Trump escalates battle with World Health Organization over coronavirus response

Alexander Nazaryan National Correspondent,Yahoo News•April 10, 2020

Trump says U.S. may cut funding for WHO because it’s ‘China-centric’

At Friday’s coronavirus task force press briefing, President Trump explained why the U.S. is looking at cutting funding for the World Health Organization, accusing the global body of being “China-centric.”

WASHINGTON — Reprising the skeptical tone he has applied to the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, President Trump accused the World Health Organization of helping China conceal the number of its citizens that have been infected by the coronavirus.

“I do believe they knew,” the president said at Friday’s briefing of the coronavirus task force, suggesting that the WHO was aware that China was not being truthful about the scope of COVID-19 infections. “But they didn’t want to tell the world. And we’re gonna get to the bottom of it.”

Trump did not provide evidence to support his assertion, but he made clear that the international public health organization would remain a primary target in the coming days. “We're going to talk about the WHO next week in great detail. I didn't want to do it today, Good Friday. I didn't want to do it before Easter, and also didn't want to do it before we have all the facts,” he said.

Friday’s comments came during a week in which Trump has repeatedly blamed the WHO for improperly handling the coronavirus pandemic. On Tuesday, he said that the WHO was “very biased toward China.”

Trump has said he wants to put a hold on U.S. funding to the WHO, although when or how he intends to do so remains unclear (funding is appropriated by Congress). The United States contributed $893 million to the WHO for its current two-year funding period, while China’s latest contribution was $86 million.

“We’re paying them more than 10 times more than China,” the president said. “And they are very, very China-centric.”

President Trump and WHO Director-General Tedros 

Adhanom Ghebreyesus. (Jim Watson/AFP via

 Getty Images, WHO video via AFP/Getty Images)

The source of Trump’s irritation appears to be that the WHO did not endorse his restriction on travel from China to the United States, which he implemented on Jan. 31. Four days before that, a WHO guidance advised against “unnecessary restrictions of international traffic.”

More broadly, the president appears to be annoyed that the WHO has generally praised China’s response to the pandemic, which originated within its borders, in the southeastern city of Wuhan. Praise for China has indeed been fulsome from WHO officials. Dr. Bruce Aylward, a Canadian epidemiologist who led the WHO team in China, told Yahoo News that if he were to get infected by the coronavirus, he would seek treatment in China.

“They know how to keep people alive,” he said.

Aylward added, however, that Chinese epidemiologists learned much of what they know from American counterparts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Praise for China has irked some in the United States, Trump’s allies in particular. They believe that Trump has been unfairly maligned while China has been unfairly celebrated. “Instead of acting in the best interest of our global health, the WHO has served as a propaganda arm for the Chinese government,” Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., wrote on Twitter earlier this week. She said she supported a funding freeze.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has also criticized the WHO for what he perceives as its overly solicitous attitude towards China.

Earlier this week, Trump also charged that the WHO “minimized the threat very strongly.” That appears to be a reference to a Jan. 14 tweet from the WHO that declared that “Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” That would prove an incorrect assertion. Trump has also made false assertions about the coronavirus, including that it would vanish of its own accord.

Experts warn that there is no proof the coronavirus will stop spreading in warmer weather

Haven Orecchio-Egresitz,Business Insider•April 9, 2020

Some have hoped that warmer weather would slow or stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Health experts warn that we don't know yet what the virus will do.

A recently released report indicates that the studies published so far on potential seasonal effects have conflicting results and are hampered by weak data.

While springtime may bring hope of life returning to normal in the Northern Hemisphere, scientists don't think people should bet on warm weather alone being enough to stop the coronavirus from spreading at alarming rates.

There have been several studies on how a change in temperature could affect the coronavirus. However, the results have been conflicted and hampered by weak data, a report released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said.

"One should not assume that we are going to be rescued by a change in the weather" Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said Thursday on Good Morning America. "You must assume that the virus will continue to do its thing."

There has been some precedent of other coronaviruses and influenza not thriving in warmer temperatures, but at this time there is no proof that COVID-19 will respond similarly.

Some studies outlined in the report did find that that an increase in temperature or humidity led to a drop in the transmission of the virus. Still, the data it was based on was not without its flaws, the report said.

One early study out of China's Hubei province suggested that for every 1 degree C increase in atmospheric temperature at relatively high levels of humidity, daily confirmed cases decreased 36-57%, but the results didn't hold up across mainland China.

A different study found that 90% of global transmission through March 22 occurred when temperatures were 3-17 degrees C. That study, though, didn't figure in variables like a country's testing capacities or policy responses.

"Some limited data support a potential waning of cases in warmer and more humid seasons, yet none are without major limitations," the report says. "Given that countries currently in 'summer' climates, such as Australia and Iran, are experiencing rapid virus spread, a decrease in cases with increases in the humidity and temperature elsewhere should not be assumed."

The conflicting studies don't necessarily mean that summer vacations are entirely off the table, though.

Fauci told CBS This Morning that getaways "can be in the cards."

"And I say that with some caution, because as I said, when we do that, when we pull back and try to open up the country, as we often use that terminology, we have to be prepared that when the infections start to rear their heads again that we have it in place a very aggressive and effective way to identify, isolate, contract trace and make sure we don't have those spikes we have now," Fauci said. "So, the answer to your question is yes, if we do the things that we need to do to prevent the resurgence."

