H5N1

COVID-19 in Brazil: 65,163 new cases, 2,029 deaths today

I'm back from a holiday that included two power outages and a couple of days offline. 

A screenshot from the CONASS PANEL | COVID-19 dashboard:

In related news, Brazilians are yet again marching in the streets to demand the ouster of President Jair Bolsonaro over a vaccine corruption scandal.

Haiti has no Covid-19 vaccine doses as violence looms larger than pandemic

Via The Guardian: Haiti has no Covid vaccine doses as violence looms larger than pandemic.

Haiti does not have a single vaccine to offer its more than 11 million people over a year after the pandemic began, raising concerns among health experts that the wellbeing of Haitians is being pushed aside as violence and political instability across the country deepen. 

So far, Haiti is slated to receive only 756,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine through a United Nations program aimed at ensuring the neediest countries get Covid-19 shots. The free doses were scheduled to arrive in May at the latest, but delays are expected because Haiti missed a deadline and the key Indian manufacturer is now prioritizing an increase in domestic demand. 

“Haiti has only recently completed some of the essential documentation that are prerequisites for processing of a shipping order,” said Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a Geneva-based public-private partnership that is co-managing the UN-backed Covax effort. 

The country also didn’t apply for a pilot program in which it would have received some of its allotted doses early, according to the Pan American Health Organization. However, a spokeswoman commended its other pandemic efforts, including reinforcing hospital preparedness. 

Meanwhile, a human rights research center cited in a new US state department report found Haiti’s government misappropriated more than $1m worth of coronavirus aid. The report also accused government officials of spending $34m in the “greatest opacity”, bypassing an agency charged with approving state contracts. 

Lauré Adrien, general director of Haiti’s health ministry, blamed the vaccine delay on scrutiny of the AstraZeneca shots and concerns that the country lacks the necessary infrastructure to ensure proper vaccine storage, adding that his agency prefers a single-dose vaccine. AstraZeneca requires two doses. 

“It’s no secret that we don’t have excellent conservation facilities,” he said. “We wanted to be sure that we had all the parameters under control before we received vaccine stocks.” 

Adrien also noted all the money his agency received has been properly spent, but said he could not speak for other agencies. A presidential spokesman did not return calls for comment.

WHO to probe 'sexual exploitation' by Ebola aid workers in DR Congo

This is bad. Via BBC News: WHO to probe 'sexual exploitation' by aid workers in DR Congo. Excerpt:

The World Health Organization (WHO) has pledged to investigate allegations that aid workers tackling the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo sexually abused and exploited women. 

WHO and other aid agency staff were accused by 50 women in a joint investigation by two news agencies. 

Local women were allegedly plied with drinks, "ambushed" in hospitals, forced to have sex, and two became pregnant. 

The allegations cover the period between 2018 and March this year. 

The New Humanitarian news agency and the Thomson Reuters Foundation have carried out an almost year-long investigation. 

The WHO said the allegations would be "robustly investigated". 

"Anyone identified as being involved will be held to account and face serious consequences, including immediate dismissal," it said in a statement. 

"The betrayal of people in the communities we serve is reprehensible." 

More than 2,000 people died in the Ebola outbreak in DR Congo. 

The WHO, which spearheaded global efforts to curb the spread of the outbreak, declared it over in June this year. 

The UN and aid agencies have previously promised zero tolerance of sexual abuse following similar allegations against some of their staff in other countries. 

A spokesperson for the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it would scrutinise the WHO findings closely, adding: "Sexual exploitation and abuse are completely abhorrent. We regularly assess all of our partners against the highest safeguarding standards." 

Who does the investigation implicate the most? 

Most of the allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation were against men, including doctors, said to be from the WHO. At least 30 women made allegations against them, the news agencies reported. 

The next highest number of allegations - made by eight women - were against men said to be from DR Congo's health ministry. 

Two other UN agencies, and four international charities, were also named in the report.

Some of the accused men came from Belgium, Burkina Faso, Canada, France, Guinea-Conakry and Ivory Coast. 

Many men refused to wear condoms, and at least two women said they became pregnant as a result of the abuse, the news agencies reported.

White House seeks to discredit Fauci as COVID-19 surges

Via NBC News: White House seeks to discredit Fauci as coronavirus surges. Excerpt:

The White House is seeking to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's leading infectious disease expert, as President Donald Trump works to marginalize him and his dire warnings about the shortcomings of the U.S. coronavirus response. 

In a remarkable broadside by the Trump administration against one of its own, a White House official said Sunday that "several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things." The official gave NBC News a list of nearly a dozen past comments by Fauci that the official said had ultimately proven erroneous.  

