What We Know About The Wuhan Lab That Trump Blames For COVID-19

The Wuhan Institute of Virology previously conducted controversial experiments to test what could make coronaviruses more dangerous to humans, but scientists have ruled out that SARS-CoV-2 is a product of genetic engineering.

Peter Aldhous BuzzFeed News Reporter May 6, 2020

Johannes Eisele / Getty Images
Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli (left) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have been beating a drumbeat of blame for COVID-19: Both claim that the novel coronavirus behind the pandemic came from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Asked on April 30 by a reporter if he had seen evidence that the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Trump responded: “Yes, I have. Yes, I have,” going on to accuse the World Health Organization of being “like the public relations agency for China.”

On May 3, Pompeo said on ABC News that there was “enormous evidence” that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab. Both men claimed they were “not allowed” to reveal what this evidence was, suggesting their information came from classified intelligence.

Before being seized on by Trump and Pompeo, the theory that the virus came from a Wuhan lab had been promoted by right-wing media outlets including Fox News and the Washington Examiner, as well as the Epoch Times, a publication linked to the Chinese dissident religious group Falun Gong.

While scientists can’t eliminate the possibility of a lab escape entirely, the evidence suggests that the virus most likely evolved naturally, probably spreading to people in a seafood market in Wuhan where live animals were also on sale. Anonymous briefings from international intelligence officials have also suggested that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is unlikely to be the source of COVID-19.

Despite the questions and rumors, there’s quite a bit we do know about the research that was done at the Wuhan lab and why it’s unlikely to be the origin of the new coronavirus. Here’s what we know:




The Wuhan lab began studying bat coronaviruses in 2004 after SARS.

The head of the lab, which is operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is virologist Shi Zhengli. (Shi did not immediately respond to queries about her work from BuzzFeed News; a representative said by email that they would seek permission from the Chinese Academy of Sciences for her to be interviewed.)

Popularly known as China’s “bat woman,” Shi studies the many different coronaviruses circulating in bats across China and beyond, trying to assess the risk that they could jump into people and cause a pandemic like COVID-19.

That became a priority after SARS, a respiratory illness caused by another coronavirus, which appeared in China in 2002 and spread to more than two dozen countries, killing 774 people. MERS, a similar disease caused by yet another coronavirus, emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012, spread to 27 countries, and has killed 858 people.

Both SARS and MERS are thought to have spread to people from animals — civets in the case of SARS and dromedary camels for MERS. But bats are believed to be the natural reservoir for these and other potentially pandemic coronaviruses, circulating the viruses in their populations and occasionally passing them to other species. And so from 2004 onward, Shi searched caves across China for colonies of roosting bats, taking swabs from the animals and collecting their droppings to examine the coronaviruses they carry.

Shi’s team has since identified dozens of coronavirus variants in bats, constructing an evolutionary tree of how they are related to one another based on the sequences of the RNA that makes up their genetic material, and showing that viruses from distinct branches of this tree seem to be found in different parts of China. In 2013, Shi’s group identified two coronavirus strains from horseshoe bats that were 95% genetically similar to the virus that caused SARS, providing the strongest evidence that, while the virus likely jumped to humans via a civet, bats were the ultimate origin of the virus.

Shi’s team has also studied the genetic mutations that seem to make bat coronaviruses more likely to cross over into people, focusing in particular on the gene that encodes its “spike protein.” The halo of spikes on the surface of coronaviruses gives them their signature crownlike appearance when viewed through an electron microscope. The ability of bat coronaviruses to infect human cells seems to depend on the interaction between the spike protein and a receptor called ACE2 on the surface of cells in the lungs.



Menahem Kahana / Getty Images
A horseshoe bat

The lab previously conducted controversial experiments to test what could make coronaviruses more dangerous to humans.

Most controversially, Shi’s research on the spike protein has involved experiments that some scientists view as unacceptably risky: deliberately genetically engineering viruses to study what makes them more dangerous.

In 2015, Shi and Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, described experiments in which they engineered the spike protein from one of Shi’s SARS-like horseshoe bat coronaviruses into another coronavirus that had already been adapted to infect mice. The engineered virus replicated easily in human cells, and antibodies and vaccines developed against the SARS virus were relatively ineffective in protecting mice from infection.

Shortly after these experiments were run, the US government placed a moratorium on so-called gain-of-function research to make pathogens more dangerous. The ban was eventually lifted in December 2017, but the research remains controversial. “As the world reels from the impacts of the present pandemic, it should be clear to anyone without a conflict of interest that creating new potential pandemic pathogens is unwise,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told BuzzFeed News by email.

Baric did not respond to requests from BuzzFeed News to discuss his work with Shi. BuzzFeed News could find no evidence that Shi has performed gain-of-function studies since.
Scientists are certain that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was not genetically engineered.

In March, an international team of virologists led by Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, published an analysis of the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. They concluded: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

If the virus had been deliberately engineered, scientists would expect to see sequences that are suspected to make coronaviruses more dangerous spliced into the backbone of a viral strain commonly used for experiments of this type. Instead of this smoking gun, SARS-CoV-2 has mutations all along its genetic sequence that experts would have had no prior reason to guess would be associated with a potentially pandemic virus. This result is what they would expect to see if the virus had evolved naturally.

“I am quite sure SARS-CoV-2 was not lab-synthesized, judging by the sequence,” Susan Weiss, a coronavirus expert at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in Andersen’s study, told BuzzFeed News by email. “It seems impossible that someone could figure out how to make a virus with these properties.”
It’s also highly unlikely the virus escaped the Wuhan lab by accident — though we can’t rule out the possibility.

Such “lab escape” accidents are not unknown. They happened several times during the SARS epidemic, with accidental infections occurring at labs in Singapore, Taiwan, and China. The most serious incidents were at the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing, where the virus escaped and infected people on several occasions.

