The American Workplace Isn’t Ready for an Epidemic

Amanda Mull
© Getty / Robert Nickelsberg

As the coronavirus that has sickened tens of thousands in China spreads worldwide, it now seems like a virtual inevitability that millions of Americans are going to be infected with the flu-like illness known as COVID-19. Public health officials in the United States have started preparing for what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is calling a “significant disruption” to daily life. Because more than 80 percent of cases are mild and many will show no symptoms at all, limiting the disease’s spread rests on the basics of prevention: wash your hands well and frequently, cover your mouth when you cough, and stay home if you feel ill. But that last thing might prove among the biggest Achilles heels in efforts to stymie the spread of COVID-19: the culture of the American workplace puts everyone’s health at unnecessary risk.

For all but the independently wealthy in America, the best-case scenario for getting sick is being a person with good health insurance, paid time off, and a reasonable boss who won’t penalize you for taking a few sick days or working from home. For millions of the country’s workers, such a scenario is a near-inconceivable luxury. “With more than a third of Americans in jobs that offer no sick leave at all, many unfortunately cannot afford to take any days off when they are feeling sick,” Robyn Gershon, an epidemiology professor at the NYU School of Global Public Health, writes in an email. “People who do not (or cannot) stay home when ill do present a risk to others.” On this count, the United States is a global anomaly, one of only a handful of countries that doesn’t guarantee its workers paid leave of any kind. These jobs are also the kind least likely to supply workers with health insurance, making it difficult for millions of people to get medical proof they can’t go to work.

They’re also concentrated in the service industry or gig economy, in which workers have contact, directly or indirectly, with large numbers of people. These are the workers who are stocking the shelves of America’s stores, preparing and serving food in its restaurants, driving its Ubers, and manning its checkout counters. Their jobs often fall outside the bounds of paid-leave laws even in states or cities that have them. Gershon emphasizes that having what feels like a head cold or mild flu—which COVID-19 will feel like to most healthy people—often isn’t considered a good reason to miss a shift by those who hold these workers’ livelihoods in their hands.

Even if a person in one of these jobs is severely ill—coughing, sneezing, blowing their nose, and propelling droplets of virus-containing bodily fluids into the air and onto the surfaces around them—asking for time off means missing an hourly wage that might be necessary to pay rent or buy groceries. And even asking can be a risk when inconveniencing the higher-ups in jobs with few labor protections because in many states, there’s nothing to stop a company from firing you for being too much trouble. So workers with no good options end up going into work, interacting with customers, swiping the debit cards that go back into their wallets, making the sandwiches they eat for lunch, unpacking the boxes of cereal they take home for their kids, or driving them home from happy hour.

Even for people who have paid sick leave, Gershon notes that their choices are often only marginally better; seven days of sick leave is the American average, but often people get as few as three or four. “Many are hesitant to use [sick days] for something they think is minor just in case they need the days later for something serious,” she writes. “Parents or other caregivers are also hesitant to use them because their loved ones might need them to stay home and care for them if they become ill.”

In jobs where having enough sick leave isn’t a problem, getting it approved might be. America’s office culture often rewards those who appear to go above and beyond, even if it requires coughing on an endless stream of people to get to and stay at work. Some managers believe leadership means forcing their employees into the office at all costs, or at least making it clear that taking a sick day or working from home will be met with suspicion or contempt. Other times, employees bring their bug to work of their own volition, brown-nosing at the expense of their coworkers’ health.

Either way, the result is the same, especially in businesses that serve the public or offices with open plans and lots of communal spaces, which combine to form the majority of American workplaces. Even if your server at dinner isn’t sick, she might share a touch-screen workstation with a server who is. Everyone on your side of the office might be hale and healthy, but you might use a tiny phone booth to take a call after someone whose throat is starting to feel a little sore. “Doorknobs, coffee makers, toilets, common-use refrigerators, sinks, phones, keyboards [can all] be a source of transmission if contaminated with the agent,” writes Gershon. She advises that workers stay at least three to six feet away from anyone coughing or sneezing, but in office layouts that put desks directly next to each other with no partition in between—often to save money by giving workers less personal space—that can be impossible. No one knows how long COVID-19 can live on a dry surface, but in the case of SARS, another novel coronavirus, Gershon says it was found to survive up to a week on inanimate objects.

Work culture isn’t the only structure of American life that might make a COVID-19 outbreak worse than it has to be—the inaccessible, precarious, unpredictable nature of the country’s healthcare system could also play an important role, if an epidemic comes to pass. But tasking the workers who make up so much of the infrastructure of daily American life, often for low wages and with few resources, with the lion’s share of prevention in an effort to save thousands of lives, is bound to fail, maybe spectacularly. It will certainly exact a cost on them, both mentally and physically, that the country has given them no way to bear.

Health experts issued an ominous warning about a coronavirus pandemic 3 months ago. The virus in their simulation killed 65 million people.

