Plexiglass Alone Can’t Protect Against Aerosolized Virus

September 4, 2020 University of Pittsburgh

In settings where personal protective equipment (PPE) is in short supply, inserting a breathing tube down a patient’s throat poses a major risk of SARS-CoV-2 exposure for doctors and nurses as viral particles are released into the air.

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, UPMC and the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory created an individual biocontainment unit, or IBU, to keep front line health care workers safe while they provide life-saving care. The device is described in a study published Sept. 3 in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Authors on the study include Benjamin Schilling, a pre-doctoral fellow in bioengineering at Pitt; Heng Ban, Richard K. Mellon professor of mechanical engineering and materials science in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering; Robert Turer of Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Nicholas Karlowsky of Filtech; and Lucas Dvoracek, Jason Chang and J. Peter Rubin of UPMC.

Earlier attempts to minimize exposure to health care workers involved placing a plexiglass intubation box over a patient’s head and shoulders. Clinicians place their hands through two large holes in the box to intubate the patient inside. While such a device may contain the worst of the splatter, it can’t keep aerosols from leaking out.

The IBU is designed to suck contaminated air out of the box with a vacuum and trap infectious particles in a filter before they seep into the room.

Simulating a COVID-19 patient, the researchers placed a mannequin inside the IBU as well as in a commercially available intubation box. Near its mouth, they piped in an oil-based aerosol which formed tiny droplets in the air, similar in size to the SARS-CoV-2 particles in breath that spread COVID-19.

The IBU trapped more than 99.99% of the simulated virus-sized aerosols and prevented them from escaping into the environment. In contrast, outside of the passive intubation box, maximum aerosol concentrations were observed to be more than three times higher than inside the box.

“Having a form of protection that doesn’t work is more dangerous than not having anything, because it could create a false sense of security,” said Turer, the study’s co-lead author and a plastic surgeon who recently completed his residency at UPMC.

Because of concerns about the potential of airborne viruses to leak from the plexiglass boxes, the Food and Drug Administration recently revoked their Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for these enclosures. Several months ago, Turer and colleagues submitted an EUA application for the IBU and are preparing to manufacture the devices for distribution.

“It intentionally incorporates parts from outside the medical world,” said Turer. “So, unlike other forms of PPE, demand is unlikely to outstrip supply during COVID-19 surge periods.”

Besides protecting providers during intubation, the IBU can also provide negative pressure isolation of awake COVID-19 patients, supplying an alternative to scarce negative pressure hospital isolation rooms, as well as helping isolate patients on military vessels.

“The ability to isolate COVID-19 patients at the bedside is key to stopping viral spread in medical facilities and onboard military ships and aircraft,” said study co-lead author Cameron Good, a research scientist at the Army Research Laboratory.

Devices similar to IBUs were first used in practice by military personnel in the Javits Center field hospital in New York City when local hospitals were overrun with COVID-19 patients during the first wave of the pandemic.

Once the EUA is granted, hospitals and military units will be able to use the IBU to protect health care workers caring for COVID-19 patients.

Additional authors on the study include Benjamin Schilling and Heng Ban of the University of Pittsburgh; Robert Turer of Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Nicholas Karlowsky of Filtech; and Lucas Dvoracek, Jason Chang and J. Peter Rubin of UPMC.

This work is supported by the University of Pittsburgh Center for Medical Innovation.

CategoriesHealth, Technology

Post navigation

Editing Immune Response Could Make Gene Therapy More Effective

Common class of drugs linked to increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease

The material in this press release comes from the originating research organization. Content may be edited for style and length. Have a question? Let us know. and the connection 

Retired general: Climate change is a threat to national security, military readiness
Anton L. Delgado Arizona Republic


Climate change is a continuing threat to national security both at home and abroad, according to Stephen Cheney, a retired brigadier general who is now president of the American Security Project.

"What we have seen today is unprecedented heat going on in the country and in the world. Those of you who are in Arizona certainly understand," Cheney said this week in an online forum.

"We have to acknowledge the risk of climate change. The risks are real and growing every day," he said. "If there is any one part of us that is threatened the most, it's our national security."

Cheney spoke specifically about how climate change in Arizona could affect national security during his keynote address in a webinar hosted by Arizona Forward, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Association of Defense Communities.

The issues are connected and need greater attention, organizers said.

“National security is typically not a top-of-mind issue when we consider climate change," said Lori Singleton, president and CEO of Arizona Forward. "But recognizing the serious impacts of climate and weather-related events occurring across the country, we were interested in learning more about this critical topic.”

The most direct affect climate change has on national security in Arizona is in the state’s military bases.

“Climate change really impacts military training readiness in Arizona because extreme heat is going to limit the amount of time a person can spend outside,” Cheney said. “As a former commander of a Marine Corps base, we have always put health and safety as no. 1. We are going to protect the troops first. 

Training for heat-related hazards

Arizona is home to six military bases representing three different branches: Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Luke Air Force Base, Barry M. Goldwater Range Air Force Base, Yuma Proving Ground Army Base, Camp Navajo Army Base and Marine Corps Air Station Yuma.

If a black flag is flying over any of these bases that usually indicates all physical training and strenuous exercise is suspended. Across the Air Force, Army and Marines, the flag flies when temperature hits 90 degrees and above.


Davis-Monthan Air Force Base recognized its first black flag day this summer on July 8. There have been 16 others since, according to Master Sgt. Kate Grady.

Grady is the base's flight chief of bioenvironmental engineering. She oversees any occupational health and safety issues facing airmen on base. One of her daily tasks is reading a wet bulb globe thermometer and reporting its results to command.

“It helps us alert the base to conditions and allows us to try to alleviate any heat stress issues airmen may encounter,” Grady said. “When we do have hot conditions, that doesn’t mean the mission stops, but people adhere to them as much as possible by taking more breaks and drinking more water.”  

Airmen commonly participate in the Air Force’s Thermal Injury Prevention Program to learn how to address the issues posed by extreme temperatures in Arizona. Grady said it teaches airmen how to adapt to the heat and still complete their mission.

“Training makes them aware of heat-related hazards and aware of what they can do to keep it from affecting them,” Grady said. “We do our best to take care of our people and we work with what we have because the mission always needs to get done.”


There have been no heat stress-related deaths or medical issues at Davis-Monthan so far this summer, Grady confirmed.

