, Joey Garrison and Kevin McCoy, USA TODAY.
115 MORE PHOTOS HERE
https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/world/2020/01/22/deadly-coronavirus-spreading-across-china-reaches-u-s/4536705002/
Task force health expert contradicts Trump about coronavirus vaccine timing
By Maegan Vazquez, CNN Tue March 3, 2020
TEN DAYS LATER AND NOTHING HAS CHANGED
Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump was contradicted by a health expert on his coronavirus task force over the timing for a potential vaccine during a briefing Monday.
Trump was asked about a timeline for a vaccine during the Cabinet Room meeting with pharmaceutical executives and members of his task force.
"I don't know what the time will be. I've heard very quick numbers, that of months. And I've heard pretty much a year would be an outside number. So I think that's not a bad range. But if you're talking about three to four months in a couple of cases, a year in other cases," Trump said.
But Dr. Antony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, immediately corrected the President: "Let me make sure you get the ... information. A vaccine that you make and start testing in a year is not a vaccine that's deployable."
Trump defends holding campaign rallies even as coronavirus spreads
As Fauci explained the timeline, Trump folded his arms.
Fauci said: "So he's asking the question -- when is it going to be deployable? And that is going to be, at the earliest, a year to a year and a half, no matter how fast you go."
"Do you think that's right?" Trump asked the pharmaceutical executives at the table, just as Fauci finished speaking. "Well, I think treatment in many ways might be more exciting."
The pushback didn't come just from Fauci.
Throughout the meeting, Trump was hyperfocused on pressing industry leaders in the room for a timeline for a coronavirus vaccine and treatment. But experts at the table -- from the administration and the pharmaceutical industry -- repeatedly emphasized that a vaccine can't be rushed to market before it's been declared safe for the public.
"So you're talking over the next few months, you could have a vaccine?" Trump later asked Stéphane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna, a biotechnology company.
"Correct, (for) phase two (testing)," Bancel answered.
Fauci interjected: "He wouldn't have a vaccine. He'd have a vaccine to go into testing."
Trump said: "Oh, so you're talking in about a year."
Fauci said: "A year to a year and a half."
The President said that one executive was "talking about two months."
But Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar clarified that Regeneron, a biotechnology company that was represented in the room, would be ready for phase one testing for a vaccine in two months.
Leonard Schleifer, the CEO of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, then underscored that "vaccines have to be tested because there's precedent for vaccines to actually make diseases worse. ... You don't want to rush and treat a million people and find out you're making 900,000 of them worse."
"That's a good idea," Trump said.
The President also said he agrees that any coronavirus vaccine has to be safe in order for it to be made widely available, but added: "Get it done. We need it. We want it fast."
Inovio CEO J. Joseph Kim, who was in the meeting, told CNN that Trump told the executives to contact him directly if they encountered holdups within the federal government.
A source familiar with the administration's response said the scientists and experts gathered for the meeting were able to convince Trump that it will likely take a year or longer for an effective vaccine to be on the market.
"I think he's got it now," the source said.
Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump was contradicted by a health expert on his coronavirus task force over the timing for a potential vaccine during a briefing Monday.
Trump was asked about a timeline for a vaccine during the Cabinet Room meeting with pharmaceutical executives and members of his task force.
"I don't know what the time will be. I've heard very quick numbers, that of months. And I've heard pretty much a year would be an outside number. So I think that's not a bad range. But if you're talking about three to four months in a couple of cases, a year in other cases," Trump said.
But Dr. Antony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, immediately corrected the President: "Let me make sure you get the ... information. A vaccine that you make and start testing in a year is not a vaccine that's deployable."
Trump defends holding campaign rallies even as coronavirus spreads
As Fauci explained the timeline, Trump folded his arms.
Fauci said: "So he's asking the question -- when is it going to be deployable? And that is going to be, at the earliest, a year to a year and a half, no matter how fast you go."
"Do you think that's right?" Trump asked the pharmaceutical executives at the table, just as Fauci finished speaking. "Well, I think treatment in many ways might be more exciting."
The pushback didn't come just from Fauci.
Throughout the meeting, Trump was hyperfocused on pressing industry leaders in the room for a timeline for a coronavirus vaccine and treatment. But experts at the table -- from the administration and the pharmaceutical industry -- repeatedly emphasized that a vaccine can't be rushed to market before it's been declared safe for the public.
"So you're talking over the next few months, you could have a vaccine?" Trump later asked Stéphane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna, a biotechnology company.
"Correct, (for) phase two (testing)," Bancel answered.
Fauci interjected: "He wouldn't have a vaccine. He'd have a vaccine to go into testing."
Trump said: "Oh, so you're talking in about a year."
Fauci said: "A year to a year and a half."
The President said that one executive was "talking about two months."
But Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar clarified that Regeneron, a biotechnology company that was represented in the room, would be ready for phase one testing for a vaccine in two months.
Leonard Schleifer, the CEO of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, then underscored that "vaccines have to be tested because there's precedent for vaccines to actually make diseases worse. ... You don't want to rush and treat a million people and find out you're making 900,000 of them worse."
"That's a good idea," Trump said.
The President also said he agrees that any coronavirus vaccine has to be safe in order for it to be made widely available, but added: "Get it done. We need it. We want it fast."
Inovio CEO J. Joseph Kim, who was in the meeting, told CNN that Trump told the executives to contact him directly if they encountered holdups within the federal government.
A source familiar with the administration's response said the scientists and experts gathered for the meeting were able to convince Trump that it will likely take a year or longer for an effective vaccine to be on the market.
"I think he's got it now," the source said.
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