Bill Gates warns that a coronavirus-like outbreak will probably happen 'every 20 years or so'

(Rosie Perper),Business Insider•April 9, 2020

Bill Gates spoke to the Financial Times via a video chat on April 2.\
Screenshot/Financial Times

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said that people are now realizing that a viral outbreak similar to COVID-19 will likely happen "every 20 years or so."

Speaking to the Financial Times earlier this month, Gates said that COVID-19 was the "biggest event that people will experience in their entire lives" and said world leaders and global policymakers have "paid many trillions of dollars more than we might have had to if we'd been properly ready."

The 67-year-old billionaire has been warning about the risk of a pandemic disease for years, stating that a global health crisis like coronavirus could wipe out 30 million people in less than a year.



Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said that this coronavirus pandemic was the "biggest event that people will experience in their entire lives," and warned that a viral outbreak will likely happen "every 20 years or so."

Gates discussed the global fight against the novel coronavirus with the Financial Times via Skype on April 2. FT posted the interview and transcript online on April 8.

He said world leaders and global policymakers have "paid many trillions of dollars more than we might have had to if we'd been properly ready."

"This is the biggest event that people will experience in their entire lives," Gates told FT.

He said that in response to this outbreak, future governments will have "standby diagnostics, deep antiviral libraries, and early warning systems."

"The cost of doing all those things well is very small compared to what we're going through here," he said. "And so now people realize, 'OK, there really is a meaningful probability every 20 years or so with lots of world travel that one of these [viruses] will come along.' And so the citizens expect the government to make it a priority."

He said he was confident that lessons learned from this outbreak will encourage people to better prepare for next time, but lamented that the cost this time around was too high.

"It shouldn't have required a many trillions of dollars loss to get there," he said. "The science is there. Countries will step forward."

The 67-year-old billionaire has been warning about the risk of a pandemic disease for years, stating that a global health crisis like coronavirus could wipe out 30 million people in less than a year.

In 2015, Gates gave a Ted Talk warning that the world was "not ready" for an impending pandemic.

"There's no need to panic ... but we need to get going," he said in 2015.

In February, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $100 million last month to fight the coronavirus outbreak, designating money towards vaccine research, frontline responders, prevention measures, and treatment efforts around the world.

Business Insider

THIRD WORLD USA
"It's been torture": LGBTQ health care suffers amid coronavirus

Li Cohen,CBS News•April 10, 2020


The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted life for billions of people, forcing the world to deal with a sudden loss of jobs, security, and regular health care. But for those who identify as .

"If someone is transphobic, if someone is anti-black, if someone is anti-immigrant, if someone is anti-queer, and they have to make a choice between a patient who is visibly gender non-conforming, and someone who is gender conforming ... it actually doesn't matter whether something is scientifically sound or not," Swadhin said. "If the health care provider has that bias then that is what's going to steer their hand in the moment of making decisions."

Tori Cooper, director of community engagement for the Transgender Justice Initiative at the Human Rights Campaign, said, "Out of all the folks under the LGBTQ spectrum, trans folks are going to fare even worse" throughout the pandemic. She added, "I don't think that we can rely on the federal government to provide any protections in favor of trans folks."

In the more than 300 pages that comprise the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed by Congress, there is no mention of the LGBT community. On March 31, the International Transgender Day of Visibility, the governor of Idaho signed two anti-transgender bills into law, one of which bans people from changing the sex listed on their birth certificates.

"A lot of our lawmakers don't represent the communities that they serve," Cooper said. They represent a small part of the community, but they don't represent the fullness and the color and the vibrancy and the diversity that exists within so many of our communities across the country."

German minister criticises U.S. coronavirus response as too slow: Spiegel

Reuters•April 10, 2020

FILE PHOTO: German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas
DON'T FORGET HE IS A CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRAT

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has criticised the United States' handling of the coronavirus outbreak as too slow, the latest sign of tensions between the two allies as they respond to the crisis.

China took "very authoritarian measures, while in the U.S., the virus was played down for a long time," Maas said in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in a preview sent to the media on Friday.

"These are two extremes, neither of which can be a model for Europe," he said.

Germany was among countries that last week accused the United States of "Wild West" tactics in outbidding or blocking shipments to buyers who had already signed deals for vital medical supplies. [nL8N2BR5O2] THEY CALLED IT PIRACY

Maas told Der Spiegel that he hoped the United States would rethink its international relationships in light of the coronavirus crisis.

"Let's see to what extent the actions of the American government will lead to discussions in the U.S. about whether the 'America First' model really works," he said, adding that aggressive trade policies may have hurt the country's ability to procure protective equipment.

A spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Berlin was not immediately able to respond to a request for comment.

'How Do I Get Help?' Dying Coronavirus Patient Asked Alexa
HORROR OF AMERICA'S FOR PROFIT NURSING CARE 

IN THE AGE OF CORONAVIRUS

Neil Vigdor, The New York Times•April 10, 2020


'How Do I Get Help?' Dying Coronavirus Patient Asked AlexaMore

They lived about 20 minutes apart in Michigan, but when a cousin gave the sisters Lou Ann Dagen and Penny Dagen each an Amazon Echo Show last year to make video calls, they would keep each other company for hours on end.

