Infectious-disease doctors ask government to explain how it decides who gets Gilead’s remdesivir

Published: May 7, 2020 By Jaimy Lee
Emergency-use authorization for remdesivir states that distribution of the drug will be controlled by the U.S. government, and several organizations have raised questions about access to the drug

Getty Images

Within a week of the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization of remdesivir as a COVID-19 treatment, clinicians are pushing the Trump administration to clarify how it is selecting which hospitals get access to the drug.

Shares of Gilead Sciences Inc. GILD, +0.18%, which developed remdesivir, edged up 0.2% in Thursday trades and are up 19.4% in 2020.

The emergency-use authorization, or EUA, for remdesivir, which came out on Friday, states that distribution of the drug will be controlled by the U.S. government, which will then allocate the medication to hospitals and other health-care providers. However, several organizations have raised questions this week about access to the treatment, which is one of two types of COVID-19 drugs to receive an EUA since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Read:FDA grants Gilead’s remdesivir emergency authorization for COVID-19 treatment
AmerisourceBergen Corp. ABC, +3.78%, the distributor for remdesivir, said in a statement on Tuesday that the administration is coordinating “the distribution of remdesivir to hospitals in regions most heavily impacted by COVID-19,” and that it and Gilead aren’t involved in the distribution decision-making process.

In a letter addressed to Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday, the HIV Medicine Association and the Infectious Diseases Society of America said: “The plan for distributing remdesivir should be transparent and should be based on state and regional COVID-19 case data and hospitalization rates.”


A similar request for insight into the allocation process was made by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists in a letter on Thursday. The organization requested that the administration share details about how the donated doses of the drug are being distributed so hospitals can better plan if they need to purchase remdesivir when it becomes available commercially. “The process for hospitals to access the drug remains unclear,” the ASHP CEO Paul W. Abramowitz wrote.

A physician associated with Boston Medical Center tweeted that the hospital hasn’t received any doses of remdesivir. “We have the second highest absolute case count and highest per bed in Boston,” Dr. Benjamin Linas, an epidemiologist at the safety-net hospital, tweeted on Wednesday. “We also had no access to early trials. Today, the family of a dying patient asked me why we do not have RDV. What am I supposed to say?”

Doctors at other hospitals around the U.S. have raised similar concerns, according to Stat News, and a spokesman for the American Hospital Association said the organization is “waiting to hear more” from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA.

The development and distribution of remdesivir doesn’t follow the same model as drugs launched pre-pandemic. The therapy didn’t go through the FDA approval process; instead it received an EUA, and only the top-line data from a Phase 3 clinical trial conducted by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has been shared publicly and used to inform the EUA. Gilead has said that additional data will be made available in a study that will be peer reviewed and published in a medical journal.


In addition, Gilead has said that through June it will donate 1.5 million doses of the drug, which can be used for 140,000 patients on a 10-day regimen.

When the FDA granted an EUA to hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients, it prompted a run on the products that led some states, including New York, to put requirements around who could get a prescription for hydroxychloroquine as patients who take the medicines for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis found themselves without access to their prescriptions.

Given the lack of proven treatments for a disease that has killed more than 266,000 people worldwide, since the novel coronavirus was detected last year, it’s not surprising that access to remdesivir has become a concern for those on the front line of caring for severely ill COVID-19 patients. On Tuesday, Gilead announced it was in talks with other drug makers to produce remdesivir outside of the U.S.

“We intend to allocate our available supply based on guiding principles that aim to direct global access for appropriate patients in urgent need of treatment,” CEO Daniel O’Day told investors last week, according to a FactSet transcript of the earnings call.

Separately, Gilead announced Thursday that it received approval for remdesivir under the brand name Vuklury in Japan as a treatment for severely ill COVID-19 patients there.

Since the start of the year, as Gilead’s stock has surged more than 19%, shares of AmerisourceBergen have gained 4.9% and the S&P 500 SPX, +1.15% is down 11.8%.

Face masks becoming a culture-war front as Trump says his wearing one would ‘send the wrong message’

Published: May 7, 2020 By Associated Press

After criticism of his decision not to wear a face mask during an April 28 visit to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.,Vice President Mike Pence did wear one two days later as he toured a General Motors/Ventec ventilator production facility Kokomo, Ind., with Chris Kiple of Ventec and GM CEO and Chairman Mary Barra. Associated Press

PENCE WEARS A MASK IN AN AUTO FACTORY 

AFTER REFUSING TO WEAR ONE IN A HOSPITAL

VISITING A RECOVERING PATIENT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The decision to wear a mask in public is becoming a political statement — a moment to pick sides in a brewing culture war over containing the coronavirus.

While not yet as loaded as a “Make America Great Again” hat, the mask is increasingly a visual shorthand for the debate pitting those willing to follow health officials’ guidance and cover their faces against those who feel it violates their freedom or buys into a threat they think is overblown.


Trump is known to be especially cognizant of his appearance on television and has also told confidants that he fears he would look ridiculous in a mask and the image would appear in negative ads.

That resistance is fueled by some of the same people who object to other virus restrictions. The push-back has been stoked by President Donald Trump — he didn’t wear a mask during an appearance at an Arizona facility making them — and some other Republicans, who have flouted rules and questioned the value of masks. It’s a development that has worried experts as Americans are increasingly returning to public spaces.

“There’s such a strong culture of individualism that, even if it’s going to help protect them, people don’t want the government telling them what to do,” said Linsey Marr, a Virginia Tech engineering professor with experience in airborne transmission of viruses.


Inconclusive science and shifting federal guidance have muddied the political debate. Health officials initially said wearing masks was unnecessary, especially amid a shortage of protective materials. But last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began recommending wearing cloth masks in crowded public situations to prevent transmitting the virus.

