Tuesday, April 21, 2020

USA BONFIRES OR MASS GRAVES

RIGHT TO LIFE EXCEPT
Tennessee anti-lockdown protester demands state ‘sacrifice the weak’ to reopen economy

THE POSTER IS CLEARLY A HOME SCHOOLING PROJECT

April 21, 2020 By Brad Reed


A woman protesting Tennessee’s COVID-19 lockdown this week carried a startling sign that recommended sacrificing “weak” people to reopen the state’s economy.

Local news station News Channel 9 has captured a photo of the sign, which read, “Sacrifice the weak — reopen TN [Tennessee].”



According to the station, “dozens” of protesters showed up in Nashville on Monday to demand that the economy be reopened as soon as possible, as many people are struggling without any kind of income and have been shut out of getting small-business loans.

“We have no problem being shut down, but we can’t afford to stay shut down if we don’t have some kind of an income coming in,” demonstrator Adrienne Hitch told News Channel 9.
The station also reports that many of the people at the rally were not practicing social distancing and were not wearing protective face masks, as has been recommended by public health officials as a way to slow down the spread of the disease.


TENNESSEE IN PROTEST: Even with the announcement to start re-opening the state's economy on May 1, Governor Bill Lee has been facing some sharp criticism for not starting the process immediately. https://t.co/Pn3jY7k85S
— WTVC NewsChannel 9 (@newschannelnine) April 21, 2020


Ohio COVID-19 recovery panel goes off the rails after businessman says the virus is a plot to ruin Trump


April 21, 2020 By Brad Reed


An Ohio state legislature hearing about recovering economically from the COVID-19 pandemic went off the rails after a local businessman said that the entire virus was a plot to harm President Donald Trump’s chances at winning the 2020 election.

The Columbus Dispatch reports that Bill Bader Jr., owner of Summit Motorsports Park said that all of the public safety measures adopted during the pandemic were enacted for the sole purpose of hurting the president.

“This was a government overreach that was politically motivated, quite frankly, to derail our commander in chief’s ability to be re-elected for four more years,” Bader said during a discussion hosted by a GOP-controlled Ohio House panel. “It was more politically motivated than erring on the side of the health and safety and well-being of the citizens of this great country of ours. The media reaction incensed, scared, struck fear in the hearts of people to the point where it blinded people to their constitutional rights.”

Bader was then asked by Democratic Ohio State Rep. David Leland if he honestly believed that Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine was part of a global plot to undermine the president.

“Yes,” Bader replied. “I think this was a well-constructed plan. I think the timing of it was unique.”

Bader also questioned the reported death tolls from the disease in the United States.

“I understood that every fatality that took place in the United States of America, there was a check box that it was mandated that they perish as a result of the coronavirus,” he said. “Are there truly 41,000 fatalities due to COVID-19?”

In reality, no doctors are required to say that everyone who dies under their care died from being infected by the coronavirus.

Texas Republican Dan Patrick gets hammered for bleak and macabre argument against coronavirus lockdowns

 April 21, 2020 By Alex Henderson, AlterNet


Far-right Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has been inundated with criticism for his recent assertion that if more coronavirus deaths is the price that the U.S. has to pay for reopening its economy, so be it. And instead of walking back that assertion, Patrick doubled down on it during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program.

Social distancing, Patrick stressed to Carlson, is crushing the U.S. economy — and saving lives, Patrick insisted, isn’t the only thing to be concerned about.

Patrick told Carlson, “When you start shutting down society and people start losing their paychecks and businesses can’t open and governments aren’t getting revenues…. I’m sorry to say, I was right on this. And I’m thankful that we are now, Tucker, beginning to open up Texas and other states because it’s been long overdue.”

TX Lt Gov Dan Patrick: "There are more important things than living … I dont want to die, nobody wants to die but man we've got to take some risks" pic.twitter.com/dRTF8Moav4
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) April 21, 2020

The Texas Republican went on to say, “There are more important things than living, and that’s saving this country for my children and my grandchildren — and saving this country for all of us. And I don’t want to die. Nobody wants to die. But maybe we’ve got to take some risks and get back in the game — and get this country back up and running.”

Media Matters’ Andrew Lawrence tweeted a clip of Patrick making those assertions, and plenty of Twitter users have been slamming the Texas lieutenant governor.

@EdKamen posted, “Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick said, ‘There are more important things than living.’ Uh … what are they?” And @RogueSNRadvisor wrote, “Yeah he wants everyone else to take the risks.”