Scientists also now think that the 1977 reemergence of the H1N1 flu was the result of a laboratory accident. H1N1, the subtype of flu that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, hadn’t been seen in the wild since 1957. But in 1977, an H1N1 virus turned up in China and Russia. It spread across the world, but fortunately only affected younger people who had not been exposed to similar viruses before and proved less deadly than regular seasonal flu.

The 1977 pandemic H1N1 was very similar to viruses sampled from flu patients around 1950. Because viruses typically accumulate genetic mutations as they replicate, making them slowly change over time, the explanation for this uncanny similarity was that the virus had been kept frozen for years in a laboratory. “We and others estimated that it was 27 years in the freezer,” Joel Wertheim of the University of California, San Diego, who has studied the origins of the 1977 flu pandemic, told BuzzFeed News


The closest known virus to SARS-CoV-2 is called RaTG13. Isolated by Shi’s team from a horseshoe bat in Yunnan province in southern China, hundreds of miles away from Wuhan, RaTG13 has a genetic sequence that is 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. While that might sound like a close match, it means the two viruses are probably separated by “decades of evolution,” according to Wertheim.

Andersen’s team also considered the possibility that the particular combination of mutations seen in SARS-CoV-2 arose as a result of growing it in cell cultures in the lab. But they decided this was unlikely. Some of the mutations, they noted, seemed to be the result of interacting with an animal’s immune system, while the part of the spike protein that binds to human cells via the ACE2 receptor was similar to sequences found in coronaviruses in pangolins. Together, this evidence suggested a natural origin, they concluded.

Shi has said that she initially worried that the virus might have escaped from her lab, but found no close match among her samples. “That really took a load off my mind,” she told Scientific American. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

Proponents of the lab-origin theory have also pointed out that only 27 of 41 patients described in a study of the initial outbreak in Wuhan had a direct connection to the seafood market that has been blamed for the emergence of COVID-19. But unlike the accidents with SARS, there is no evidence that anyone connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was among the early patients.


While highly unlikely, scientists can’t rule out that SARS-CoV-2 was secretly studied in a lab and accidentally released. The brief appearance in mid-April of online notices and a Chinese government directive suggesting that research in China on the origins of COVID-19 must be “strictly and tightly managed,” first reported by CNN, has added to suspicion of a cover-up by Chinese authorities.


NIAID / Via Flickr: nihgov
SARS-CoV-2

US intelligence is looking into whether the virus escaped from the lab, but the international intelligence community suggests that’s “highly unlikely.”

Speculation that COVID-19 may have been released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology grew after Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin reported on April 14 that he had seen a 2018 US diplomatic cable warning about “inadequate safety” at the facility.

However, Dennis Carroll, a virologist and former official with the US Agency for International Development, which has funded Shi’s work, has questioned the importance of the cables, which he saw while working in Beijing. “I didn’t place an enormous amount of weight on the observations that were made because they were not part of a critical, standardized evaluation,” Carroll told Science.

On April 30, after Trump started to blame the Wuhan lab for COVID-19, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement saying that “the entire intelligence community” agreed with the scientific consensus that the virus was not genetically modified, but was leaving open the possibility that it had been accidentally released from a lab.

“The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan,” the statement went on.

The same day, the New York Times reported that senior Trump administration officials had been applying pressure to US intelligence agencies to hunt for evidence to support the unsubstantiated theory.

Australian officials told the Sydney Morning Herald that a dossier shared among political leaders in the Five Eyes coalition — the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — linking the coronavirus to a Wuhan laboratory was mostly based on news reports and contained no original intelligence.

Anonymous officials from the Five Eyes coalition told CNN that an intelligence assessment shared in the network suggests the lab-release theory is “highly unlikely.”
Nevertheless, the fight over the Wuhan lab has dealt a blow to research into COVID-19 and other potentially pandemic viruses.

The most obvious casualty is a grant to Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance in New York City from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), given to understand the risks of coronaviruses spreading from bats to people.

Daszak has worked with Shi to study China’s bat coronaviruses, including the 2013 paper on the two horseshoe bat viruses similar to the SARS virus. But on April 24, the grant to Daszak was abruptly terminated, as first reported by Politico. That happened just one week after Trump was asked a question about the funding for the Wuhan lab at a press conference and said: “We will end that grant very quickly.”

In 2016, Shi and Daszak also described a “fast and cost-effective method” for genetically engineering coronaviruses, funded in part by the NIAID grant. But it’s unclear that this aspect of the work had anything to do with the termination of the grant. Instead, emails obtained by Science from the National Institute of Health’s deputy director for extramural research suggested that the decision to terminate the grant was made because of safety issues at the lab, though no evidence was given to support that claim.

Other scientists have described the termination of the grant as a “horrible precedent” that will hamper efforts to understand the threat of future pandemics.

“Our work on the NIAID funding was to assess the risk of bat-origin coronaviruses getting into people, causing sickness and emerging globally,” Daszak told BuzzFeed News by email. “The real risk is out in nature, not in the lab.”


MORE ON THIS
Scientists Haven’t Found Proof The Coronavirus Escaped From A Lab In Wuhan. Trump Supporters Are Spreading The Rumor Anyway.

Ryan Broderick · April 22, 2020

Past Coronavirus Research Grants Are Being Used To Smear Anthony Fauci

Jane Lytvynenko · April 29, 2020

The US Government Just Lifted A Ban On Making Deadly Viruses Even More Dangerous

Peter Aldhous · Dec. 20, 2017

 Peter Aldhous is a Science Reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.

PRIVATIZED FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE
Hospitals Expect To Lose More Than $200 Billion Because Of The Coronavirus

In the first three months of the coronavirus pandemic, tens of thousands of health care workers have lost their jobs. Hospitals expect to lose $202.6 billion.