As part of daily temperature collection, Grady also factors in the fighter index of thermal stress. This considers the conditions a pilot may face while in the cockpit of an aircraft.
'Too hot to fly'

Less flight time will be another side effect of extreme temperatures, Cheney said in the online forum.

“Extreme heat means in some cases it’ll be too hot to fly,” Cheney said. “Heat creates thinner air, which won’t have enough density for planes to take off.”

As summer temperatures continue to break records in Arizona, Cheney said flights and physical training will most likely start taking place at night.

“While there are benefits to this because wars happen no matter what time of day, switching to a night model in a training base is incredibly disruptive,” Cheney said. “Everyone in all of the services has families and the whole aspect of normal living gets disrupted if everything starts getting done at night.”

During his years of active service, Cheney served as the executive officer of an artillery battalion in California. The unit was so well known for its nightly operations that one of its slogans is, “We own the night.”

“Take my word for it, no other country in the world operates as well at night as the U.S., but it’s really not ideal for our troops in training,” Cheney said.

Cheney believes the most effective step to mitigate the warming weather and maintain national security is for the Department of Defense, the government’s largest consumer of fossil fuels, to invest in renewable energy and lower its CO2 emissions.

“The military understands this but given certain administrations it has waxed and waned in importance,” Cheney said. “Even if you choose not to believe that human activity contributes to climate change, we can’t wait until there is a 100% certainty. We have to do something about climate change.”

In Arizona, he says the solution lies in solar power.

“It’s so hot in your state because the sun is shining so much, so use that. Use what is heating us up to cool us down,” Cheney said. “Arizona could take the national lead in solar energy because it has the environment and landscape to do so.”

According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, Arizona ranks third in the country for cumulative amount of “solar electric capacity” installed in the first quarter of 2020.

Beyond the military push to combat climate change, Cheney’s suggestion to the 130 Arizonan businesses, cities and other environmental non-profits who attended the webinar, was to fight carbon emissions from the ground up.

“The average Joe would say there is nothing we can do about it, but that’s not true. Don’t be like the average Joe. Moderate your air conditioning, cut down on power use, there are a multitude of things the individual American can do,” Cheney said. “When we’ve all done that, we can also start leaning pretty hard on our elected officials to make sure they are making the best decisions for our community.”

Anton L. Delgado is an environmental reporter for The Arizona Republic/AZCentral. Follow his reporting on Twitter at @antonldelgado and tell him about stories at anton.delgado@arizonarepublic.com.

Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

China may dump U.S. Treasuries as Sino-U.S. tensions flare: Global Times



FILE PHOTO: Chinese and U.S. flags flutter near The Bund, before U.S. trade delegation meet their Chinese counterparts for talks in Shanghai, China July 30, 2019. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China may gradually cut its holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds and notes, in light of rising tensions between Beijing and Washington, state-backed newspaper Global Times cited experts as saying.

With Sino-U.S. relations deteriorating over various issues including coronavirus, trade and technology, global financial markets are increasingly worried if China would sell the U.S. government debt it holds as a weapon to counter rising U.S. pressure.

“China will gradually decrease its holdings of U.S. debt to about $800 billion under normal circumstances,” Xi Junyang, a professor at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, was quoted as saying on Thursday, without giving a detailed timeframe.

“But of course, China might sell all of its U.S. bonds in an extreme case, like a military conflict.”

China, the second largest non-U.S. holder of Treasuries, THE LARGEST IS JAPAN

 held $1.074 trillion in June, down from $1.083 trillion the previous month, according to latest official data.

China has steadily decreased its holdings of the U.S. bonds this year, although some market watchers suspect China may not have necessarily sold U.S. Treasuries as it may have used other custodians to purchase Treasuries.

Dropping to $800 billion from the current level could mean shrinking its holdings by more than 25%. Analysts say large-scale Chinese selling, often referred to as the “nuclear option”, could trigger turmoil on global financial markets.

Another reason the state newspaper cited was the potential default risk in the United States as the debt of the world’s largest economy has surged sharply to about the same size of its gross domestic product, a level not seen since the end of the World War Two and well above the internationally recognized safety line of 60%.

China is heavily exposed to the U.S. dollar and dollar-denominated assets. Its official foreign exchange reserves stood at $3.154 trillion at the end of July.

China seems to have launched a secret reusable space plane
SPACE 4 September 2020
By Jonathan O’Callaghan   

China’s Long March 2F rocket on a launchpad at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center
Imaginechina Limited / Alamy

China appears to have launched an experimental space plane earlier this morning, which may be the precursor to a vehicle that can carry humans to and from space.

Early on 4 September, China is thought to have launched a Long March 2F rocket from their Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. While there was no official announcement prior to the launch, several observers noticed air traffic restrictions that indicated a launch was taking place.

The state-run Xinhua News Agency later confirmed the launch, saying that a “reusable experimental spacecraft” was on board that would “test reusable technologies during its flight, providing technological support for the peaceful use of space.”

Orbital data later confirmed that the vehicle had been placed in an orbit up to 350 kilometres in altitude, a similar height to China’s previous crewed flights. Much about the launch remains shrouded in mystery, however, including the size of the vehicle, how long it will remain in space and what it will do in orbit.

China is known to have been working on space plane technology for the past decade, with the country announcing in 2017 that it aimed to fly such a vehicle by 2020. “There have been some clues that this mission might happen,” says Andrew Jones, a journalist who covers the Chinese space programme, including modifications to the launch tower and a potential mission patch referencing the spacecraft. “But the actual timing was a surprise.”

Read more: SpaceX says tests show Starlink satellites deliver high-speed internet

Such a vehicle could take Chinese astronauts to and from orbit, possibly to a planned future Chinese space station. Jean Deville, a space analyst who tracks China’s activities, says a reusable crewed space plane could be part of China’s ambitious crewed space programme, which includes its operational Shenzhou spacecraft and a new deep space vehicle. “A space plane is an ideal technology for atmospheric re-entry due to less brutal accelerations for the human body,” she said.

Another possibility is that the vehicle is more similar to the secretive American X-37B space plane, a small uncrewed reusable craft built by Boeing, which has flown to space multiple times on missions lasting more than a year, performing unknown activities in orbit. “There [are] undeniable military uses for a space plane,” says Deville. “China has shown a strong interest in developing these technologies.”