Whether Americans are embracing the change may depend on their political party. While most other protective measures like social distancing get broad bipartisan support, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say they’re wearing a mask when leaving home, 76% to 59%, according to a recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.



‘You’d think, as the president of the United States, you would have the confidence to honor the guidance he’s giving the country.’— House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, speaking of President Donald Trump

The split is clear across several demographics that lean Democratic. People with college degrees are more likely than those without to wear masks when leaving home, 78% to 63%. African Americans are more likely than either white people or Hispanic Americans to say they’re wearing masks outside the home, 83% to 64% and 67%, respectively.

The notable exception is among older people, a group particularly vulnerable to serious illness from the virus. Some 79% of those age 60 and over were doing so compared with 63% of those younger.

“Who knows what the truth is on masks?” asked Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who, unlike some of his colleagues, went without a mask in the Senate. Paul, himself an ophthalmologist, already contracted the virus and believes he is no longer contagious.

That was a long way from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s moral argument for masks days earlier. “How people cannot wear masks — that to me is even disrespectful,” Cuomo said. “You put so many people at risk because you did not want to wear a mask?”


Effectiveness aside, politicians of both parties are clued into the powerful symbolism of the mask, and many Americans who support him likely take their cues from the president.

Trump was barefaced when he spoke to masked journalists, workers and Secret Service agents at the Arizona factory Tuesday. He later said he briefly wore a mask backstage but took it off because facility personnel told him he didn’t need it.

But Trump has been mask averse for weeks. Within minutes of the CDC’s announcing its updated mask recommendations, he said, “I don’t think that I’m going to be doing it.”

Trump has told advisers that he believes wearing one would “send the wrong message,” according to one administration and two campaign officials not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations. The president said doing so would make it seem like he is preoccupied with health instead of focused on reopening the nation’s economy — which his aides believe is the key to his reelection chances.

Moreover, Trump, who is known to be especially cognizant of his appearance on television, has also told confidants that he fears he would look ridiculous in a mask and the image would appear in negative ads.

“It’s a vanity thing, I guess, with him,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of Trump on MSNBC. “You’d think, as the president of the United States, you would have the confidence to honor the guidance he’s giving the country.”

That’s left those around him unsure of how to proceed. White House aides say the president hasn’t told them not to wear them, but few do. Some Republican allies have asked Trump’s campaign how it would be viewed by the White House if they were spotted wearing a mask.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Thursday that he himself wears a mask when near others but said of Trump, “The president has his doctor around him all the time” and makes “sure what he does is correct.”


Republican allies have asked Trump’s campaign how it would be viewed by the White House if they were spotted wearing a mask.

Meanwhile, Trump’s re-election campaign has ordered red Trump-branded masks and is considering giving them away at events or in return for donations. But some advisers are concerned the president will eventually sour on the idea.

That uncertainty was on display last week, when Vice President Mike Pence went maskless at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. He later said he should have worn one and did during a subsequent trip to a ventilator plant in Indiana. Pence didn’t wear a mask Thursday while dropping off supplies at a rehabilitation center outside Washington — but he also didn’t go in.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden says he wears a mask when interacting with the Secret Service. But dilemmas for politicians and other Americans are going to increase as parts of the country ease stay-at-home orders. Such tensions have already flared in Michigan, where a dispute over a mask turned deadly.

One of the earliest communities to require masks in public was Laredo, Texas. A $1,000 noncompliance fine was negated by an order from the governor, but Mayor Pete Saenz said his community is still asking citizens to comply so hospitals aren’t overtaxed with new cases.

“We don’t want to violate anyone’s civil liberties,” Saenz said. But “we can’t help you, if it’s beyond our medical capacity, whether you exercise your civil liberties or not.”

Giant ‘murder hornet’ is in U.S. to stay, will eventually reach East Coast, experts say

Are they dangerous? ‘Absolutely. Oh, my God,’ ex-NYPD beekeeper says


The Asian giant hornet, aka "murder hornet," has made it to the U.S. Washington Department of Agriculture

The New York Post 

Published: May 3, 2020 By Reuven Fenton and Kate Sheehy

It’s not a matter of if but when the “murder hornet’’ will hit the East Coast, experts warned The Post on Sunday.

The deadly meat-eating Asian giant hornet, which has been known to kill up to 50 people a year in Japan, recently surfaced for the first time in the US in Washington state — and New York City beekeepers say there is no way it won’t make its way here, too.

“I told the NYPD back in 2012 … ‘Your problem is not the bees. This [the murder hornet] is your problem,’” recalled retired Police Department beekeeper Anthony “Tony Bees” Planakis.

“I showed them a picture of it, and they go, ‘What the hell is that?’ ” Planakis said. “I go, ‘That is an Asian hornet. My suit is useless against that thing.’”


Asked if the monstrous insects are dangerous to humans, Planakis added, “Absolutely. Oh, my God.”

“Have you seen the mandibles on these things?”

The hornets, the world’s largest at more than 2 inches long, were first spotted in Washington in December, likely having made their way to the U.S. aboard a ship from China, experts said.

Planakis said he expects them to arrive East at least in the next two to three years.

He said that in terms of eventual local infiltration, city green spaces in the outer boroughs are the most likely places.

“All it takes is a few hornets, and you’ve got a colony,” Planakis said.

Spots such as the Bronx Botanical Gardens are ideal because there’s plenty of open space and lots of food, he said. Parks in general would be attractive to the giant hornets, although you won’t find them in very urban spots such as Manhattan because they tend to nest in the ground or burrow in rotted wood, he said.