The virtual assistant Alexa connected them during meals and discussions about what was on television.

“I think she just wanted to know that I was there,” Penny Dagen, 74, said of her sister, who lived in a nursing home.

And when Lou Ann Dagen, 66, became gravely ill with COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, she turned once again to Alexa, Penny Dagen said in an interview Thursday.

Penny Dagen discovered voice recordings of her sister pleading with Alexa to intervene as her health worsened. She said she found the recordings Monday, two days after Lou Ann Dagen died of complications from the virus.

“‘How do I get help?’” her sister asked in the recording. “‘How do I get to the police?’”

Lou Ann Dagen was one of six residents of the nursing home, Metron of Cedar Springs, who died after being stricken with the virus, a spokesman for the center confirmed. Thirty-one residents and five staff members at the nursing home, which is about 20 miles north of Grand Rapids, Michigan, have tested positive for the virus, according to the nursing home.

“I was surprised how much she had cried for help on there,” Penny Dagen said. “She was hurting so bad.”
Dagen said she and her sister were aware of the limitations of Alexa, the ubiquitous voice-activated assistant.

“It won’t call 911,” she said. “Alexa won’t do that.”

Amazon officials noted that smart devices like the Echo Show are not meant as a replacement for life safety services and are unable to contact emergency services.

“We were saddened to hear about this news, and our hearts go out to the family,” a company spokeswoman said Thursday night in a statement. “Today, customers can ask Alexa to call family or friends, or set up skills like Ask My Buddy, which lets you alert someone in your Personal Alert Network that you need them to check on you. We continue to build more features to help our customers.”

Dagen said that her sister had diabetes and high blood pressure, which also contributed to her death. She lived at the nursing home for about 10 years after having two strokes that caused paralysis on the left side of her body, Dagen added. Her oxygen levels plummeted because of the virus, which she contracted several weeks ago, said Dagen, who lives in Sparta, Michigan.

“It was like she couldn’t breathe,” she said of her sister, who died at Mercy Health St. Mary’s in Grand Rapids on Saturday, shortly after being hospitalized.

A nursing home executive said that the center took appropriate action and that Lou Ann Dagen’s condition deteriorated rapidly.

“We can share that Lou Ann was getting excellent care and that our team was following both her advanced directives and clinical practice guidelines to manage her pain and symptoms,” Paul Pruitt, the nursing home’s director of operations, said in a statement. “Once those symptoms progressed rapidly, and at the advice of her medical team, she was immediately sent to the hospital.”

Pruitt said the nursing home encouraged the sisters’ regular video calls.

“Alexa was Lou Ann’s primary communication tool with her sister, who was unable to get to our facility,” he said. “It was a very positive part of her life, which we supported fully.”

Penny Dagen described her sister, who never married, as multitalented, and said that she played the organ, piano and guitar. She also sang and was an artist who wrote a children’s book, Dagen said.

The last time she spoke with her sister was on a video call Saturday morning before she went to the hospital, Dagen said. She added that she had the recordings of her sister asking Alexa for help on her iPad, but that she did not plan on keeping them.

“I don’t want to keep that memory of her,” she said. “I just wish they could have taken the pain away. She isn’t in any pain any more.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

Coronavirus Was Slow to Spread to Rural America. Not Anymore.

Jack Healy, Sabrina Tavernise, Robert Gebeloff and Weiyi Cai,
The New York Times•April 10, 20203,693 Comments

Coronavirus cases spread through U.S. rural pockets, and communities fear they may not be able to handle it

Grace Rhodes was getting worried last month as she watched the coronavirus tear through New York and Chicago. But her 8,000-person hometown in southern Illinois still had no reported cases, and her boss at her pharmacy job assured her: “It’ll never get here.”

Now it has. A new wave of coronavirus cases is spreading deep into rural corners of the country where people once hoped their communities might be shielded because of their isolation from hard-hit urban centers and the natural social distancing of life in the countryside.

The coronavirus has officially reached nearly three-quarters of the country’s rural counties, with 1 in 7 reporting at least one death. Doctors and elected officials are warning that a late-arriving wave of illness could overwhelm rural communities that are older, poorer and sicker than much of the country, and already dangerously short on medical help.

“Everybody never really thought it would get to us,” said Rhodes, 18, who is studying to become a nurse. “A lot of people are in denial.”

Downtown Fairmont, W.V., April 2, 2020. (Kristian Thacker/The New York Times)

With 42 states now urging people to stay at home, the last holdouts are the Republican governors of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Arkansas. Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota has suggested that the stricter measures violated personal liberties, and she said her state’s rural character made it better positioned to handle the outbreak.

“South Dakota is not New York City,” Noem said at a news conference last week.

But many rural doctors, leaders and health experts worry that is exactly where their communities are heading, and that they will have fewer hospital beds, ventilators and nurses to handle the onslaught.

“We’re behind the curve in rural America,” said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., who said his state needs hundreds of thousands of masks, visors and gowns. “If they don’t have the protective equipment and somebody goes down and gets sick, that could close the hospital.”

Rural nurses and doctors, scarce in normal times, are already calling out sick and being quarantined. Clinics are scrambling to find couriers who can speed their coronavirus tests to labs hundreds of miles away. The loss of 120 rural hospitals over the past decade has left many towns defenseless, and more hospitals are closing even as the pandemic spreads.

