Elon Musk has a lot to say about COVID-19. Some of it isn't true

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has called stay-at-home orders "fascist" and spread misinformation about Covid-19 on Twitter. Now, he says he's reopening a factory despite government orders.

Elon Musk truly entered the public consciousness just over a decade ago, when Tesla was a quirky upstart putting batteries in the chassis of a little Lotus sports car. Musk grew it into an electric powerhouse, building cars that he promised would one day drive themselves, with doors that swung upward much like the time machine from Back to the Future.


Musk deftly played the part of a new kind of CEO, one who made jokes on Twitter, engaged with fans, and even sought to re-define the very idea of what "fun" could be in a car. Then things began to change. Increasingly, the risks Musk has been taking are not with his own money, or even his own life, but with the money, careers, reputations and lives of others. And the boundaries that once held him back are caving under the pressure.

This week, the fun CEO from the past has become something different. What that is exactly may depend on your view of him and the current pandemic. Maybe he's a figure out of an Ayn Rand novel standing up against "sweeping, authoritarian and undemocratic restrictions on individual liberty" that are holding back business and the public, working for the greater good and ensuring that his workers can keep earning a living. Or maybe he's just another old-school executive (albeit one who's very attached to Twitter) demanding that he be allowed to send his non-unionized factory workers back to assemble cars at potential risk to their health and in violation of orders from the local health department in service of no greater purpose than his company's profits.

Musk's public persona today could not be more different from its beginnings. Once there was an entrepreneurial executive, helpfully cheering on popular cartoonists, urging on workers and mocking the established investors who doubted the company could survive.

Tesla and Musk promised big things that car companies had never done before, and when critics doubted those promises could ever be met, the company exceeded them. Musk promised an SUV that could go more than 300 miles on a charge and accelerate faster than a Porsche, seemingly impossible feats but soon enough, customers were driving them. Tesla cars could do the seemingly miraculous. They could be updated over the air in real time, even getting reminders to recharge when their electricity supply was threatened by wildfires. Tesla's market capitalization grew and grew in ways that looked just as miraculous.

Musk entertained notions of flights to Mars, and at the same time denied that it was his home planet. He behaved unlike any other car company CEO before him, and legions of adoring fans fell in line, giving his Twitter account a level of attention rivaling that of President Donald Trump. When Elon Musk tweets a vague hint about an upcoming product reveal or reports of potential planetary destruction, news outlets pick it up immediately. Even Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has asked Musk's advice on how to improve the service.

Ford's CEO, Jim Hackett, doesn't have a Twitter account.

Everything seemed great until it didn't.

In the summer of 2018, a boys' soccer team in Thailand became trapped in a cave that was quickly filling with water. As the 12 boys and their coach waited desperately for rescue, Musk stepped in to offer his services. His team could use much of the same capsule technology developed by Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, to build a submarine capsule to aid in the rescue, he said at the time.

But after one of the rescuers involved in the life-saving effort criticized the vessel, Musk lashed out, baselessly calling the rescuer a "pedo," which is often shorthand for "pedophile," but which Musk maintained merely meant "creepy."

It was the first time that Musk's apparent belief that he can do anything, that he knows better than the traditional experts, brought a wide public backlash down on him.

The rescuer sued Musk for defamation. Musk won, and the civil victory only seemed to embolden him and appeared to defuse the effect any criticism had had on him. Whereas Musk was once the rebellious leader of a scrappy upstart, he was now the wealthy tycoon who had crushed a lone emergency responder in court after publicly calling him, at best, "creepy."© Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, on March 9, 2020. (Photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Even before the lawsuit victory, however, Musk's Twitter account veered in another expensive direction. On August 7, 2018, Musk tweeted that he was taking Tesla private at a price of $420 per share, and that the funding for the deal was "secured." An announcement like that would send shockwaves through the business world however it was made. That it was tweeted out with such relative nonchalance was either the hallmark of an unconventional executive getting deals done — or, perhaps, of something going off the rails.

It quickly emerged that the deal was far from done, and the would-be funding from Saudi Arabia never materialized. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission stepped in, saying that "in truth and in fact, Musk had not even discussed, much less confirmed, key deal terms, including price, with any potential funding source."

Surely this would be the straw that broke the back of Musk's Twitter feed. It's one thing to target a cave diver without Musk's own vast resources. It's entirely different to take on the regulators of the American federal government. Shareholders filed lawsuits alleging that he was intentionally manipulating Tesla's stock price.

The SEC wanted to prohibit Musk from acting as an officer or director of a publicly traded company, effectively demanding that he be removed from Tesla entirely.

But it didn't stick. Musk spent the next few weeks mocking the SEC from, of course, his Twitter account. After months of negotiations, the SEC agreed to a weakened settlement, the only significant result of which was that Tesla would appoint a new chairman, and Musk's tweets on some topics -- largely limited to the company's financial well-being and production numbers -- would now be reviewed by "an experienced securities lawyer."

It didn't seem to matter to investors. Tesla's share price soared ever-higher, soon totaling a market capitalization greater than the former "Big Three" of Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles combined.

Then the coronavirus pandemic began.

In a county that is one of the hardest hit by coronavirus in the area, Tesla workers are returning to the company's factory in Fremont, California. Despite an order from local health authorities prohibiting the manufacture and assembly of non-essential goods, the Tesla factory began churning out vehicles once more over the weekend.

Musk, as usual, took to Twitter, saying that if anyone was to be arrested for violating the order, it should be him.

The local health department capitulated, acceding to Musk's demands that the factory reopen next week, even though production has already re-started.

It is a situation that has been months in the making. Musk has long questioned the actual risk from the coronavirus. As early as January he tweeted that the coronavirus was no more dangerous than other common viruses despite expert opinions that it is, in fact, far more deadly.

By March, when there were just over 15,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases nationally he was tweeting that the U.S. would have "close to zero" new cases by the end of April.

"The coronavirus panic is dumb," he wrote.

Also in March, when Alameda County, California, where Tesla's headquarters and a manufacturing facility are located, put in place stay-at-home orders, Tesla delayed its shutdown for a week.

But by the end of April, the country was fast approaching the 1 million cases mark. By the time Musk forced his factory to reopen, more than 80,000 Americans had died.

On a recent conference call with investors Musk took time to rail against stay-at-home restrictions that, he said, were hampering his business, likening them to "forcibly imprisoning people in their homes."

In re-opening the factory, Musk and Tesla have said that steps are being taken to ensure workers' safety. County health officials have said they would be monitoring those efforts to ensure that workers are, as much as possible, protected from infection.