Manhattan beekeeper Andrew Cote said it “could be years before they make a foothold [on the East Coast] — or they could end up in the back of somebody’s truck and be here in four days.”

Either way, the carnivorous insect “is here to stay” in the U.S., he said.

“We can expect them to be everywhere on the continent in time. … It’s a done deal,” Cote said. “There’s no way to contain it to the West Coast.”

He said he saw the giant hornets on a trip to China in 2017, where “local beekeepers there used small bats that looked like miniature cricket bats” to hit the hornets mid-air.

“It sounded like someone hitting a rock. The hornets are extraordinarily aggressive,” Cote said.

“The prospect of my semi-defenseless bees having to confront them sends chills up my spine.”

The killer hornet “can decimate a honey-bee colony because it needs to build up protein for its own colony, so it decapitates and consumes part of the honey bee,” Cote said.

Planakis said the hornet’s stinger “is approximately a quarter of an inch,” compared to the one-sixteenth of an inch for a honey bee.

“It’s a little bit bigger than a cicada,” he said of the hornet. “You’ll see the tip of the stinger, but it’s not until it actually extends the stinger out that it goes into your skin. And they’re meat-eaters. … They’ll go after birds, small sparrows if they have to.”

Planakis said that inside their venom “is a pheromone, which is like a magnet to other hornets.”

“So you can get swarmed just from getting stung by one.”

“The worst thing anyone can do with these things is kill them,” he said. “That scent is going to be airborne, and the rest of the hive will come.

“Getting stung is extremely painful, and anyone who is allergic, heaven help them,” he added. “And they don’t sting you one time. They have the ability to sting you multiple times. Honeybees can only sting you once, and then they die.”

Still, “you have to understand, out in the wild, unless you go up to their hive, they’re not going to sit there and just seek you out,” the beekeeper said. “There’s got to be a reason for them to come at you.”

Cote said bees can fight back by swarming a hornet if it gets in their hive and suffocating it.

Meanwhile, beekeepers can make the entrance to their beehives smaller to limit the number of hornets getting in at a time, or place “a roach motel for hornets’’ outside of hives that consists of a cage with meat in it to attract, and then trap, the carnivorous insects, said Cote, author of the upcoming book “Honey and Venom: Confessions of an Urban Beekeeper.”

Planakis said that in China, they have hornet hunters.

“There’s a tracker, and what they do is they set up a water source, and they wait there, like a deer hunter would,” he said.

“As soon as they see the hornet coming to the water source to drink, the guy jumps out with a net, and he grabs it. Then, ever so carefully, he ties a strong on it and lets it go.

“There’s a spotter watching it now with binoculars, and he watches this thing as it flies, because obviously it’s going to fly back to the nest. When they find it, they mark where the nest is.

“And at night they come back and with a flame-thrower, pretty much go at it, just follow them back to their base camp, and when they least expect it, boom, go after them.”

This report originally appeared on NYPost.com.

Trump campaign slammed for ‘Death Star’ tweet: ‘A little too on the nose’

Published: May 7, 2020 By Shawn Langlois

666
‘Laugh all you want, we will take the win!’ — Brad Parscale

MarketWatch photo illustration/Getty Images, Everett Collection

President Trump reportedly erupted at his top political advisers when they presented him with polling data last month that showed he was losing support in some of the battleground states.

“I am not f—-ing losing to Joe Biden,” he repeated in a series of heated conference calls, according to five sources cited by the Associated Press last week.

Among those on the receiving end of his rant: campaign manager Brad Parscale, the bearer of bad news who reportedly took the brunt of it. Parscale has apparently been under fire lately because Trump and some of his aides, according to the AP, believe he’s been using association with the president to seek personal publicity and enrich himself in the process.

Regardless of whatever infighting there may be in the White House, Parscale is still on the front lines of Trump’s campaign, and that means firing off tweets like this:

The Atlantic described “Death Star” as a “disinformation campaign” that is “heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives.”  

(LONG READ WELL WORTH IT, BUT BEHIND PAYWALL IF YOU HAVE USED UP YOUR MONTHLY QUOTA SEE EXCERPT BELOW)

Critics might also say “you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

Aside from the perhaps poor taste, timing-wise, the internet was there to remind Parscale and the bunch at campaign headquarters of what ultimately happened in the original story and pushed “Death Star” to the top of Twitter’s TWTR, +3.93% trending list in the process:

Then again, Parscale’s defenders offered a different take either way, Parscale seems pleased with how it all played out

EXCERPT FROM ATLANTIC ARTICLE DEATHSTAR

DISINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
In his book This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher at the London School of Economics, writes about a young Filipino political consultant he calls “P.” In college, P had studied the “Little Albert experiment,” in which scientists conditioned a young child to fear furry animals by exposing him to loud noises every time he encountered a white lab rat. The experiment gave P an idea. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enough—about 100,000 members—he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.

Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. (Duterte once boasted that, as mayor of Davao City, he rode through the streets on his motorcycle and personally executed drug dealers.) P’s experiment was one plank in a larger “disinformation architecture”—which also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of former call centers—that experts say aided Duterte’s rise to power. Since assuming office in 2016, Duterte has reportedly ramped up these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings.

The campaign in the Philippines was emblematic of an emerging propaganda playbook, one that uses new tools for the age-old ends of autocracy. The Kremlin has long been an innovator in this area. (A 2011 manual for Russian civil servants favorably compared their methods of disinformation to “an invisible radiation” that takes effect while “the population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon.”) But with the technological advances of the past decade, and the global proliferation of smartphones, governments around the world have found success deploying Kremlin-honed techniques against their own people.

Read: Peter Pomerantsev on Russia and the menace of unreality

In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminology—muddy the waters; alternative facts—but they’re building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.