Australia-based Twitter user Suzie Calalesina, @SuzieGabriella, cited Patrick as a prime example of why so many people around the world view U.S. politics as a mess.

“Is this for real???,” Calalesina posted. “In Australia we went into lockdown in March and if our politicians spoke like this they would gone!!! I’m sorry but the US is in worse shape than is thought globally.”

@660Mary tweeted, “I don’t EVER want to hear another conservative Republican claim to be pro-life! EVER! @LtGovTX.” And @Panos_Iliop wrote, “This is, without a doubt, the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. What are these people on?”
important to clarify that when he says "we've got to take some risks" he means you…you've got to take some risks
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) April 21, 2020

I want those words shoved down his throat every time he backs any anti-choice legislation, lawsuit, etc. Some things are more important than life, huh? These rabid pro-lifers just aren’t very pro-life when it comes to their stock portfolios
— Dawn (@goldenheart1995) April 21, 2020

Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick said, "There are more important things than living."
Uh … what are they?
— Ed Kamen (@EdKamen) April 21, 2020
I think Dan Patrick meant that there are more important things to *him* than *other* people living.
— Kansas Grant (@KansasGrant) April 21, 2020

Stock portfolios, bank accounts, income statements…all exceedingly more important than breathing.
— Dave Soutter (@Delby2016) April 21, 2020

Is this for real??? In Australia we went into lockdown in March and if our politicians spoke like this they would gone!!! I’m sorry but the US is in worse shape than is thought globally
— Suzie Calalesina (@SuzieGabriella) April 21, 2020

This is, without a doubt, the stupidest thing I've ever heard. What are these people on?
— Panos Iliopoulos (@Panos_Iliop) April 21, 2020

There is quite literally nothing more important than staying alive.
— PupperMum (@pupper_mum) April 21, 2020

He doesn't get to choose. The virus chooses. Now ask him if he's willing to sacrifice one of his children or grandchild, just 1, & see what the answer is then.
— Elisa Spencer (@ElisafromCA) April 21, 2020

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ALBERTA RESISTANCE NEWS

As we watch how the global health pandemic caused by COVID-19 is impacting our communities, we are monitoring responses from different levels of government, workplaces and approaches from different jurisdictions. The AFL wants to continue to share some of this work we are doing with you and keep you informed about how the crisis is being handled.

News

The UCP re-opening child care centres to help ensure essential workers can return or remain at work is a decision worth applauding. Yet, there are still key issues that have been left unaddressed for how essential workers will access the care they need, including high and inconsistent fees and a lack of spaces and hours. Some essential workers now have to pay higher fees than before the COVID-19 crisis. Read AFL secretary treasurer Siobhan Vipond's editorial.
The UCP government needs to step up and provide quality and accessible child care for essential workers now, and coming out of this pandemic quality child care needs to be expanded so that it is accessible to all Alberta families, ensuring that all working Albertans can fully participate in our economy.  Email your MLA.

As workplace infections spread in Alberta, AFL calls on government to reassess its approach to keeping workers and the public safe

In light of news that workers have tested positive for COVID-19 at an oil sands worksite near Fort McMurray and at a meat-packing plant near Calgary, last week, Gil McGowan, the president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, said the time has come for the provincial government to re-evaluate its list of “essential workplaces” and consider beefing-up inspection and enforcement on worksites that continue to operate during the provincial pandemic lockdown.

Alberta needs inclusive health care for everyone, especially during a pandemic

The UCP government recently announced that beginning on April 1, 2020, Alberta Health will no longer pay physicians to treat anyone that does not have a provincial health card number. 
Provinces such as Quebec and Ontario have already acted to protect all residents in their province by removing barriers and ensuring free health care coverage of everyone regardless of status, including for COVID-19 assessments and care.
“The UCP needs to take public health during this pandemic seriously. If other provinces can act, so can Alberta. They need to immediately reverse their attacks on physicians, and ensure barrier free access to health care for everyone in Alberta," said Gil McGowan.

Decisions in a Crisis Determine the Fate of Public Education

How governments react during a crisis has long-lasting consequences for public services and especially public education.
Some governments prioritize the best interest of their citizens, and shore up public services to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, while others use a crisis as a way to advance destabilizing and unpopular policies.

Alberta unions applaud federal support for oil and gas workers

"The money for orphan wells and methane reduction, announced by the federal government Friday, will help the environment and create jobs at a time when they’re desperately needed,” said Gil McGowan. McGowan says he’s also very happy with the work the federal government did to get input from a wide variety of stakeholders.

