Link: https://www.genengnews.com/news/sars-cov-2-lurked-for-decades-where-others-like-it-lurk-still/

Future pandemics—and suffering of the kind inflicted by COVID-19—could be avoided if we troubled ourselves to see where dangerous pathogens lie in wait. We could, two unrelated studies suggest, save ourselves untold woe and conserve our fortunes if we were to look into matters geographic, zoologic, and genomic. More specifically, we need to keep our eyes wide open when we venture into the planet’s last wild places. There, we may run into wild animals that are infected with pathogens harboring wild genetic traits—which is to say, genetic traits that evolved naturally, beyond our gaze, and that waited patiently, perhaps decades, for a chance to strike.

Recognizing the potential for outbreaks

According to an international research team of Chinese, European, and U.S. scientists, the SARS-CoV-2 lineage responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic has been circulating in bats for 40–70 years and likely includes other viruses with the ability to infect humans. This finding, which is derived from a newly constructed evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, has implications for the prevention of future pandemics stemming from this lineage.

To put together SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary history, the scientists had to account for recombination events, which occur frequently in coronaviruses and which complicate inquiries into a pathogen’s origins.

“Coronaviruses have genetic material that is highly recombinant, meaning different regions of the virus’s genome can be derived from multiple sources,” explained Maciej Boni, associate professor of biology at Penn State and the lead author of a study that appeared July 28 in Nature Microbiology. “This has made it difficult to reconstruct SARS-CoV-2’s origins. You have to identify all the regions that have been recombining and trace their histories. To do that, we put together a diverse team with expertise in recombination, phylogenetic dating, virus sampling, and molecular and viral evolution.”

The study, titled “Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic,” described how the team used three different bioinformatic approaches to identify and remove the recombinant regions within the SARS-CoV-2 genome. The article also detailed how the team reconstructed phylogenetic histories for the nonrecombinant regions and compared them to each other to see which specific viruses have been involved in recombination events in the past.

“We find that the sarbecoviruses—the viral subgenus containing SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2—undergo frequent recombination and exhibit spatially structured genetic diversity on a regional scale in China,” the article’s authors wrote. “SARS-CoV-2 itself is not a recombinant of any sarbecoviruses detected to date, and its receptor-binding motif, important for specificity to human ACE2 receptors, appears to be an ancestral trait shared with bat viruses and not one acquired recently via recombination.”

The authors maintained that the results generated by the three bioinformatic approaches were consistent with Bayesian evolutionary rate and divergence date estimates as well as with two different prior specifications of evolutionary rates based on HCoV-OC43 and MERS-CoV. In addition, the authors estimated that divergence dates between SARS-CoV-2 and the bat sarbecovirus reservoir were 1948 (95% highest posterior density (HPD): 1879–1999), 1969 (95% HPD: 1930–2000), and 1982 (95% HPD: 1948–2009).

These findings led the scientists to conclude that viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been circulating in horseshoe bats for many decades. The scientists added, “The unsampled diversity descended from the SARS-CoV-2/RaTG13 common ancestor forms a clade of bat sarbecoviruses with generalist properties—with respect to their ability to infect a range of mammalian cells—that facilitated its jump to humans and may do so again.”

The team found that one of the older traits that SARS-CoV-2 shares with its relatives is the receptor-binding domain (RBD) located on the spike protein, which enables the virus to recognize and bind to receptors on the surfaces of human cells.

The team emphasized that preventing future pandemics will require better sampling within wild bats and the implementation of human disease surveillance systems that are able to identify novel pathogens in humans and respond in real time.

“The key to successful surveillance is knowing which viruses to look for and prioritizing those that can readily infect humans,” said the article’s senior author, David L. Robertson, PhD, professor of computational virology, MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research. “We should have been better prepared for a second SARS virus.”

“We were too late in responding to the initial SARS-CoV-2 outbreak,” added Boni, “but this will not be our last coronavirus pandemic. A much more comprehensive and real-time surveillance system needs to be put in place to catch viruses like this when case numbers are still in the double digits.”