Central to that effort is the campaign’s use of micro-targeting—the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.

Parscale didn’t invent this practice—Barack Obama’s campaign famously used it in 2012, and Clinton’s followed suit. But Trump’s effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example, Trump’s team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, “Hillary Thinks African-Americans Are Super Predators.” An unnamed campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was one of “three major voter suppression operations underway.” (The other two targeted young women and white liberals.)

The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.

The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources—without users’ consent—Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed “psychographic profiles” for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: “Did you feel like you had to say that?”

Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that “with the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. “Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,” Wylie said. “We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.”

Cambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual “honey traps” on behalf of clients. (The firm denied that it actually used such tactics.) Since then, some political scientists have questioned how much effect its “psychographic” targeting really had. But Wylie—who spoke with me from London, where he now works for H&M, as a fashion-trend forecaster—said the firm’s work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come.




“What happens if North Korea or Iran picks up where Cambridge Analytica left off?” he said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this year’s election. “There are countless hostile states that have more than enough capacity to quickly replicate what we were able to do … and make it much more sophisticated.” These efforts may not come only from abroad: A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press, is working with the Trump campaign. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.)

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University, the CEO argued that his company shouldn’t be responsible for arbitrating political speech, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs.

#SAVEUSPS 

Republican donor, fundraiser Louis DeJoy named postmaster general

Trump ally takes over as president ups his attacks on Postal Service

Louis DeJoy speaks at Elon University in North Carolina in 2017.

 Elon University via APPublished: May 7, 2020 Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C. — A Republican fundraiser and prolific political donor from North Carolina will be the next postmaster general.

Louis DeJoy of Greensboro, a close ally of President Donald Trump, was the unanimous pick of the U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors, which made the announcement.

He’s expected to begin the job June 15 and succeeds Megan Brennan. She became the first female postmaster general in 2015 and announced her retirement plans in October.

DeJoy, a retired logistics company CEO, had been heavily involved in fundraising for the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, scheduled to begin in August.

“Having worked closely with the Postal Service for many years, I have a great appreciation for this institution and the dedicated workers who faithfully execute its mission,” DeJoy said in a news release late Wednesday. The board said it conducted a nationwide search that began with reviewing records of over 200 candidates.

Trump mentioned DeJoy by name at recent North Carolina campaign rallies. DeJoy is “a friend of mine who has been with us from the beginning,” Trump said at a event in Fayetteville in September.

DeJoy’s wife, Aldona Wos, is Trump’s nominee to become the next U.S. ambassador to Canada. Wos, a retired physician, was the state Health and Human Services secretary for then-Gov. Pat McCrory.

DeJoy’s selection comes as the Postal Service, with over 600,000 workers, has had many years of net losses caused in part by declining first-class mail volume. It’s now hurting more with revenue losses due to COVID-19.

The USPS received a $10 billion loan under the government’s pandemic rescue package, but Democratic lawmakers are seeking more funds for the agency.

Trump, however, has threatened to veto anything that helps the post office. The president also has complained about the below-market rates charged by the postal service to Amazon AMZN, +0.69% and other companies to deliver their packages. Trump has threatened blocking the $10 billion loan unless those rates are raised dramatically.

In a news release Thursday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said under DeJoy’s leadership, “this historic and cherished American institution will experience a bright future.”

Trump ally and Republican fundraiser named new head of the Postal Service

Louis DeJoy, a North Carolina businessman who has made large donations to President Trump and the Republican National Committee, will serve as the new postmaster general, the Postal Service's Board of Governors confirmed with The Washington Post on Wednesday. This puts a Trump ally in charge of an agency that he has been criticizing for years. Trump has accused the Postal Service of not charging Amazon and other companies enough to deliver their packages, calling the agency "a joke" last month and saying it needs to quadruple its shipping prices. The Postal Service said it charges enough, and has to keep its prices competitive. DeJoy, who will start on June 15, is the Republican National Convention's finance chairman. Since 2016, he has given more than $2 million to Republican causes and the Trump campaign, Federal Election Commission records show.

Source: The Washington Post

FTC warns company to stop claiming that listening to certain musical frequencies will ‘weaken’ the coronavirus

Published: May 7, 2020 By  Elisabeth Buchwald

The FTC has sent more than 100 warning letters demanding that companies and individuals remove allegedly false marketing claims about preventing, curing or treating coronavirus


The FTC sent out 45 letters to companies making claims they can stop or treat COVID-19. Getty Images/iStockphoto

A company that claimed listening to certain musical frequencies would “weaken” the coronavirus is one of 45 businesses that the Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to Thursday, demanding that the companies stop making allegedly false claims about coronavirus treatments.

Musical Medicine, a musical therapy company, claimed that listening to the “bare frequencies” on its “Coronavirus Program CD” for 25 minutes would “assist in boosting your immune system and weakening the virus,” the FTC said in a warning letter to the company.

Musical Medicine’s Coronavirus Program CD was still listed for sale on the company’s website as of Thursday afternoon, at $5.99 for a hard copy or $1.99 for a digital version. (Musical Medicine did not respond to MarketWatch’s request for a comment.)

In addition to Musical Medicine, 44 marketers received warnings from the FTC on Thursday telling them to stop making unsubstantiated claims that their products and therapies can effectively prevent or treat COVID-19.

The companies included A Center for Natural Healing, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based Chinese medicine therapy practice, which the FTC ordered to remove claims such as “Western treatments have no actual benefit in reducing viral replication within the body; a role that Chinese herbal medicine has proven to provide to a great extent.”