Among them: Fauci's comments in January that the coronavirus was "not a major threat" and his guidance in March that "people should not be walking around with masks."  

It was a move more characteristic of a political campaign furtively disseminating opposition research about an opponent than of a White House struggling to contain a pandemic that has killed more than 135,000 people, according to an NBC News tally.

Fauci, who runs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had been a leading member of the White House coronavirus task force and a key communicator with the public until the president soured on his sober assessments of the situation, which have increasingly conflicted with the more sanguine picture of a virus in retreat that the president has sought to paint.

In recent days, Fauci has deviated from Trump by disputing that the U.S. is "doing great" and by faulting the decision in some states to reopen too quickly and to sidestep the task force's suggested criteria for when it's safe to loosen restrictions. In a particularly alarming prediction, Fauci said he wouldn't be surprised if the U.S. was soon adding 100,000 new cases a day — a figure that would reflect an abject failure to slow the spread. 

Fauci declined to comment.

In Guatemala, COVID-19 shows its power to kill trust

Via The Tyee, my colleague Emi Sasagawa writes: In Guatemala, the Virus Shows Its Power to Kill Trust. Excerpt:

It’s the start of month six of the world living with the threat of coronavirus. While restrictions are easing in Canada, a first wave of COVID-19 cases is resurging just south of the border in the U.S.  

Further south, in many less-developed countries, the first wave is just now picking up speed. With fewer resources and restless populations, some of those nations’ governments are seeing their political lives put in danger by the coronavirus.  

As citizens are asked to endure lockdowns and economic deprivation as a result of pandemic measures, trust becomes a currency increasingly precious. Eroding it are doubts about the statistics their leaders share, what competence they show in managing the virus and the economy, and where government money flows. 

Guatemala is a case in point — one The Tyee is looking in on occasionally as part of a project in partnership with the TulaSalud Foundation, which funds rural public health work in that Central American country. Grassroots opposition to corruption in Guatemala has roiled the country for years, playing a key role in unseating the previous president who was replaced in January by Alejandro Giammattei, a right-wing former physician and director of the prison system. He, too, under the harsh glare of the pandemic, faces severe trust issues. 

 As July arrives, Guatemala is struggling to deal with a steepening infection curve and a health system leaning towards collapse. The reported numbers have soared from 644 cases and 16 deaths on May 1 to 20,072 cases and 843 deaths on July 2. There is no indication the curve with be flattened any time soon. What took months to unfold across Canada — the outbreaks, the overwhelmed health system in certain regions, the economic and financial repercussions of the pandemic — has been compressed into a matter of weeks. 

Still, there were months to prepare. Yet Giammattei’s government is taking fire for not yet managing to provide personal protective equipment for frontline workers.  

“At this point, doctors still don’t have the appropriate health equipment,” said Dr. Rubén Gonzalez, former vice-minister of health and one of the leading voices in an alternative COVID-19 response exercise. “Of the total budget assigned for this emergency, only a small fraction, less than five per cent is being used, because the government hasn’t been able to negotiate a price with providers and, as a result, all plans by the government collapse. In the meantime, our health-care workers suffer.”

Hollowed-out public health system faces more cuts amid COVID-19 pandemic

Many thanks to Lauren Weber for sending this major report by Kaiser Health News and The Associated Press: Hollowed out public health system faces more cuts amid virus. Here's an excerpt and then a comment, but you should just click through and read the whole long, grim story. Don't let it depress you, but do let it enrage you.

The U.S. public health system has been starved for decades and lacks the resources to confront the worst health crisis in a century. 

Marshaled against a virus that has sickened at least 2.6 million in the U.S., killed more than 126,000 people and cost tens of millions of jobs and $3 trillion in federal rescue money, state and local government health workers on the ground are sometimes paid so little, they qualify for public aid.  

They track the coronavirus on paper records shared via fax. Working seven-day weeks for months on end, they fear pay freezes, public backlash and even losing their jobs.  

Since 2010, spending for state public health departments has dropped by 16% per capita and spending for local health departments has fallen by 18%, according to a KHN and Associated Press analysis of government spending on public health. At least 38,000 state and local public health jobs have disappeared since the 2008 recession, leaving a skeletal workforce for what was once viewed as one of the world’s top public health systems. 

An Associated Press-KHN investigation has found a skeletal workforce facing more possible county budget cuts. KHN, also known as Kaiser Health News, and AP interviewed more than 150 public health workers, policymakers and experts, analyzed spending records from hundreds of state and local health departments, and surveyed statehouses. On every level, the investigation found, the system is underfunded and under threat, unable to protect the nation’s health.  

Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview in April that his “biggest regret” was “that our nation failed over decades to effectively invest in public health.”  

So when this outbreak arrived — and when, according to public health experts, the federal government bungled its response — hollowed-out state and local health departments were ill-equipped to step into the breach.

Over time, their work had received so little support that they found themselves without direction, disrespected, ignored, even vilified. The desperate struggle against COVID-19 became increasingly politicized and grew more difficult. 

States, cities and counties in dire straits have begun laying off and furloughing their limited staff, and even more devastation looms, as states reopen and cases surge. Historically, even when money pours in following crises such as Zika and H1N1, it disappears after the emergency subsides. Officials fear the same thing is happening now. 

“We don’t say to the fire department, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. There were no fires last year, so we’re going to take 30% of your budget away.’ That would be crazy, right?” said Dr. Gianfranco Pezzino, the health officer in Shawnee County, Kansas. “But we do that with public health, day in and day out.”

This is not just a Republican failure; the Democrats are equally to blame. Both parties, since about 1980, have presided over an enormous project of social engineering: the transfer of wealth from working people and the middle class to the 0.1%.

"Government is the problem" was Reagan's mantra, and as people began to notice that their incomes couldn't quite cover all their bills any more, they were taught to blame government spending for their suddenly heavy taxes. (Never mind that Americans were already among the most lightly taxed citizens of any industrialized country.)

 

So tax cut after tax cut came from Republican and Democratic administrations alike, on all levels of government. Somehow the taxes were always too burdensome, the government spending too wasteful. Universal health care was for those overtaxed "socialist" Europeans and Canadians, and a little grudging support for public health came only to provide symptomatic relief—to provide a Band-Aid, not to prevent the cut in the first place.

 

"We're all in this together" rings hollow in a country that's been taught for 40 years that everyone is personally responsible for his or her success or failure, health or sickness. And now that the consequences of 40 years of wealth transfer are manifest, 126,000 rugged American individualists are dead, 2.6 million have been sickened (so far), and everyone but the 0.1% have been further impoverished. (The 0.1% have been doing just fine, thanks.)

 

It will take more than yet another transfer of power from Republicans to Democrats to roll back COVID-19. It will take a rollback of 40 years of systemic theft from the 99%.

Lula: Bolsonaro leading Brazil 'to slaughterhouse' over COVID-19

Via The Guardian: Lula: Bolsonaro leading Brazil 'to slaughterhouse' over Covid-19. Excerpt:

Jair Bolsonaro is leading Brazilians “to the slaughterhouse” with his irresponsible handling of coronavirus, the country’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has said. 

In an impassioned interview with the Guardian – which came as Brazil’s Covid-19 death toll hit 1,924 – Lula said that by undermining social distancing and defenestrating his own health minister, Brazil’s “troglodyte” leader risked repeating the devastating scenes playing out in Ecuador where families have had to dump their loved ones’ corpses in the streets.  

“Unfortunately I fear Brazil is going to suffer a great deal because of Bolsonaro’s recklessness … I fear that if this grows Brazil could see some cases like those horrific, monstrous images we saw in Guayaquil,” said the 74-year-old leftist. 

“We can’t just want to topple a president because we don’t like him,” Lula admitted. “[But] if Bolsonaro continues to commit crimes of responsibility … [and] trying to lead society to the slaughterhouse – which is what he is doing – I think the institutions will need to find a way of sorting Bolsonaro out. And that will mean you’ll need to have an impeachment.”  

Bolsonaro – a proudly homophobic former army captain already despised by progressive Brazilians for his hostility to the environment, indigenous rights and the arts, as well as his alleged links to Rio’s mafia – has alienated millions more with his dismissive stance towards the coronavirus, which he belittles as media “hysteria” and a “bit of a cold”. 

Since the World Health Organization declared the pandemic on 11 March, Brazil’s president has repeatedly thumbed his nose at social distancing, first by egging on and attending pro-Bolsonaro protests and then with a series of provocative visits to bakeries, supermarkets and pharmacies. During one unnecessary outing Bolsonaro declared: “No one will hinder my right to come and go.” 

In March the rightwing populist even suggested Brazilians need not worry about Covid-19 since they could bathe in excrement “and nothing happens”. 

Such moves put Bolsonaro at loggerheads with his own health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, a doctor-turned-politician who was fired on Thursday after challenging the president’s behaviour. 

Meanwhile Bolsonaro’s politician son, Eduardo, has taken the wrecking ball to ties with Brazil’s most important trade partner, China, by accusing its Communist party leaders of being to blame for the coronavirus crisis.  