Musk and Tesla are not known for erring entirely on the side of caution even when it comes matters of safety. This is, after all, the company that provides Autopilot semi-autonomous driving software for its cars that comes with the warning that it is still in "beta test" mode. Musk and Tesla have insisted that the software is, on balance, safer than an unaided human driver when used as intended. Other automakers that offer such technology, though, have said that they would not ask driver to "beta test" the software on public roads.

Tesla's way is not to wait, though. While other automakers wait until lockdown orders have been lifted to even begin reopening their plants Tesla pushes ahead. For better or worse, that is what Tesla and Musk do. But now, with seemingly nothing in government or his company holding back Musk's impulses, the well-being and the lives of their workers rest on that decision.

And for better or worse, the barriers that are set up by society are dependent on the institutions that maintain them to ensure their strength. But those barriers were not designed to withstand an assault from an aggressive CEO backed by vast personal wealth, workers faced with a soaring unemployment rate, and a regulatory framework that crumbles when faced with a genuine, calamitous test. With an Elon Musk-sized hole smashed in those barriers, it's unclear that anything is holding Musk back.

VIDEO 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/analysis-what-happened-to-elon-musk/ar-BB142JsI

RECYCLED UFO STORY

Newly released incident reports detail US Navy's 'UFO' encounters


By Ryan Browne and Mike Conte, CNN  2 hrs ago MAY 13, 2020

Newly released "hazard reports" detailing encounters between US Navy aircraft and "unidentified aerial phenomena," reveal new details about incidents which were thrust into the spotlight when the Pentagon officially declassified and released videos of three encounters late last month.

© To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences

"The unknown aircraft appeared to be small in size, approximately the size of a suitcase, and silver in color," one report describing an incident from March 26, 2014 said.

During that encounter one of the Navy F/A-18 jets "passed within 1000' of the object, but was unable to positively determine the identity of the aircraft," the report added, saying the US Navy pilot "attempted to regain visual contact with the aircraft, but was unable."

CNN obtained the Navy Safety Center documents, which were previously labeled "For Official Use Only."

The reports were first published by the Drive which obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Pentagon late last month officially released three short videos showing "unidentified aerial phenomena" that had previously been released by a private company.

The videos show what appear to be unidentified flying objects rapidly moving while recorded by infrared cameras. Two of the videos contain Naval aviators reacting in awe at how quickly the objects are moving. One voice speculates that it could be a drone.


Objects could be drones

The newly released reports appear to share this assessment, describing many of the unidentified aircraft as "Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS)," the Pentagon's official name for drone aircraft.

According to another incident report from November 2013 a Navy F/A-18 pilot "was able to visually acquire a small aircraft. The aircraft had an approximately 5 foot wingspan and was colored white with no other distinguishable features."

"Due to the small size, the aircraft was determined to be a UAS," the report said.

Another incident from June 27, 2013, said the encountered "aircraft was white in color and approximately the size and shape of a drone or missile," according to the report.

But the reports say that even when the unidentified flying objects are assessed to be drones the military was unable to identify who was operating the drone, presenting a major safety and security challenge to the Navy jets training in the area which are restricted military training airspace ranges off the east coast of Virginia.

"Post flight, the controlling agency contacted numerous local UAS operators, but none claimed knowledge of" the unidentified aircraft, the November report said.

"I feel it may only be a matter of time before one of our F/A-18 aircraft has a mid-air collision with an unidentified UAS," one of the authors of a report warned.

"In many ways" drones "pose a greater midair risk than manned aircraft. They are often less visually significant and less radar apparent than manned aircraft," the report said.

There is also the possibility that the drones could be operated by an adversary such as Russia or China who may have been seeking to collect information about the US military's operations.

The Navy now has formal guidelines for how its pilots can report when they believe they have seen possible UFOs.

The videos of the encounters were first released between December 2017 and March 2018 by To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, a company co-founded by former Blink-182 musician Tom DeLonge that says it studies information about unidentified aerial phenomena.


The truth is out there

The Pentagon has previously studied recordings of aerial encounters with unknown objects as part of a since-shuttered classified program that was launched at the behest of former Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada. The program was launched in 2007 and ended in 2012, according to the Pentagon, because they assessed that there were higher priorities that needed funding.

Nevertheless, Luis Elizondo, the former head of the classified program, told CNN in 2017 that he personally believes "there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone."

"These aircraft -- we'll call them aircraft -- are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the US inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of," Elizondo said of objects they researched. He says he resigned from the Defense Department in 2017 in protest over the secrecy surrounding the program and the internal opposition to funding it.

President Donald Trump called the recently officially released Pentagon footage a "hell of a video" and told Reuters he wonders "if it's real."

"I just wonder if it's real," Trump said of the videos. "That's a hell of a video."

Microsoft, Visa and others worth combined $11.5 trillion want Congress to include climate in COVID-19 recovery plan

Published: May 13, 2020 Rachel Koning Beal

Solar cells are joined together as solar panels are manufactured at SunSpark Technology Inc. in Riverside, Calif. A business effort known as LEAD on Climate wants Congress to put Americans into clean-energy jobs as part of the COVID-19 recovery. Bloomberg News/Landov
Chief executives and other representatives from more than 330 businesses, including Capital One COF, -7.10% , General Mills GIS, +1.68% , Microsoft MSFT, -1.51% , Nike NKE, -2.53% , Salesforce CRM, -4.45% , Visa V, -1.16% and more are calling on bipartisan federal lawmakers to build back a better economy from COVID-19 by infusing resilient climate solutions.

The businesses, in lobbying Congress Wednesday through an effort they call LEAD on Climate 2020, represent combined annual revenues of more than $1 trillion and a shared market valuation of nearly $11.5 trillion. They employee more than 3 million people. The group, supported by sustainable investing advocates Ceres, claims they are the largest ever to advance a call to action from the business community to Congress on climate change.

Read:Microsoft aims to be ‘carbon negative’ by 2030

House Democrats unveiled their opening bid Tuesday in the next debate on Capitol Hill over how to fight the coronavirus and revive the economy. The sweeping bill, projected to cost a little over $3 trillion, was set to be voted on at the end of the week. The proposal includes bolstering the direct payments program put in place in the $1.8 trillion coronavirus bill passed in late March, additional monies for state and local governments, and extending the expiration date for some unemployment benefits related to the pandemic.

The businesses behind the pledge want Congress to work toward putting Americans into clean-energy jobs, as well as foster an accelerated transition to a net-zero emissions economy by 2050 or sooner and provide more investment in sustainable infrastructure. The business leaders also urge Congress to consider a goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 and setting a carbon price. Setting a market-based carbon price remains a policy sticking point in a divided quest for a solution to man-made accelerating climate change, although has been increasingly, if slowly, adopted.