Regardless of its true purpose, the launch is another signal of China’s growing launch capabilities. “If you look at what they’re doing in the commercial sector, promoting innovation and low-cost launch vehicles, this is part of a wider context of Chinese plans for space transportation,” says Jones. “But it’s hard to say how big this [space plane] is in China’s plans.”

Now, observers will be watching keenly to get more information about the vehicle. “We don’t know if this is a scaled version to test certain technologies, or a full-sized version,” he says. “It’s so vague, so secretive. It’s very interesting, but it’s also quite frustrating.”

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2253813-china-seems-to-have-launched-a-secret-reusable-space-plane/#ixzz6X7fsoglJ

Aviation’s contribution to global warming has doubled since 2000

ENVIRONMENT 3 September 2020 By Michael Le Page 

motive56/Shutterstock

The most comprehensive analysis so far of how much warming is caused by aeroplanes has found that flying’s contribution to global warming nearly doubled between 2000 and 2018. Rapid growth is far outpacing efforts to reduce its contribution.

“It is growing so rapidly,” says David Lee at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. “It’s just astonishing.”

The study only goes up to 2018, before the big decrease in flying due to the coronavirus pandemic, but this is just a blip, says Lee. “It’s not going to make much difference in the long term.”

Flying has extremely complex effects on the climate. For instance, the soot from jet engines triggers the formation of contrails that, like clouds, can have both a warming effect by reflecting outgoing heat back down to Earth’s surface and a cooling effect by reflecting sunlight back into space.

Similarly, nitrogen oxides from the engines can increase the formation of ozone, an important greenhouse gas, but also destroy methane, another potent greenhouse gas.

So the team behind the new analysis, which included Ulrike Burkhardt at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Germany, used computer models to improve on previous estimates of the overall effect. These suggest that contrails cause less than half as much warming as previously thought.

Even so, short-lived contrails still lead to more warming than the long-lasting carbon dioxide emissions from aircraft.

Overall, the team calculated that flying is responsible for 3.5 per cent of the global warming effect resulting from human activities. That is less than previous estimates of around 5 per cent. Figures suggesting that flying is responsible for around 2 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions don’t take into account the other ways in which flying causes warming.


Read more: It turns out planes are even worse for the climate than we thought

This contribution of 3.5 per cent has remained relatively constant since 2000, but only because other sources of warming have also increased rapidly. Over this period, the warming effect from flying has nearly doubled.

“It’s the growth that is the real feature,” says Lee. “It is rising quite dramatically.”

Switching to biofuels – such as palm oil – isn’t the answer, he says, because when the full effects of growing crops for biofuels are taken into account, it isn’t clear that they reduce emissions much, if at all.

However, using renewable energy to turn carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into synthetic kerosene could greatly reduce emissions. Switching to synthetic kerosene would make individual flights carbon neutral. It would also halve the warming effect from contrails, says Lee, because synthetic kerosene doesn’t contain the aromatic chemicals that produce most soot.

“It’s feasible, but we don’t know how to do it at scale,” he says. “And as long as it’s cheaper to dig it out of the ground, it’s never going to happen.”

A major policy initiative is required, he says, such as setting a date beyond which the use of fossil kerosene will be banned.

Journal reference: Atmospheric Environment, DOI: 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2020.11783

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2253626-aviations-contribution-to-global-warming-has-doubled-since-2000/#ixzz6X7efghvU

Top U.S. prosecutor says 'agitator removed' after police kill Portland shooting suspect

Deborah Bloom, Andrew Hay

PORTLAND, Ore. (Reuters) - Police shot and killed a self-declared anti-fascist activist in Washington state on Thursday night as they moved in to arrest him on suspicion he fatally shot a right-wing counterprotester last weekend in Portland, Oregon, officials said.

Michael Reinoehl, 48, wanted on a murder charge, was armed with a handgun when members of a U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force shot him dead in Olympia, Washington, after he left an apartment building and got in a car around 7:30 p.m., according to the Marshals Service and the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office.

“During the attempt to apprehend him, shots were fired at the suspect in the vehicle and he fled from the vehicle on foot. Additional shots were fired at the suspect and he was later pronounced deceased at the location,” the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office, which is responsible for investigating the incident, said in a statement.

A Multnomah County, Oregon court had charged Reinhoel with the murder of Aaron Danielson, and Portland police issued a warrant for his arrest, asking U.S. marshals to locate him.

“It sounded like fireworks, it was that many shots,” bystander Jashon Spencer said in an online video.

Reinoehl, who had provided security for Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, in a video interview with Vice aired hours before his death appeared to admit he shot Danielson on Saturday night.

Danielson, 39, was part of a caravan of supporters of Republican President Donald Trump who rode in pickup trucks into downtown Portland and clashed with protesters demonstrating against racial injustice and police brutality.

This marks the first case in which the Justice Department has directly linked a demonstrator in Portland to a far-left political movement.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oregon confirmed that none of the defendants from those protests facing federal charges had been linked to any particular group or political ideology.

“The tracking down of Reinoehl - a dangerous fugitive, admitted Antifa member, and suspected murderer - is a significant accomplishment in the ongoing effort to restore law and order to Portland and other cities,” U.S. Attorney General William Barr said in a statement. “The streets of our cities are safer with this violent agitator removed.”

A state trooper allows a vehicle to enter at the scene at Tanglewilde Terrace, where law enforcement officers shot and killed a man reported to be Michael Forest Reinoehl, in Lacey, Washington, U.S. September 4, 2020. REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs.

Nationally, Antifa is a largely unstructured, far-left movement whose followers broadly aim to confront those they view as authoritarian or racist.

Danielson, a Portland man who ran a specialty moving company in the city for over 20 years, was a supporter of right-wing Christian conservative group Patriot Prayer.

Facebook Inc (FB.O) on Friday said it took down the pages of Patriot Prayer and group founder Joey Gibson, whose supporters have clashed with anti-fascists in Portland every weekend since mid-August.

“They were removed as part of our ongoing efforts to remove Violent Social Militias from our platform,” Facebook said in a statement.

Portland has seen escalating confrontations between right- and left-wing groups after nearly 100 days of protests since George Floyd, a Black man, died in Minneapolis on May 25 after a white police officer knelt on his neck.
‘NO CHOICE’

Reinoehl told freelance journalist Donovan Farley he acted in self-defense.