Bolsonaro’s actions have sparked nightly pot-banging protests in cities up and down the country and drawn scorn from across the political spectrum.  

“Coronavirus must be laughing its head off,” Eliane Cantanhêde, a columnist for the conservative Estado de São Paulo newspaper, wrote of Bolsonaro’s antics this week. 

The rightwing governor of Brazil’s most populous state, São Paulo, has declared the country at war with both the coronavirus and the “Bolsonaro-virus”.

COVID-19 in the US: Thomas Massie is a monster Republicans created

A column in The Washington Post: Thomas Massie is a monster Republicans created. This guy would make a great cellmate for Rush Limbaugh in Leavenworth, or better yet, a USMC brig. Excerpt:

Republicans were aghast that one of their own had committed such a monstrously selfish act.  

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), in purely symbolic opposition to the $2.2 trillion emergency coronavirus legislation, forced hundreds of his colleagues to risk their lives — literally — by flying back to Washington. So what if many of the lawmakers are elderly and at high risk? 

In order to thwart Massie’s pointless protest, an attempt to force a roll-call vote instead of a simple voice vote, leaders had to summon 216 members to fill the chamber, eerily separated on the floor and in the gallery above to limit infection. This fruitless, immoral gesture by the 49-year-old legislator was in service of another: to thwart a nearly unanimous Congress from dispensing aid to the sick and suffering in the middle of a pandemic.

President Trump called Massie a “third rate Grandstander” and proposed to “throw Massie out of Republican Party!” 

Joining in bipartisan revulsion, former secretary of state John Kerry shared Trump’s tweet and added: “Congressman Massie has tested positive for being an asshole. He must be quarantined to prevent the spread of his massive stupidity.”  

But if Republicans are disturbed by Massie, they might pause for self-reflection. Massie is the epitome of the anti-government culture they have nurtured and encouraged. He embodies the drain-the-swamp political philosophy they have embraced.  

“I came here to make sure our Republic doesn’t die by unanimous consent in an empty chamber, and I request a recorded vote!” the bespectacled rebel said in his quickly-stifled stunt. 

“Shut the fuck up,” Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) replied from the gallery, an ABC News journalist heard.  

Massie has it backward. Unanimous consent doesn’t kill the Republic. Unanimity, or at least consensus, is what we need in Washington, and what we have lost. Massie and scores like him in the congressional GOP exist to break up consensus, to throw sand in the gears, to hobble government. Maybe Massie’s antics in this moment of national crisis will help Republicans remember that the government they’ve been demonizing is the only thing they have to save a collapsing national economy and stop a deadly disease. 

Massie, a believer in the “deep state” conspiracy, is a product of the tea party, a protege of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and a collaborator with outgoing Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who is becoming Trump’s chief of staff, when they tried to oust then-Speaker John Boehner. “I’m ready to be unpopular,” Massie said after his 2012 election, and he has opposed even anti-lynching and human rights legislation — and celebrated when he uses “the process” so that “things die.”

Former DR Congo health minister convicted of embezzling Ebola funds

Well, he was a hero for a while. Via the National Post, a Reuters report: Former DR Congo health minister convicted of embezzling Ebola funds.

KINSHASA — A former health minister in the Democratic Republic of Congo and his financial advisor were sentenced on Monday to five years of forced labor for embezzling more than $400,000 from the country’s Ebola response funds, a court order showed.  

Oly Ilunga was health minister for seven months at the height of the Ebola epidemic in eastern Congo, which has killed more than 2,200 people since mid-2018. It is winding down now, with no new cases recorded in over a month.  

President Felix Tshisekedi stripped him of his role managing the Ebola response last July and he resigned from the government days later, criticizing actions taken by Tshisekedi. He was arrested in September. 

Ilunga’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday, but they have previously denied all the allegations. 

The court convicted Ilunga and his financial advisor of forging receipts worth $391,332 from a fake company, referred to as New Sarah pharmaceutical depot, to justify purchases of products already paid for by international donors. 

The pair diverted a further $13,000 intended to pay for transport of life-saving goods to Ebola hotspots, the court found.  

The judgment marks the first time a minister from former President Joseph Kabila’s government has been convicted for corruption since Tshisekedi took power last year. 

Ilunga was nominated by Kabila but remained in his post for months while negotiations about Tshiskedi’s first cabinet dragged out. 

Having run on an anti-corruption ticket, Tshisekedi’s declared ambitions to clean up public finances have been hampered by an awkward power-sharing deal with Kabila, whose allies control a majority of ministries and seats in parliament.  

The hundreds of millions of dollars pumped by foreign donors into the response to Congo’s Ebola outbreak, the second deadliest ever, raised fears of corruption after the response to West Africa’s even larger 2013-16 outbreak was dogged by allegations of graft.