Some economists believe that raising the cost of burning coal, oil and gas can be a cost-effective way to curb emissions. But countries using the practice have found it politically difficult to set prices that are high enough to spur truly deep reductions in emissions. Many carbon pricing programs today are fairly modest.

Several participants LEAD on Climate call for plans that put the U.S. on a 1.5° Celsius warming target, the more aggressive end of a range of temperatures deemed a manageable level of average warming in coming decades by the Paris Climate accord and other initiatives. The Paris pact, for instance, has called for slowing to at least 2°C by 2050.

Read:5 ways to slow global warming that share the burden with the oil patch: McKinsey

The LEAD on Climate businesses include more than a dozen Fortune 500 firms as well as trade associations, including the skiing-tourism sector, medium and small businesses from all 50 states. The companies and investors calling for climate action as part of economic recovery efforts span across the American economy, including retailers, manufacturers, health-care services, food and beverage companies, outdoors industries, technology companies and energy providers.

The high level of participation is notable given the disruption most of the companies and investors are experiencing due to the economic collapse, as well as the current social distancing constraints on in-person advocacy.

This increased corporate and investor policy engagement comes at a time when the consequences of the climate crisis have never been clearer or more dire. Last year, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were at their highest levels in at least the last 800,000 years, and the World Meteorological Organization recently found that the last decade was the hottest on record.

As U.S. and global emissions have steadily grown over the years, so has corporate and investor ambition to reduce emissions even amidst the current pandemic. In April, General Mills committed to source 100% renewable electricity by 2030 after joining the RE100 global corporate initiative, while both the clothing brand Eileen Fisher and the commercial real estate company JLL had their ambitious science-based targets approved by the Science Based Target initiative to limit their greenhouse gas emissions in line with the 1.5 degrees Celsius ambition of the Paris Agreement. All three belong to LEAD on Climate.

Also announced Wednesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat, will co-head the climate policy group that presidential contender Joe Biden has set up in collaboration with his one-time rival Bernie Sanders, his campaign confirmed on Wednesday. The panel’s other co-chair will be former Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a Biden ally who helped craft the Paris climate accord when he was President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. Ocasio-Cortez and co-writers of a proposed New Green Deal share some of the objectives of the LEAD on Climate effort, including green-job promotion.

Below, select quotes from the participants:

“Today we have a health crisis, an economic crisis and a climate crisis all happening at once. The best solutions will tackle all three together. We have a distinct opportunity at this unique moment in history to define what we want our future to look like,” said Patrick Flynn, vice president for sustainability at Salesforce.

“At Nestlé, our ambition to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is at the heart of our strategy to build a resilient business,” said Meg Villarreal, government affairs manager at the food giant.

“We urge Congress to enact policies that leverage private sector investment and innovation, such as a carbon dividend,” said Hannon Armstrong HASI, -5.68% Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Eckel. “This is how we turn the tide on the climate crisis and propel our country toward a thriving economy that is good for people and the planet.” Hannon Armstrong is the first U.S. public company that provides capital to companies in energy efficiency, renewable energy and other sustainable infrastructure markets.

“Policymakers must ensure that the decisions that are being taken today to rebuild our economy also factor in the dire climate consequences that are not too far behind,” said Mindy Lubber, CEO and president at Ceres. “They have the potential to reshape a new resilient economy in fundamental ways that prevent the next climate-fueled crisis.”

“Through smart investments in infrastructure and clean energy, we can create and build on industries and pave the way for family-sustaining careers, all while keeping our families healthy and making our communities more resilient for decades to come,” said Rep. Kathy Castor, a Democrat of Florida, and chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.

“Cement and ultimately, concrete, is a fundamental part of society, literally creating the foundation and structure of every city and community in the United States,” said Jamie Gentoso, CEO, U.S. Cement at LafargeHolcim. “As the leader in cement manufacturing in the U.S., LafargeHolcim actively seeks ways to decrease our carbon footprint. In participating with such a diverse, accomplished group of companies, I believe our combined experience, expertise and advocacy efforts will prompt Congress to take action on the climate crisis.”

“In the face of a global pandemic, America’s farmers have displayed tremendous resolve to ensure we remain fed and fueled—but grower profitability is at even greater risk due to the economic impact of the virus,” said David Perry, CEO of Indigo Ag. “By paying farmers for storing carbon in their soil we can create a new income stream for farmers during this challenging time, while leveraging one of the most scalable, affordable and immediate opportunities to address climate change: agriculture. Indigo is proud to stand by industry-leading companies to encourage Congress to build back better with climate positive stimulus funding, including incentives for agricultural carbon sequestration.”

“Tiffany & Co. TIF, +0.03% has long been committed to operating in a manner that respects both people and the planet,” said Anisa Kamadoli Costa, chief sustainability officer at Tiffany & Co. “Businesses must continue to lead in this way but cannot tackle climate change alone. We need smart public policies to advance our economy while protecting society’s most vulnerable citizens and facilitating a net-zero emissions future.”

“The ski industry has been increasingly vocal about the need for climate action at the federal level. Now, the opportunity exists to rebuild our economy and future focused on renewable, clean energy,” said Kelly Pawlak, president and CEO, National Ski Areas Association. “Ski areas have paved the way for other small and rural businesses by installing and investing in wind and solar energy, and making broad-scale change to their operations to reduce their carbon emissions. This pandemic has given us a preview of the havoc climate change can wreak on our industry, and our way of life. It’s time to raise our collective voice and advocate for the policies that ensure a sustainable future.”

FEMA cancels $55.5 million contract for masks with company that has no history of selling masks


May 12, 2020 By Associated Press


Panthera failed to provide 10 million N95 face masks by deadline

N95 particulate respirators. Bloomberg News

The federal government said it canceled a $55.5 million contract for respiratory masks, signed last month with a small Virginia firm with no history in the mask business and a parent company in bankruptcy.

The no-bid contract, with Panthera Worldwide LLC, was one of the largest mask orders signed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as it has raced in recent weeks to find masks and other protective equipment during the coronavirus pandemic.


Panthera originally had agreed to provide 10 million N95 masks to FEMA by May 1. The contract had been extended once to May 11, FEMA has said.

A FEMA spokeswoman said the contract was canceled Tuesday “on the grounds of nondelivery.” FEMA has said it wouldn’t pay Panthera until the masks were delivered.

Panthera’s two owners have been accused of fraud in lawsuits by business associates—which the owners deny—and both had IRS tax liens filed against them in 2018 for alleged unpaid taxes, The Wall Street Journal reported last month.