Action

Tell Kenney to STOP firing workers and start helping to save Albertans’ lives

Use our email tool to tell Kenney to STOP firing workers and start helping to save Albertans’ lives.  If you haven't yet, sign up for our #KenneysCuts campaign to join the fight.

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Your weekly update on Alberta politics for April 21, 2020

Progress Report #213
Your weekly update on Alberta politics for April 21, 2020

Last week the NDP and UFCW 401 warned that a coronavirus outbreak was underway at the Cargill meat packing plant in High River, urging Cargill to immediately put the facility staff on paid leave and stop the spread of infection.
Jason Kenney and the UCP, siding with the plant owners over the plant workers, called these warnings alarmist and refused to act. UCP MLA Roger Reid, who represents the Livingstone-Macleod constituency that contains High River, ranted last Thursday that “the misinformation and fear-mongering being put out by the Leader of the Official Opposition is dishonest to hard working Albertans and denigrates the work being done by the Cargill facility to protect their employees.”
On Saturday, agriculture minister Devin Dreeshen said that he’d “directly communicated with workers to reassure them that their worksite is safe.”
The massive outbreak at the Cargill plant makes up more than 15% of all of Alberta’s current coronavirus cases, and it’s getting out into the surrounding community. CUPE is reporting that employees at the Seasons retirement communities in High River are testing positive for the virus.

Sundries

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Jason Kenney needs to hire Albertans, not fire them. Add your name

Alberta's NDP
Just over one year ago, Jason Kenney’s UCP won the election. He promised you that “Albertans have elected a government that will be obsessed with getting the province back to work.” (CBC: April 18, 2019)
Tell me — do you think that’s true?
I don’t. Especially not after seeing him fire over 20,000 workers in the middle of a crisis.
I don’t blame Mr. Kenney for the COVID-19 crisis. There is no politician on earth that could have avoided the fallout from a global pandemic.
But what he did have control over was his response. Instead of protecting jobs, he slashed them. That doesn’t help people – the workers, their students, and families – it hurts them.
It’s not the Albertan way. If the UCP government is truly obsessed with getting the province back to work, Jason Kenney will rehire the 20,000 education workers he just fired. Help me remind him.
Jason Kenney needs to hire Albertans, not fire them. Add your name if you agree:
We’re in this together. Let’s fight for what we were promised – and what I know you deserve.
Rachel Notley
Leader
Alberta’s NDP
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As Earth Day turns 50, green movement faces fresh challenges

MICHAEL CASEY and TAMMY WEBBER,
Associated Press•April 21, 2020


FILE - In this Nov. 26, 2019, file photo, firefighters battle the Cave Fire burn above Santa Barbara, Calif. Fifty years after the first Earth Day helped spur activism over air and water pollution and disappearing plants and animals, significant improvements are undeniable but monumental challenges remain. Minority communities suffer disproportionately from ongoing contamination. Deforestation, habitat loss and overfishing have wreaked havoc on global biodiversity. And the existential threat of climate change looms large. (AP Photo/Noah Berger File)
Earth Day Missed Opportunities
FILE- In this Feb. 6, 1969, file photo, state forestry conservation crews gather up oil-soaked straw on a beach in Santa Barbara, Calif. Fifty years after the first Earth Day helped spur activism over air and water pollution and disappearing plants and animals, significant improvements are undeniable but monumental challenges remain. Minority communities suffer disproportionately from ongoing contamination. Deforestation, habitat loss and overfishing have wreaked havoc on global biodiversity. And the existential threat of climate change looms large. (AP Photo/Wally Fong, File)

BOSTON (AP) — Gina McCarthy remembers the way things used to be: Tar balls clinging to her legs after swimming in Boston Harbor. The Merrimack River colored bright blue and green by textile mill chemicals. Black smoke everywhere.

Kim Wasserman worries about what it's like today: Hundreds of diesel trucks rolling down residential streets in her mostly low-income, Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. Houses blanketed in ash from a recent smokestack demolition at a shuttered coal-fired power plant. High rates of asthma and other illnesses.

Fifty years after the first Earth Day helped spur activism over air and water pollution and disappearing plants and animals, significant improvements are undeniable. But monumental challenges remain.

Black, brown and poor communities suffer disproportionately from ongoing contamination. Deforestation, habitat loss and overfishing have wreaked havoc on global biodiversity. And the existential threat of climate change looms larger than anything that came before.

A fundamental, global change in thinking and action is needed that goes well beyond any one day, said former California Gov. Jerry Brown, who called Earth Day an opportunity for “a wake-up call.”