COVID-19 and the Kursk submarine disaster

Via The New Yorker: The Coronavirus and the Kursk Submarine Disaster.

When we face catastrophe, our minds look for points of comparison. Recently, people have talked and written about world wars, the Spanish flu, the plague, and the Great Depression. I have written about terror. Each of these parallels sheds some light on our current predicament. Here is one more: often, these days, I think of a submarine.  

In August, 2000, the Kursk, a giant nuclear submarine, went out to sea off the coast of Murmansk with an undertrained crew and a load of torpedoes that were past their expiration date. One or two of those torpedoes appear to have exploded onboard, killing most of the men on the submarine. The tremors set off by the explosion were picked up by a Norwegian seismic station, but the Russian Navy didn’t acknowledge the accident for nine hours, and President Vladimir Putin wasn’t notified for another nine hours after that. He was on vacation in Sochi, on the Black Sea, and he remained on vacation. All this time, twenty-three men inside what remained of the Kursk awaited rescue at the bottom of the sea.  

The Russian Navy sent rescue crews, but they failed to dock to the submarine. It seemed that they lacked the necessary skills, because, ten days later, when a Norwegian crew were finally allowed to attempt a rescue, they docked on their first try. By that time, the men inside had been dead a week. 

Trapped in their underwater capsule, those twenty-three seamen had survived for more than two days. As long as they lived, they kept beating out an S.O.S. signal. In August, 2000, Russia had thriving independent television and print media that were reporting on the tragedy, but the vacationing President, at first, said nothing. Then he mumbled something incoherent about the value of the equipment aboard the Kursk. On the seventh day after the explosion, Putin’s aides finally persuaded him to return to Moscow. He told television reporters, “I did the right thing, because the arrival of nonspecialists from any field, the presence of high-placed officials in the disaster area, would not help and more often would hamper work. Everyone should keep to his place.” Then he travelled to the Arctic and, under the cover of night, met with the families of the dead sailors, told them that the sailors might still be alive, and also railed against the forces that had destroyed the Russian military. “I never thought that things were in this kind of condition,” he said. 

There is no direct parallel between the coronavirus pandemic and the Kursk submarine, but, as sometimes happens with President Donald Trump and Putin, there is a similarity of spirit. Both Presidents stayed silent when they should have been speaking. (Putin vacationed; Trump golfed.) Both offered false hope and accepted no responsibility. Both blamed other countries (Russia briefly embraced the theory that an American submarine had collided with the Kursk), and both blamed their predecessors for destroying a system that should have saved people. 

But there is more. The most striking aspect of Putin’s failure to accept responsibility for the Kursk disaster was his retreat into bureaucratese. It was a preview of the twenty years since (and possibly the next twenty). Putin’s use of bureaucratic language is a means of misleading the public and deflecting responsibility, but it also offers an insight into his understanding of government. He saw himself as a figurehead who might get in the way of people doing their work, and seemed unaware that his job was to lead the effort. Perhaps as a result, the Russian Navy and government were overcautious, rejected foreign help, and didn’t even respond to the S.O.S. signals from the submarine. 

I don’t usually think of Trump as a bureaucrat. In many ways, he seems the opposite of one—he favors snap decisions, and sweeping ones, and he abhors regulation. But he and Putin share a toxic combination of imperiousness and laziness, a kind of high-handed lassitude. They like to be in charge, but they can’t be bothered to take charge. They disdain competence but somehow assume that other people’s competence will fix whatever it is that needs fixing. As his relentless campaign against government has shown, Trump sees the American system of government as a giant bureaucracy. The government, under Trump, has been partly dismantled, partly corrupted, and partly allowed to churn along, in part because he didn’t feel like paying attention. 

But, in a crisis, when churning along will not do, the government cannot function without a leader; or at least its proper functioning is severely delayed, as it struggles to adapt to the idea that the leader—who in other respects is something of a control freak and in all respects is terrifying—isn’t going to lead.  

My colleague Robert P. Baird has traced why testing for the coronavirus has not been widely available in the United States, laying out a succession of contradictory and confusing events. The test was delayed not only by human error but by rules that had unintended consequences; by a reluctance to make decisions; and, most of all, it seems, by a system’s inability to recognize its own failings. In this age of anti-bureaucratic government, it was a story of bureaucratic failings. 

This is not actually surprising: Hannah Arendt called bureaucracy “the rule of Nobody.” Trump, who rejects all responsibility, is this Nobody now. And we are all in a submarine at the bottom of the sea, banging out an S.O.S. signal.