Investing in prevention

A surveillance system of the kind suggested by Boni is in line with recommendations from another recent study, one that argues for investments in preventive efforts. The study, prepared by scientists from Boston University, Princeton University, Duke University, Conservation International, and other institutions, indicated that “preventive efforts would be substantially less than the economic and mortality costs of responding to these pathogens once they have emerged.”

The scientists assessed the cost of monitoring and preventing disease spillover that is driven by the unprecedented loss and fragmentation of tropical forests and by the burgeoning wildlife trade. They discovered that significantly reducing transmission of new diseases from tropical forests would cost, globally, between $22.2 and $30.7 billion each year.

In stark contrast, they found that the COVID-19 pandemic will likely end up costing between $8.1 and $15.8 trillion globally—roughly 500 times as costly as what it would take to invest in proposed preventive measures. To estimate the total financial cost of COVID-19, researchers included both the lost gross domestic product and the economic and workforce cost of hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide.

These findings appeared in Science, in a policy brief titled, “Ecology and economics for pandemic prevention.” The brief emphasized that “we invest relatively little toward preventing deforestation and regulating wildlife trade, despite well-researched plans that demonstrate a high return on their investment in limiting zoonoses and conferring many other benefits.”

For decades, scientists and environmental activists have been trying to draw the world’s attention to the many harms caused by the rapid destruction of tropical forests. One of these harms is the emergence of new diseases that are transmitted between wild animals and humans, either through direct contact or through contact with livestock that is then eaten by humans. The SARS-CoV-2 virus—which has so far infected more than 15 million people worldwide—appears to have been transmitted from bats to humans in China.

“Much of this traces back to our indifference about what has been occurring at the edges of tropical forests,” said Les Kaufman, PhD, one of the article’s co-authors and a Boston University professor of biology.

To reduce disease transmission, Kaufman and his collaborators propose expanding wildlife trade monitoring programs, investing in efforts to end the wild meat trade in China, investing in policies to reduce deforestation by 40%, and fighting the transmission of disease from wild animals to livestock.

The researchers also propose to increase funding for creating an open-source library of the unique genetic signatures of known viruses, which could help quickly pinpoint the source of emerging diseases and catch them more quickly, before they can spread.

“The pandemic gives an incentive to do something addressing concerns that are immediate and threatening to individuals, and that’s what moves people,” argued Kaufman. “There are many people who might object to the United States fronting money, but it’s in our own best interest. Nothing seems more prudent than to give ourselves time to deal with this pandemic before the next one comes.”

Some news you haven't seen anywhere else:

New campaign finance data show Chuck Schumer's political machine spent $15 million to crush progressive candidates & tilt primaries to candidates who pledge to block Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. https://t.co/N8D4fGepQu

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) July 16, 2020

from link above

===

Senate Democrats’ political machine has spent more than $15 million to help more moderate Senate candidates defeat progressive primary challengers in the 2020 election cycle.

With the help of the party, its major donors, and the Senate Majority PAC (SMP) — a super PAC funded by labor unions, corporate interests and Wall Street billionaires — candidates endorsed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have won contested primaries in four battleground states.

While the DSCC’s chair, Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, said last year the party would support progressive incumbent Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey if he faced a primary challenger, he hasn’t seen any outside help yet from the DSCC or SMP in his tough battle with Rep. Joseph Kennedy III.

Colorado was the most emblematic example of the party putting its thumb on the scale against progressives: There, former Gov. John Hickenlooper cruised to a primary victory over former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. In the final weeks of the race, SMP spent $1 million to boost Hickenlooper, after he spent his failed presidential campaign attacking key tenets of progressives’ legislative agenda, including Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

At the time of the cash infusion, Hickenlooper was losing ground in the polls and engulfed in scandals: He had just been fined by Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission for violating state ethics law as governor, the local CBS station uncovered evidence of his gubernatorial office raking in cash from oil companies, and a video circulated showed Hickenlooper comparing his job as a politician to a slave on a slave ship, being whipped by a scheduler.

With the help of SMP and the endorsement of the DSCC, Hickenlooper held off the more progressive Romanoff to win a 17 point primary victory.

Unions, Billionaires, and Corporate Interests
SMP is led byformer top staffers at the DSCC. The super PAC has raised a staggering $118 million this cycle, pooling cash from both organized labor and business titans to promote corporate-aligned candidates over more progressive primary challengers.