Coronavirus illnesses and deaths are still overwhelmingly concentrated in cities and suburbs, and new rural cases have not exploded at the same rate as in some cities. But they are growing fast. This week, the case rate in rural areas was nearly double what it was six days earlier.

Deaths are being reported in small farming and manufacturing towns that barely had a confirmed case a week ago. Fourteen infections have been reported in the county encompassing Rhodes’ southern Illinois hometown, Murphysboro, and she recently quarantined with her parents, who are nurses, as a precaution after they got sick.

Rich ski towns like Sun Valley, Idaho, and Vail, Colorado, have some of the highest infection rates in the country, and are discouraging visitors and second homeowners from seeking refuge in the mountains. Indian reservations, which grapple daily with high poverty and inadequate medical services, are now confronting soaring numbers of cases.

In some places, the virus has rushed in so suddenly that even leaders are falling ill. In the tiny county of Early in southwest Georgia, five people have died. And the mayor and the police chief of the county seat, Blakely, are among the county’s 97 confirmed cases. It has been a shock for the rural county of fewer than 11,000 people.

“Being from a small town, you think it’s not going to touch us,” Blakely’s assistant police chief, Tonya Tinsley, said. “We are so small and tucked away. You have a perception that it’s in bigger cities.”

That is all gone now.

“You say, wait a minute, I know them!” she said. “It’s, like, oh my God, I knew them. I used to talk to them. I knew their family. Their kids. It’s a blow to the community each time.”

Even a single local case has been enough to jolt some people out of the complacency of the earliest days of the virus, when President Donald Trump spent weeks playing down the threat and many conservative leaders brushed it aside as politically driven hysteria.

In Letcher County, Kentucky, which got its first case on Sunday, waiting for the disease to arrive has been unnerving. Brian Bowan, 48, likes the daily briefings by Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, and he is glad for the governor’s relatively early actions to close nonessential businesses. Without them, Bowan said, “we could have a really bad pandemic. We could be like California or New York.”

In Mississippi, a mostly rural state, the virus had spread to nearly every county by April, causing health care workers to wonder, nervously, when the governor would issue a stay-at-home order. Last week, he finally did, and doctors at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson breathed a sigh of relief. The state now has more than 2,000 cases.

“There was this chatter today at the medical center, people saying ‘Oh thank goodness — we need this to get people to realize how serious this is,’” said Dr. LouAnn Woodward, the hospital’s top executive.

While Americans are still divided on whether they approve of how Trump has handled the crisis, the virus is uniting nearly everyone in the country with worry — urban and rural, liberal and conservative. More than 90% of Americans said the virus posed a threat to the country’s economy and public health, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted from March 19-24.

“Some of the petty things that would be in the news and on social media before have sort of fallen away,” said David Graybeal, a Methodist pastor in Athens, Tennessee. “There’s a sense that we are really in this together. Now it’s, ‘How can we pull through this and support one another in this social distancing?’”

In Mangum, Oklahoma, a town of 6,000 in the western part of the state, it all started with a visit. A pastor from Tulsa appeared at a local church, but got sick shortly thereafter and became the state’s first COVID-19 fatality.

Then somebody at the local church started to feel unwell — a person who eventually tested positive for coronavirus.

“Then it was just a matter of time,” said Mangum’s mayor, Mary Jane Scott. Before realizing they were infected, several people who eventually tested positive for the virus had moved about widely through the city, including to the local nursing home, which now has a cluster of cases.

Overall in the town, there were four deaths and 32 residents had tested positive for the coronavirus as of Wednesday — one of the highest infection rates in rural America.

“You’d think in rural Oklahoma, that we all live so far apart, but there’s one place where people congregate, and that’s at the nursing home,” Scott said. “I thought I was safe here in southwest Oklahoma, I didn’t think there would be a big issue with it, and all of a sudden, bam.”

Mangum now has an emergency shelter-in-place order and a curfew — just like larger towns and cities around the United States.

Just as New Yorkers have gotten accustomed to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily televised briefings, residents of Mangum have turned to the mayor’s Facebook page, where she livecasts status updates and advisories. On Monday night, it was the recommendation that residents use curbside pickup when going to Walmart, a broadcast that garnered more than 1,000 views in the hour after she posted it.

“Since we have no newspaper, it’s the only way I know to get the word out,” she told viewers, after inviting them to contact her personally with any questions or concerns.

She also has encouraged residents to step out onto their lawns each night at 7 p.m. where she leads them in a chorus of “God Bless America.”

The virus has complicated huge swaths of rural life. Darvin Bentlage, a Missouri rancher, says he is having trouble selling his cattle because auctions have been canceled. In areas without reliable internet access, adults are struggling to work remotely and children are having to get assignments and school updates delivered to their door.

The financial strain of gearing up to fight the coronavirus has put much pressure on cash-strapped rural hospitals. Many have canceled all nonemergency care like the colonoscopies, minor surgeries and physical therapy sessions that are a critical source of income.

Last month, one hospital in West Virginia and another in Kansas shut their doors altogether.

“It’s just absolutely crazy,” said Michael Caputo, a state delegate in Fairmont, West Virginia, where the Fairmont Regional Medical Center, the only hospital in the county, closed in mid-March. “Across the country, they’re turning hotels and sports complexes into temporary hospitals. And here we’ve got a hospital where the doors are shut.”