FORTRAN, COBOL, COMTRAN, DOS, OMG!!!  

OLD TECH DOMINATES GOVERNMENTS AT ALL LEVELS

Retired coders to the rescue: They’re helping state agencies respond to the crisis by working on the outdated, overloaded computer systems 

May 11, 2020  Michelle V. Rafter

They’re part of a generation who can still program in computer languages that are no longer taught in schools

iStock

This article is reprinted from NextAvenue.org.

Last September, Brian Boyer celebrated turning 60 by retiring after a long career at Citibank CIT, -9.56% starting as a software programmer and ending as a tech project manager. He couldn’t have known he’d be back in the digital trenches six months later, putting his skills to use fighting the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

Boyer, of Key West, Fla., is one of a legion of software developers and tech talent over 50 who’ve answered the call to remotely volunteer or work for pay on older government computer systems overloaded by the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus.

“I’m learning a bunch, doing a bunch, and pushing myself, which is fun,” Boyer said.

He’s part of a generation —make that two generations — of coders who can still program in computer languages like COBOL that are no longer taught by most college computer science departments or in coding bootcamps. Though these languages might seem antiquated, they continue to power everything from computer systems some states use to process unemployment benefits to ATMs.

In the weeks since the coronavirus has spread throughout the country, hundreds of older coders proficient in COBOL, .net, Linux and other languages have come out of retirement or otherwise stepped forward to help. Some are doing so through public-interest technology initiatives such as U.S. Digital Response and Code for America. According to job board Indeed.com, full-time jobs for programmers who know COBOL pay $30 to $70 an hour or more.

Calling all COBOL programmers

Mainframe companies also have responded to states’ call for help by making it easier for men and women with COBOL skills to share what they know. Less than a month after IBM IBM, -3.76% launched its Calling All COBOL Programmers forum, asking coders to post their profiles, more than 1,610 have signed up, according to spokeswoman Elizabeth Banta.

The Gainesville, Texas-based job placement agency Cobol Cowboys has been overrun with recent requests from programmers in their 40s, 50s and older to be added to its pool of people available for paid private- or public-sector work.

Co-owners Bill and Eileen Hinshaw named the firm after “Space Cowboys,” the 2000 movie about four retired astronauts who rocket into space to repair aging equipment). They’ve recently had so many inquiries, they posted a message to the firm’s LinkedIn page asking applicants to be patient while they work through the backlog.

Cobol Cowboys has around 350 coders in its database. The average age of the independent contractors they work with is 45 to 60.

“Our goal is pretty simple,” said CEO Bill Hinshaw. “People who started in the IT [information technology] business in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s — we want to reward them and help them earn a little money.”

In the initial months after Boyer retired, he did some volunteering, including helping low-wage earners file their tax returns and assisting students who have reading disabilities. When shelter in place orders put an end to volunteering in person, Boyer looked for other ways to contribute.

Buckling state agency computer systems

That was just as U.S. companies began shutting down and laying off millions of workers, inundating state employment departments with new benefits claims. States sent out virtual flares for help when their older computer systems and online and phone-based processes began to buckle.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy described the situation his state faced in an April 4 press conference, saying: “There’ll be lots of postmortems and one of them on our list will be how the heck did we get here when we literally needed Cobol programmers?” Other states were in a similar bind. For instance, Florida’s unemployment claims system was so overwhelmed, the Sunshine State government reverted to using paper applications.

Boyer applied to volunteer through U.S. Digital Response, created in the initial days of the pandemic by four public-interest technologists — including three Obama administration technology officials — to match people with digital skills with federal, state and local agencies needing help. Since then, the group has attracted more than 5,000 prospective volunteers. To date, it has placed 200 people in about 160 projects with agencies in multiple states and cities, according to U.S. Digital Response CEO Raylene Yung. About 300 know COBOL or other mainframe languages.

U.S. Digital Response is working with New Jersey state agencies on several projects, including helping small-business owners determine their eligibility to receive funds from the $2.2 trillion CARES Act federal stimulus package and an online tool for residents to see if they’ve exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms.
A good feeling helping others

Boyer signed up thinking he’d use his COBOL skills, which he hadn’t tapped since the first decade of his career. Instead, he was asked to use his project management expertise to lead a pilot program tracking state compliance with the federal stimulus package’s requirements. If the pilot goes well, the program may be rolled out to multiple states, Yung said.

Boyer works about 20 hours a week, just enough to feel busy while sheltering in place.

“It helps with that aspect,” he said. “And in addition, just the idea of it feels good, for everybody to help out.”

Some states are only working with software developers who know their particular computer systems.

Oregon’s Employment Department, for example, recently brought back two retirees and expects to get two more to assist with changes to its unemployment insurance system. “The department is experiencing historically high demand for benefits, in addition to an expansion of programs and eligibility,” department spokesman Matt Shelby said.

Connecticut’s Labor Department was due to migrate to a new unemployment insurance system in 2021 but stopped working on the upgrade to deal with the influx of COVID-19 related benefits claims.

The agency brought back retirees and used IT staff from other departments to upgrade its 40-year-old system, said Nancy Steffens, communications head for the department. “Some of the retirees returning to work are programmers knowledgeable in COBOL,” she said.
Coming to the aid of restaurants, too

State governments aren’t the only public agencies turning to seasoned coders for assistance.

The Eugene, Ore. chapter of the nonprofit group Code for America is helping the city’s Chamber of Commerce create a map and database of local restaurants now open for take-out orders. Mark Davis, 51, a local software developer and entrepreneur, started Code for America’s local branch, called Open Eugene, in 2018.

Davis devotes one day a week to what he calls “Civic Day,” where he works on projects with volunteers from Open Eugene and other local tech groups.

When he’s not volunteering, Davis and partner Doug Frazier run Dark Matter Consulting, which works on web, mobile and cloud-computing projects, including some based on .net, C# and other time-tested computer languages.

Half of the dozen software developers and freelance tech talent working for Dark Matter are over 50. “I’d like to help the state if I can,” said Davis, who has put feelers out to several Oregon agencies.

When states call for COBOL developers, “what they’re really saying is: ‘We didn’t invest in our infrastructure,’” Davis said.

Michelle V. Rafter is a Portland, Oregon, business reporter and longtime chronicler of the intersection of technology and work.

This article is reprinted by permission from NextAvenue.org, © 2020 Twin Cities Public Television, Inc. All rights reserved.