Aria Bendix
Jan 23, 2020,

Health officials in protective gear check the temperatures of passengers arriving from Wuhan, China, at the Beijing airport on Wednesday. Emily Wang/AP Photo


A coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, has killed 81 people and infected more than 2,700.

The virus has been reported in at least 12 other countries, including the US.
A scientist at Johns Hopkins last year modeled what would happen if a fictional coronavirus reached a pandemic scale. In his simulated scenario, 65 million people died within 18 months.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.


Eric Toner, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, wasn't shocked when news of a mysterious coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, surfaced in early January.

Less than three months earlier, Toner had staged a simulation of a global pandemic involving a coronavirus.

Coronaviruses typically affect the respiratory tract and can lead to illnesses like pneumonia or the common cold. A coronavirus was also responsible for the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in China, which affected about 8,000 people and killed 774 in the early 2000s.

"I have thought for a long time that the most likely virus that might cause a new pandemic would be a coronavirus," Toner said.

The outbreak in Wuhan isn't considered a pandemic, but the virus has been reported in Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia. The US reported its first case on Tuesday: a man in his 30s living in Washington's Snohomish County, north of Seattle, who recently visited China.


So far, the virus has killed 81 people and infected more than 2,700.

"We don't yet know how contagious it is. We know that it is being spread person to person, but we don't know to what extent," Toner said. "An initial first impression is that this is significantly milder than SARS. So that's reassuring. On the other hand, it may be more transmissible than SARS, at least in the community setting."

Toner's simulation of a hypothetical deadly coronavirus pandemic suggested that after six months, nearly every country in the world would have cases of the virus. Within 18 months, 65 million people could die.
A viral pandemic could kill 65 million people

Toner's simulation imagined a fictional virus called CAPS. The analysis, part of a collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, looked at what would happen if a pandemic originated in Brazil's pig farms. (The Wuhan virus originated in a seafood market that sold live animals.)

The virus in Toner's simulation would be resistant to any modern vaccine. It would be deadlier than SARS, but about as easy to catch as the flu.

A coronavirus. BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images

The pretend outbreak started small: Farmers began coming down with symptoms that resembled the flu or pneumonia. From there, the virus spread to crowded and impoverished urban neighborhoods in South America.


Flights were canceled, and travel bookings dipped by 45%. People disseminated false information on social media.

After six months, the virus had spread around the globe. A year later, it had killed 65 million people.

Public-health officials run thermal scans on passengers arriving from Wuhan at the Suvarnabhumi Airport in Thailand on January 8. Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images

The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, by contrast, claimed as many as 50 million lives.

Toner's simulated pandemic also triggered a global financial crisis: Stock markets fell by 20% to 40%, and global gross domestic product plunged by 11%.

"The point that we tried to make in our exercise back in October is that it isn't just about the health consequences," Toner said. "It's about the consequences on economies and societies."


He added that the Wuhan coronavirus could also have significant economic effects if the total number of cases hits the thousands.

On Tuesday, Hong Kong's stock market fell by as much as 2.8%. The drop was led by the tourism and transportation sectors, including airlines, tour agencies, hotels, restaurants, and theme parks.
An age of epidemics
People wearing masks in Guangzhou, China. Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

In the CAPS simulation, scientists were unable to develop a vaccine in time to stop a pandemic. That's a realistic assumption: Even real coronaviruses like SARS or MERS (a virus that has killed more than 840 people since 2012) still don't have vaccines.

"If we could make it so that we could have a vaccine within months rather than years or decades, that would be a game changer," Toner said. "But it's not just the identification of potential vaccines. We need to think even more about how they are manufactured on a global scale and distributed and administered to people."

If scientists don't find a way to develop vaccines quicker, he said, dangerous outbreaks will continue to spread. That's because cities are becoming more crowded and humans are encroaching on spaces usually reserved for wildlife, creating a breeding ground for infectious diseases.


"It's part of the world we live in now," Toner said. "We're in an age of epidemics."

On the Cover of New York Magazine: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
By Aude White

ON THE COVER JAN. 6, 2020

Photo: David Williams for New York Magazine

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reshaped her party’s legislative agenda, resuscitated Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, and hardly has a friend in Washington. For the January 6–19, 2020, cover story, New York offered Ocasio-Cortez the opportunity to assess her first year. As she tells writer David Freedlander, she’s one of the most hated people in the country; she’s also one of its most influential. Freedlander talked to the freshman member of Congress from Queens and the Bronx about Democratic party leadership, the 2020 election, and what she’ll do next.

Freedlander, who is writing a book about Ocasio-Cortez due later this year and lives in her district, says he first interviewed her when she was just an unknown upstart engaged in a quixotic political campaign against one of the most powerful people in New York City. Her win against Congressman Joe Crowley (“an old-school Irish pol who slapped backs and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his peers”) was one of the biggest congressional upsets in at least a generation. “She impressed immediately,” Freedlander says of Ocasio-Cortez. “It was clear that she had a unique connection to people, a fierce sense of justice, and a preternatural self-possession.”

