John Oliver walks us through the massive failure in the US to develop both diagnostic and antibody tests for covid-19.
Mano Singham
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The Trump administration has done a remarkable about face in its attitude towards China during the current pandemic. After initially praising that nation and its president fulsomely for the way they handled the crisis, it is now harshly criticizing them, starting with insisting on calling covid-19 the ‘Chinese virus’ and accusing them of covering up the emergence of the virus. The motivation for this shift is quite transparent. As it became increasingly clear how badly Trump has bungled this issue, he very likely seeks to distract people from the administration’s woefully incompetent response .
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You may have noticed that Trump is no longer touting the virtues of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for Covid-19. While not in the same class of insanity as suggesting the injecting of disinfectants, this was still dangerous and has resulted in there being a run for this unproven treatment, resulting in those patients who need it to treat their lupus and rheumatoid arthritis not getting it. In a preliminary study conducted by the Veterans Administration with 368 patients that has not been peer-reviewed, no benefits were observed and there seemed to be extra deaths.
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I wrote earlier that the heads of some evangelical churches are urging their worshippers to attend church services even at the risk of spreading the virus among their parishioners, giving the spurious argument that their god would stop the disease from affecting the faithful. I said that I suspected that part of the reason may be that they are feeling the loss of revenue that is collected by passing the plate during the services.
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As talk increases of states relaxing the restrictions on physical distancing, on a recent episode of the radio show Fresh Air, Donald G. McNeil Jr., science and health reporter for the New York Times, says that the US is nowhere near ready to do that. He says that the remarkable success of the Chinese government in shutting down the spread of the virus was due to its willingness to put in place highly restrictive measures for as long as was necessary and only after the number of new cases were tiny enough to ensure that contact tracing could be done effectively did they begin to loosen the restrictions.
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Donald Trump is trying to kill the Untied States Postal Service by denying them funding to cover their operating deficit, because he is apparently irked that Amazon, owned by Jeff Bezos, uses the USPS to deliver some of their products at what Trump claims is below cost. Trump hates Bezos because he also owns the Washington Post that Trump is aggravated by because of negative coverage of him.
So we have the spectacle of the president of the country trying to kill an organization that provides a public good just because he is angry that a tiny part of its business might possibly, just possibly, be aiding the business of a person he hates. Trump is just piggy-backing on the long-term efforts of the Republicans to privatize the postal service, just like they want to privatize everything else.
Samantha Bee explains why the postal service is worth saving.
One of the things that the current pandemic has exposed is the utter cruelty, inefficiency, and inadequacy of the private, employer-based health care system in the US. If you are well-to-do and don’t mind dealing with the tedious paperwork or have other people do it for you, this may not be a concern, because you can buy good health care. It turns out it is also not a problem if you are member of Congress since, as Lee Fang reports, they have an excellent system and in the recently passed pandemic stimulus bill, they quietly included additional funding for themselves. Even those Republicans who rail against any proposals that seek to provide universal health care are more than happy to take advantage of their tax-payer funded health care system. So is Democrat Nancy Pelosi, an adamant opponent of Medicare For All.
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As most people must be aware, the element lithium plays a major role in battery technology, powering many of our technology devices and electric vehicles. But it also plays a key role in medical devices and Lydia DePillis writes that the US has been losing the global competition for lithium-ion battery manufacture to China, and that is part of the reason that it has not been able to adequately meet the demands due to the pandemic.
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