The company has since removed those types of claims from its website. However there is still a “Coronvirus Prevention Plan” post on its site, which urges consumers to take “regular supplements to boost your immunity and support respiratory health, including specific Chinese Herbal formulas, Vitamin C, Zinc and probiotics.” (A Center for Natural Healing did not respond to MarketWatch’s request for comment.)

The FTC said it has sent out four sets of warning letters to companies urging them to stop making allegedly “deceptive and scientifically unsupported” claims about products they’re marketing as coronavirus treatments.

The letters noted that if the companies don’t stop making the allegedly false claims, the FTC “may seek a federal court injunction and an order requiring money to be refunded to consumers.”

In early March, the FTC and the Food and Drug Administration began by reaching out to seven companies to stop selling allegedly “fraudulent” products in warning letters, including one to the televangelist Jim Bakker.

“There already is a high level of anxiety over the potential spread of coronavirus,” said FTC Chairman Joe Simons on March 9. “What we don’t need in this situation are companies preying on consumers by promoting products with fraudulent prevention and treatment claims. These warning letters are just the first step. We’re prepared to take enforcement actions against companies that continue to market this type of scam.”

In total the FTC says it has sent out more than 100 warning letters to individuals and companies that allegedly make false claims.

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We explain how cutting-edge scholarship about past climate change can shed new light on issues relevant to present and future warming. While we love climate science in all its forms, we emphasize climate change scholarship in disciplines other than the sciences, including: history, economics, political science, and law. We also feature research that links past, present, and future climate change to the human experience.

Have past climate changes caused some societies to collapse, while others succeeded? Did past societies perceive climate changes, and to what effect? Is climate change responsible for present-day conflict? Can we trust computer simulations of future climate change, and why? This site explores all of these questions, and many more.

We were founded in April 2010, and we started as a research blog.

Dr. Dagomar Degroot, now a professor of environmental history at Georgetown University, was in the middle of a months-long archival trip to Amsterdam. He founded HistoricalClimatology.com to share his progress through seventeenth-century ship logbooks: a hot new source for scholars of past climate change. By the end of 2010, HistoricalClimatology.com was on course to receive nearly 10,000 unique hits for the year, many from interested lay people. The site had tapped into a popular desire for unconventional, interdisciplinary climate research that could shed new light on global warming.

​Today, Historical Climatology.com provides bimonthly feature articles about climate change research, written by some of the most dynamic climate scholars. It offers monthly updates on the most interesting climate change web articles, and comprehensive quarterly updates on scholarship about past climate changes. It presents interviews with key newsmakers in climate change research, policymaking, and journalism, as well as updates on projects by leading interdisciplinary scholars. It provides extensive resources that let our visitors explore past climate changes for themselves. 

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A Conversation with Joseph Manning: Climate Change in the Ancient World
4/30/2020


In the 14th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview Joseph Manning, the William K. and Marilyn Milton Simpson Professor of Classics at Yale University.

​Professor Manning is a leading expert on the law, politics, and economy of the ancient world, particularly the Hellenistic Period (between 330 and 30 BCE). In recent years, he's led efforts to uncover a link between volcanic eruptions, climatic shocks, and rebellions in ancient Egypt: efforts that inspired headlines in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and elsewhere. Professor Manning explains how his team uncovered the influence of climate change in Egyptian history, and what the ancient world has to tell us about our uncertain future.
To listen to this episode, click here to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes. If you don't have iTunes, you can still listen by clicking here.

A Conversation with Bathsheba Demuth: Histories of the Changing Arctic
10/22/2019

In the tenth episode of Climate History, our podcast, Emma Moesswilde and Dagomar Degroot interview Bathsheba Demuth, assistant professor of environmental history at Brown University. Professor Demuth specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interests in northern environments and cultures began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon, where she spent several years training sled dogs. In the years since, she has visited and lived in Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. She has a BA and MA from Brown University, and an MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in publications from the American Historical Review to the New Yorker. Her first book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait is now out with Norton, and has received rave reviews in both popular and academic publications. 

Professor Demuth is a returning guest. In our first interview, she introduced the major themes of what was then her doctoral dissertation, and is now ​Floating Coast. In this episode, she describes how she wrote the book, and what we can learn from it. She details her experiences in the Arctic, her deep engagement with the community of Old Crow, her thinking about non-human actors in historical stories, her success in writing for the general public, and her views on what the past can reveal about the future of the rapidly-warming Arctic.​

To listen to this episode, click here to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes. If you don't have iTunes, you can still listen by clicking here.

The Nuclear Renaissance in a World of Nuclear Apartheid

3/27/2019

Prof. ​Toshihiro Higuchi, Georgetown University.

This is the fifth post in a collaborative series titled “Environmental Historians Debate: Can Nuclear Power Solve Climate Change?” hosted by the Network in Canadian History & Environment, the Climate History Network, and ActiveHistory.ca.


Nuclear power is back, riding on the growing fears of catastrophic climate change that lurks around the corner. The looming climate crisis has rekindled heated debate over the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear power. However, advocates and opponents alike tend to overlook or downplay a unique risk that sets atomic energy apart from all other energy sources: proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Despite the lasting tragedy of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the elusive goal of nuclear safety, and the stalled progress in radioactive waste disposal, nuclear power has once again captivated the world as a low-carbon energy solution. According to the latest IPCC report, released in October 2018, most of the 89 available pathways to limiting warming to 1.5 oC above pre-industrial levels see a larger role for nuclear power in the future. The median values in global nuclear electricity generation across these scenarios increase from 10.84 to 22.64 exajoule by 2050.

The Cold War Constraints on the Nuclear Energy Option

3/13/2019

Dr. Robynne Mellor.