Social Capital
Opinion: Native Americans are being hit hard by coronavirus, an echo of colonial pandemics that nearly wiped them out

Published: May 13, 2020 By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa MARKET WATCH


Lack of jobs, lack of health care, and lack of respect predate the COVID-19 crisis


A home on the Lower Brule Indian Reservation in South Dakota. AFP via Getty Images

ative Americans comprise the original peoples and cultures of an entire continent, yet the coronavirus pandemic is highlighting just how depressed economic and social conditions already were for millions of U.S. tribal residents even before the pandemic hit.

Evidence is mounting that Native Americans, like other minority groups, are getting infected and dying at higher rates than whites due the coronavirus. The Navajo Nation’s official count tallies 3,204 confirmed cases and 102 deaths at latest count.

This is a trend associated with “pre-existing” social conditions like poverty, lack of access to health care, and in some cases, even lack of clean water — a basic in normal times but paramount for the public welfare during a viral pandemic.

The pre-existing disparities are vast, and captured morbidly in statistics showing death rates nearly 50% higher for American Indian and Alaska Native people than those of non-Hispanic whites.

Economic vulnerability

A recent report from the Minneapolis Fed’s Center for Indian Country Development highlights the economic corollary of this disproportionate health risk — a severe impact on already frayed job and housing markets.

“Unlike other recent economic shocks, COVID-19 is significantly affecting service occupations and industries impacted by social distancing. Compared to non-Native communities, the share of employment in tribal communities is much more heavily concentrated in the service sector,” the report says.
Over 30% of jobs in some tribal areas are in the service occupations — such as food, health, cleaning and personal services — a much higher share than the 18% national average.


Native Americans are more like to work in low-paying service occupations than non-tribal Americans are. Minneapolis Fed

The same general pattern holds for the percentage of work concentrated in industries likely to be heavily affecting by social distancing measures, including the arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodation, food service, and personal-care industries.

This reliance is due in part to the limited scope of activity that is officially sanctioned on reservations, which are widely known for their large involvement in the very hard-hit casino industry.

Indian gaming employment generated 787,878 direct or indirect jobs nationwide contributing to $34.5 billion in direct or indirect wages, according to the National Indian Gaming Association.


“Another way Native American employment and communities are more vulnerable to social-distancing policies is that tribal enterprise revenues often fund the operational activities of tribal governments, which are themselves large employers in reservation communities,” the report said.

“When tribal enterprise revenues fall, tribal government jobs, services, and basic functions are at risk,” the report said. Tribal communities’ economic vulnerability to COVID-19 is thus underestimated, it concluded.
Solutions

So what can be done to address the issue?

Thankfully, this Congress has the first two ever Native American congresswomen among its ranks, Rep. Sharice Davids in Kansas and Rep. Deb Haaland in New Mexico.

Haaland is leading the charge to make sure tribal communities are not forgotten about when it comes to the large stimulus packages coming out of Washington.

She has introduced legislation aimed at ensuring tribes have the same rights in applying for emergency medical assistance from the Center for Disease Control as states and municipalities.

Native Americans make up just 11% of New Mexico’s population but account for 57% of cases and half of COVID-19 deaths.

Worse, Native peoples with COVID-19 are being “severely undercounted” because their ethnicity is too often misclassified, according to Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute in Seattle.

“Native peoples are a small population because of genocide and colonization,” she said in a statement. “The elimination of our people from public health data is a further erasure of our experience.”
Fighting back

Some tribes are fighting back. In South Dakota, two tribes have set up checkpoints on roads leading into their lands, banning nonessential travel and requiring visitors to fill out a health questionnaire. They argue that their health-care facilities could be overwhelmed if the virus takes hold. The tribes have ordered residents to stay home, but the state is one of the few that has not.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem threatened on Monday to take the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and Oglala Sioux Tribe to federal court.

It’s not just Native communities in the United States who are at risk. Brazil’s Yanomami tribe, which resides in the Amazon, recently reported its first coronavirus case. Actual instances are likely higher.

Native communities, which rely on their elders for oral history and tradition, are concerned not just about their immediate well-being and survival but, in some cases, are fighting for the very continued existence of their ancient cultures and traditions.

Allowing these truly American values to get erased from history would be a crime against human heritage. We must pay attention and focus our resources to ensure it doesn’t happen.

Maternity ward massacre shakes Afghanistan and its peace process

Orooj Hakimi, Abdul Qadir Sediqi, Hamid Shalizi MAY 13,2020
Newborn children who lost their mothers during the yesterday's 

attack lie on a bed at a hospital, in Kabul, Afghanistan May 13, 2020. 

REUTERS/Omar Sobhani 

KABUL (Reuters) - After struggling to get pregnant for years, Zainab, 27, gave birth to a baby boy on Tuesday morning at a small hospital in the southwestern corner of Kabul. She was overjoyed and named the boy Omid, meaning ‘hope’ in Dari.
At around 10 a.m. (0530 GMT), an hour before she and her family were set to return home to neighbouring Bamiyan province a three-hour drive away, three gunmen disguised as police burst into the hospital’s maternity ward and started shooting.

Zainab, who rushed back from the washroom after hearing the commotion, collapsed as she took in the scene. She spent seven years trying to have a child, waited nine months to meet her son and had just four hours with him before he was killed.

“I brought my daughter-in-law to Kabul so that she would not lose her baby,” said Zahra Muhammadi, Zainab’s mother-in-law, unable to contain her grief. “Today we’ll take his dead body to Bamiyan.”

No group has claimed responsibility for the massacre of 24 people, including 16 women and two newborns. At least six babies lost their mothers in an attack that has shaken even the war-torn nation numbed by years of militant violence.

“In my more than 20-year career I have not witnessed such a horrific, brutal act,” said Dr. Hassan Kamel, director of Ataturk Children’s Hospital in Kabul.

The raid, on the same day that at least 32 people died in a suicide bomb attack on a funeral in the eastern province of Nangarhar, threatens to derail progress towards U.S.-brokered peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.


President Ashraf Ghani condemned the attacks and ordered the military to switch to offensive mode rather than the defensive tactics it adopted while U.S. troops withdraw from the country after a long, inconclusive war.

The Taliban, the main militant group, has denied involvement in both attacks, although trust among officials and the broader public has worn thin. An offshoot of Islamic State is also among the suspects: it admitted it was behind the Nangarhar bloodshed.

WE NAMED HIM ‘HOPE’

Muhammadi, the mother-in-law, said she saw one of the attackers firing at pregnant women and new mothers, even as they cowered under hospital beds.

“We gave him the name Omid. Hope for a better future, hope for a better Afghanistan and hope for a mother who has been struggling to have a child for years,” she told Reuters by telephone in Kabul.