What happened in the year and a half since that election has been staggering, Freedlander says, and unlike anything he has seen in New York, or American politics — she’s the first thing people overseas ask him about, he’s spotted counterfeit pins and bumper stickers featuring her face in a surf shop in a Podunk town on the North Carolina coast, and she’s, of course, become a favorite of Fox News. “It is clear that in the past year she has become the most significant political figure in the country not named Donald Trump, which is all the more staggering when you consider that she just turned 30 years old and serves on the backest bench in Congress,” says Freedlander. “She has come to symbolize everything that people on the left and the right either hope or fear will be coming true in American politics —that it is turning sharply to the left as a rising, hyperliberal, wired-into-social-media generation takes over. It’s only been a year, and I can’t imagine what the future holds for her.”

In 2002, Our Singles-Issue Cover Model Was the Future First Lady of the United States
By Christopher Bonanos

Melania is the one on the right. Photo: New York Magazine

New York Media Press Room

REREAD FEB. 27, 2020

New York Magazine has, over the years, published quite a few issues devoted to single life and dating, often around Valentine’s Day. In February 2002 — a few months after the 9/11 attacks, when first responders, especially those of the FDNY, were on everyone’s mind — our editors had the last-minute idea of recreating Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1945 photograph of the sailor and nurse in Times Square on V-J Day. The photographer Firooz Zahedi, on barely any notice, made the picture you see here. The guy was not a model in costume but a real New York City firefighter (and part-time model) named Daniel T. Keane; the young woman was, similarly, hired from a modeling agency. These days, the image perhaps seems a little corny — even if you set aside the contemporary controversy about Eisenstaedt’s original — although we will note that it accurately reflects the sentiment of the time. That, however, is not what is most interesting about it.

Recently, the journalist Matt Haber learned (via this Flickr post) something that we at New York had forgotten: The female model we’d hired was a pretty young Slovenian named Melania Knauss, who had been dating a New York real-estate developer on and off for several years, and married him a couple of years after that. We did not, at the time, expect to be working with the future First Lady of the United States. But we were.

Photo: New York Magazine

This past week, Haber called up Keane, who is now an FDNY battalion chief and remembers the shoot well. “The person who was doing my hair and makeup, they said, ‘Do you know who that is?’” he recalls. “I don’t know any models, I really wasn’t into the scene. And they said, ‘That’s Melania Knauss… That’s Donald Trump’s girlfriend.’ And I said, ‘Oh, okay.’” As he recalls it, they struck the pose “a couple hundred times” for the camera. Caroline Miller, who was New York’s editor back then, also offered Haber some context: “After 9/11 firefighters were the heroes of New York—they were the rock stars,” she says. “We wanted to show that.” And, she adds, “there was also the twist that she was grabbing him.”

It was not her last time on our cover, by the way: Melania appeared a second time, for a story about the Met Gala, in 2005. She’s under her own name there, and we knew about that one.

You can read more about it here, in the inaugural issue of My Back Pages, Haber’s e-mail newsletter devoted to magazines and their history.

Trump Insists on Paying for Coronavirus Prep by Cutting Heating Aid for the Poor

By Eric Levitz@EricLevitz
One sick puppy.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has slashed taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars, while increasing the Defense Department’s annual budget by $130 billion (a sum more than large enough to cover the costs of tuition-free public college and paid family leave). All together, the policies implemented during Donald Trump’s tenure are poised to push the federal deficit past $1 trillion this year.

That last bit isn’t necessarily concerning. Many mainstream economists consider our nation’s existing debt load more than sustainable. From a progressive perspective, the problem with Trump’s deficit spending isn’t its scale but its content.

From a self-styled fiscal conservative’s point of view, however, that $1 trillion figure is a real eyesore. And for at least some of the self-professed conservatives who work in the Trump White House, it is a source of psychological discomfort bordering on guilt.

Or at least, that’s my best guess as to why the Trump administration has, (1) spent the past several weeks refusing to endorse new spending on coronavirus preparation, despite the pleas of lawmakers in both parties for action, and (2) is still holding up funding for the imminent public health crisis by insisting on offsetting a small fraction of the emergency appropriation with a $37 million cut to home heating aid for the poor.

As the Washington Post reports:

House Democrats tell us they are outraged by one aspect of the White House response in particular: The White House appears to have informed Democrats that they want to fund the emergency response in part by taking money from a program that funds low-income home heating assistance.

A document that the Trump administration sent to Congress, which we have seen, indicates that the administration is transferring $37 million to emergency funding for the coronavirus response from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which funds heating for poor families.