Venessa Wong BuzzFeed News Reporter May 6, 2020

Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters
Health care workers gather for lunch purchased by members of the New York City Police Department outside the Brooklyn Hospital Center.

The United States' health care industry is losing billions of dollars every week during the coronavirus pandemic, resulting in widespread layoffs and furloughs as waiting rooms lie paradoxically empty during an unprecedented health crisis.

The country’s hospitals and health systems are expected to lose $202.6 billion from March 1 to June 30, according to a new report from the American Hospital Association, which is advocating for federal relief funds for hospitals.

“It is a catastrophic number,” Aaron Wesolowski, the AHA’s vice president of policy research, analytics, and strategy, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s clear there are going to be serious financial consequences for hospitals and health systems.”

“It is a catastrophic number.”

Other than treating the coronavirus, hospitals have come to a virtual standstill during the outbreak. Governors around the country have asked hospitals to cancel nonessential procedures and elective surgeries, operations that account for a significant share of hospital revenues. Meanwhile, stay-at-home orders have discouraged people from making doctors’ visits.

As a consequence, hospitals around the country have announced layoffs, reduced hours, and furloughs of doctors, nurses, technicians, administrative staffers, and other workers to offset the losses. The AHA said hospitals are also racking up expenses, such as purchasing personal protective equipment and supporting frontline workers' childcare, transportation, housing, and screening and treatment for COVID-19.

Those impacts are being felt in other parts of the health care sector, not just hospitals. Across the industry, employment declined by 43,000 jobs during February and March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, including large job losses in offices of dentists (17,000) and physicians (12,000).

“It’s been pretty devastating to nurse practitioners. Many have been furloughed,” Sophia Thomas, president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, who also works as a nurse practitioner in New Orleans, told BuzzFeed News. “Most nurse practitioners work in the outpatient setting, and those clinics are very slow right now. They’re trying to switch to telehealth, but in certain places it’s been very slow on the uptake primarily due to the technological limitation of patients.”

Federal stimulus money could prop up the industry and stanch the bleeding but might not be able to do more. The bills passed in the wake of the pandemic allocated $175 billion to hospitals and other health care providers, but the losses have “exceed[ed] the funds hospitals have received in relief payments to date, and are larger than the total amount of potential relief payments for them as well,” said Wesolowski.

A report released Tuesday by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security drew a similar conclusion: “Until there is a vaccine, there will be ongoing public fear of contagion at healthcare settings, which may result in sustained decreases in patient volume beyond the immediate response and recovery to the pandemic. It is not clear that the funds authorized so far are enough to cover all the losses incurred to date, much less the ongoing losses that the health sector will continue to experience.”

Wesolowski said: “I think it’s reasonable to expect that it’s going to take a while to rebound. When hospitals start offering elective surgeries again, all of that volume won’t come back in at once. And it depends on whether there are subsequent waves [of the coronavirus].”

Like the pandemic, the financial toll has not been evenly distributed across the country. Rural hospitals, which had been struggling financially for decades, lost up to 80% of their revenue when they suspended elective procedures and outpatient care. Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association, told BuzzFeed News that the federal stimulus money was helping, but only barely. “Rural hospitals nationwide now are able to keep their doors open through the end of June," he said.


It's still unclear how the pandemic will play out in the rest of 2020; there could be sustained small outbreaks or a large second wave. Health systems may take a different approach at that time due to increased availability of testing.

Eric Toner, senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told BuzzFeed News hospitals could make more informed decisions about if and when to cancel nonessential and elective procedures.

“The problem was in, say, rural Texas, you canceled elective surgeries and for two months the hospitals were empty," he said. "There was nothing for their staff to do, so they ended up furloughing them." With increased testing capacity, “they could wait until they saw evidence of COVID in their communities before they cancel those surgeries.”



Venessa Wong is a technology and business reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

Amazon Didn’t Pay This Worker Who Tested Positive For The Coronavirus Until A Reporter Asked Questions

Amazon has publicly promised to pay workers who test positive for or are quarantined because of the coronavirus, but some say they haven’t received that money.

“Don’t risk your life for $15 an hour. It’s not worth it. They don’t care." 

Caroline O'Donovan BuzzFeed News Reporter
Last updated on May 5, 2020

Thomas Pausuan SUPPLIED

Thomas Pausuan, a father of two who works at an Amazon warehouse outside Philadelphia, tested positive for the novel coronavirus in early April.

Under Amazon policy, Pausuan was eligible for paid sick leave. But Amazon stopped paying him the day after he got home from urgent care with a fever of 104, labored breathing, and a diagnosis of a potentially fatal disease.

It is the latest example of Amazon failing to promptly follow through on its promise to pay two weeks of wages to employees who are sick or quarantined. In some cases, workers have said they have consequently missed payments on their bills or had to borrow money from family or friends.

“We are working with employees on an individual basis and gathering the information we need to approve extra time off with pay for quarantine and/or diagnosis of COVID,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “With over 1,000 sites around the world, and so many measures and precautions rapidly rolled out over the past several weeks across safety, pay, benefits and operational processes, there may be instances where we don’t get it perfect, but can assure you that’s just what they are — exceptions.”


Amazon said it would deposit the money in Pausuan’s bank account after BuzzFeed News requested information about his case.

Amazon employees have complained that the department that handles sick leave payments was understaffed even before the coronavirus pandemic, and it has since been overwhelmed by the upswing in cases.



Pausuan started feeling sick in late March. He worried it could be the coronavirus, especially because he knew some of his coworkers at the Amazon warehouse where he worked had already tested positive.

He immediately isolated from his wife and children, but in their small apartment in South Philadelphia it was hard to maintain social distance. Before long, his family was sick too — although not as sick as he was.