“But the darkness, the blindness is so pervasive,” said Brown, who several years ago started an organization with ex-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to address climate change.

Outrage over the burning Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, an oil spill that killed thousands of seabirds off the California coast and a plunging bald eagle population blamed on pesticides drew millions of people to the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970.

Later that year, Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency to oversee the nation's response and in ensuing years, passed landmark laws to protect air and water quality, marine mammals and endangered species, and to clean up the nation's most toxic sites.

“It was quite an amazing time,” said McCarthy, who led the EPA for four years under President Obama and now heads the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “People just (said), ‘Hey, enough is enough ... it’s just not going to happen anymore.’”

Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, who has led a campaign for universities to pull investments from fossil fuel industries, said the first Earth Day “changed our understanding of the environment almost overnight.”

“We have way cleaner air and way more rivers, streams and lakes you can swim in than people did in 1970,” McKibben said.

Yet in the decades since, some problems that sparked the environmental movement have only gotten worse.

Urbanization, farming and industry have led to widespread loss of forests and grasslands, exacerbating the dangers of climate change and contributing to an alarmingly swift decline in animal and plant species. Overfishing threatens the ocean food web. Hotter global average temperatures are leading to both heavier rainfall and drought, and are contributing to sea level rise that threatens coastal communities.

And new issues emerged that weren't foreseen in 1970, including widespread contamination of waterways and drinking water by perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl — industrial chemicals known collectively as PFAS — and plastic pollution that kills and injures marine life.

Meanwhile, minority and poor communities affected by ongoing pollution as well as climate change feel left behind as environmental organizations often focus on issues that don’t always resonate with struggling neighborhoods.

Studies show that polluting industry, highways and shipping terminals are more likely to be located in poor and non-white neighborhoods with less political clout, often because historic housing discrimination or poverty forced people of color to live there.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, blacks ended up living near a major railroad line and industrial areas. Those living near Houston refineries and chemical plants are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. Detroit's most polluted ZIP code, near an oil refinery, is predominantly black and low-income.

“Saving the polar bears is important, don’t get me wrong, but we’re dying in our neighborhoods. What about saving people, too?” said Wasserman, who spent a decade fighting to close two coal-fired power plants in Chicago’s two largest Hispanic enclaves and now worries plans for a distribution warehouse on one site will bring more diesel pollution. “We need to be talking more holistically about saving the earth in general.”

Environmental groups for decades also have struggled to get lawmakers to act on climate change — and to persuade the public to take it seriously.

Early water and air pollution were problems people could see and smell, while climate change until recently had seemed decades away.

"The initial burst of things around Earth Day were mostly things that directly affected people — freeways cutting through their neighborhoods, oil spills on their beaches, their river in Cleveland catching on fire,” said Denis Hayes, who was the 25-year-old national coordinator for that first Earth Day and who is still involved in the movement.

Then, efforts to speak to worldwide climate change began in the 1990s. “That is much more difficult to get people aroused by," Hayes said. "Maybe more important, it’s more difficult to address.”

As evidenced by last year's climate protests, a new, diverse generation of activists is demanding action, fueled by fears the worst impacts will happen in their lifetime.

Yet environmental issues have become so politically polarized that it's difficult for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground, said Carol Browner, who was EPA administrator under President Clinton and directed climate change policy under Obama.

“We could have done a better job at maintaining the bipartisan support for environmental protection,” she said.

Now, environmentalists fear, regulatory rollbacks under the Trump administration, along with attacks on science long used to make decisions, also threaten years of progress. Trump is pulling the U.S. out of the landmark Paris agreement, which the United Nations rolled out on Earth Day 2016.

Some Democratic lawmakers have responded by introducing the sweeping Green New Deal to transition the economy away from fossil fuels, and many of the Democratic presidential candidates rolled out their own climate plans. But such efforts face stiff opposition from Republicans and some within the party.

For environmental reforms, the support of minority communities will be very important, activists say, because people of color will comprise the majority of the U.S. population within about 20 years.

Yet representation of people of color in large environmental organizations still is far too low, said Dorceta Taylor, a University of Michigan professor who researches the social impacts of environmentalism. Taylor, who is black, published a study in 2014 study that found just 16% of staff jobs in those organizations were held by minorities, though that's a big jump compared to 10 years earlier.

Green 2.0, an advocacy organization that tracks racial and ethnic diversity among the top environmental groups and foundations, found growing diversity among staff and boards, though minorities still were just a fraction of the leadership compared to whites in most organizations.