The gunmen then turned to target the cradle where Omid had been asleep. As the sound of bullets reverberated through the ward, Muhammadi said she fainted in fear.

“When I opened my eyes, I saw that my grandson’s body had fallen to the ground, covered in blood,” she recalled, as she wailed with grief.

The Kabul attack began in the morning when gunmen entered the Dasht-e-Barchi hospital, throwing grenades and shooting, government officials said. Security forces had killed the attackers by the afternoon.

The 100-bed, government-run hospital hosted a maternity clinic run by Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French name Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

Just hours before the attack, MSF had tweeted a photo of a newborn in his mother’s arms at the clinic after being delivered safely by emergency caesarean section.

On Wednesday, the group condemned the attack, calling it “sickening” and “cowardly”.

“Whilst fighting was ongoing, one woman gave birth to her baby and both are doing well,” MSF said in a statement. “More than ever, MSF stands in solidarity with the Afghan people.”

Deborah Lyons, head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, condemned the hospital assault in a tweet. “Who attacks newborn babies and new mothers? Who does this? The most innocent of innocents, a baby! Why?”

‘LITTLE POINT’ IN PEACE TALKS

In a statement, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday condemned the two attacks, noted the Taliban had denied responsibility and said the lack of a peace deal left the country vulnerable to such violence.

Pompeo also described the stalled peace effort, which planned for intra-Afghan peace talks to begin on March 10, as “a critical opportunity for Afghans to ... build a united front against the menace of terrorism.” Talks have yet to start.

The Pentagon declined to comment on Ghani’s stated intent to restart offensive operations, saying only that the U.S. military continued to reserve the right to defend Afghan security forces if they are attacked by the Taliban.

Relations between the government in Kabul and the Taliban movement, which was ousted from power in 2001 by a U.S.-backed assault in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, are already frayed, and Tuesday’s events will make any rapprochement harder.

“There seems little point in continuing to engage Taliban in ‘peace talks’,” Afghan National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib said in a tweet.

For Afghanistan, the hospital attack also risks further disrupting a healthcare network that is creaking amid the challenges of dealing with the new coronavirus pandemic.

More than a third of the coronavirus cases in Kabul have been among doctors and healthcare staff, Reuters reported in early May.

The high rate of infection among healthcare workers has already sparked alarm among medics and some doctors have closed their clinics. At least 5,226 people have been infected by the coronavirus and 132 have died, according to the health ministry.

KABUL MEDICAL COMMUNITY SHAKEN

The attack has shaken the small medical community in Kabul to its core.

Nurses and doctors who survived the hospital attack said they were in shock, and resuming duties would be an emotional challenge on top of the uncertainty caused by the pandemic.

“Last night I could not sleep, as scary scenes of the attack kept crossing my mind,” said Masouma Qurbanzada, a midwife who saw the killings.

“Since yesterday my family has been telling me to stop working in the hospital, nothing is worth my life. But I told them ‘No, I will not stop working as a health worker’.

Officials at MSF said they were working to try to normalise operations and had received support from other hospitals to treat dozens of infants and adults wounded in the attack.

Some medics at the hospital, however, said it would be hard to move on.

“The gunmen blew up a water tank and then started shooting women. I saw a pool of water and blood from the small gap of a safe room where some of us managed to lock ourselves,” said a nurse with MSF, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I saw patients being killed even as they begged and pleaded for their life in the holy month of Ramadan. It is very hard for me to work now.”

Additional reporting by Charlotte Greenfield in Islamabad, Ahmad Sultan in Jalalabad; Writing by Rupam Jain; Editing by Euan Rocha and Mike Collett-White

Outbreak at German slaughterhouse reveals migrants’ plight

- Iulian, Romanian worker who stands behind the fence that was set up at the entrance of a housing of Romania slaughterhouse workers in Rosendahl, Germany, Tuesday, May 12, 2020. Hundreds of the workers were tested positive on the coronavirus and were put on quarantine. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

COESFELD, Germany (AP) — Big white trailers adorned with pictures of juicy roasts and the wholesome slogan “Straight from the farmer” sit idle in northwestern Germany, their usual pork hauls disrupted by a coronavirus outbreak at one of the country’s biggest meat processing companies that has put the industry in the spotlight.

At least 260 workers at Westfleisch’s slaughterhouse in the city of of Coesfeld have tested positive for COVID-19 in recent days, causing alarm at a time when the country is trying to slowly relax the restrictions that were imposed to curb the pandemic.

As authorities scrambled to contain the growing outbreak over the weekend, it emerged that many of those infected were Eastern European migrants working for subcontractors who also provide them with accommodation and shuttle buses to work.

“If one person is infected then basically everybody else that sits on the bus or lives in the shared houses is infected,” said Anne-Monika Spallek, a Green Party representative in Coesfeld who has campaigned against the meat industry’s practice of outsourcing much of its back-breaking work to migrants working under precarious conditions.

Among them is Iulian, a trained carpenter from Bacau in Romania’s poor northeast who previously worked for a German courier company . He recently got a job at Westfleisch that promised several times what he would make back home.

The 48-year-old, who declined to give his last name fearing repercussions, said he still must pay his employer rent for a room he shares with a colleague, but he doesn’t know if he will receive pay while he isn’t working.

Standing behind a metal fence erected to stop workers from leaving the house they share about a 15-minute drive from Coesfeld, Iulian waited Tuesday for results from a coronavirus test. Residents inside also awaited results from tests taken four days earlier.

“Like a jail,” he said of his current situation. “Like a lion in a cage.”

Authorities had stopped the men from going to a nearby supermarket but subsequently groceries had been delivered.

“Water, food, salami, it’s OK for now,” Iulian said. As for medical care, so far there is none. “If we do have problem, we call,” he said hopefully.

Westfleisch declined a request for an interview. But in a statement, the company said it was “deeply affected” by what had happened in recent days.


“We are fully aware of our responsibility,” Westfleisch said, adding it now requires workers at facilities that remain open to wear face masks on site, have their temperature taken at the gate and work in clearly separated small groups. The company said it is also trying to impress upon workers “the importance of hygiene and behavior measures in the company and in private settings.”

The outbreak has caused consternation in Berlin, where German Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged Wednesday the “alarming news” about the situation at Westfleisch.

“There are significant shortcomings in accommodation – we have all seen that now – and it has to be seen who is held responsible,” Merkel said. “I can tell you in any case that I am not satisfied with what we have seen there.”

The outbreak began shortly before Germany’s federal and state governments agreed to trigger an “emergency brake” on relaxing restrictions when the number of new infections passed 50 per 100,000 inhabitants in a week — a threshold that Coesfeld has far surpassed.

Authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia, where Coesfeld is located, have ordered all 20,000 workers in the meat industry tested for the new coronavirus and delayed the reopening of bars and restaurants in the region by another week.

Some enraged restaurant owners have threatened to sue for lost earnings, though it is unclear who they would take to court: Westfleisch, the subcontractors, the workers or regional officials now being accused of acting too slowly.

Olaf Klenke of the NGG union, which represents workers in the food industry, says the outbreak could be the right moment to clamp down on outsourcing in the meat industry.

“The corona crisis simply reveals the situation that exists in this area,” he said. “We often talk about animal welfare in the industry,“but what happens to the people who work there is at least as important.”

While the outbreak in Coesfeld has drawn the most attention, there have been smaller clusters of cases at slaughterhouses across the country in recent days. And though there’s been no death yet among abattoir workers, a 57-year-old farm worker from Romania died of COVID-19 in Germany last month.

In the United States, which has also seen a spate of infections at meatpacking plants, experts have cited extremely tight working conditions that make factories natural high risk locations for contagion.

Klenk blamed a lack of public interest in the issue and price pressure from large supermarket chains for promoting cut-throat competition in the slaughterhouse business. At a market stall in Coesfeld’s town square, a pork cutlet from a pig butchered by hand costs 15.50 euros per kilogram ($7.63 a pound), compared with 3.29 euros per kilogram ($2.32 a pound) for an industrially processed portion of the same cut at a nearby supermarket.

Amid mounting pressure to act, Labor Minister Hubertus Heil pledged late Wednesday to “clean up” conditions in German slaughterhouses.

“We as a society mustn’t continue to look on as people from Central and Eastern Europe are exploited,” he said, adding that the subcontractors were the “root of the problem.”

Spallek, the Green party politician, said the outbreak has prompted sympathy for the migrants among many Germans who had previously taken little notice of the problem.

“Everybody wants these miserable conditions to finally end,” she said. “On the other hand the people are really mad at Westfleisch and at the county official for not closing (the factory) sooner.”

Spallek voiced fears that a number of workers might develop serious illnesses in the coming days.

“I’m convinced that we’ve yet to see the consequences, including in the hospitals,” she said.

___

Kerstin Sopke in Berlin, and Vadim Ghirda in Bucharest, Romania, contributed to this report.

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Follow AP pandemic coverage at http://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

THIRD WORLD USA
Faxes and email: Old technology slows COVID-19 response

 In this Feb. 13, 2020, file photo, Jay Butler, deputy director for infectious diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), speaks to the media in regards to the novel coronavirus, while standing in front of a map marked with areas having reported cases, inside the Emergency Operations Center in Atlanta. In the United States, the nation with the most pandemic deaths, the reporting of vital coronavirus case and testing data is not keeping pace with its speedy spread. Public health officials nationwide lean too heavily on faxes, email and spreadsheets, sluggish and inefficient 20th-century tools. (AP Photo/John Amis, File)By FRANK BAJAK AP MAY 13, 2020

On April 1, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emailed Nevada public health counterparts for lab reports on two travelers who had tested positive for the coronavirus. She asked Nevada to send those records via a secure network or a “password protected encrypted file” to protect the travelers’ privacy.

The Nevada response: Can we just fax them over?

You’d hardly know the U.S. invented the internet by the way its public health workers are collecting vital pandemic data. While health-care industry record-keeping is now mostly electronic, cash-strapped state and local health departments still rely heavily on faxes, email and spreadsheets to gather infectious disease data and share it with federal authorities.

This data dysfunction is hamstringing the nation’s coronavirus response by, among other things, slowing the tracing of people potentially exposed to the virus. In response, the Trump administration set up a parallel reporting system run by the Silicon Valley data-wrangling firm Palantir. Duplicating many data requests, it has placed new burdens on front-line workers at hospitals, labs and other health care centers who already report case and testing data to public health agencies.

There’s little evidence so far that the Palantir system has measurably improved federal or state response to COVID-19.

Emails exchanged between the CDC and Nevada officials in March and early April, obtained by The Associated Press in a public records request, illustrate the scope of the problem. It sometimes takes multiple days to track down such basic information as patient addresses and phone numbers. One disease detective consults Google to fill a gap. Data vital to case investigations such as patient travel and medical histories is missing.

None of this is news to the CDC or other health experts. “We are woefully behind,” the CDC’s No. 2 official, Anne Schuchat, wrote in a September report on public health data technology. She likened the state of U.S. public health technology to “puttering along the data superhighway in our Model T Ford.”

HOLES IN THE DATA

This information technology gap might seem puzzling given that most hospitals and other health care providers have long since ditched paper files for electronic health records. Inside the industry, they’re easily shared, often automatically.


But data collection for infectious-disease reports is another story, particularly in comparison to other industrialized nations. Countries like Germany, Britain and South Korea — and U.S. states such as New York and Colorado — are able to populate online dashboards far richer in real-time data and analysis. In Germany, a map populated with public data gathered by an emergency-care doctors’ association even shows hospital bed availability.

In the U.S., many hospitals and doctors are often failing to to report detailed clinical data on coronavirus cases, largely because it would have to be manually extracted from electronic records, then sent by fax or email, said Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo.

It’s not unusual for public health workers to have to track patients down on social media, use the phone book or scavenge through other public-health databases that may have that information, said Rachelle Boulton, the Utah health department official responsible for epidemiological reporting. Even when hospitals and labs report that information electronically, it’s often incomplete.

Deficiencies in CDC collection have been especially glaring.

In 75% of COVID-19 cases compiled in April, data on the race and ethnicity of victims was missing. A report on children affected by the virus only had symptom data for 9%of laboratory-confirmed cases for which age was known. A study on virus-stricken U.S. health care workers could not tally the number affected because the applicable boxes were only checked on 16% of received case forms. In another study, the CDC only had data on preexisting conditions — risk factors such as diabetes, heart and respiratory disease — for 6% of reported cases.

Missing from daily indicators that CDC makes public is data such as nationwide hospitalizations over the previous 24 hours and numbers of tests ordered and completed — information vital to guiding the federal response, said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

“The CDC during this entire pandemic has been two steps behind the disease,” Jha said.

REINVENTING THE WHEEL

Instead of accelerating existing efforts to modernize U.S. disease reporting, the White House asked Palantir, whose founder Peter Thiel is a major backer of President Donald Trump, to hastily build out a data collection platform called HHS Protect. It has not gone well.

On March 29, Vice President Mike Pence, who chairs the task force, sent a letter asking 4,700 hospitals to collect daily numbers on virus test results, patient loads and hospital bed and intensive care-unit capacity. That information, the letter said, should be compiled into spreadsheets and emailed to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which would feed it into the $25 million Palantir system.