This is the third post in a collaborative series titled “Environmental Historians Debate: Can Nuclear Power Solve Climate Change?” hosted by the Network in Canadian History & Environment, the Climate History Network, and ActiveHistory.ca.

https://www.historicalclimatology.com/features/march-13th-2019

Mt. Taylor Mine in New Mexico. Author's photograph.


Shortly before uranium miner Gus Frobel died of lung cancer in 1978 he said, “This is reality. If we want energy, coal or uranium, lives will be lost. And I think society wants energy and they will find men willing to go into coal or uranium.”[1]
​
Frobel understood that economists and governments had crunched the numbers. They had calculated how many miners died comparatively in coal and uranium production to produce a given amount of energy. They had rationally worked out that giving up Frobel’s life was worth it.

I have come across these tables in archives. They lay out in columns the number of deaths to expect per megawatt year of energy produced. They weigh the ratios of deaths in uranium mines to those in coal mines. They coolly walk through their methodology in making these conclusions.

These numbers will show you that fewer people died in uranium mines to produce a certain amount of energy. But the numbers do not include the pages and pages I have read of people remembering spouses, parents, siblings, children who died in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and so on. The numbers do not include details of these miners’ hobbies or snippets of their poetry; they don’t reveal the particulars of miners’ slow and painful wasting away. Miners are much easier to read about as death statistics.

The erasure of these people trickles into debates about nuclear energy today. Any argument that highlights the dangers of coal mining but ignores entirely the plight of uranium miners is based on this reasoning. Rationalizations that say coal is more risky are based on the reduction of lives to ratios.

If we are going to make these arguments, we must first acknowledge entirely what we are doing. We must be okay with what Gus Frobel said and meant: that someone is going to have to assume the risk of energy production and we are just choosing whom. We must realize that it is no accident that these Cold War calculations permeate our discourse today, and what that means moving forward.

Financial Crises in Eighteenth-Century England

Julian Hoppit

The Economic History Review

New Series, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Feb., 1986), pp. 39-58

Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Economic History Society

DOI: 10.2307/2596100

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2596100

Page Count: 20

Abstract

Some confusion surrounds the dating and importance of financial crises in eighteenth-century England. By looking at the pattern of bankruptcy much of this confusion can be cleared up. Crises in public finance created few bankrupts and affected the economy less than did crises in private finance. The novelty, speculation and political uncertainty that created crises in public finance all became less significant factors in the second half of the century. But in the last third of the century the more intensive and extensive use of trade credit, along with stronger speculative tendencies encouraged by economic growth, were powerful forces creating crises of private finance. The pattern of financial crises demonstrates changing uses of finance and changing in the strength of financial ties within the domestic economy during early industrialization. It also shows how erratic and uncertain the growth process seemed at the time.

The Economic History Review © 1986 Economic History Society

18TH CENTURY SCIENCE

Discourse on Atmospheric Phenomena Originating from Electrical
Force by Mikhail Lomonosov 

Mikhail Vasil’evich Lomonosov Russian contemporary of Benjamin Franklin who published his research in Advance of Franklin as documented in the Russian press and before Franklin was published in Russian 

Oratio De Meteoris Vi Electrica Ortis, Autore Michaele Lomonosow Habita

EXCERPT FROM FULL DOCUMENT PDF
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1709/1709.08847.pdf