Minorities care deeply about pollution and climate change “because they see it 24/7,” said Robert Bullard, an environmental policy professor at Texas Southern University and a longtime environmental justice activist.

"Earth Day 50 should not look anything demographically like the first one, which was very white and middle class," he said. “It needs to be ... a day to celebrate the fact that our country is changing.”
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Environmental Destruction Brought Us COVID-19. What It Brings Next Could Be Far Worse.

Jimmy Tobias, HuffPost•April 21, 2020
(Photo: Illustration: Jun Cen for HuffPost)
Dr. Richard Kock was on duty at London’s Royal Veterinary College in January 2017 when he received an urgent message from international health officials. He was needed for an emergency response mission in the Mongolian countryside, where a deadly viral outbreak was underway.

He packed his things, caught a flight to the capital city of Ulaanbaatar and drove for two days into the arid steppe. He found a disturbing scene: frozen corpses scattered on hillsides, burn pits stacked with bodies and residents addled with anxiety.

But this pandemic was not targeting humans. It was goat plague, a lethal and highly infectious virus that has killed goats, sheep and other small ruminants in huge numbers since it was first detected last century. There is a vaccine, but its application in Mongolia had been botched. The virus had spilled from domestic livestock into local populations of critically endangered saiga antelope, and it wiped out about 85% of the infected, Kock said.

“Nearly everything died across a huge landscape,” said Kock, who has worked for decades to stem infectious diseases around the world. There are only a few thousand saiga antelope left in Mongolia today, largely due to the goat plague.

The only comforting element of this tale is that the disease is not transmissible to humans. At least, not yet.

But Kock worries. Goat plague is a paramyxovirus, a virus in the same family as measles. Its case fatality rate can be as high as 90%, and some animals that contract it can infect eight to 12 others.

“They are nasty viruses,” Kock said, adding that they’re formidable in their spread and aggressiveness. It wouldn’t take a big tweak in the goat plague’s genome ― “just two amino acids, essentially” ― for it to become infectious to humans, he said. “In theory, it is very possible.”
Residents pay for groceries by standing on chairs to peer over barriers set up by a wet market on a street in Wuhan, the epicenter of China's coronavirus outbreak, on April 1. (Photo: Aly Song / Reuters)

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, killing thousands and crushing the global economy, the potential threat of zoonotic spillover — when novel viruses and bacteria jump from animals to people — is becoming increasingly clear. The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 almost certainly originated in bats and is believed to have spilled into humans at a live animal market in Wuhan, China. Readily transmissible and far deadlier than the seasonal flu, COVID-19 is now one of the worst pandemics of animal origin that humans have faced in a century. But it won’t be the last.

There are millions of viruses and bacteria out there that reside in wild animals and can potentially infect humans, and these emerging diseases are on the rise everywhere as humans disrupt ecosystems and exploit animal habitat across the globe. We are living in an age of pandemics, and the next one — let’s call it “Disease X,” as scientists often do — could be even more devastating than COVID-19.

“On a scale of 1 to 100, we could place [the current outbreak] probably somewhere a little below midway,” said Dennis Carroll, the chair of the Global Virome Project and former director of the emerging threats division at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Some known viruses circulating today have much higher mortality rates than the novel coronavirus but don’t spread easily among humans. If one of them mutated and became highly infectious in humans, Carroll said, Disease X could make this pandemic “look like a warmup.”
Workers wearing personal protective equipment bury bodies in a trench on Hart Island, which is in the Bronx borough of New York City, earlier this month. (Photo: John Minchillo/ASSOCIATED PRESS)


A Plague Rooted In Environmental Destruction

Political leaders are taking unprecedented measures to contain a virus that has infected at least 2.31 million people, killed at least 157,000 and forced national economies to their knees. Yet those unprecedented measures address only the symptoms of this crisis, an entirely reactionary response that has so far avoided addressing the root causes of novel disease emergence.

“COVID-19 is just the latest zoonotic disease to emerge that has its roots in the rampant habitat loss occurring around the world and the burgeoning wildlife trade,” a group of more than 100 conservation organizations wrote in a letter to the U.S. Congress last month, urging it to include in its stimulus bill new funding to combat the conditions that give rise to outbreaks like COVID-19. “Global pandemics will likely continue and even escalate if action isn’t taken.”

So far, though, Congress has failed to act on that threat, and the Trump administration is exacerbating the problem with its relentless campaign to roll back wildlife protections and cut environmental programs at home and abroad. All the while, the threat of zoonotic disease continues to intensify.