Working for Working Americans, a super PAC funded by the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, has donated $5 million. The Laborers’ International Union of North America’s super PAC has given $1.5 million. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’s political action committee has chipped in $1.3 million. SMP has received also big donations from groups affiliated with labor unions like the Service Employees International Union ($1 million), the National Association of Letter Carriers ($750,000), and Communications Workers of America ($500,000).

Overall, the top donor to SMP so far this cycle has been Democracy PAC — a super PAC that’s bankrolled by billionaire George Soros and the Fund for Policy Reform, a nonprofit funded by Soros. Democracy PAC has contributed $8.5 million to SMP.

Other donors from the financial industry include: Renaissance Technologies founder and billionaire Jim Simons ($3.5 million) and billionaire D. E. Shaw & Co. founder David Shaw ($1 million).

Some major donors have financial stakes in current and future legislation.

For instance: SMP received a $1 million donation from billionaire Jonathan Gray, an executive at Blackstone, which owns the hospital staffing chain, TeamHealth. SMP also received $2 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association.

In late 2019, Schumer helped stall Senate legislation that would have kept patients from receiving “surprise medical bills,” the hefty charges that occur when they visit hospitals that are in their insurance network but are unknowingly treated by providers who are considered out-of-network.

SMP is affiliated with Majority Forward, a dark money group focused on attacking Republican Senate candidates. Majority Forward received $450,000 in 2018 from pharmacy giant CVS Health — which also owns health insurer Aetna. The group also received $300,000 from the American Health Care Association (AHCA), a trade association that represents the nursing home industry.

The Democratic primary candidates backed by the DSCC have expressed reservations about Medicare for All, arguing they believe people should be allowed to keep their private health insurance if they want it. Many of the DSCC’s favored candidates do support creating a public health insurance option.

Meanwhile, the Real Estate Roundtable, a trade group for real estate investors, donated $50,000 to Majority Forward. Schumer and Senate Democrats recently helped Republicans unanimously pass pandemic relief legislation that included a special, little-noticed provision that amounted to $170 billion worth of new tax breaks for wealthy real estate investors.

Deciding Primaries
In addition to the Colorado race, SMP has waded into at least three other Senate primaries this year.

In North Carolina, SMP funded Carolina Blue, a super PAC that spent $4.5 million to help veteran and former state senator Cal Cunningham win the primary in March. Cunningham handily defeated his chief opponent, state senator Erica Smith, who was running to his left. (Republicans, for their part, also tried to influence the primary, spending $2.7 million to boost Smith.)

In Iowa, SMP spent nearly $7 million to promote real estate developer Theresa Greenfield. She easily bested her two primary opponents, including progressive Kimberly Graham, who campaigned in support of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

SMP has already spent more than $2 million in Maine, including nearly $500,000 to promote House Speaker Sara Gideon in the Democratic primary. Some of the group’s advertising against Republican Senator Susan Collins was also designed to boost Gideon.

On Tuesday, Gideon won the primary decisively, defeating two candidates, including Betsy Sweet, a former lobbyist for progressive advocacy groups who supported the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.

It was his dream job. He never thought he’d be bribing doctors and wearing a wire for the feds.
In an exclusive interview, the man behind a $678 million whistleblower settlement says “drastic action” was needed to shake up the pharmaceutical industry.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/it-was-his-dream-job-he-never-thought-he-d-n1232971

On July 1, Ozzie Bilotta’s years long effort to blow the whistle at Novartis paid off. The Justice Department announced a $678 million settlement with the company over improper inducements it made to doctors to prescribe 10 of the company’s drugs, including the anti-hypertension drug Lotrel. The deal represents the biggest whistleblower settlement under the federal anti-kickback law, Bilotta’s lawyer said.

“I felt like you needed to take drastic action to turn this system upside down and make it more legit,” Bilotta, 57, said in an exclusive interview with NBC News. “The whole system needed to be blown up and pieced together in a fair way — fair for taxpayers and good for patients.”

Although the payout Bilotta will get under federal whistleblower laws hasn’t been determined, he could receive a pretax sum of $75 million through the settlement, his attorneys said.