For now, there is an ambulance posted outside the emergency room, in case sick people show up looking for help.

Michael Angelucci, a state delegate and the administrator of the Marion County Rescue Squad, said the hospital’s closure during the pandemic is already being felt.

On March 23, emergency medics were called to take an 88-year-old woman with the coronavirus to the hospital, Angelucci said. Instead of making a quick drive to Fairmont Regional, about two minutes away, Angelucci said that the medics had to drive to the next-nearest hospital, about 25 minutes away. A few days later, she became West Virginia’s first reported coronavirus death.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

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Trump's obsession with hydroxychloroquine is an encapsulation of his presidency

Neil J. Young

Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock April 11, 2020

What began primarily as a series of tirades against the media and other perceived enemies in President Trump's daily press briefings about the coronavirus has in recent days devolved into a bizarre and brazen infomercial for hydroxychloroquine, something Trump has touted as a potential miracle cure for COVID-19. "What do you have to lose? Take it," the president said last weekend as he hyped the drug, an anti-malarial medication that lupus patients have long relied on for its anti-inflammatory benefits.


Health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director and sometime guest expert at Trump's daily pressers, have consistently pointed out that hydroxychloroquine has not been proven to be safe or effective against COVID-19. But that's not stopping Trump — or the conservative media universe that props up his presidency — from continuing to push the drug. And while reports this week showed the president has a small financial interest in the medicine, Trump has something even more precious to gain than money by promoting hydroxychloroquine: the puffing up of his power and authority through the continued undermining of expert knowledge and dissenting voices.

No doubt, Trump's financial stake in hydroxychloroquine, however small, has surely played some part in his actions. This is a man, after all, who once stole $7 from his charity to pay for his son's Boy Scouts fee.

In plain daylight, Trump has funneled millions of public dollars to his coffers while president, an ongoing violation of the Constitution and a direct assault on the public trust. As both candidate and president, Trump has regularly used the public limelight to shill everything from his line of steaks and winery to his golf resorts and properties. Rather than a national security hawk who has kept America safe, Trump is a smarmy hawker of shoddy products, some of which may threaten the safety of Americans. From the start, Trump understood that the presidency could be a cash cow for himself, and he'll never let the Constitution — or American lives — stand in the way of raking in millions.

Yet Trump also covets power and has an insatiable need for public adoration that has been curtailed by the momentary pause on his public rallies. Clearly out of his depth when it comes to understanding the virus, Trump has latched onto hydroxychloroquine as a way of keeping himself at the center of the story. Like an ignored child who settles for his parents' negative attention by acting out, Trump knows he can keep the spotlight on him by continuing to recklessly promote hydroxychloroquine, something reporters are right to press him on. And all of it has the added benefit of undercutting the actual experts in the room, a move essential to Trump's constant pitch that his gut instinct is superior to expert knowledge.

That's why Trump didn't allow Fauci to answer a question about hydroxychloroquine earlier this week. Fauci's cautious skepticism of the medicine's usefulness for treating COVID-19 importantly demonstrates that experts always make the limits of their knowledge clear, a galling affront to a president who has never let his ignorance keep him from spouting off. Fauci's steady presence also threatens Trump's sense of himself as the final word on all matters, an authoritarian impulse that animates his presidency, especially now.

If hydroxychloroquine turns out to work, Trump can extravagantly boast he had been right all along, the singular genius who "alone could fix" what all those egghead scientists couldn't figure out. That outcome doesn't look likely, as research on hydroxychloroquine's effectiveness for COVID-19 continues to show. But for the meantime, Trump can continue to position himself as the unconventional thinker boldly leading the nation to a solution against all those slow-moving intellectuals who just mess everything up and want to wreck the economy. Such fantasies propelled candidate Trump to the White House; those delusions now keep his base fanatically attached to him, no matter how deadly the consequences.

In the end, Trump's obsession with hydroxychloroquine is an encapsulation of his presidency: a mixture of sham and scam fueled by questionable ideas pushed by fringe outlets, all working to undermine scientific expertise and sow chaos. "So what do I know?" Trump shrugged to reporters last Sunday after he was pressed about hydroxychloroquine's potential harm to patients, especially those with heart issues.

Those five words represent the Trump presidency— and Trump himself— in a nutshell. But rather than a gracious expression of intellectual humility, they are a careless admission of the callousness and indifference at the heart of everything this president says. Nothing matters to Donald Trump but himself. And he'll sacrifice truth, expertise, and even the lives of his own people to satisfy his ego. That's a drug Trump will never put down.

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Woman gives birth standing with trousers on while detained at US-Mexico borderABOLISH US BORDER PATROL 
ABOLISH ICE 

Justin Vallejo, The Independent•April 9, 2020

A woman suffering flu-like symptoms gave birth standing and fully clothed while detained near the Mexican-US border, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Guatemalan woman, 27, was being processed at the Chula Vista Border Patrol Station near San Diego when her complaints of pain and pleas for help were allegedly ignored by agents, according to a complaint filed on Wednesday by the ACLU and Jewish Family Service of San Diego with the US Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General.

The woman, holding onto a garbage can for support, was repeatedly told to sit and wait to be processed. Her husband, hearing a baby's cries, removed her pants to reveal the newborn's head while their daughters, aged 2 and 12, witnessed the event, according to the ACLU's interviews with the family.