The virus that causes COVID-19 is just the latest infectious agent to jump from animals into people. HIV, Ebola, Marburg virus, SARS, MERS, Zika ― those, too, originated in animals and are part of the same perilous trend of novel diseases that have surfaced with increasing frequency as population growth, industrial agriculture, deforestation, wildlife exploitation, urban sprawl and other human activities bring our species into continuous contact with animal-borne pathogens.

“Emerging infectious diseases, the majority of which are zoonotic and have their origin in wildlife, have been increasing significantly — both numbers of outbreaks and diversity of diseases — over the past 50 years,” said Dr. Christian Walzer, chief global veterinarian at the New York City-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

The majority of emerging infectious diseases originate in animals, a 2017 study in the journal Nature Communications concluded, and “their emergence often involves dynamic interactions among populations of wildlife, livestock, and people within rapidly changing environments.” A 2015 study found that land use changes, such as urban expansion and deforestation, is the single most significant driver of many of the zoonotic outbreaks that have occurred since 1940.

“In the broadest sense, humans are the main drivers of zoonotic disease outbreaks,” said Catherine Machalaba, a policy adviser and research scientist at the EcoHealth Alliance.
A small island of trees in a clear-cut pine forest. Dramatic changes in land use have contributed to the rise of zoonotic diseases. (Photo: eppicphotography via Getty Images)
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought global attention to live wild animal markets, which are common throughout Southeast Asia and Africa and which scientists say provide ideal conditions for new pandemics to spawn. The markets, which are often located in dense, urban areas, bring a wide variety of domestic and wild species, living and dead, into contact with humans. They are potential petri dishes for novel pathogens to evolve and spread.

It is at one such “wet market” in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, that the novel coronavirus, labeled SARS-CoV-2, is believed to have first spilled from its original host (thought to be a bat) into an intermediary host species or directly into humans. The crowded market featured dozens of live and dead animals for sale that rarely, if ever, come in contact in the wild, from fish and rats to monkeys and foxes. These markets are poorly regulated, and endangered species are known to end up in them.

This coronavirus crossed over to humans in China, but the spillover of such diseases is occurring all over the world, including in the United States. Walzer points, for instance, to the rise of Lyme disease in North America, where our suburban developments and shopping malls wiped out wild forests, killed native predators, amplified rodent and deer populations, and fueled outbreaks of the tick-borne illness.

“It’s the classic example of how biodiversity loss has increased the risk for spillover,” Walzer said.

Consider also Nipah, a paramyxovirus, like the goat plague, that first appeared in Malaysia in 1998. That virus — an inspiration for the 2011 film “Contagion” — has its origins in fruit bats, but it spilled over to pigs on a farm where livestock pens abutted mango trees that bats used as a food source.

“Bats were coming in in large numbers, feeding on mangos and, in the process of chewing on the mango, they would drop mangos laden with mucus and other body fluids into the pig pens,” said Jonathan Epstein, vice president for science and outreach at the EcoHealth Alliance, which works to study and prevent zoonotic disease spillover. “That is how it started.”

Nipah does not harm bats. But it sickened pigs and soon infected humans, too. First, it spread to workers on the farm. Then, as pigs were traded around the country, it infected other humans. By the end of the outbreak in 1999, 265 people had contracted the virus and more than 100 had died. Malaysian authorities, meanwhile, had slaughtered millions of pigs to staunch the infection’s spread.

But the story doesn’t end there. Nipah, scientists soon discovered, was also in Bangladesh. Since the early 2000s, the country has suffered from a series of recurrent outbreaks that have claimed scores of lives. In these cases, however, there were no pigs involved. The virus spread here happened via sap from date palm plants, which some in Bangladesh harvest and drink raw in the winter months. Fruit bats have learned to exploit this food source, too, and their saliva, urine and droppings sometimes fall into the pots that people use to collect the palm sap. In this way, scientists say, Nipah has spread from bats to Bangladeshis.

“Nipah is a scary virus because it is super deadly,” said Epstein, who has studied the virus’s spread and notes that it has a case fatality rate in Bangladesh of about 75%.

But there’s another reason Nipah keeps disease experts up at night: Humans can spread the virus directly to each other, with no animal intermediary necessary.

“Nipah has shown human-to-human transmission consistently in Bangladesh, and that is why it is among the top listed infectious disease threats,” Epstein said. “It is only a matter of time before a version of Nipah virus gets into people, one that is both deadly and highly transmissible.”

In other words, there’s no need to speculate about the spillover of a scary disease like goat plague when Nipah is already on the scene.