Democrats see this as provoking budgetary bickering and unnecessary political friction at a time when a clean emergency appropriation could easily avoid both.

Low-income Americans in frigid regions of the country aren’t the only victims of the administration’s arbitrary penny-pinching. The White House is also calling for $535 million cut to funding for Ebola virus treatment and containment — despite the fact that the Republic of Congo is still battling an Ebola epidemic. The administration’s insistence on financing the fight against one epidemic disease with cuts to funding for the containment of a different epidemic disease — so as to avoid increasing the federal budget by .01 percent — is emblematic of this White House’s goldfish-esque lack of foresight: Since taking office, President Trump has tried to slash national health spending by $15 billion; cut the disease-fighting budgets of DHS, NSC, HHS, and CDC; allowed the ranks of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps to steadily erode (after trying and failing to shrink its budget by 40 percent); eliminated the federal government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund; and shut down the National Security Council’s entire global health security unit.

There is no rational explanation for the administration’s current position. The coronavirus represents a massive political liability for Trump, not least because of how indefensible his previous bouts of penny-pinching on public health now appear. There is no mass constituency for prioritizing opposition to infinitesimal increases in the national debt over pandemic prevention. In fact, many congressional Republicans were alarmed by the austerity of Trump’s proposal. As Politico reports:


Administration officials sought to swat away concerns their emergency request for $2.5 billion to address the outbreak was inadequate, even as some Republicans joined Democrats in criticizing the amount — and slamming a lack of transparency around efforts to contain the disease on U.S. soil.

… The Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee at Azar’s hearing accused the administration of making a “low ball” request.

“It could be an existential threat to a lot of people in this country,” warned Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). “So money should not be an object. We should try to contain and eradicate this as much as we can, both in the U.S. and helping our friends all over the world.”

On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer unveiled an $8.5 billion emergency funding proposal, composed entirely of new spending. The Democrats’ counteroffer is not merely superior on the merits, but also a sound election-year messaging device: If the coronavirus creates major disruptions to American life, the Democratic Party will be able to say it demanded more ambitious preparations than the Republican president would allow; if the epidemic somehow peters out, no voters are going to reward Trump for holding the line against a $7 billion increase to the $1 trillion deficit.

Thus, the most plausible explanation for the White House’s stance is the neurosis of budget director Mick Mulvaney and his ideological kin. In the House, Mulvaney was that rare breed of a “small-government” crusader whose zeal for slashing spending didn’t spare the Pentagon. By most accounts, the man is a supply-side, deficit-hawk true believer. Now, like a guilt-prone cannibal who seeks to mitigate his sense of moral injury by religiously observing “meatless Mondays,” Mulvaney is ostensibly trying to compensate for his complicity in an exploding deficit by holding pandemic prevention hostage to trivial spending cuts.

Across the World, Voters Are Losing Faith in Government

Eric Levitz

© Hasan Shaaban/Bloomberg via Getty Images 

In 2002, 78 percent of Pew’s respondents in Lebanon said their 

government worked for the benefit of all the people. 

Today, that figure is 26 percent. Hasan Shaaban/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In our crowded, hot, interdependent world, humanity faces challenges that it cannot meet absent sweeping exertions of state power at both the national and global levels. The burgeoning coronavirus pandemic has illuminated this reality in recent weeks. The ever-deepening climate crisis reiterates the same point every day.

But fostering the social trust necessary pursuing ambitious collective action — and weathering all the disruptions that attend it — can be hard to sustain at the national level, let alone the planetary level (and recent European history underscores the difficulty of scaling up governance merely to the continental one). And over the past two decades, political elites the world over have done more to undermine their constituents’ faith in state power than to consolidate it.

In 2002, Pew Research asked citizens across 20 nations whether they believed that “the state is run for the benefit of all of the people.” In nearly all jurisdictions, majorities said yes. Eighteen years, one historic financial crisis and innumerable globalization and climate-induced disruptions later, faith in government has declined significantly in 11 of those countries, while increasing in only three (Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Japan). In Germany, the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Italy, and Lebanon, faith in the beneficence of the state has fallen from being a majority position.

Trust in political elites is similarly low. Asked whether elected officials care what people like them think, overwhelming majorities in 34 countries surveyed said no.

Pew’s report does not offer much insight into the roots of the declining trust it documents. And the proximate sources of disaffection vary considerably from one nation to another. In the United States, our government’s xenophobic abuses of immigrants are a source of outrage for a wide swath of the public; in Hungary, the state’s virulent xenophobia has earned Viktor Orbán’s government aberrantly high marks from the public, with some 74 percent of Hungarians saying their state is run for the benefit of all the people (refugees ostensibly do not fall under majority’s definition of “people”). Relatedly, in places where right-wing populist parties are out of power, their supporters are among the most distrustful of government; in places where such parties rule, reactionary nationalists are among the most fervent statists.