Слово о явлениях воздушных, от электрической силы происходящих,

предложенное от Михайла Ломоносова

G.Richmann regularly reported his results in the Vedomosti – on May 7 (No. 37), on May 11 (No. 38), on May 18 (No. 40) and on July 13 (No. 56), 1753 – see Fig.1b. His communicated on efficiency of lightning protection indicate that sharp-end metal rods work best, and that dielectrics (glass) are good to hold the metal rod. Lomonosov also reported in the newspaper of June 4 (No. 45) of 1753 and was the first to establish that "power of the electricity in the air may extend beyond the area of thundering or be present even without a thunder" - that is, to detect an electric field in the atmosphere. In April 1753, the two studied whether canon shorts could affect the atmospheric electricity during the Imperial Court’s celebration fireworks which employed up to 58 canons – and seemingly found no significant effect. Fig. 2: The map (left) and photo of the Vasilievsky Island in St.Petersburg, indicating the paths of Lomonosov and Richmann from the Academy (Kunstkamera) to their homes on the 2nd Liniya and on the 5 th Liniya, respectively, on the infamous afternoon of July 26, 2753. On July 26 (o.s.), 1753, Academician Georg Richmann was tragically killed by a lightning strike while conducting the experiments – see, e.g., [3, 4] for more details. On that day, from 10am to about noon, both Richmann and Lomonosov attended Academy’s meeting at what is now Kunstkamera. Around noon they have noted a big thunderstorm cloud coming and left for their home labs: Richmann to the 5th Liniya (about 16 min from the Academy) and Lomonosov to the 2nd Liniya (24 min). Both observed strong electricity activity out of the cloud in their setups, both experienced minor shocks prior to the disaster, Lomonosov was eventually distracted by his wife (presumably, asking him to take long awaiting lunch). Richmann’s death made a great impression in the academic world as in St. Petersburg, and abroad. Detailed reports about the accident were published in the Vedomosti on August 3, 1753, as well as in some foreign periodicals, for example, in the Philosophical Transactions [20, 21], in the Memoires de l'Academie Royale de Sciences (Paris) and others. The description of the tragic death of his friend was given by Lomonosov in a well-known letter to his patron, Count Ivan Shuvalov ([8], vol.X, pp.484-485) written on the same day while still being under the impression of the tragedy: “…What I am now writing to your Excellency – needs to be considered as a miracle, for the fact that the deads do not write. I do not know yet, or at least I doubt whether I am alive or dead. I see that Mr. Richmann was killed by thunder under the exact same circumstances in which I was at the same time…. Meanwhile, Mr. Richmann died a beautiful death, performing the duties of his profession. His memory will never get silent." In the time followed, Lomonosov did a lot to arrange pension for Richmann’s widow and children and effectively cared for their well-being. 34 Shortly thereafter, on August 5, 1753, an Adviser to the Chancellery of the Academia I.Schumacher wrote to the President, who was then in Moscow, on the desirability, in his opinion, to cancel the September 6 public meeting of the Academy. Accordingly, Razumovsky canceled the meeting on September 2, i.e., just four days prior to it. Lomonosov, naturally, could not reconcile himself with the cancellation of the public meeting and pulled all possible strings and insistently sought revision of the President's decision. After much trouble, Lomonosov managed to succeed and on October 18 , the Conference of the Academy had announced a new presidential decree on the organization of the public meeting on the 25th of November with following motivation ".... so that Mr. Lomonosov would not be late with his new inventions among the scientists in Europe and by that his work on electric experiments up to this time would not in vane”. Acdemician A. Grischow was appointed an official opponent of Lomonosov presentation at a public meeting. Lomonosov first wrote the Latin version of the speech, sent it to his fellow Academicians and then himself translated it into Russian. Members of the Academic Conference A.Grischow, N.Popov and I.Braun submitted their doubts and objections on individual particular moments of Lomonosov's speech – all of which Lomonosov addressed to the Conference’s satisfaction and the approval of the publication was given on November 3. On November 16, the Conference also approved the text of the Grischow's reply to Lomonosov's speech. It was decided that both public presentations will be given in Russian. Finally, on November 26 (o.s.), 1753, Lomonosov read Discourse on Atmospheric Phenomena Originating from Electrical Force at the public meeting of the Academy of Sciences. Lomonosov's presentation, Grischow's response were published separately in Russian and separately in Latin. Later, an addendum to the Lomonosov's work, entitled Explanations, Appropriate to the Discourse on Atmospheric Phenomena Originating from Electrical Force was also published ([8], vol.III, pp.101-133). It should be considered as an integral part of the Lomonosov’s work as it contains descriptions of a number of new observations and experiments, executed by Lomonosov, and explanations of the figures and drawings attached to the Discourse – see Fig.1 above. In the Explanations Lomonosov also proves as unfounded the doubts Grischow, who tried to belittle originality of the Lomonosov's research in the field of atmospheric electricity and to attribute him the role of imitator of B.Franklin. Lomonosov points out that a) his “Discourse..” had been written and sent for publication before any communications of the Franklin theories reached Russia; b) his "theory about the cause of the electrical force in the air” has nothing taken from Franklin, even in the cases which look similar – like the origin of the Northern lights – their explanations are totally different, as Lomonosov had totally different approach based on the air up- and down-drafts; c) Lomonosov’s theory got initiated after observations of electrical phenomena right after major cold air downdrafts causing severe frosts – nothing that Franklin ever could observe in Philadelphia, d) Lomonosov has evaluated mathematically the phenomena of the up- and down-drafts in atmosphere; e) he interpreted many phenomena which Franklin did not even considered. 200 out of 300 copies of the Latin version of the Oratio De Meteoris Vi Electrica Ortis were sent abroad, to foreign honorary members of the Academy, universities, foreign academies and large libraries. In January-February of 1754 several responses to the Lomonosov work were received from L.Euler, G. Krafft, G. Heinsius. Euler's comments were rather positive: “… the mechanism proposed by the wittiest Lomonosov concerning the currents of that subtle matter in the clouds, should bring the greatest help to those who want to study the issue. His thoughts about lowering the upper air and about the sudden cruel frosts happening from this are excellent.” Some engravings from the Lomonosov’s paper were reprinted by William Watson in the account of G.Richmann’s death in the Philosophical Transactions [20]. 