Live animal markets and COVID-19. Degraded forests and Lyme disease. Agricultural production, disrupted bat habitat and a petrifying new paramyxovirus. These examples all tell the same story: Humanity’s effect on the natural world, and on wildlife especially, is causing novel pathogens to infect, harm and kill us. When we mine, drill, bulldoze and overdevelop, when we traffic in wild animals and invade intact habitat, when we make intimate contact with birds, bats, primates, rodents and more, we run an intensifying risk of contracting one of the estimated 1.6 million unknown viruses that reside in the bodies of other species.

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A monkey is kept in a cage for sale at an animal market in Jakarta, Indonesia, in May 2007. (Photo: AFP via Getty Images)

Far From An ‘Unforeseen Problem’
Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has consistently undermined science as part of his pro-development, anti-environment agenda. And the administration’s response to COVID-19 has, unsurprisingly, been defined by similar denial.

Trump spent weeks downplaying the threat, only to suddenly change his tune and insist that no one could have possibly predicted or prepared for such a devastating pandemic. He described the outbreak as an “unforeseen problem,” “something that nobody expected.”

But a crisis of this magnitude was not only possible, it was all but inevitable. Many people, from business leaders to intelligence officials to infectious diseases experts, have been saying so for years.

“If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates said in a 2015 Ted Talk, stressing that the U.S. and the world at large are wildly unprepared to respond.

Even Trump’s own appointees in the intelligence community had issued warnings.
“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,” says the 42-page Worldwide Threat Assessment that then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats presented to the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2019.

The report highlights stalled progress in combating infectious diseases such as malaria and the measles, as well as the link between emerging pathogens and human encroachment.

“The growing proximity of humans and animals has increased the risk of disease transmission,” it says. “The number of outbreaks has increased in part because pathogens originally found in animals have spread to human populations.”

And yet the Trump administration was caught unprepared, confused and unable to craft a coherent strategy to tackle the threat. Indeed, even in mid-March, the president was still comparing COVID-19 to the seasonal flu.

Beyond their hapless response, Trump and his Cabinet have also promoted a slew of policies that actively exacerbate the potential for zoonotic spillover.

Since taking power in 2017, the Trump administration has been on an anti-environment bonanza, rolling back wildlife and land protections while also working to cut funding for key international conservation programs that help prevent the sort of activities that give rise to infectious disease emergence. In its proposed budget for fiscal year 2021, for instance, the administration seeks to cut more than $300 million from critical USAID and State Department programs that combat wildlife trafficking, conserve large landscapes and otherwise promote biodiversity and wildlife protection abroad.

“USAID is one of the largest global donors for biodiversity conservation,” said Kelly Keenan Aylward, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Washington, D.C., office.

She pointed, for instance, to the agency’s Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment, a landscape-scale effort that focuses on combating wildlife trafficking and deforestation, two key drivers of biodiversity loss. USAID, Aylward said, also funds essential biodiversity programs in the Amazon and Southeast Asia, among other places.
A poisonous, critically endangered golden mantella frog in the rainforest of Madagascar. Habitat loss from logging and agriculture has driven the species toward extinction. Trump administration policies have exacerbated the loss of biodiversity. (Photo: Ger Bosma via Getty Images)

Trump and his small army of industry-linked political appointees are also going after the country’s key domestic wildlife agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act and fighting the illegal wildlife trade. In fiscal year 2021, they aim to slash the agency’s budget by roughly $80 million, including significant cuts to its law enforcement programs. They also want to whittle away at the agency’s Multinational Species Conservation Fund, which finances conservation programs for imperiled species abroad.

The administration also finalized regulations that significantly weaken both the Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, two bedrock conservation laws. It engineered the largest rollback of public lands protection in U.S. history and has presided over a steep decline in the number of new species listed under the ESA. It has withdrawn U.S. membership in UNESCO, a United Nations program that protects hundreds of natural sites around the world, and earlier this month Trump threatened to halt U.S. funding for the World Health Organization over its pandemic response, a clear effort to shift blame away from his administration. All this while advocating drastic cuts to U.S.-sponsored global health programs that fight infectious diseases.

Wildlife and land protection programs, advocates say, should be getting more support, not less — especially in light of a raging pandemic that has its origins in environmental destruction and disruption.

“Conservation and wildlife protection efforts must be prioritized in order to protect not only our precious resources,” said Kate Wall, the senior legislative manager at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, “but the stability of our global economy and, indeed, our very existence.”