"This horrific case is just the most recent and one of the most egregious examples of this agency's abuse," said ACLU attorney Monika Y. Langarica.

An account of the birth by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), released a few days after the incident on 16 February, describes a conflicting version of events.

After entering the country illegally, the family was detained but "did not appear to be in distress and did not request any medical attention", the agency said in a statement.

"Thanks to the medical resources available in our stations, this woman and her child were well cared for and received immediate medical attention," said Chief Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke. "Our agents are well trained to manage the unexpected, and I'm proud of the work they did in caring for this mother."

A CBP spokesman told The Independent that after an internal investigation of the complaint, the agency "strongly disagrees with the unsubstantiated allegations against our agents".

"Based on this available information, CBP supports what appear to be nothing short of heroic actions of medical personnel and agents on scene and welcomes the response of [Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General]," the spokesman said.

In a letter to Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal demanded an investigation into the incident, as well as other reported mistreatment of pregnant women in custody.

In the letter, Mr Blumenthal said the woman was not allowed to shower after giving birth and after returning from hospital to the Border Patrol station two days later was refused a blanket for the baby.

"Nobody should be treated this way. But sadly, this woman is not the only one to have experienced inexcusable treatment at CBP's hands," Mr Blumenthal said in the statement.

Trump administration, citing coronavirus, expels 10,000 migrants in less than 3 weeks
Molly O'Toole, LA Times•April 9, 2020

Central American migrants seeking asylum return to Mexico over 

the border bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez on March 21. (Christian Chavez / Associated Press)

The Trump administration has quickly expelled roughly 10,000 migrants to Mexico and other countries in less than three weeks since imposing its most severe immigration restrictions yet in response to the coronavirus outbreak, officials said Thursday.

After the United States and Mexico last month closed their border to "nonessential travel," U.S. officials began rapidly removing almost all migrants arriving at the border, with minimal processing. For the first time, those turned away en masse include people seeking asylum as well as hundreds of lone migrant children, both groups that are protected by U.S. law.

The actions reflect how the administration — in response to the pandemic — is taking steps toward achieving some of President Trump's long-sought goals restricting immigration, in this instance barring asylum seekers and unaccompanied children from entry into the United States, and with an end-run around the laws and bureaucratic requirements.

Administration officials said they were acting to protect U.S. residents according to guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"This is not about immigration," the acting commissioner of the Customs and Border Protection agency, Mark Morgan, said repeatedly in a call with reporters. "Right now this is purely about infectious disease and public health."

The unprecedented new steps go beyond existing policies such as one known as "Remain in Mexico." Under that policy, more than 60,000 asylum seekers had to wait on the Mexican side of the border for immigration hearings in the U.S. Now, with rare exception, migrants do not get the chance to seek protection in the United States, including those attempting to enter at official entry points.

Officials cited a CDC order on March 21, when Director Robert Redfield suspended travelers from Canada or Mexico for 30 days, based on a law dating to 1944, and wrote that "the existence of a communicable disease in a foreign country or place creates a serious danger."

Morgan said asylum and other humanitarian protections are still available to migrants seeking refuge in the United States. Those who show "an appropriate level of fear," he said, "will be processed on a case-by-case-basis."

The numbers of migrants whom U.S. officials have encountered at the southern border in recent weeks have fallen sharply from a high last spring to among the lowest levels in decades. Morgan said most of the arrivals have been adult males from Mexico, followed by Central America's "Northern Triangle" countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

The danger is potentially greater for them north of the border. The United States is the global epicenter of the pandemic, with more than 460,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, as of late Thursday. Mexico and the three Central American nations combined have fewer than 4,000, less than 1% of the U.S. total.

Democrats in Congress have criticized the administration's actions. A group of senators assailed the Department of Homeland Security for a "power grab" at the border "under the guise of a global pandemic response."

"We are deeply concerned that DHS is blatantly misinterpreting its limited authorities" under the CDC order, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf on Tuesday. "A public health crisis does not give the Executive Branch a free pass to violate constitutional rights, nor ... operate outside of the law."

Morgan said U.S. officials at the border are acting in ways to minimize contacts with and among the migrants. To avoid transporting and then holding them in facilities not equipped for quarantine or social distancing, as the CDC recommends, Border Patrol agents are instead conducting basic medical assessments and taking biometric information, then immediately returning the migrants to the nearest point of entry, in coordination with Mexican authorities. Those not sent to Mexico are flown to their home countries.

About 80% of migrants are being returned "within just a couple hours," Morgan said. His agency, Customs and Border Protection, has fewer than 100 migrants in its custody, which he called "the intended impact of the CDC order." Last year the agency held roughly 19,000 at the peak, provoking an overcrowding crisis.

Officials on the call declined to provide the total number of children without guardians whom U.S. officials have removed since March 21, but as of April 1, nearly 300 had been expelled, according to Customs and Border Protection spokesman John Mennell. Receiving countries are indicating a dramatic increase. Guatemala received about 100 unaccompanied minors in the first week of April alone, as many as it took in during all of March.

When a migrant arriving at the border claims fear of persecution or torture in their home country, Border Patrol personnel typically refer them to trained asylum officers from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency for screening, the first step in the long process of applying for protection in the United States.