35 Lomonosov himself very much valued the Oratio De Meteoris Vi Electrica Ortis and listed it among his most important scientific accomplishments – see [8], v.10, p.398 and p.409 – as well as included it in the convolute of his 9 major publications, bound under the title Opera Academica just in twelve copies, which were sent abroad on very special occasions, such as, e.g., for consideration for election to the Bologna Academy of Sciences in 1764 [22]. The interest in the atmospheric electricity led Lomonosov to create the first model helicopter. In 1754, looking for a way to send meteorological instruments and electrometers aloft, he designed and built the first working helicopter model. It used two propellers rotating in opposite directions for torque compensation, and was powered by a clock spring. While Leonardo da Vinci famously left a sketch of an airscrew, Lomonosov actually constructed a proof of principle that managed to demonstrate significant measurable lift – see, e.g. [15]. Most, though not all, elements of the Lomonosov’s work are profoundly correct even by present day understanding of the phenomena. The basis of the Lomonosov theory is the idea of vertical air movements as the main cause of atmospheric electricity - the immersion of the cold upper strata of the atmosphere into the lower (warmer) layers causes mechanical friction of minuscular particles in the air against each other, that results in generation of atmospheric electricity. Two kinds of particles are required: those of water (vapors) capable of accumulation of the electricity, and other which are involved in production of the electricity via friction. The latter are organic compounds, which can not mix with water, “fatty substances…balls of flammable vapors… that appear in the air in a great variety from the body fumes of animals and humans”, products of combustion, burning and rotting of all kinds of organics. Electrically charged droplets are assumed to be spread throughout the entire volume of the cloud. The transfer of charges from individual “fatty” particles to droplets of water in the clouds via countless collisions leads to formation in atmosphere, in clouds of strong electric fields, which are the cause of the appearance of lightning. Today’s explanation of the atmospheric electricity is much more complex – see e.g. [23] – but it involves many features of the Lomonosov theory and the vertical air movements as the centerpiece. Water (micro) droplets and ice crystals of various sizes are known to be the most important elements in the formation of the atmospheric electricity. Famous American atmospheric scientist Bernard Vonnegut commented in [24] “…It is worth recognizing earlier perceptions of convection in cumuli. Lomonosov (1753) was aware of updrafts and downdrafts and suggested that friction between them caused the electrification of clouds. Again, convection was proposed as the source of electrical energy, when Grenet (1947) in France published a novel theory of cumulus electrification in which a charge deposited on the upper surface of the cloud by electrical conduction was carried down to lower levels by upper-level downdrafts to accumulate and cause lightning.” It is simply remarkable how close the illustrations of the evolution of the lightning clouds and cells depicted in Feynman’s Lectures on Physics – see, e.g., figures on page 9-6 of volume II [25] – resemble Lomonosov’s Fig.2. Involvement of organic or “fatty” particles was not confirmed in common lightning, but they been experimentally observed in a related phenomenon of ball-lightning [26]. On base of his original observations and measurements with Richmann’s electrometer, Lomonosov concluded existence of electric fields in quiet atmosphere, i.e., not during a thunderstorm but in a clear, cloudless weather. Lomonosov was also the first to correctly proclaim the presence of the electricity-generating particles and processes all over the entire volume of a thundercloud, while until the end of the 19th century, it was commonly believed that the clouds are charged only over the surfaces. Presentation and proof of the new concept of the atmospheric electricity take three quarters of the Discourse, the rest is dedicated to practical matters and expansion of the theory to other electrical 36 phenomena. It was very appropriate for a public meeting to discuss countermeasures to mitigate the risks of lightning strikes. Notably, all of them were not Lomonosov’s inventions, but instead were presented as kind of consensus among the experts. He listed three of them: hiding in underground facilities, especially those which have water above them (the method which is nor supported by any theory but supported by experience in Freiberg mines and in Japan, and sort of consistent with the notions of the water being an effective acceptor of electricity), the lightning rods with sharp edges and shaking the air. The latter two are presented without full certainty – “…could seemingly be successfully used”. Such an attitude toward the lightning rods probably indicates that Franklin ideas were not yet fully accepted in Russia and in the European scientific circles actively communicating with the St.Petersburg Academy. The shaking of ether by church bell ringing and cannon firing was ideologically consistent with Lomonosov’s views that “electric power” and lightning are due to vibrations of ether (illustrated in Lomonosov’s Figs. 12, 13 and 14). At the same time it is remarkable that though his joint studies with Richman in April 1753 did not significant effect of firing dozens of firework canons during the Imperial Court celebration, the method was still considered as generally acceptable. Again, that might reflect nothing but common understanding of the times. For expample, eminent Dutch physicist, inventor of the first electric capacitor (“Leyden jar”) Pieter van Musschenbroek (1692-1761) in the article on electricity for the famous French Encyclopedie (under “Tonnerre” [27]) stated that “…thunder can be disrupted and diverted by the sound of several bells or the firing of a cannon; in this way a great agitation is excited in the air, which disperses the parts of the lightning; but it is necessary to be careful not to ring when the cloud is precisely above the head, to avoid direct thunderbolt from the cloud splitting overhead.” Musschenbroek defended such “traditional ways” of preventing lightning as quite effective in several other publications [28]. Lomonosov was not the only one in mid-18 century who stated the electrical nature Northern lights (aurora borealis). What was original in his approach is generation of the electricity from the movement of ascending and descending air currents in upper atmosphere in the polar regions – similar to what he proposed for the lightning – and the assertion that they ignite shining of the ether above the atmosphere – concluded out fundamental similarity of the auroras to a gas discharge in vacuum or thin gas. While the former is not true, the latter is correct. Observing aurora radiance in St.Petersburg on October 16, 1753, Lomonosov, as described in Explanations, was able to measure its height with an remarkable accuracy for those years and found the upper edge of the lights reaching about 420 versts, or 450 kilometers. That is compared to modern values of typical lower boundary of auroras at 95-100 km, and the upper edge between 400km to 600 km, as a rule, but sometimes up to 1000-1100 km. Finally, Lomonosov briefly discusses the nature of comet tails, expresses doubts in the Newton’s hypothesis [29] and proposes his own, naturally explaining the tails by electricity generation in the comet atmosphere down- and up-drafts at the borders of the shade areas (as in the theory of lightning) and by radiance of the electricity-induced vibrations of ether far beyond the atmosphere (i.e., like in his theory of Northern lights. None of these effects are involved in modern explanations of the phenomena of comet tails. There are no documented evidences of the audience reaction to Lomonosov’s presentation made on November 25, 1753, but present day reader of the Discourse should definitely be impressed by Lomonosov’s wit, depth of his rational thinking and the breadth of his knowledge – he covered subjects and cited evidences from various epochs and from a wide range of sources, brought up interesting classification of various electrical phenomena in atmosphere, touched such diverse subjects as electromechanical responses of the mimosa plant [30], St.Elmo’s lights and typhoons, he paid sincere tribute to 37 his late colleague Georg Richmann and praised the support of sciences exhibited by Peter the Great and his daughter, governing Empress Elizaveta Petrovna. In 1963, by B.Vonnegut’s request, the American Meteorological Society commissioned David Krauss to translate Discourse on Atmospheric Phenomena Originating from Electrical Force from Russian to English. The draft manuscript with numerous hand-written corrections was never published and has been made available to author from the university archives at SUNY Albany, NY. Despite a number of misreadings and mis-interpetations - very much excusable because of quite heavy kind of the 18th century Russian language of Lomonosov’s Discourse - that draft has been widely used a reference for this translation.