“I had a fever of 104, and then the next day I started losing all smell and taste,” Pausuan said. “I felt very weak, and the whole body aches. It’s very hard to breathe. That’s the worst thing.”

On April 8, his test results confirmed what he’d known was almost certainly true: He had COVID-19.

As soon as Pausuan received his diagnosis, he sent documentation to Amazon human resources. The company had previously announced in early March that any employee who tested positive for the novel coronavirus would get up to two weeks of pay.

He expected to be paid as usual on his April 17 payday. After all, Amazon had repeatedly promised that workers who got sick would be paid. In fact, Jay Carney, senior vice president of global corporate affairs, said as much on CNN on April 17, the same day Pausuan was waiting in vain for the money to land in his account.

“We’re focusing our resources on helping our workers, giving them protective gear, giving them paid time off, increasing their pay,” Carney told CNN anchor Brianna Keilar.

"The only answer I got was 'Your case manager isn’t available right now.' How can someone be unavailable for a whole month?"

But the money never came.

"They gave me my case manager's extension, but whenever I tried to call that extension, the only answer I got was 'Your case manager isn’t available right now.' How can someone be unavailable for a whole month? It doesn't make sense,” Pausuan said on May 1.

He shared some of the correspondence between him and Amazon with BuzzFeed News.

“My name is Thomas T Pausuan I work for AcY1 amazon warehouse,” he emailed an HR associate on April 13. After testing positive for COVID-19, Pausuan explained, he requested paid medical leave, but his request wasn’t approved. “I hope I get all help fast because I’m test positive my wife also have to quarantine herself[. N]o one can go to work and there is no paycheck.”

Pausuan said this email and subsequent ones went unanswered.

Four days later, he wrote to Amazon’s disability and leave team: “According to Amazon Covid-19 policy I was tested positive and never get paid sick leave why? It’s been 2 weeks I stay home isolate myself. I didn’t get paid why?”

And on May 1, he wrote again: “I still didn’t hear nothing from my case manager. [...] I need money[.] I have a family to feed. I hope some one hear my voice.”

Pausuan said he received a federal stimulus check in April, which helped him cover credit card payments, car payments, car insurance, and rent. “That’s how we survive until now,” he said on Friday.

Like other Amazon employees who spoke with BuzzFeed News, Pausuan said when he called the employee resource center he was told he’d hear back within a few days. They never called.

“Almost every day, I call them to prove my case and escalate my case so I can get paid. I tried so many times. Believe me,” he said. “The only answer I get is ‘someone will call you in two business days.’ And then, [after] two business days, they don’t call you. For one month.”

Finally, last week, Pausuan reached out to BuzzFeed News, which has repeatedly written about workers who are not being paid despite having symptoms of COVID-19 or being instructed to quarantine by a doctor.

In April, BuzzFeed News reported that at least eight employees who had been told to stay home by doctors hadn’t received payment as promised.

When asked about those cases, the company publicly promised employees who had been quarantined by a doctor would eventually be paid.

Nearly four weeks later, four of those employees, most of whom asked not to be named out of fear of retribution, said they’ve since received some payment from Amazon, though most said they had received less money than they thought they were owed. An employee on short-term disability leave receives just 60% of their usual paychecks.

Two more could not be reached this week by BuzzFeed News.

And two said they have still received nothing.

“Don’t risk your life for $15 an hour. It’s not worth it. They don’t care."

One of those workers, a single mother in Missouri who requested anonymity to protect her job, said Amazon HR told her she was eligible for two weeks of pay and could apply for short-term disability thereafter. She was eventually diagnosed with pneumonia but tested negative for the coronavirus. She has not been paid.

“I’m just lucky I live in a very generous community who has stepped forward and helped feed me and my family,” she said.

During the pandemic, Amazon sales have soared as people stay home and avoid shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. On an earnings call last week, executives said the company is spending that additional revenue on its response to the coronavirus, including protections and higher wages for its warehouse staff. The company also said it’s hired 175,000 new staffers in its logistics and delivery network since March. Many of those new hires, said Brian T. Olsavsky, Amazon's chief financial officer, during the call, “were displaced from other jobs in the economy.”

Pausuan said the way he has been treated has made him feel like a worn-out part that can easily be replaced by a newer model.

“Don’t risk your life for $15 an hour. It’s not worth it. They don’t care,” he continued. “Once someone’s sick, they hire two people. They don’t care about the sick one, because they can hire back as many as they want.”

MORE ON THIS

The NLRB Is Looking Into Claims That Amazon Violated Employees' Rights During The Coronavirus Pandemic

Caroline O'Donovan · April 18, 2020

Amazon Fired An Employee Involved In Workplace Organizing In Minnesota, Sources Say

Caroline O'Donovan · April 14, 2020

Amazon Says Employees Quarantined By A Doctor Will Get Paid, But So Far Many Say They Haven’t

Caroline O'Donovan · April 11, 2020

TOPICS IN THIS ARTICLE
Amazon

Caroline O'Donovan  is a senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.

WORKING At The Amazon Warehouse Was Always Painful. Now It's Terrifying.

In the best of times, the work I did at the Amazon warehouse left me aching and numb. Now, going to work is just terrifying.

Rina CummingsBuzzFeed Contributor Posted on May 5, 2020

Chris Radburn / PA Wire/PA Photo An Amazon warehouse in the UK

Even before the coronavirus hit, going to work at an Amazon warehouse already felt like I was risking my health. Standing on your feet for 12 hours at a time and performing repetitive motions while sorting boxes takes a toll on your body. By the middle of my shift, my joints throb with pain and sometimes my fingers become numb. I know my body is asking me to take a breather. But the clock doesn’t stop ticking, and I can’t make rate if I take a break.