Administration officials have not said how Border Patrol agents quickly make that assessment whether to refer a migrant to an asylum officer rather than simply expel them, and Customs and Border Protection declined to share any guidance given to its agents. Asylum officers have yet to receive any direction on the new measures, officials told The Times.

A leaked Border Patrol memo obtained by ProPublica described only one humanitarian exception to expulsion: if the migrant "spontaneously" makes a "reasonably believable" claim to an agent that he fears torture in his home country. That potentially would allow one to stay in the United States under the international Convention Against Torture, but the standard for proof is higher, and it provides a less secure status than asylum for remaining in the United States.

Since March 21, asylum officers have continued to receive referrals of migrants for screenings of their fear claims, meaning the Border Patrol is "letting some people in," according to an employee at Citizenship and Immigration Services who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect against retaliation. But instead of the usual hundreds of referrals a day from detention centers in Georgia, New York, California and Arizona, the daily total is in the single digits.

Administration officials as well as their foreign counterparts initially had suggested that the policy would apply to migrants other than asylum seekers or unaccompanied children, and that Mexico, for example, would not accept noncitizens.

Morgan acknowledged that the coronavirus poses a "serious danger" to migrants as well as Homeland Security personnel and the broader public.

According to an internal report of the Department of Homeland Security obtained by The Times, more than 9,000 employees have been sidelined by COVID-19. More than 600 have tested positive. The department has yet to publicize, to its employees or the public, the total number of confirmed coronavirus cases among its roughly 240,000 employees or 34,000 migrants in its custody.

The detained population has dropped sharply in recent weeks. Immigration judges, lawyers and advocates have called for migrants to be released from often overcrowded, unsanitary facilities that experts describe as "Petri dishes" for the virus. Amid a broader review, as of March 30, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had identified 600 "vulnerable" migrants in detention and released 160.

Separate from immigration enforcement at the border, Morgan said that at airports and seaports, Customs and Border Protection officers have referred more than 268,000 people returning from coronavirus-affected areas to the CDC.

International travel has dropped by almost 98%. At land borders, noncommercial traffic is down more than 70%, and about 75% for pedestrians, accounting for almost 400,000 fewer people entering the United States each day.

Coronavirus stimulus package includes $1.1B going to for-profit colleges

Aarthi Swaminathan Reporter,Yahoo Finance•April 10, 2020

For-profit colleges and universities are estimated to get $1.1 billion in federal funding from the coronavirus stimulus package, despite Democrats and some experts expressing deep reservations about federal dollars flowing to for-profit higher education institutions.

Out of nearly $14 billion provided by the CARES Act, which was designed to support college students and higher education, around 9% was allocated to for-profit schools including Alabama State College of Barber Styling and University of Phoenix, according to new data released on Thursday by the Education Department (ED).

“The for-profits can distribute aid to students, but as for-profit businesses they should be treated like other for-profit businesses,” Bob Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and former Education Department official during the Obama administration, told Yahoo Finance. “Aid to a nonprofit or public college is restricted to educational and public purposes, but for-profit corporations have no such restrictions. They should not be getting institutional aid apart from the business assistance available through SBA and other agencies.”

According to analysis of data from ED by Ben Miller at the Center for American Progress, Grand Canyon University received the most federal money out of all for-profit higher education institutions, followed by National University College (NUC) and Pima Medical Institute.

Top 10 for-profits. These are the ones you'd want to ask about what they are doing with the money pic.twitter.com/oE3o4tG3xA
— Ben Miller (@EduBenM) April 9, 2020

The ED said that school allocations were “weighted significantly by the number of full-time students who are Pell-eligible but also takes into consideration the total population of the school and the number of students who were not enrolled full-time online before the coronavirus outbreak.”

In any case, “with respect to the question around the for profit schools, the law does not include proof of precluding those students,” DeVos added on a call with reporters. “This first tranche of funding is intended for direct support to students. And so they are going to institutions across the country of every variety.”

Democrats have long been wary of for-profit colleges, describing them as predatory entities that neither provide high quality education nor help its graduates find solid careers.

Devos, for her part, previously overturned a 2014 rule called borrower defense designed to allow students of defunct for-profit colleges to claim debt relief. Both the House and the GOP-controlled Senate voted to roll back the policy.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos 

and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue look on during a briefing on the 

coronavirus pandemic in the press briefing room of the White House on 

March 27, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)More

‘It's clear that Secretary DeVos has chosen to override congressional intent’

One thing is certain: For-profit colleges tend to saddle students with high levels of loan debt.

Data from ED in 2019, which looked at undergraduate enrollment data from 2015 to 2016 for students who went to private for-profit colleges, revealed that 85% of them took out a student loan to pay for school — averaging at around $43,600.

In comparison, only 69% of those who went to a private nonprofit and 65% of those who went to a public institution took out student loans, averaging at about $32,500 and $27,000, respectively.

Consumer advocates — like the Democratic senators — also worried about oversight of the funds.

“It's clear that Secretary DeVos has chosen to override congressional intent,” Student Borrower Protection Center Investigations Lead Tariq Habash told Yahoo Finance. “As for-profit schools receive a significant portion of CARES Act relief funds, there must be strict oversight for how these dollars are being used by an industry that has preyed on the most vulnerable borrowers for too long.”

