Six on Coronavirus: In true nativist fashion Trump is blaming immigrants for US problems; The pandemic could be a call to action on climate change; Antibody testing for COVID-19 isn’t the quick fix it’s been made out to be; FOX News Falls Silent Abou
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Thanks John and Gary
"Coronavirus has accelerated the dynamics that enabled Trump’s nativist presidency and the global rise of the far right. The countries that long benefited from global dominance have for decades failed to broadly redistribute empire’s benefits to their citizens: neoliberalism decimated worker power, stagnated wages, and funeled wealth to the richest. The same geopolitics that delivered such massive wealth and power to the global north also led to the mass arrival of migrants. Without a powerful left, nativist nationalism is the interpretative frame that won out. Nativism has always thrived by providing visible substitutes for “invisible enemies,” from the abstract violence of global capitalism to the US empire raging against its unexpected limits.
Since the Clinton administration, business has been content with a bipartisan war on “illegal immigrants” and the militarization of the border as long legal immigration remained untouched. While Trump has failed to secure legislative cuts to legal immigration, he has done a lot to restrict it administratively. Covid-19 provides him with incredible new opportunities. But the guest worker exemption shows that business still wields ample power in the conservative coalition, and that racist and culture war policy must bend to the profit imperative.
Trump and his allies have celebrated the ban in the language of rightwing populism, emphasizing its purported economic benefits for working-class Americans. In court, however, the executive order will likely be defended on the same national security grounds that were successfully marshalled to defend the Muslim ban, this time under the guise of the nation’s public health.
The pandemic, of course, has exposed the inescapability of human sociality and proven the libertarian premise that every man is an island to be a lie. Nationalism’s promise to protect Americans behind secure borders has likewise been shown to be empty: as long as coronavirus exists in one place it threatens every place. But contrary evidence has never easily demolished powerful ideologies.
Instead, the trajectory of the pandemic will, if left unchecked, reaffirm the very status quo that is facilitating its spread. The same global inequalities that drive immigration and facilitate the xenophobic response to it could create a situation where the virus is tamed in the global north while it ravages the global south. Massive outbreaks in poor countries could then lead to this temporary shutdown in human movement transitioning into a more permanent system that locks much of the poor world behind a massive cordon sanitaire."
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"Amid its horrors and tragedies, the coronavirus pandemic has driven home a startling reality. Travel bans and lockdowns have cleaned the globe, flushing the murk from Venice’s canals, clearing Delhi’s polluted smog, making distant snowy peaks visible for the first time in years from the shores of the Bosporus. With humans in retreat, nature reclaimed what was once its own in whimsical ways: Goats strutted through villages, antlered deer grazed on manicured city lawns and mountain lions found perches by suburban fences.
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“A good way to think about the coronavirus pandemic is that it is like climate change at warp speed. What takes decades and centuries for the climate takes days or weeks for a contagious disease,” New York University climate economist Gernot Wagner wrote last month. “That speed focuses the mind and offers lessons in how to think about risk in an interconnected world.”
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"Paradoxically, public-health officials were hoping those numbers would be much higher, because higher infection rates would suggest more people are immune, and that the true COVID-19 mortality rate is lower.
We won’t know if that is the case until we’ve done a fair bit of serosurveillance – random testing in the community.
There are two major impediments to that step: the spotty quality of the tests and the lack of availability.
The United States was broadly criticized for being too slow and finicky in its approval of diagnostic tests, and the lack of testing allowed coronavirus to spread like wildfire. Now, it has gone to the other extreme, rubber-stamping dozens of antibody tests with very little evidence they are accurate.
Health Canada, for its part, is fast-tracking reviews but has yet to approve any commercial tests.
You have to determine which antibodies to measure: transient ones that spike during active infection, or others that only peak weeks after infection.
The sensitivity and specificity of the tests matter. A particular challenge with this virus, SARS-CoV-2, is that it resembles other widely circulating coronaviruses that cause colds.
Once you have a decent test, the more difficult part of the equation begins: figuring out if antibodies confer immunity."
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"On Wednesday, Ronald Klain, who led the Obama administration’s response to an Ebola outbreak in 2014, tweeted: “Dr Bright is a professional – an expert on vaccines – who I met during the Ebola response. If this is true, it … represents an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to put politics ahead of science and safety.”
Dr Bright said he would request that the health department inspector general investigate the way in which the Trump administration has “politicised the work of Barda, and has pressured me and other conscientious scientists to fund companies with political connections and efforts that lack scientific merit.
“Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths. Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics.”
Bright, whose entire career had been spent in vaccine development, had led Barda since 2016. He was moved to a less influential post at the National Institutes of Health.
He told the New York Times: “I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the Covid-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit.
“I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science – not politics or cronyism – has to lead the way.”
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Jack P. Chan
President, Social Studies Supervisors Association - NYC
Assistant Principal, Supervision Social Studies
New Utrecht High School
1601 80th Street
Brooklyn, New York 11214
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2020 12:00 PM
To:
Subject: New Call-in Info - COPING WITH COVID-19 FOR TEENS WEBINAR
When: Apr 30, 2020 05:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Topic: COPING WITH COVID-19 TEEN WEBINAR
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
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