In the first few weeks after COVID-19 came to New York City, the warehouse operated as usual. People started getting sick, and we knew it, but Amazon wasn’t giving us any information. The company said it sent people who were confirmed to have had contact with the virus home with pay, but most people who were sick weren’t able to get tested. And we know many people who were sent home still haven’t received pay. We kept working, standing next to each other on the floor of the sorting department, in the break room, and on the crowded buses taking us to the warehouse.

I have been out on medical leave for a few weeks, choosing not to go into work to protect myself and my family. Amazon let us have unlimited unpaid time off (UPT) last month, but that’s not an option anymore. We either have to go to work or quit, which would risk eligibility for unemployment.

I worry about catching the coronavirus when I go back to work. The company has now staggered our shifts, so there are fewer people. But there’s no real social distancing in the warehouse. We get gloves and masks, but we have to keep wearing them over and over again because the supply is nowhere near enough. When I get home from work, I jump in the shower right away, even before hugging my kids, because I don't want to spread the virus. Amazon doesn’t pay me for the extra time it takes for me to sanitize everything that went to work with me, or the extra loads of laundry I am running to keep everything clean.



I am a single mom with two beautiful children. Right now, my kids are home from school. When I can afford to, I’ll pay for a babysitter — but mostly my 15-year-old takes care of my 2-year-old when I go to work. My shift is 12 hours, overnight Thursday through Sunday.

From my coworkers I organize with, I’ve heard that things are busier than ever in the warehouse. Every day during COVID-19 feels like the week before Christmas. Amazon is making a killing from this crisis. Almost literally. Jeff Bezos’s net worth has grown by more than $24 billion since the crisis started since everyone is at home trying to avoid going to the store and ordering everything online. But none of that money is going to workers. I have more expenses now than before, buying masks, gloves, and cleaning supplies; doing more laundry; paying for childcare; and trying to do everything I can to keep life as normal and happy as possible for my kids. And I don't know what I’ll do if I get sick.



Stephanie Keith / Getty Images
Immigrant and labor activists rally outside an Amazon distribution center in New York City.

When Amazon workers, including some of my coworkers, have spoken out about unsafe conditions and demanded the facility be shut down and sanitized after positive COVID-19 cases were identified, some have been fired in apparent retaliation.

We just learned yesterday that an Amazon executive resigned over the unfair firing of whistleblowers who are trying to keep themselves and their workers safe. Amazon doesn’t need much of an excuse to fire us; it happens all the time. Anyone can be fired without any notice or reason — being a few minutes late, getting written up for not making rate, demanding more gloves or masks. My elderly coworker was fired over voicemail for leaning on a stopped belt on a break. Management said he was sitting while he should have been working.

I can’t afford to get fired, so I’m on my toes all the time to make sure that Amazon doesn’t have an excuse. I live just 20 minutes from the warehouse in Staten Island, and I usually take the bus to work. My commute should be easy, but it easily turns bad. The buses coming from the ferry often skip my stop because they are jam-packed with Amazon workers. When that has happened in the past, I take a $50 Uber to work to avoid being late and having an hour deducted from my UPT. There is a lot of fear from workers that Amazon will terminate you if you use too much UPT, which makes everyone stressed about getting to work on time.

Time is everything at Amazon. I’ve developed digestive issues since I’ve been working there because I have to shove food down my throat and then run back to my station. A robot will write me up if I am late. It doesn’t care whether I had my lunch or not. It doesn’t care if I am coughing, or if I faint at my station, or if someone else sneezes on me. They just count the rate of how many packages I sort.

I am a human. Not a machine.

I learned that the New York City Council is considering legislation that would require big corporations like Amazon to pay extra during this crisis to compensate us for the increased risks we are taking on and make it harder for them to fire us on a whim. Going to work is a health hazard during this crisis, but we need the money, and people need to get the supplies we are sorting. A bit more pay and some job security would ease a lot of stress. They say we are essential, but Amazon treats us like we’re expendable.

Rina Cummings works at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island and is a member of Make the Road New York. She testified before the New York City Council in support of the proposed Essential Workers Bill of Rights.

TOPICS IN THIS ARTICLE
Amazon

Essence Nash, Amazon warehouse worker, Etna, Ohio

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-voices-of-may-day-usa-2020-amazon.html

I am striking because of Amazon's work environment is hard mentally, physically and emotionally. It's sad we had to wait for a pandemic to get to this point, but I'm hoping this changes the work environment and labor as a whole for the future. Two things I wish the public knew about work conditions are that we get cases of COVID-19 daily and that there are no extra steps they're taking besides the ones we have been doing since the pandemic started. We’re also being micromanaged all day everyday no matter what you do while we’re at work.

A Worker in Amazon's New York Warehouse Has Died of the Coronavirus

Amazon had fired a worker who organized a walkout to demand the company sanitize the Staten Island warehouse after someone there tested positive.

By Alex Lubben May 5 2020


A worker at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse has died of COVID-19, the company confirmed to VICE News.

Since March, workers at that fulfillment center in New York have been protesting, calling for additional safety precautions to protect them from the coronavirus. The company has instituted some additional safety precautions; it also fired a worker for protesting, and then tried to smear him.

The company said the employee who died hadn’t been at the warehouse since April 5, and he tested positive for the coronavirus on April 11. “We are deeply saddened by the loss of an associate at our site in Staten Island, NY,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “His family and loved ones are in our thoughts, and we are supporting his fellow colleagues.”


The death was first reported by The Verge.

Amazon fired one of the workers at the Staten Island warehouse, Christian Smalls, who organized a walkout to demand the company sanitize the warehouse after someone who worked in the facility tested positive for the coronavirus. An internal memo previously obtained by VICE News laid out a plan to smear Smalls, calling him “not smart or articulate.”

Another Amazon employee, who worked at the company’s warehouse in Hawthorne, California, died in mid-April.