“I had no choice. I mean, I, I had a choice. I could have sat there and watched them kill a friend of mine of color. But I wasn’t going to do that,” he said in the video Farley provided to Vice News, adding he feared he would be stabbed.

Bystander video showed two men approaching Danielson and a friend, one saying “Hey, we got one over here, we got a couple over here,” and another “Pull it out,” before two shots were fired.

“I was confident that I did not hit anyone innocent. And I made my exit,” Reinhoel said in the Vice interview.

He was previously cited for carrying a loaded gun at a July 5 Portland protest, resisting arrest and interfering with police, according to The Oregonian newspaper. The charges were subsequently dropped, the newspaper reported.

In social media posts Reinoehl, a father of two, described himself as a professional snowboarder, an Army veteran and “100% ANTIFA.”

He said he was prepared to fight to change the “course of humanity.”

“It will be a war and like all wars there will be casualties,” he said in a June 16 Instagram post.

Reporting by Deborah Bloom; additional reporting by Ann Maria Shibu, Andrew Hay, Gabriella Borter, Mark Hosenball and Sarah N. Lynch; editing by Mike Collett-White and Jonathan Oatis
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Federal troops and street battles: Portland protests near 100 days

Caitlin Ochs


PORTLAND (Reuters) - The protests that erupted in Portland after George Floyd’s killing nearly 100 days ago have evolved into a seemingly constant battle between progressives and far-right groups while highlighting long-standing racial tensions in Oregon.


FILE PHOTO: Alan Swinney points a gun during clashes between groups like Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, and protesters against police brutality and racial injustice in Portland, Oregon, U.S., August 22, 2020. REUTERS/Maranie Staab

The protests drag on even as street demonstrations in other U.S. cities have waned, and some civic leaders say they have been spurred rather than quelled by the deployment of federal troops in July.

Marked by clashes between right- and left-wing protesters, caravans of people supporting U.S. President Donald Trump have squared off on the streets against counter-protesters with deadly results.

The tensions have roiled downtown Portland, the Pacific northwestern enclave with a reputation as a liberal city, every night for nearly three months.

“If you have a place that’s perceived as progressive, very liberal, and then you have people who might have a different perspective, this is (seen as) the place where you can ‘battle it out,’” said Shirley Jackson, a professor of Black studies at Portland State University.

On Aug. 29, one member of a pro-Trump group was shot and killed. The suspect in the case, who had said he was part of the anti-fascist movement, was killed while being arrested by U.S. marshals on Thursday.

Although Oregon is known as a progressive, left-leaning state, it has a history of institutional racism that is extreme even for the United States.

Oregon was the only state to join the union that explicitly banned Black people from living there, and it once had the largest Ku Klux Klan organization west of the Mississippi River. The state also failed to fully ratify the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which granted citizenship and equal protection under the law to Black people, until 1973.


That history means white supremacy groups and anti-government militias have deep roots in the state, outside of its liberal hubs.

Demonstrations against racism and police brutality swept across the United States after the May killing of Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

In Portland, however, the protests have taken on a sense of permanency.

Tai Carpenter, president of Don’t Shoot PDX, an anti-gun violence nonprofit, said the state’s racist past - and continued police brutality in the present - are fueling the longevity of the city’s protests.

“Police are still showing that Black lives don’t matter. Because they were never meant to matter in Oregon,” Carpenter said. “The fact that we’re in Portland is why we’re coming up on 100 days of protest. That’s why the movement isn’t blowing down here.”

The violence between rival groups over historic tensions has alienated some activists.

Elizabeth Reitzell, 29, a high school teacher in Portland, has demonstrated with the Portland Buddhist Peace Fellowship by joining in silent meditations every week since July, after initially being put off by the aggression she saw in the street protests.

“I was really eager to be involved but I struggled to find how I could fit in a meaningful way without being wrangled in with the less peaceful protesters,” she said.

“(The violence) is very confusing to us organizers,” said Xavier “Princess” Warner, 19, a co-founder of Black Unity PDX, a civil rights collective. “Because us fighting for equality, us fighting for our lives, us fighting for our rights, is not political.”

Reporting by Moira Warburton in Vancouver and Caitlin Ochs in Portland; Editing by Tom Brown

Outrage after Trump excludes U.S. from WHO-backed global vaccination cooperation pact

The admin's latest decision regarding vaccines and global cooperation denounced as "more self-inflicted damage

KENNY STANCIL SEPTEMBER 4, 2020

This article originally appeared at Common Dreams. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

Provoking a flurry of critical reactions from health experts and lawmakers, the Trump administration announced Tuesday afternoon that it will not participate in the "global effort to develop, manufacture, and equitably distribute a coronavirus vaccine, in part because the World Health Organization is involved"—a decision the Washington Post said "could shape the course of the pandemic and the country's role in health diplomacy" going forward.

The purpose of the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax) Facility is to "speed vaccine development and secure doses for all countries and distribute them to the most high-risk segment of each population," explained the Post.

While more than 170 countries are in negotiations to participate in Covax, Judd Deere, a spokesperson for the White House, told reporters that "The United States will continue to engage our international partners to ensure we defeat this virus, but we will not be constrained by multilateral organizations influenced by the corrupt World Health Organization and China."

The Post described the decision as a "doubling down by the administration on its bet" that the U.S. will win the so-called "vaccine race."

Yet by foregoing the opportunity to "secure doses from a pool of promising vaccine candidates," the Trump administration is pursuing a "potentially risky strategy," the newspaper reported.

Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University told the Post that "America is taking a huge gamble by taking a go-it-alone strategy."

Senator Chris Van Hollen tweeted that "Trump's go-it-alone strategy has already given us the highest death toll in the world. At his inaugural, he spoke of 'American carnage' and he now seems determined to make it a reality."

Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding called it an "absolutely terrible" decision that "will hurt us in the long run." Akin to "shooting ourselves in the foot," he said that "turning down an insurance policy during a pandemic is nonsensical and madness."

In addition to the domestic risks, Trump's decision could have negative international ramifications, too.

"The idea behind Covax is to discourage hoarding and focus on vaccinating high-risk people in every country first, a strategy that could lead to better health outcomes and lower costs," but "U.S. nonparticipation makes that harder," the Post explained.