Coronavirus cases are still on the rise, though the rate of infection seems to be slowing amid social distancing measures. (David Foster/Yahoo Finance)

Habash added that it was ironic that the for-profit college industry, which has “been the subject of dozens of lawsuits in recent years for deceiving borrowers, is now getting emergency relief funds.”

One prominent for-profit colleges receiving the funding — the University of Phoenix — has announced that it will “commit every federal dollar” of $6.58 million to students who were “not exclusively studying online” before the coronavirus pandemic.

“These for-profit institutions should... be restricted in their use of funds,” Ashley Harrington, director of federal advocacy at the Center for Responsible Lending, told Yahoo Finance. “No stimulus dollars should be used for advertising, market, recruitment, CEO salaries, or stock buybacks. For-profit colleges shouldn't use emergency federal COVID-19 funding relief to grow enrollment while neglecting program quality and student needs … The Department must provide oversight to ensure that this funding is actually used to support students struggling to navigate this crisis.”

Harrington added that borrower defense should still be accessible to students who may see their program or college close during this pandemic. Under that rule, students who incur student debt from attending an institution are eligible for debt relief if their school closes and there is the basis that the school had defrauded them.

Everest College, a part of Corinthian Colleges Inc., one of the nation's largest for-profit college chains, shut down in 2015. (Photo by Al Seib / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
‘What’s best for students’

As college campuses across the country remain closed with the possibility of a dip in revenue looming, higher education institutions have been eager for some help from the federal government.

On Thursday, the ED released $6.28 billion intended to be distributed “immediately” to “provide direct emergency cash grants to college students” who have been impacted by the coronavirus.

The money can be used for students’ course materials, technology, food, health care and child care, but cannot be used by colleges to refund room and board, despite colleges remaining closed.

“What’s best for students is at the center of every decision we make,” DeVos said in a statement. “That’s why we prioritized getting funding out the door quickly to college students who need it most. We don’t want unmet financial needs due to the coronavirus to derail their learning.”

Students move out of dorm rooms on Harvard Yard on the campus of Harvard University on March 12, 2020 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Photo: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
The intention was commendable, one expert said.

“I’m still sort of in shock that Congress actually passed emergency aid for students,” Carrie Welton, senior policy consultant at the nonprofit Believe in Students, told Yahoo Finance. “For those of us who have been in this sort of student basic needs, advocating for low income students space for the last five years or so, five years ago, this would have been unheard of. If institutions are thoughtful about how they are targeting students who are at the greatest risk, it could be incredibly impactful.”

While Welton has yet to observe bad actors during this crisis, she noted that there was scope for opportunism.

“The Department of Education is giving institutions pretty broad authority on how they design and implement these emergency aid … [and so] the institution has to complete the certification and go through a couple of steps just to be able to draw down the dollars,” she explained. “Let's say hypothetically an institution has already started doing that, it's probably going to be at least a couple of days before the Department of Education releases funds to them.”

At the same time, the ED gives colleges “one year from the date of this Certification and Agreement” to report how it distributed the funds.

“Within a year says to me that institutions may not apply the proper amount of faith in getting these dollars out, and it might give bad actors ... an opportunity to think about how to game the system in that timeframe,” Welton noted.

Charter School Founded by DeVos Family Reflects National ...

https://www.nytimes.com › betsy-devos-west-michigan-aviation-academy

Jun 14, 2017 - Betsy DeVos's devotion to school choice is inspired by her husband's gold-plated charter school in Grand Rapids, Mich., but is the Aviation ...

DeVos Family Money Is All Over The News Right Now : NPR

https://www.npr.org › 2018/08/02 › devos-family-money-is-all-over-the-ne...

Aug 2, 2018 - Family separation, the Supreme Court on public-sector unions, the ... Those foundations include the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation (founded by the education ... Betsy and Dick DeVos support free-market conservative ... It backs issues such as school vouchers and criminal justice reform.

Missing: DEVRIES ‎| Must include: DEVRIES

For a glimpse at the billionaire class check out Betsy DeVos ...

https://www.cnbc.com › 2017/01/26 › for-a-glimpse-at-the-billionaire-clas...

Jan 26, 2017 - And in the case of education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos, filings reveal a ... In her confirmation hearing, DeVos said that her family had likely given around ... But Betsy DeVos owns stakes in a cross-section of American industry even ... Then there are trusts that have interests in the for-profit college ...

Missing: DEVRIES ‎| Must include: DEVRIES

Betsy DeVos, Trump's Big-Donor Education Secretary | The ...

https://www.newyorker.com › news › news-desk › betsy-devos-trumps-big...

Nov 24, 2016 - Jane Mayer on Donald Trump's decision to nominate Betsy DeVos as his Secretary of Education, and her family's ties to the Koch brothers. ... publications on college campuses; and the secretive Council on National Policy, which ... Her brother Erik founded Blackwater, the private military company that the ..

ED, Inc: Profile of Betsy DeVos — IONA Journal

https://www.ionajournal.ca › exchange › ed-inc-profile-of-betsy-devos

Mar 24, 2017 - Betsy DeVos was the most (empirically) controversial nomination of president ... For example, he founded Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in ... In 1979, Ms. Prince was entrusted with the DeVos family name by taking ...

Missing: DEVRIES ‎| Must include: DEVRIES