New York’s attorney general has taken notice: A letter from the AG’s office dated April 22, obtained by NPR, noted that the company may be providing “inadequate” protections to its workers under state law. That letter also noted that the company may have violated labor law by firing Smalls.

READ MORE: Leaked Amazon Memo Details Plan to Smear Fired Warehouse Organizer: ‘He’s Not Smart or Articulate’

And on Monday, one of the company’s top engineers and a vice president, Tim Bray, announced his resignation from Amazon and called the company “chickenshit” for firing protesting workers.

It’s not known how many workers at Amazon facilities have died of coronavirus, but an unofficial tally by the workers themselves and reviewed by The Verge indicates that at least 130 workers have fallen ill.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the date the deceased worker was last at the Staten Island warehouse.


Cover: In this March 30, 2020 file photo, workers at Amazon's fulfillment center in Staten Island, N.Y., gather outside to protest work conditions in the company's warehouse in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File )

The Gig Economy Is a Public Health Risk

The gig economy's plan for workers: Keep working until you get the deadly pandemic with an unknown death rate. Then self-isolate and hope you don't die.

As Christian Perea, a driver for Uber and Lyft 

"it seems kind of obvious that transporting millions of people via super non-regulated Uber/Lyfts that don't have sick pay or any ability to self-isolate to proactively prevent spread is an obvious way this will spread."

By Edward Ongweso Jr and Jason Koebler

Mar 16 2020
MATTHEW HORWOOD / CONTRIBUTOR

The coronavirus pandemic has crystallized this important fact: Gig economy companies are a public health risk.

By their very design, regulation-ignoring companies that treat their workers as independent contractors rather than employees have created a class of people who are uninsured or underinsured and are incentivized to work long hours, even if it puts them or customers at risk. Even now, as gig economy companies are rolling out the bare minimum in terms of sick leave, we are seeing how vulnerable gig workers really are and how these services have created an underclass of people who serve the rich.

While most of Silicon Valley’s white-collar workers are working from home and the masses are being asked to self-isolate, Uber and Lyft drivers, Grubhub and Seamless delivery drivers, and Instacart shoppers continue to work. After weeks of silence and rolling out policies designed to convince customers to continue using their platforms (“contactless deliveries!”), several companies including Uber, have just rolled out two-weeks of paid sick leave, but even these policies feel dystopian, their subtext being: Keep working until you get the deadly pandemic with an unknown death rate. Then you can self-isolate (without health insurance) and hope you don’t die.

It’s easy to focus on the gig economy’s lackluster response during the pandemic, but this problem has been years in the making.

Uber’s gig economy business model is one that prioritizes private profits above public health. Each of Uber’s ride-hail options feature subsidies to incentivize higher use: some offer low prices to increase passenger demand, while others use higher or lower pay to motivate more drivers. The outcome here is the same for every other gig company seeking monopoly profits whether or not there is a pandemic: a two-tiered system of customers who can stay inside, and workers who are forced to consistently risk their health and well-being.



Gig companies are fundamentally unprofitable, their business model subsidized by venture capital that is focused on loss-leading, destroying competition, and monopolizing the industry. Uber and Lyft, in particular, have conditioned people to use their services as a replacement for ambulances. This phenomenon is not just informal: Lyft has worked with cities to study specifically using Lyfts as emergency vehicles.

Now, during a pandemic, there is little reason to expect that people will stop using these services, and surely coronavirus patients will at least consider taking an Uber or Lyft to the hospital should their symptoms become severe.

Uber and Lyft are perfectly primed to be a vector for outbreaks as drivers are incentivized by sub-minimum-wages insufficient to last any period of self-quarantine, let alone to seek treatment, and as passengers are incentivized by cheap trips and fears of exposure in public transit. This is incompatible with what should be our prime objective: “flattening the curve” to minimize community transmission through social distance.

We could have a different discussion if Uber were taking steps beyond advising drivers to essentially stay safe out there. In China, DiDi—the ride-hailing company that beat back Uber’s attempt to enter the country—not only suspended service across the country but created special fleets to both mitigate transmission while still meeting community transit needs. One fleet had protectively uniformed drivers in regularly disinfected cars to transport medical workers in Wuhan—for free. Another fleet was a volunteer "community service fleet" that allowed local authorities to try and meet demand despite the suspension of private and public transit.


In the United States, Uber has not even been able to guarantee reliable access to clean bathrooms for its drivers, let alone provide protective gear, regular disinfectant services. It does not seem like Uber is imminently going to start providing special training for drivers on how to specifically transport those who might be sick; its latest suggestion to drivers was an email containing general advice such as “CLEAN AND DISINFECT YOUR VEHICLE—Pay special attention to surfaces that you and passengers frequently come in contact with,” without giving any guidance about how to do that, or how often to do it.

As Christian Perea, a driver for Uber and Lyft who recently wrote an article asking drivers to stop working, told Motherboard, "it seems kind of obvious that transporting millions of people via super non-regulated Uber/Lyfts that don't have sick pay or any ability to self-isolate to proactively prevent spread is an obvious way this will spread."

THE VOICES OF MAY DAY USA 2020

Amazon, Instacart, Target, and FedEx Workers Explain Why They're Striking

As part of a historic May Day strike, frontline workers tell the public about their working conditions and why they believe there's strength in numbers.
By Lauren Kaori Gurley

May 1 2020,

Today, May Day, thousands of frontline workers at Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Target, and FedEx have organized a historic strike to protest working conditions and demand worker protections at these companies, which have all seen revenues skyrocket during the coronavirus pandemic.

Striking workers say they have formed an "alliance" to help save the lives of workers and communities who have faced increased workloads and unprecedented dangers in the wake of the pandemic. They are asking customers to boycott these companies during the strike. Almost uniformly, the companies they work for have retaliated against workers or refused to meet their demands, which include guaranteed paid sick leave, personal protective equipment such as masks and hand sanitizer, and hazard pay.