On April 10, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar added more reporting requirements for hospitals.

Those mandates sparked a backlash among stressed stressed hospitals already reporting data to state and local health departments. Producing additional cumbersome spreadsheets for the federal government “is just not sustainable,” said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.

HHS Protect now comprises more than 200 datasets, including reporting from nearly three-quarters of the roughly 8,000 U.S. hospitals, according to Katie McKeogh, an HHS press officer. It includes supply-chain data from industry, test results from labs and state policy actions.

But due to limited government transparency, it’s not clear how accurate or helpful HHS Protect has been. Asked for examples of its usefulness, McKeogh mentioned only one: White House task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx receives a nightly report based on what the system gathers that provides “a common (nationwide) operating picture of cases at a county level.”

”We will continue to work to improve upon the common operating picture,” McKeogh said when asked about holes in HHS data collection. Neither HHS nor the CDC would provide officials to answer questions about HHS Protect; Palantir declined to discuss it on the record.

FIXING THE PROBLEM

Farzad Mostashari, who a decade ago oversaw the federal effort to modernize paper-based medical records, said it would be far more efficient to fix existing public-health data systems than to create a parallel system like HHS Protect.

“We have a lot of the pieces in place,” Mostashari said. A public-private partnership called digitalbridge.us is central to that effort. Pilot projects that automate infectious disease case reporting were expanded in late January. Overall, 252,000 COVID case reports have been generated so far, said CDC spokesman Benjamin N. Haynes. In December, Congress appropriated $50 million for grants to expand the effort, which is already active in Utah, New York, California, Texas and Michigan.

Going forward, the CDC is evaluating how to spend $500 million from March’s huge pandemic relief package to upgrade health care information technology.

In the meantime, public-health officers are still doing things the hard way. Up to half the lab reports submitted for public health case investigations lack patient addresses or ZIP codes, according to a May 1 Duke University white paper co-authored by Mostashari.

“We’re losing days trying to go back and collect that information,” said Hamilton of the epidemiologists’ council. “And then we’re reaching out to hospitals or physicians’ offices that, quite frankly, are saying ‘I’m too busy to tell you that.’”

Virus consipracy-theory video shows challenges for big tech

FILE - In this Feb. 28, 2011, file photo, Director of research Judy Mikovits talks to a graduate student and research associate in the lab, at the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease, in Reno, Nev. Tech companies scrambled to take down a 26-minute documentary-style video called “Plandemic” of Mikovits promoting a string of questionable, false and potentially dangerous coronavirus theories. (David Calvert for AP Images, File)

By AMANDA SEITZ and BARBARA ORTUTAY MAY 13, 2020

CHICAGO (AP) — One by one, tech companies across Silicon Valley scrambled to take down a slickly produced video of a discredited researcher peddling a variety of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus.

It was all too late.

The 26-minute documentary-style video dubbed “Plandemic,” in which anti-vaccine activist Judy Mikovits promotes a string of questionable, false and potentially dangerous coronavirus theories, had already racked up millions of views over several days and gained a massive audience in Facebook groups that oppose vaccines or are protesting governors’ stay-at-home orders.


Its spread illustrates how easy it is to use social media as a megaphone to swiftly broadcast dubious content to the masses, and how difficult it is for platforms to cut the mic.

Mikovits’ unsupported claims — that the virus was manufactured in a lab, that it’s injected into people via flu vaccinations and that wearing a mask could trigger a coronavirus infection — activated a social media army already skeptical of the pandemic’s threat.

Amid uncertainty and unanswered questions about a virus that has upended everyone’s lives, and a growing distrust of authoritative sources, people shared the video again and again on the likes of YouTube, Facebook and Instagram until it took on a life of its own even after the original was taken down.

“The other video has already been deleted by YouTube. … Let’s get it to another million! Modern day book burning at its finest,” read one post on a private Facebook group called Reopen California.

“Once it’s available, it has an infinite lifespan,” said Ari Lightman, a professor of digital media at Carnegie Mellon University.

In a matter of days, two of Mikovits’ books became best-sellers on Amazon. Conservative radio talk show hosts and dozens of podcasts available on platforms like Apple began airing the audio from “Plandemic” to their listeners. Fringe TV streaming channels invited Mikovits on for interviews.

Mikovits did not respond to The Associated Press’ request for comment.

Her sudden fandom and notoriety come nearly a decade after she pushed a discredited theory that a virus in mice known as XMRV causes chronic fatigue syndrome. Other researchers were unable to recreate her findings.

She was later fired from a medical institute and then arrested in 2011 on felony charges of stealing computer equipment and data belonging to her former employer. She wrongly claims in the recent documentary that she was held without charges, though the felony charges were later dropped.

Efforts by social media platforms to delete and ban “Plandemic” have given rise to further dubious claims and theories about a supposed coverup by tech companies regarding how the coronavirus started and is spread.

“It sort of increases its fandom or allegiance among followers and adds credence to their rallying cry that there’s a conspiracy theory out there that people are trying to shut down,” Lightman said.

Facebook said it is removing full versions of the video that include Mikovits’ suggestion that masks can make you sick, because that claim could “lead to imminent harm.” YouTube and Vimeo both said it violated their rules on harmful misinformation. Twitter said Monday it had prevented “Plandemic” from being displayed prominently and trending on the platform.

Michael Coudrey, CEO of Yukosocial.com and a verified Twitter user popular among supporters of Donald Trump, said that while he’s not anti-vaccine and does not believe in conspiracy theories, he doesn’t think the platforms should wipe out the video.

“Information is continuously being updated about the virus,” said Coudrey, who has more than 256,000 followers. “Censoring a doctor’s opinion sets a very dangerous and unnecessary precedent.”

Facebook user Benjamin Romberger first saw the video when three friends posted it last week.

“I immediately groaned and thought, ‘Oh no, not another video filled with false information that I will have to spend time and energy explaining basic science, biology and medicine to others,’” said Romberger, a Southern California resident.

He sent information debunking the video to his friends and flagged it to Facebook, but it was still up the next morning.

Clips of the video are still possible to find on some of the major platforms with just a few clicks, and the full version is readily available on lesser-known sites notable for lax policies on questionable or harmful material.

“Imagine a flood of more and more of these things,” said Tristan Harris, a former Google ethicist and co-founder of the Center for Humane Tech. “The solution isn’t just, ‘Gosh, we need to get better at taking this stuff down after a million people saw it.’”

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AP writer David Klepper contributed to this story from Providence, R.I.