As one would expect, assessments of whom the state serves are also deeply correlated with perceptions of the economy. Those who regard their nation’s economic situation as bad are much more likely to take a dour view of how their democracy is functioning.

How precisely progressive forces can foster a faith in state power broad enough to facilitate a historic energy transition — and greater global cooperation on matters of climate, tax evasion, labor rights, and public health — is unclear. In many nations, the conflicts beneath (ethno-)nationalist traditionalists and cosmopolitan liberals appear inescapably zero-sum. And in many contexts, reactionary plutocrats have found that arming the immoderate rebels in such culture wars is a handy way of suppressing latent conflicts between labor and capital.

But it’s hard to see how our species meets the challenges of the coming decades (and/or, weeks) unless more of us accept “big,” democratically-accountable government as our collective instrument and potential savior.

Pompeo declines to apologize for Trump's downplaying of service members' brain injuries

PEOPLE SAY TRUMP CALLED THE TROOPS LOSERS

© Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testifies before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on "Evaluating the Trump Administration's Policies on Iran, Iraq and the Use of Force" in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on February 28, 2020. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)



Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday declined to apologize on President Donald Trump's behalf for his comments downplaying the seriousness of traumatic brain injuries suffered by US service members in a January Iranian missile attack on a military base in Iraq.


The heated exchange occurred during Pompeo's two-hour hearing Friday on Iran before the House Armed Services Committee.

"Mr. Secretary, do you want to take the opportunity -- it's a yes or no question -- do you want to take the opportunity here today to apologize to those service members for trivializing their injuries?" Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, asked.

Pompeo replied that he had never trivialized any injuries, so Sherman asked if he would like to apologize on behalf of the administration in which he serves.

In late January, Trump downplayed the severity of the injuries to US service members who were being treated for concussion symptoms from the Iranian attack as "headaches."

"We take seriously every American service member's life. It's why we've taken the very policies in Iran that we have," Pompeo said Friday.

The Pentagon and the President had initially said no service members were injured or killed in the Iranian missile attack, which was retaliation for the January 2 US drone strike that killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

About two weeks later, US Central Command said that 11 service members were treated for concussion symptoms from the attack.

That number of diagnosed cases continued to climb week after week. Concussions are not always apparent immediately after they've been suffered.

In early February, the Pentagon confirmed that more than 100 service members had been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries and that nearly 70% had returned to duty.

Approximately 200 people who were in the blast zone at the time of the attack were screened for symptoms.

BACK IN THE USSA
Trump Accuses Media and Democrats of Exaggerating Coronavirus Threat

Peter Baker and Annie Karni


 

President Trump said that news outlets were “doing everything they can to instill fear in people.” 3 SLIDES © Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times


WASHINGTON — President Trump and members of his administration mobilized on Friday to confront the threat of the coronavirus — not just the outbreak, but the news media and the Democrats they accused of exaggerating its danger.

While stock markets tumbled, companies searched for new supply chains and health officials scrambled to prevent a spread of the virus, Mr. Trump and his aides, congressional allies and backers in the conservative media sought to blame the messenger and the political opposition in the latest polarizing moment in the nation’s capital.

Mr. Trump said that news outlets like CNN were “doing everything they can to instill fear in people,” while some Democrats were “trying to gain political favor by saying a lot of untruths.” His acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, went even further, telling conservative activists that journalists were hyping the coronavirus because “they think this will bring down the president; that’s what this is all about.”

At a campaign rally on Friday evening in South Carolina, the president denounced Democrats, describing the concerns they have expressed about the virus as “their new hoax” after the Russia investigation and then impeachment. “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” he said. “We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They cannot even count the votes in Iowa.”


The accusations came as other elements of the federal government moved to head off a broader wave of infections like those in China. The State Department urged Americans to reconsider traveling to Italy , where the virus has spread, and health officials reported three more cases of unknown origin, in California , Oregon and Washington State, raising fears of local transmission. The World Health Organization reported cases in 56 countries and warned of a “very high” global risk, while stock markets closed their worst week since the 2008 financial crisis.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general said that it would begin a “comprehensive review” of the federal government’s coronavirus response, speeding up a process that had already been underway to monitor how the health agency was organizing its resources for a potential domestic outbreak.

While other presidents in moments like this have sought to transcend politics and assert national leadership, Mr. Trump has framed the issue in partisan terms while playing down the risk to the United States. Privately he has been consumed by concern that his enemies will use the coronavirus and the economic impact it has against him as he seeks re-election.





China has been battling an outbreak of a new SARS-like coronavirus (COVID-19), which originated in Wuhan. The virus has claimed over 2,700 lives and infected nearly 80,000 people around the world.

Democrats said that Mr. Trump was making the crisis all about himself rather than the American public. “For Mick Mulvaney to suggest that Americans turn off their TVs and bury their heads in the sand when they’re worried about a global health pandemic is Orwellian, counterproductive, dangerous and would be repeating China’s mistake,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.