Motherboard asked some workers who are participating in the strike to take the brave step of explaining why they are striking, and what they want the public to know about their working conditions

Tim Billado, Whole Foods worker, Portland, Oregon

One would think that with the economic resources it would take to put together a union organizing tracking system that Whole Foods would listen to their team members’ concerns and make good on providing things like a livable wage and paid sick time for all workers. No need for fancy (and probably expensive) technology to tell you what could be known by actually listening to your workers. It’s almost like they feel threatened by their workers advocating for autonomy. Public support is what helps workers have the confidence to organize.

Willy Solis, Shipt shopper, Dallas, Texas


There are two things I would like to tell the general public about Shipt. The first one is that they will do anything in their power to silence our voices. They will go as far as defaming us, smearing us, and outright intimidation. They will release our personal information to the media in an effort to discredit us, so that we are not used as reliable sources. Even if we’re not being utilized as a source for a particular story. Our information is being given freely in an effort to keep us from speaking out. The second thing I would like the general public to know is that we will not be silenced. We are a collective of several thousand people. Singularly, we are weak, collectively we are strong. We will continue to speak out the truth. In regards to our demands, PPE for all, for example. Shipt tells the general public that they have procured enough PPE for all shoppers. The reality is that all shoppers have not received PPE, only a select few have. I myself have ordered masks and have yet to receive them. And here we are at the end of April. The reality on the ground is totally different than the PR spin being given by the company. I ask that customers and shoppers support us by calling Shipt and voicing their concerns. Let them know that we deserve to be heard, we have a right to speak out, we have a right to ask for basic protections.


An anonymous Shipt shopper

I have been working as a Shipt Shopper since December of last year. When I started this job, I thought it would be perfect for my situation. I've had two failed spinal fusions, so being able to work a schedule of my own making and choose what I pick up was ideal. However, this job is creating a major issue in my life because Shipt doesn't see me as a person. I'm a number on a body bag. They don't care if I live or die working this job. There are more people who can replace me. I loved this job. Being able to help people, shop at Target, and be paid. Yes, please. Now it's a constant fight to get orders. They are lying left and right in their PR scheme. It's hurtful to be treated with such little disrespect. I'm striking for hazard pay and for a more transparent pay scale. I need to know how much I'm going to make so I can continue to see my doctor, get my prescriptions, pay my rent, and all my other bills.


Essence Nash, Amazon warehouse worker, Etna, Ohio

I am striking because of Amazon's work environment is hard mentally, physically and emotionally. It's sad we had to wait for a pandemic to get to this point, but I'm hoping this changes the work environment and labor as a whole for the future. Two things I wish the public knew about work conditions are that we get cases of COVID-19 daily and that there are no extra steps they're taking besides the ones we have been doing since the pandemic started. We’re also being micromanaged all day everyday no matter what you do while we’re at work.

Cassidy Melczak, Target worker, specialty sales in tech, Matthews, North Carolina

I'd like the public to know that most Target team members they come into contact with every day do not have health insurance. That means they can't actually get the testing they need to know whether or not they are carriers for the virus, because many carriers don't have symptoms.

I'd also like the public to understand that this is a natural disaster. It's slow and invisible, but people are dying. We don't keep stores open during a wildfire so that people can buy a TV or a new video game console. We send in front line experts and protect the people who are in harm's way. We should be treating this the same.

Minnie Val, Shipt shopper

I am striking on May 1st because Shipt has cut my pay while saying they are paying their shoppers 30 percent more. This is a horrible thing to do during these COVID-19 times. They also haven't provided everyone with PPE while stating in the press that they have.

Bill, Instacart full service shopper, Houston, Texas

I think it’s ironic we’re talking about a strike because basically I’ve been made unemployed by Instacart. Being a full-service shopper for Instacart for two years, I averaged between $500-$800 a week, but because of certain elements of Instacart being hacked by third party bots or an overhiring, I have basically been rendered unemployed. The last two weeks I made $130 and $60.

Tom, FedEx Ground packaging handler, Grove City, Ohio

I am striking in solidarity with Amazon and other workers all over the United States, because I believe a better world is truly possible. If we all come together and stop the machinery of the system, we can democratically make demands and make a world where men like Jeff Bezos and Fred Smith can’t profit billions off the deaths and misery of their workers, especially during a pandemic.

One thing I wish people knew is that we die moving packages for FedEx, and it’s been happening before COVID-19. In late January of 2019, a FedEx worker died after being exposed to temperatures exceeding -20 degrees in East Moline, Illinois. An unknown number of FedEx employees have died so far from COVID-19.

The second thing I wish people knew was that they are not protecting us, drivers and other hubs aren’t getting PPE, drivers and multiple hubs aren’t being compensated properly at FedEx Ground and Express, they’re not temperature checking people, they have us working on top of each other and aren’t following social distancing guidelines, they have drivers coming in for things that could be emailed. FedEx isn’t taking this seriously and Fred Smith and the corporate executives, and shareholders do not care about us, they care about money.

Jurassic Park got it wrong: UW Oshkosh research indicates raptors don't hunt in packs 

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN OSHKOSH
NEWS RELEASE 6-MAY-2020

A new University of Wisconsin Oshkosh analysis of raptor teeth published in the peer-reviewed journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology shows that Velociraptors and their kin likely did not hunt in big, coordinated packs like dogs.

The raptors (Deinonychus antirrhopus) with their sickle-shaped talons were made famous in the 1993 blockbuster movie Jurassic Park, which portrayed them as highly intelligent, apex predators that worked in groups to hunt large prey.