One potentially catastrophic scenario acknowledged by the Post is that "a U.S. vaccine does pan out, but the country hoards doses, vaccinating a large number of Americans, including those at low risk, while leaving other countries without."

Virologist Angela Rasmussen tweeted that "'America First' doesn't apply to pandemics. Viruses don't observe national borders. If anyone is at risk, we all are. Refusing to cooperate with other countries on vaccines will kill people."

On the other hand, if Covax does result in a reliable vaccine developed elsewhere in the world, the U.S. and its people could be left out of enjoying the benefits and protections of such a success.

Wajahat Ali of the New York Times summarized the Trump administration's latest decision regarding vaccines as "more self-inflicted damage."

Inside the Trump administration’s decision to leave the World Health Organization

On May 29, President Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the World Health Organization

SEBASTIAN ROTELLA - JAMES BANDLER - PATRICIA CALLAHAN

JUNE 28, 2020 

This article originally appeared on ProPublica. 

Right before President Donald Trump unveiled punitive measures against China on May 29, he inserted a surprise into his prepared text.

"We will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization," he announced during a press conference in the Rose Garden.
Advertisement:


Most of the president's top aides — and even some of his Cabinet secretaries — were blindsided.

Just 11 days earlier, Trump had sent an ultimatum threatening to withdraw from the WHO if reforms were not enacted in 30 days. Some senior officials hoped that he was bluffing or would change his mind about a decision that could hobble efforts to fight dangerous diseases.

Trump's foreign policy choices are at the center of a forthcoming book by former national security adviser John Bolton, who argues that many of the president's erratic actions are aimed at boosting his re-election chances.

But while Bolton's book focuses on revelations about Trump's past dealings with Turkey, Ukraine and China's leader Xi Jinping, officials interviewed by ProPublica said the less explored WHO decision may have a more lasting impact.

ProPublica has interviewed senior officials at five federal agencies to understand the repercussions and the behind-the-scenes efforts to contain the damage of a decision in which they had little input.

In the weeks after Trump's Rose Garden declaration, the White House gave little direction on what to do next. Officials who deal with the WHO knew that withdrawal is a cumbersome process requiring a year's notice, a multiagency review and payment of unpaid dues.

As a result, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar instructed his department to continue cooperating with the organization. The American ambassador in Geneva, Andrew Bremberg, kept negotiating with the WHO director general on the reforms demanded by the president, including an independent inquiry into the WHO's response to the pandemic. (The talks were first reported by Vanity Fair.) Dozens of scientists, doctors and public health specialists detailed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention kept working at their posts at the WHO's Geneva headquarters and in the field, fighting Ebola and other diseases in Africa and elsewhere.

But on Monday, the administration made it clear there would be no backing down.

At a meeting at the White House, a director with the National Security Council told diplomats and health officials that they must now justify any engagement with the WHO as being necessary for national security and public health safety, senior government officials told ProPublica. In addition, the State Department has begun preparing formal paperwork to declare the official withdrawal of the United States from the WHO, officials said.

"The president is moving toward a fast withdrawal," a senior administration official said in an interview this week. Another administration official said on Friday that the White House does not plan to reconsider the decision. National security and health officials confirmed those assertions.

"The President has made clear that the U.S. is terminating its relationship with the World Health Organization, and that process is being expedited," said Katie McKeogh, an HHS spokesperson, in an email response to a request for comment. "All US-WHO collaborations are being examined through an interagency exercise as part of the termination process to ensure the safety of the American people will be protected."

The new "no-engagement" policy is a concrete step to curtail the relationship, and it has caused alarm and confusion, other officials said.

"This is sending just unbelievable shock waves through the agencies," a senior government official said. The official warned that reduced cooperation with the WHO will have "profound and severe repercussions."

Among the most immediate potential impacts: The move could for the first time cut the U.S. government out of the development of the seasonal influenza vaccine for the Southern Hemisphere, a process coordinated by the WHO in partnership with the United States. And the withdrawal from the WHO could impede access to an eventual COVID-19 vaccine if it is created overseas, current and former officials said.

Leaving the organization could also significantly blind the U.S. to health threats in remote foreign locales that, as the pandemic has shown, have the potential to make their way to the U.S. shores. Experts also fear the impact on major initiatives to combat infectious diseases, such as a WHO-led program that is on the cusp of eradicating polio.

"To do this in the middle of a pandemic is breathtakingly dangerous," said Nancy Cox, a former CDC virologist, who for 22 years led the agency's WHO center on influenza surveillance and control. "So I worry a lot about what's going to happen to so many of the programs at WHO that were strongly supported financially and through expertise and consultation with the U.S. I just think it could be really bad."

When informed of the NSC directive, a WHO spokesman in Geneva wrote that the organization "hopes the United States will remain part of WHO, as it has been since 1948. Its leadership in global public health as a WHO Member State is important to all people, everywhere."

The United States is the largest donor among the WHO's 194 member states, giving about $450 million last year. The WHO said the U.S. cut in funding would affect childhood immunizations, polio eradication and other initiatives in some of the most vulnerable parts of the world.

Trump's disgust with the WHO is well-founded, administration officials say. The decision to leave wasn't solely due to the WHO's stumbles on COVID-19, but because they capped a record of unresolved structural issues and failures during crises, officials said. As the pandemic spread early this year, the WHO reported that only 1% of cases were asymptomatic, while Chinese doctors were privately saying that the number was actually as high as 50%, the senior administration official said.

"The organization had no credibility," the official said. "It was either clueless or cut out, being manipulated."

Recent missteps, including conflicting advice about the efficacy of masks, raised further questions, officials said.

The administration plans to fill the void left by its withdrawal with direct aid to foreign countries, creating a new entity based in the State Department to lead the response to outbreaks, according to interviews and a proposal prepared by the department. The U.S. will spend about $20 billion this year on global public health. (About $9 billion of that is emergency aid for COVID response.)

But the senior administration official conceded that important activities led by the WHO, including vaccination initiatives, need to continue. It is not yet clear what will happen to those programs when American funding and participation end, the official acknowledged.

In fact, many aspects of the new policy toward the WHO remain unclear, officials said. At the White House meeting Monday, the NSC director who outlined the policy did not answer a number of questions from the agencies about its implementation and impact, saying responses would come later, the senior government official said.