Tensions over the issue flared on Friday even at a congressional hearing on Iran when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was quickly hit with questions about the coronavirus rather than the Jan. 3 drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani , the head of Iran’s elite security forces.

Democrats argued that the virus posed a greater threat to Americans than General Suleimani, and Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island asserted that the Trump administration had not been forthcoming about the real risks each presented.

“Because of the dishonesty from this administration on this and many other issues, Americans have lost trust in their government,” Mr. Cicilline told the secretary. “Now we’re facing a serious global health crisis in the form of the coronavirus and trust is more important than ever.”

Mr. Pompeo bristled at what he considered a political ambush. “We agreed that I’d come today to talk about Iran, and the first question today is not about Iran,” he complained.

Republicans defended Mr. Pompeo by going on offense against the Democrats. “This hearing is a joke,” declared Representative Lee Zeldin of New York.

With Vice President Mike Pence leading the response to the virus , the administration has moved to coordinate its communication with the public. But officials sought on Friday to dispel the impression that they were clamping down on scientific information or limiting the availability of experts whose tone has suggested more alarm than the president’s.

In a briefing with congressional officials on Friday morning, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that he “was not muzzled” by Mr. Pence’s office, but he did say that he had to get permission for roughly a half-dozen television appearances that had already been planned.

Administration officials held a briefing at the White House featuring Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, along with Russell T. Vought, the budget director, and Eric Ueland, the White House legislative director. After each official read off a series of prepared talking points, they took only a handful of questions from journalists.

Of the three officials, Mr. Azar went the furthest in suggesting that the United States might face a difficult next phase of the coronavirus, if it spreads. Mr. Trump has repeatedly told advisers he is concerned that Mr. Azar and others in the administration are presenting an “alarmist” view.

“The administration has ignored or sidelined expert staff at agencies like the C.D.C. and the N.I.H., offered the public inconsistent and confusing information, and failed to provide clear leadership,” said Dr. Kathleen Rest, the executive director of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a health policy expert, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

Mr. Pence went to Florida on Friday for a previously scheduled fund-raiser for the state’s Republican delegation, although he planned to give a briefing to Gov. Ron DeSantis while there. He also stopped by the radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh’s studio to insist that the administration was not focused on politics.

“Washington is always going to have a political reflexive response to things,” Mr. Pence said. “But we’re going to tune that out.”

Mr. Limbaugh has been among the conservative commentators who have blamed the news media and political opponents for overemphasizing the coronavirus, which he compared to the common cold. “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Mr. Limbaugh, who was recently given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Mr. Trump, said on his show on Monday.

That theme has been amplified by some of the president’s favorite Fox News hosts, like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, in recent days and animated Mr. Mulvaney’s appearance on Friday at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md.

“The reason you’re seeing so much attention to it today is that they think this is going to be the thing that brings down the president,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “That’s what this is all about it.”

Mr. Mulvaney noted that the administration took action weeks ago to prevent a public health emergency by limiting travel from China, where the worst outbreak has centered. “Why didn’t you hear about it?” Mr. Mulvaney asked. “What was still going on four or five weeks ago? Impeachment, that’s all the press wanted to talk about.”

The news media, in fact, has been covering the global spread of coronavirus intensively for months , including the Trump administration’s travel restrictions.

Following the president’s lead , Mr. Mulvaney also minimized concerns over the virus. “The flu kills people,” he said. “This is not Ebola. It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS. It’s not a death sentence; it’s not the same as the Ebola crisis.”

Mr. Trump sounded off to reporters as he left the White House for the rally in South Carolina. “They’re doing everything they can to instill fear in people, and I think it’s ridiculous,” Mr. Trump said of CNN and other news outlets. “And some of the Democrats are doing it the way it should be done, but some of them are trying to gain political favor by saying a lot of untruths.”

His eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., even accused the president’s opponents of wishing for widespread deaths from the virus, citing a New York Times columnist who wrote that the illness should be called Trumpvirus . “For them to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so that they can end Donald Trump’s streak of winning is a new level of sickness,” he told Fox News from the conservative conference.

That message was quickly picked up and repeated at the conference. “It’s overblown in the media,” said Lee Murphy, a congressional candidate in Delaware and an actor who played a defense secretary once on “House of Cards.” “They want to get at President Trump every chance they can, but this should not be political. I’m tired of it being overblown and being political.”

Jeff Jordan, running for Congress in Virginia, said too much has been made of the coronavirus, which he compared with the common flu. “The media at large is not a fan of the president,” he said. “The media will take any opportunity they can to cause damage.”

On Capitol Hill, the attacks on coverage drew scorn from Democrats. “The problem is the American people need to be able to trust that their government will tell them the truth, no matter what the truth is,” said Representative Andy Levin of Michigan. “And I’m very concerned that the American people cannot trust this government.”