‘It Should Be A Defining Movement’

Carroll, the former USAID official, said fighting emerging disease requires social engineering that invests not only in the capability to disrupt future spillover but also measures to manage outbreaks when they occur.

Carroll designed and directed Predict, a USAID disease surveillance program that identified more than 1,000 previously unknown wildlife viruses, including strains of Ebola and dozens of coronaviruses, over the last decade. The project proved that our existing technologies could pinpoint future viral threats. But operating on that scale, it would take centuries to catalog the estimated 1.6 million viruses out there ― what Carroll calls “unknown viral dark matter.”

In September, after $200 million and a decade of virus hunting, Trump’s USAID announced it would not renew the Predict program for another five-year cycle. Carroll left USAID around that time. And on March 31, as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the U.S., the administration officially shuttered the program. USAID subsequently granted the program a six-month extension on April 1 to “provide emergency support” to other countries in their response to COVID-19, but the effective cancellation of Predict had already caused real damage — its field work came to a halt months earlier, and some of the organizations that worked on the program were forced to lay off staffers, according to an April report in the Los Angeles Times.

USAID is now in the process of developing a new project, called STOP Spillover, which is expected to be launched this fall and cost $50 million to $100 million over five years. An agency spokesperson told CNN the program will “build on the lessons learned and data gathered” during Predict and “focus on strengthening national capacity to develop, test and implement interventions to reduce the risk of the spillover.”

Carroll now leads the Global Virome Project, a nonprofit that is working to create what he describes as a “global atlas” of animal viruses that would help prepare for, and ideally prevent, pandemics. Mapping viruses by species and location would allow governments to target hot spots for increased surveillance and ecosystem protections.

Carroll also hopes it will make it possible for scientists to develop vaccines that protect humans from not just one virus but perhaps even whole viral families.

“The demise of Predict,” Carroll said, “will only be a tragedy if we don’t continue to invest in viral discovery.”
Workers prepare to spray disinfectant at the Wuhan Railway Station in Wuhan, China on March 24, 2020. The city in central China is where the coronavirus first emerged late last year. (Photo: STR via Getty Images)
Disease research and preparing for pandemics isn’t cheap. The Global Virome Project estimates it would cost $1.5 billion over a decade to identify 75% of the unknown viruses in mammals and birds. On the heels of the Ebola crisis in 2016, a commission of global health experts called for an annual global investment of $4.5 billion to help prevent and fight future pandemics, including $3.4 billion to upgrade public health systems across the globe and $1 million for the development of vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics.

But those figures pale in comparison to the costs of a global pandemic, as highlighted by the untold trillions of dollars that COVID-19 is now costing the world economy.

Perhaps the frequency of deadly disease outbreaks ― SARS in 2003, swine flu in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014 and now COVID-19 ― will convince the world it is time for a different approach, Carroll hopes. But he fears that, as with previous outbreaks, resources will dry up once the coronavirus threat dissipates and “collective amnesia” sets in.

“We should not accept the idea that spillover from wildlife into people is inevitable,” he said. “It’s not. Viruses don’t move from animals to people. We facilitate that.”

But we can change our ways.

More than 240 environmental and animal advocacy groups signed an April 6 letter urging the World Health Organization to recommend that governments institute permanent bans on wildlife markets and the use of wildlife in traditional medicines.

To truly solve the underlying conditions that fuel zoonotic pandemics, experts and wildlife conservationists are also calling for a new paradigm that recognizes the interconnection of people, animals and ecosystems, which they call the “One Health” approach.

“It should be a defining movement,” Dr. Christine Kreuder Johnson, project director of the USAID’s Predict program and associate director of the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis, said of One Health, which seeks to prevent infectious disease outbreaks by safeguarding wild animals and their habitat.

Humans have driven up to 1 million species around the globe to the brink of extinction, a United Nations report last year found. A U.N. draft biodiversity plan released earlier this year calls for protecting 30% of all lands and oceans by 2030 to combat the biodiversity crisis, which experts say would help keep new infectious diseases at bay.

Other experts told HuffPost that the U.S. should establish a high-level One Health task force that brings together agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Fish and Wildlife Service, USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to chart a course forward for protecting wildlife habitat, strengthening disease surveillance and preventing pandemics.

Still others, like Dr. Richard Kock, say humans must drastically scale back livestock production, which brought the goat plague to Mongolia and fueled the Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia.

“Pathogens can move incredibly quickly despite attempts to stop them and despite our technology and our medicines,” Kock said. “It is a wake-up call for humanity.”
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