The new directive will require officials to divert their attention from pandemic response in order to review a list of their WHO-related activities and try to justify them on national security and public health safety grounds, the senior government official said.

Critics warn of potential widespread damage as the United States attempts to extricate itself from an international health infrastructure in which it is entrenched. The timing will cause even more uncertainty, they said.
Advertisement:


A case in point: The flu vaccine that Americans receive at drugstores and doctors' offices is based on work that the CDC and Food and Drug Administration conduct through the WHO.

Since 2004, the U.S. has helped build a global network of WHO flu centers, buying lab equipment and training scientists. The centers in more than 100 countries collect samples from sick people, isolate the viruses and search for any new viruses that could cause an epidemic or pandemic. The CDC houses one of five WHO Collaborating Centers that collect these virus samples, sequence the viral RNA and analyze reams of data on flu cases around the world, while the FDA runs one of the four WHO regulatory labs that help vaccine makers determine the correct amount of antigen, which triggers the immune response, to include in vaccines.

The U.S. and other WHO members meet twice a year to pick the dominant flu viruses that are included in vaccines. The strains for this fall's flu vaccine in the U.S. were chosen in April. But in September, the WHO flu centers are scheduled to pick the flu strains for the Southern Hemisphere's vaccine, and months of work at the CDC leads up to that meeting.

The uncertainty has caused concern in the pharmaceutical industry as well as the government, officials said. The CDC could lose access to the data and virus samples that protects Americans from potentially deadly strains of flu from around the world.

"If we pull out of the World Health Organization, we're going to be flying blind in terms of influenza and other pandemic threats," said Cox, the CDC flu expert, who retired in 2014. "It's going to be a lot harder to know what's going on."

The onslaught of the coronavirus has hurt immunization activities worldwide, causing a rise in measles and other diseases. American cooperation with the WHO is vital to fighting such threats, according to current and former officials. They fear that the U.S. decision will endanger a WHO-led program that has come tantalizingly close to the eradication of polio. The wild form of the disease now lingers in just two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"We are using WHO to run an anti-polio campaign and coordinate it," said Andrew Natsios, a former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and director of the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at Texas A&M University. "And we're almost there. We can't stop that now."

The Trump administration's plan to bypass the WHO and address global health problems directly with foreign governments will run into trouble in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and other regions where Americans encounter hostility or have difficulty operating, critics said.

"People coming into countries in WHO shirts to work on polio or AIDS are less threatening," said former Ambassador Jimmy Kolker, a veteran health diplomat who represented the United States at WHO meetings until 2017. "It is easier to get collaboration from a skeptical country or population through WHO. It facilitates access."

It is fanciful to think that other nations will accept a U.S.-led health initiative as a substitute for the WHO, Kolker said.

"No one is looking for U.S.-based alternatives to WHO," he said. "Dead on arrival. There is no way they are going to be supported or even accepted."

The WHO has a history of bringing together ideological rivals. William Foege, a CDC director under Presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, credits the global agency for uniting American scientists and their counterparts from the Soviet Union during the Cold War to eradicate smallpox in a little more than a decade.

"It's not a failed bureaucracy," said Foege, who worked on the international fight against smallpox. "If you go there and see all they do every year, and they have a budget for the entire world that's smaller than many medical centers in this country."

At the same time, global health experts across the political spectrum admit that the WHO needs reform. The organization does not have the muscle to enforce international health regulations or put pressure on member states, experts say. Its decentralized structure gives the headquarters in Geneva limited power over regional offices, some of which have been fiefs dominated by politics and patronage.

During the U.S. response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, the Obama administration's displeasure with the WHO led American officials to bypass the agency and join forces instead with other nations and nongovernmental organizations, current and former officials said.

The WHO's flawed record shows the need for the United States to take the lead in response to health crises, a senior administration official said.

"As U.S. leadership demonstrated in the Ebola and MERS outbreaks, our diplomatic and development efforts enable countries to develop tools for addressing infectious disease," the official said. "Due to these efforts, we filled gaps created by the WHO's inaction to prevent, detect and respond to outbreaks immediately."

Kolker said the calls for reform are legitimate, but he and others said the United States has enough influence to make changes from within. They disagree with the allegations that China controls the WHO and its director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

"In general, the WHO is deferential to member states," Kolker said. "Yes, it should have been more aggressive in response to Chinese obstruction. Tedros surely realizes the public statements were too deferential to China. But the organization is not dominated by China. Its weaknesses reflect the challenges we have long faced in international collaboration on public health."

China will gain control over the organization if Washington really does terminate its membership, current and former officials predicted.

"There's one country that's desperate for the United States to leave the WHO, and that's China," Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said at a hearing Thursday of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. "They are going to fill this vacuum. They are going to put in the money that we have withdrawn, and even if we try to rejoin in 2021, it's going to be under fundamentally different terms because China will be much more influential because of our even temporary absence from it."

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power

How Jerry Falwell Jr. mixed his personal finances with his university's

Aram Roston, Joshua Schneyer

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - After parting ways with President Jerry Falwell Jr in the wake of personal scandals, Liberty University has hired a firm to investigate “all facets” of Falwell’s tenure, including the school’s financial and real estate operations.

There may be much to untangle.

Falwell, who took over as president of Liberty in 2007 after years as a lawyer handling its real estate interests, intertwined his personal finances with those of the evangelical Christian university founded by his father.

He put his two sons - and their wives as well - on the university’s payroll. He arranged the transfer of a multi-acre Liberty facility to his personal trainer. He enlisted a friend’s construction company to manage an ambitious campus expansion costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

And before becoming school president, Falwell set up two companies that enabled him to cut property deals with one of the many nonprofit entities affiliated with the university, Reuters found. In each of the deals, Falwell played multiple roles with potentially conflicting interests: He was an officer of the university, a board member for the nonprofit selling the land, and a private developer who could profit from the transactions.

“It’s very worrisome to have these sorts of financial arrangements going on and they deserve intense scrutiny,” said Michael Bastedo of the University of Michigan School of Education.

In 2001, property records show, Falwell set up a private company while he was a lawyer for Liberty, used it to buy an undeveloped tract of land from the school, and then developed a strip mall on the plot. The company sold the property five years later at a significant premium.

In 2005, property records show, Falwell again acted as a private businessman when a university nonprofit affiliate and a company he operated joined together to sell land to a third company - controlled by Falwell’s real estate partner.