Tony Fratto, who served as a deputy press secretary to President George W. Bush during multiple crises, including the last time the stock markets fell so far so fast, said blaming others in such a situation is counterproductive and urged the White House to keep its attention on the underlying issue.

“Focus only on health and safety, and I know they don’t believe this, but if they keep Americans safe, they will definitely get credit for it,” he said. “Because of the White House’s attacks, if things do go poorly, they’re going to be blamed for taking their eye off the ball even if they’ve done all the right things.”

Reporting was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Lara Jakes, Catie Edmondson and Noah Weiland.

Appeals court denies tribe’s quest for casino landBy PHILIP MARCELO, Associated Press

BOSTON — A federal appeals court has ruled against a Native American tribe that had been granted sovereign land to build a casino in Massachusetts.

© Provided by Associated Press FILE - In this April 5, 2016, file photo, an excavator demolishes a building during an official groundbreaking Taunton, Mass., where the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe was to build the First Light Resort & Casino. The project was halted shortly afterward when a group of residents sued, arguing the federal government couldn't take the land into trust for the tribe. A federal appeals court in Boston is hearing arguments Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2020, in the ongoing dispute. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File)

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston on Thursday upheld a lower court decision declaring the federal government had not been authorized to take land into trust for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe in 2015. 

© Provided by Associated Press Tela Troge, right, a lawyer for the Shinnecock Indian Nation from Southampton, N.Y., speaks outside federal court Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2020, in Boston. She was in court with others, left, who came to support the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe at a hearing over land rights in Taunton, Mass., where the tribe wants to build the First Light Resort & Casino. (AP Photo/Philip Marcelo)

The lower court ruled the tribe didn't qualify because it wasn't officially recognized in 1934, when the federal Indian Reorganization Act became law.


The Cape Cod-based tribe, which traces its ancestry to the Native Americans that shared a fall harvest meal with the Pilgrims in 1621, gained federal recognition in 2007.

Despite the ruling, the tribe said its years-long battle is far from over.

Its 321 acres remain in federal trust because a separate case is pending in federal court in Washington, D.C., Cedric Cromwell, the tribe's chairman, said in a statement.

“There’s no question that this is a grave injustice,” he said. “We will continue to fight, as our ancestors did, to preserve our land base, our culture and our spiritual connection to our homelands.”

Casino opponents, who had filed the original lawsuit challenging the land decision, said the latest ruling is further vindication for them.

Their lawyer said in a statement that the justices correctly interpreted federal law “as written” and "without favor or bias.”

The case was a largely semantic debate centered on whether the tribe could be considered “Indian” under the 1934 federal law, which created the process for taking lands into trust for tribes, among other things.

The casino opponents argued the law clearly defined Indians as “all persons who are descendants of such members who were, on June 1, 1934, residing within the present boundaries of any Indian reservation.”

But the tribe argued the phrase “such members” made the definition ambiguous and open to other interpretations.

The appeals judges, like the lower court, rejected that argument.

Cromwell said the tribe will continue to press Congress to approve legislation pending in the Republican-controlled Senate that would protect its reservation, regardless of what the courts decide.

The Democrat-led House has passed the measure, but President Donald Trump has asked Republicans to reject it. Trump called it a “special-interest casino bill” backed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of his potential Democratic presidential rivals.

Roughly half the trust lands awarded to the tribe are located on Cape Cod where it already operates a government center that includes a school, among other things.

The other half of the land is located in Taunton, a city some 50 miles away, where it still hopes to build a $1 billion casino, hotel and entertainment resort.

The tribe and its supporters have said the land battle sets a dangerous precedent as it represents the first time in the modern era that the federal government has moved to strip a tribe of its trust lands.

Corruption with No Consequences, from Bridgegate to Impeachment
Andrea Bernstein

John Moore/Getty Images
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie accompanying then Republican frontrunner Donald Trump at a Mar-a-Lago press conference on Super Tuesday, a few days after Christie had abandoned his presidential campaign and endorsed Trump, Palm Beach, Florida, March 1, 2016

Two days before he was sworn in to preside over the US Senate impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump, the Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts conducted a hearing on a different case entirely: concerning whether two former aides to former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie were properly convicted for running afoul of US anti-corruption statutes.

The Bridgegate trial, as it came to be known, was a result of an extraordinary abuse of power. Christie, a Republican, had set up a series of both rewards to entice and punishments to deter local elected officials in New Jersey.

His particular aim, back in 2013, was to run up the totals of Democratic mayors who had endorsed him during his gubernatorial campaign for re-election that year—to build a record of bipartisan support in anticipation of his own 2016 presidential bid. He went about this by offering inducements such as breakfasts at the governor’s mansion, or tickets to his box at the Giants–Jets stadium, or fragments of scorched steel from the destroyed World Trade Center towers. Thanks to the governor’s largesse with such 9/11 mementos, the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, Mark Sokolich, ended up with more pieces of WTC steel than any office-holder or official body besides the New York Fire Department.