"Raptorial dinosaurs often are shown as hunting in packs similar to wolves," said Joseph Frederickson, a vertebrate paleontologist and director of the Weis Earth Science Museum on the UWO Fox Cities campus. "The evidence for this behavior, however, is not altogether convincing. Since we can't watch these dinosaurs hunt in person, we must use indirect methods to determine their behavior in life."

Frederickson led the study in partnership with two colleagues at the University of Oklahoma and Sam Noble Museum, Michael Engel and Richard Cifell.

Though widely accepted, evidence for the pack-hunting dinosaur proposed by the late famed Yale University paleontologist John Ostrom is relatively weak, Frederickson said.

"The problem with this idea is that living dinosaurs (birds) and their relatives (crocodilians) do not usually hunt in groups and rarely ever hunt prey larger than themselves," he explained.

"Further, behavior like pack hunting does not fossilize so we can't directly test whether the animals actually worked together to hunt prey."

Recently, scientists have proposed a different model for behavior in raptors that is thought to be more like Komodo dragons or crocodiles, in which individuals may attack the same animal but cooperation is limited.

            WE'RE A PAIR NOT A PACK

"We proposed in this study that there is a correlation between pack hunting and the diet of animals as they grow," Frederickson said.

In Komodo dragons, babies are at risk of being eaten by adults, so they take refuge in trees, where they find a wealth of food unavailable to their larger ground-dwelling parents. Animals that hunt in packs do not generally show this dietary diversity.

"If we can look at the diet of young raptors versus old raptors, we can come up with a hypothesis for whether they hunted in groups," Frederickson said.
To do this, the scientists considered the chemistry of teeth from the raptor Deinonychus, which lived in North America during the Cretaceous Period about 115 to 108 million years ago.


"Stable isotopes of carbon and oxygen were used to get an idea of diet and water sources for these animals. We also looked at a crocodilian and an herbivorous dinosaur from the same geologic formation," he said.


The scientists found that the Cretaceous crocodilians, like modern species, show a difference in diet between the smallest and largest teeth, indicating a distinct transition in diet as they grew.

"This is what we would expect for an animal where the parents do not provide food for their young," Frederickson said. "We also see the same pattern in the raptors, where the smallest teeth and the large teeth do not have the same average carbon isotope values, indicating they were eating different foods. This means the young were not being fed by the adults, which is why we believe Jurassic Park was wrong about raptor behavior."

Frederickson added that the method used in this study to analyze carbon in teeth could be applied to see whether other extinct creatures may have hunted in packs.

DDT, other banned pesticides found in Detroit-area black women: BU study

Over half of a cohort of 23-35-year-old black women from Detroit had detectable levels of organochlorine pesticides in their blood, possibly from tobacco, alcohol, and water.

BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Over half of a cohort of 23-35-year-old black women from Detroit had detectable levels of organochlorine pesticides in their blood, possibly from tobacco, alcohol, and water.

A new Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) study published in the journal Environmental Research finds detectable levels of DDE (what DDT becomes when metabolized in the body) and other banned organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) in the blood of over 60 percent of a cohort of black women of reproductive age in the Detroit area, with higher levels in women who smoked cigarettes daily, drank more alcohol, and drank more water.

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and other OCPs were banned decades ago. But they can dissolve into a person's body fat, and remain there for years, causing hormonal and metabolic issues, and even brain development issues from in-utero exposure.

"If cigarettes, alcohol, and drinking water are in fact exposing black women to pesticides, this matters!" says study lead author Dr. Olivia Orta, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Epidemiology at BUSPH.

"The sources that we identified as potential OCP correlates should be tested for pesticide contamination," she says, "especially drinking water."

However, Orta cautions that the study was not able to distinguish between bottled and tap water, or test participants' tap water for these chemicals, so "we do not want to suggest that black women in Detroit reduce their water consumption in response to our study findings," she says. Instead, the study points to the importance of water monitoring--which has been notoriously inequitable, as seen in nearby Flint--and the need to test for OCPs in tap and bottled water as well as in alcohol and tobacco, she says.

Orta and colleagues used data from the Study of Environment, Lifestyle, and Fibroids (SELF), a prospective cohort study of reproductive-age black women recruited from the Detroit metropolitan area from 2010 to 2012. For the current study, the researchers analyzed blood samples from 742 fibroid-free participants, given when they entered the study, and their responses to questionnaires about health histories, demographics, behaviors, and other factors.

The researchers found detectable levels of four OCPs--dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDE), hexachlorobenzene (HCB), oxychlordane, and trans-nonachlor--in over 60 percent of the participants.

Adjusting for the other factors, the researchers found that heavy alcohol use was associated with 7-9 percent higher concentrations of DDE, oxychlordane, and trans-nonachlor in the women's blood plasma. Current smoking was associated with 10-19 percent higher concentrations of all four OCPs, and was highest for women who smoked ten or more cigarettes a day. Women who drank five or more glasses of water per day had 8-15 percent higher concentrations of all four OCPs, but especially trans-nonachlor, compared to women who drank two glasses of water or fewer per day.

The researchers also found evidence of exposure when the women were infants in the late 1970s and early-to-mid 1980s, the period when these pesticides were being banned. Study participants who were older had higher OCP concentrations, with each five-year age increment associated with 24 percent higher oxychlordane and 26 percent higher trans-nonachlor concentrations. Women who had been breastfed had 15 percent higher concentrations of DDE, 14 percent higher oxychlordane, and 15 percent higher trans-nonachlor than women who hadn't been breastfed.

###

About the Boston University School of Public Health

Founded in 1976, the Boston University School of Public Health is one of the top five ranked private schools of public health in the world. It offers master's- and doctoral-level education in public health. The faculty in six departments conduct policy-changing public health research around the world, with the mission of improving the health of populations--especially the disadvantaged, underserved, and vulnerable--locally and globally.

SEE  RACHEL CARSON SILENT SPRING 1958