And in 2012, in a project Falwell launched as Liberty’s president, the university spent more than $2 million to build a tunnel that links the campus to another shopping plaza near campus. Falwell is a part owner of that shopping plaza.

Falwell told Reuters that each of these transactions benefited Liberty University. None was inappropriate in any way, he said.

He stepped down last week after Reuters reported that a business associate alleged a years-long affair with Falwell and Falwell’s wife, Becki. The associate, Giancarlo Granda, says the relationship involved him having sex with Becki Falwell while Jerry Falwell looked on. Becki Falwell declined to comment; Jerry Falwell has denied involvement in the relationship, which he says was between his wife and Granda only.

Falwell’s departure marked a dramatic fall for one of the most powerful figures in America’s evangelical Christian movement. In 2016, Falwell’s endorsement of Donald Trump was widely credited as helping propel Trump to the U.S. presidency.


Falwell said in interviews that Liberty will pay him $10.5 million as part of a severance and retirement package. Liberty declined to comment on the terms or the amount.

Liberty’s board of trustees subsequently announced it was hiring “one of the leading forensic firms in the world to conduct a thorough investigation” that will examine the school’s operations under Falwell, including financial and real estate matters. It declined to name the firm.

The outside investigation may not examine the 2001 and 2005 deals that Falwell handled while he was a Liberty lawyer, however. Asked about those transactions, a Liberty spokesman said: “At this time, the forensic investigation is limited to Jerry Falwell’s term as president.”

After initially referring questions to his legal and public relations representatives, Falwell called Reuters late Wednesday afternoon and said he looked forward to the Liberty investigation. “I welcome it because it will prove that all you guys are liars,” he said, referring to members of the media. “You got nothing.”

He also warned Reuters not to question his two adult sons, both of whom still have jobs at Liberty. “Trust me,” Falwell said during the call, “you do not want to mess with me, OK?”

Liberty employed a private firm - JF Management - formed by Jerry “Trey” Falwell III, Falwell’s elder son, to manage university properties. The company received more than $58,000 in compensation in 2017, according to the school’s most recent public filing of tax form 990 with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Trey Falwell also serves as a Liberty vice president, with total compensation from the university of $189,000 a year, according to the tax filings.

Falwell’s other son, Wesley, drew compensation in 2017 from Liberty of $54,744, the filings show. Laura Falwell, Wesley’s wife, earned $57,751 that year from Liberty, and Sarah Falwell, Trey’s wife, earned $63,315.

None of the Falwell children or their spouses could be reached for comment. In a statement released by Falwell’s lawyer, Falwell said: “Trey, Wesley, and their spouses get paid fair value for their work and have performed that work very well.”

A school spokesman told Reuters that examining the Falwell family’s dealings with Liberty is “within the scope of the forensic investigation.”

Company insiders - in this case, Jerry Falwell - aren’t legally barred from conducting personal business transactions with the nonprofits they run, such as those identified by Reuters. But some governance specialists say such deals can raise concern about conflicts of interest or potential breaches of fiduciary duty. Nonprofit entities, such as Liberty and most other universities, are meant to serve charitable, educational or religious interests. Under tax laws, their proceeds cannot be used for the private benefit of individuals.

Eric Chafee, a law professor at the University of Toledo in Ohio, said Falwell’s real estate deals predating his presidency are worthy of further scrutiny. “These sweetheart land transactions are certainly eyebrow-raising,” he said.

The tax-exempt Liberty relies on hundreds of millions of dollars in Pell grants and government-backed student loans. Liberty students received $618 million in federal taxpayer loans and aid in a single year, according to a 2018 audit report.

QUESTIONABLE CONDUCT

The allegations of a sexual affair were the latest in a string of personal disclosures about Falwell. Weeks earlier, he had posted a photo of himself on Instagram with his pants unzipped and his belly exposed, his arm around a pregnant woman. Falwell said it was meant as a joke; even so, he took an indefinite leave of absence from Liberty not long after.

A Liberty spokesman said “no determination has been made” about whether the investigation will examine the personal conduct of either Jerry or Becki Falwell. But the spokesman said the school “will investigate any allegations that fall within its Title IX policies prohibiting sexual discrimination and sexual harassment and its Human Resource policies addressing sexual misconduct, as well.”

Initially, the examination appears to be focused more on business dealings, however.

As Liberty University president, Falwell oversaw a dramatic growth in the school’s revenues, due in part to the popularity of its distance learning programs. In 2018, its assets topped $2.8 billion.

He also presided over a $1 billion construction spree at its Lynchburg, Virginia, campus, adding new buildings that included a library, dorms and a gleaming sports arena that was scheduled to open this year.

Central to the campus construction boom has been a long-time Falwell friend, Robert Moon. In 2013, Moon formed a company called Construction Management Associates, or CMA - with the help of a $750,000 start-up loan from Liberty. CMA was then tapped to manage huge portions of the campus building spree. The university’s most recent public 990 filing shows CMA received more than $64 million in revenue from Liberty during 2017.

Moon’s business has also been a “substantial contributor” to the university, making gifts to Liberty, the 990 filings show.

Asked last year about CMA’s growing business with Liberty, Moon told Reuters that “using a trusted construction manager as the owner’s agent is a method being employed at lots of campuses to complete major projects.” He said that CMA had helped save Liberty “millions,” that the company had repaid its Liberty loan with interest, and that CMA’s revenues are largely “passed through the trade contractors for their labor, materials, equipment and supplies.”

A Liberty spokesman said the construction activities and contracts in which Falwell was involved, including the role of CMA, is “within the scope of the forensic investigation.”
EARLY DEALS

A Reuters examination of land records revealed that companies personally founded by Falwell cut property deals with one of the many nonprofits affiliated with the university as early as 2001. Falwell orchestrated those deals even as he was a Liberty official and a trustee for the nonprofit from which his companies bought the land, the Liberty Broadcasting Network.

The television network, LBN for short, carried sermons of Falwell’s father, the Rev. Jerry Falwell. It also promoted Liberty University, operated from the school’s campus, and offered Christian family-oriented programming. But LBN, a university affiliate, wasn’t particularly successful and required loans from Liberty to stay afloat.