But Sokolich, a Democrat, did not endorse Christie. That was when three former aides of the governor, steeped in this culture of raw displays of dominance, put the Bridgegate scheme into effect. Calling on the resources of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, they realigned lanes on the George Washington Bridge in a way that specifically punished Mayor Sokolich by creating “traffic problems in Fort Lee.” They refused to take the mayor’s calls when four days of gridlock on the approaches to the world’s busiest bridge blocked ambulances and made children late on the first day of school. (One of Christie’s aides subsequently pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors, resulting in the convictions now being argued before the Supreme Court.)

The traffic scheme also had a more general purpose: to telegraph to every other Democratic official in New Jersey that it was better simply to fall in line with Christie’s political wishes than to cross him in any way.

This type of behavior is precisely equivalent to the conduct for which President Trump was put on trial. He called a democratically elected president of Ukraine, and asked him to “do us a favor though.” That “favor” was to open an investigation that would both discredit the prosecution of Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and so reinforce Trump’s narrative about the “Russia hoax,” and at the same time smear the man Trump considered was his chief political opponent in the 2020 presidential election: Joe Biden.

Like Sokolich, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was made to understand that the price for non-cooperation could be ruinously steep: losing vital military aid and an audience with the president at the White House. Trump’s aides, instilled with their own culture of raw displays of dominance, worked overtime to use the levers of government to enhance the power of their boss.

It now appears that both abuses of power will be sanctioned, with potentially crippling consequences for fighting corruption in America.

Already, in 2015, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling that is widely seen as having discouraged the prosecution of corruption. The court ruled that year in McDonnell vs. United States that Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s conviction for bribery should be overturned, even though he had accepted $175,000 in gifts, including a Rolex watch, from a donor who wanted McDonnell’s assistance in using state resources to promote a tobacco-based dietary supplement start-up.

Even though McDonnell did things for this businessman, including setting up meetings on his behalf, the Supreme Court ruled that these actions did not qualify as “official acts,” the legal standard that would make them quid pro quo corruption.

In the Supreme Court arguments on Bridgegate, there were zero mentions of the name Chris Christie, or of his campaign, or of the culture of clientilism, favorites, and enemies that the former governor had established in Trenton. For Christie, a line from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton seemed especially true: “Everything is legal in New Jersey.”

In oral argument, lawyers and the justices stayed on a narrow legal plain: whether government officials should be criminally prosecuted for politically motivated official acts. The term “snow plow” came up a lot— whether it would be criminal for an official to have his favored constituents’ streets plowed before others’.

What was lost in all of this, though, was whether a bi-state agency—with a budget larger than many states—can devote its resources to causing a huge traffic jam with grave costs and potentially life-threatening consequences purely with the goal of furthering the political ambitions of the governor of New Jersey. The less powerful officials in the affair were convicted and sentenced to prison time. The person who conveyed to them that they were on his team and should do what it took to enhance his political career was never charged or prosecuted. Chris Christie escaped consequences.

That the highest executive in the land should never face consequences for his actions is the explicit position of the President Trump and his attorneys, public and private. Last fall, before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, his attorneys argued in the case Trump vs. Vance that even if the president shot a person on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, he can’t even be investigated so long as he’s president.

“Nothing could be done. That’s your position?” Judge Denny Chin asked Trump lawyer William Consovoy. “That is correct,” Consovoy replied. He repeated. “That is correct.”

Trump lost his case in the Second Circuit. He appealed. The US Supreme Court will consider that case in March, along with a batch of others about whether his bankers and accountants must turn over his records to Congress, a year after several congressional committees subpoenaed the documents. Here, too, as with the second article of impeachment before the Senate, there have as yet been no consequences for Trump’s obstruction of multiple investigations of his conduct.

This has long been a pattern of the Trump family business, stretching back decades. Whether through lawsuits, or donations to district attorneys and judges and power-brokers, or simply by beguiling law enforcement agents with meals and golf outings, Trump has escaped again and again. Each time, he has learned to push the boundaries further. It was one day after Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s lackluster congressional testimony that President Trump called President Zelensky of Ukraine for help with what one former aide called “a domestic political errand” and what Trump’s national security adviser called a “drug deal.” The president’s allies in Congress argued vociferously that that, too, was fine.

It’s hard to chart what will follow, with a Congress that won’t impeach, and a Supreme Court, presided over by the same John Roberts who gaveled the impeachment trial, that seems poised to further narrow the scope of corruption prosecutions and even to agree that a president has absolute immunity from investigation so long as he remains in office. But it would certainly be reasonable to conclude that for Trump the Hamilton lyric should be rewritten:


Everything is legal. If you’re president. January 31, 2020, 5:45 pm