FILE PHOTO: Jerry Falwell Jr. speaks during the final day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., July 21, 2016. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo

LBN owned properties in the area, and Jerry Falwell Jr was a trustee for those holdings. When LBN began to sell its assets, at least two of the properties ended up in deals involving Falwell, Reuters found.

One was a 1.4 acre vacant lot just across the highway from Liberty’s campus, at 3920 Wards Road. In April 2001, LBN sold the lot for $327,000 to a newly founded limited liability company. The purchaser, Gateway Country Plaza LLC, operated from a Liberty University building, corporate registration records show, but Gateway didn’t belong to the school. Rather, it was a for-profit real estate holding firm and was partially owned by Falwell himself. Falwell signed as “member/manager” on its financial documents.

Once the Falwell-led firm owned the property, it erected a building there at an estimated cost of $153,000, according to a city permit. By 2002, the vacant lot had become a strip mall.

After the shopping strip was developed - with further investment by Falwell’s company - the property value soared. By 2006, Falwell sold the property for $2.7 million, more than eight-fold what his company had paid for the undeveloped tract five years earlier.

In statements to Reuters last year, Falwell defended the deal, arguing that LBN lacked the money or expertise to develop the land itself. He said his company “paid fair market for this property” and invested $1.7 million to build the mall. He did not provide documentation for this figure.

In 2005, Falwell engineered another deal involving Liberty-owned land and a separate private entity he controlled, called Eastern Heights LLC, according to records filed in Lynchburg City Court. Eastern held land next to a parcel owned by LBN. Railroad tracks separate the land from Liberty’s campus.

Eastern and LBN together sold the parcels for $1 million. Falwell signed the deed of sale on behalf of Eastern, property records show.

The buyer: Swift Creek Capitol, a company controlled by Chris Doyle, a friend and business partner of Falwell. Doyle has brokered or co-invested with Falwell in several private property ventures.

Falwell was involved in various sides of the Swift Creek transaction. He wrote up the deed itself, as “Jerry L Falwell Jr, Attorney-at-Law.” He signed the deed he created, listing himself as Manager of Eastern Heights LLC. He was an owner of Eastern Heights, the for-profit co-seller. And he also was in private business with Doyle, the buyer. In addition to investing in property with Falwell, Doyle has also worked as a real estate broker for Liberty University, where Falwell oversaw the property holdings.

In a statement to Reuters, Doyle said he is honored to have worked with the Falwells. “My business dealings and personal relationships are private matters,” he said.

In another matter that linked Liberty business with Falwell’s own, the university spent millions on a project that connected the campus to a nearby shopping plaza.

In January 2012, school president Falwell announced that a new pedestrian tunnel, paid for by Liberty, would let students and staff leave the campus from another exit. The tunnel cost the school around $2.2 million, a Liberty official told the local newspaper - a figure confirmed by a person familiar with the project. The tunnel runs beneath railroad tracks that made it perilous to cross from campus to the stores.

Falwell and his business partner Doyle owned part of the shopping plaza near where the tunnel exits.


In a statement to Reuters last year, Falwell said the tunnel helps ensure the safety of students who otherwise had to cross railroad tracks to get to the shopping area. It was “the only workable” location for the tunnel, Falwell said.

Moreover, he said, the pedestrian tunnel did not help the shopping plaza but hurt it. The reason, Falwell explained: Students would sometimes park at the mall and clutter the area.

A Liberty spokesman told Reuters that the university knew about Falwell’s ownership interest before the tunnel project was launched. The school has said the tunnel offers “easy and safe access to restaurants and stores along the busiest corridor in the City of Lynchburg.”

Chafee, the professor at the University of Toledo, said that, given the nature of Falwell’s presidency at Liberty, the school’s investigation should examine deals like these.

“There was so much control and domination by Falwell in regard to the transactions that were undertaken,” Chafee said.

Reporting by Aram Roston and Joshua Schneyer. Edited by Blake Morrison.

Boris Johnson defends sexist, homophobic, misogynist, climate change denier Tony Abbott

PUBLISHED: 04 September 2020

Boris Johnson has defended Tony Abbott as being a “guy who was elected by the people of the great liberal democratic nation of Australia”.

Asked during a visit to Solihull about allegations the Australian former prime minister, who is set to receive a trade role, Johnson said: “There’s going to be an announcement I think in due course about the composition of the Board of Trade.

“I don’t, obviously don’t agree with those sentiments at all, but then I don’t agree with everyone who serves the government in an unpaid capacity on hundreds of boards across the country

“And I can’t be expected to do so.

“What I would say about Tony Abbott is this is a guy who was elected by the people of the great liberal democratic nation of Australia.

“It’s an amazing country, it’s a freedom-loving country, it’s a liberal country. There you go, I think that speaks for itself.”

LGBT charity Stonewall has expressed concern about the potential appointment.

Eloise Stonborough, head of policy and research at the charity, said: “We are profoundly concerned by the potential impact of Abbott’s appointment.

“The UK has long been a world leader in LGBT rights but the 2020 ILGA-Europe rankings show the UK slipping to ninth place among European countries, from first place in 2015.

“The appointment of an individual with known homophobic and misogynist views risks undermining the Government’s commitment to ‘defend and promote the rights of LGBT people globally’.”

Prominent LGBT figures including Sir Ian McKellen and Doctor Who writer Russell T Davies have signed an open letter alongside environmental activists to ask the government to reconsider.

The letter, first reported by ITV News, said: “This is a man who described abortion as ‘the easy way out’ and suggested that men may be ‘by physiology or temperament more adapted to exercise authority or to issue command’.”

It added that Abbott “vigorously campaigned” against Australia’s successful marriage equality referendum in 2017 and said climate change is “probably doing good”.

“For all these reasons and more besides, this man is not fit to be representing the UK as our trade envoy,” the letter added.

It concluded: “If the Government is truly committed to an outward-looking future for Britain, to tackling climate change and to creating an equal society for all, it should reconsider its proposed appointment.”

Human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who also signed the letter, said appointing Abbott would “send the wrong signal”.

He told the PA news agency: “Abbott’s opposition to LGBT+ equality, denial of the dangers of climate change and suggestion that men are more suited than women to exercise power is not only offensive but harmful to Britain’s image.”

He added: “Given his poor record on green issues, it is feared that he will negotiate trade deals that water down environmental protections. He is the wrong man for the job.”