In the settlement, Novartis admitted to “certain conduct” alleged by the government and will sharply curtail practices exposed by Bilotta that gave doctors incentives to prescribe its drugs. Novartis derived at least $40 million as a result of the conduct, money that was paid by federal health care programs, the government said.

“For more than a decade, Novartis spent hundreds of millions of dollars on so-called speaker programs, including speaking fees, exorbitant meals, and top-shelf alcohol that were nothing more than bribes to get doctors across the country to prescribe Novartis’s drugs,” said Audrey Strauss, the acting U.S. attorney for southern New York, whose office prosecuted the case.

Chief Executive Vas Narasimhan said in a statement that Novartis is committed “to resolve and learn from legacy compliance matters. We are a different company today — with new leadership, a stronger culture, and a more comprehensive commitment to ethics embedded at the heart of our company.”

A Novartis spokesman declined to comment on Bilotta.

Bilotta, a Novartis sales representative for the eastern end of Long Island, filed his suit in January 2011 under the False Claims Act, detailing remuneration to physicians, such as lavish dinners at restaurants; costly tickets to sporting events and entertainment, including a trip to a Manhattan strip club; gift cards; and catering for events in the lives of doctors’ children, such as graduations or bar mitzvahs.

On behalf of the government and to prove his case, Bilotta secretly recorded himself making cash payments to two doctors and got confirmation from four others of having accepted prior remuneration.

The government and New York state took up his case in 2013. It covers activities at Novartis that took place from January 2002 until November 2011. In addition to Bilotta’s evidence, the government interviewed 350 witnesses, he said. The anti-hypertensive drug Valturna and the anti-diabetes drug Starlix were among the 10 or so drugs involved in the kickbacks.

The federal government’s anti-kickback statute is a criminal law barring remuneration to health care providers for patient referrals or other business involving goods and services covered by health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Kickbacks can result in higher health care costs, overuse of drugs or services and improper patient steering.

The company’s doctor speaker programs took place at luxury restaurants in New York City, Miami, Chicago and San Francisco where physicians were supposed to educate other practitioners about Novartis’ drugs. Over the period, one doctor received over $320,000 in honoraria and wrote more than 8,000 prescriptions for the company’s drugs, the government said. None of the doctors were identified by the government.

Bilotta, a child of immigrants from southern Italy, said he felt he had made it when he got the job at Novartis. “The positions are very competitive — they have thousands of applicants per job,” he said. “You felt almost honored to have gotten the position.”

Right away, however, some things seemed off, Bilotta said. He recalled one doctor presenting him with a page listing 10 patients’ names on his first day visiting doctors’ offices. Confused, he asked what it was. “I was told, ‘Once we get to 10 patients on this drug, we get a $100 gift certificate to a restaurant,'” he said.

Bilotta said that when he asked about it, his manager didn’t seem concerned and didn’t follow up. Novartis’ ethics policy stated that it was a criminal offense to offer payments or inducements to prescribe its drugs, according to the settlement.

Keeping high-prescribing doctors happy was an intense focus at Novartis, Bilotta said. At meetings with higher-ups, sales representatives would get hundreds of dollars in American Express gift checks to present to doctors.

As the years progressed, talk grew among pharmaceutical sales representatives about other drug companies’ buying big-ticket items for doctors — covering the cost of a swimming pool was one rumor Bilotta recalled. Some physicians started asking for more — a television for the waiting room, a donation to a child’s graduation. A top prescriber demanded that Novartis hire his son, which it did. The son didn’t last long on the job, Bilotta said.

“I saw things evolve,” Bilotta said. “We went from a strictly product focus to one that is more about incentivizing.”

In the mid-2000s, Novartis began ramping up its doctor speaker programs, at which the company paid physicians to educate other practitioners about a drug’s merits. But some of the drugs Bilotta sold had been around for years and were well-known, making it clear to him that the events were simply a payment system, he said. At the vast majority of the programs, small talk dominated and the drugs weren’t mentioned, Bilotta added.

“They wanted to have the veneer of conveying medical knowledge,” he said. “But how much education on these old drugs do you need? I’d be stunned if 10 percent of the programs were legitimate.”

According to the Justice Department, Novartis “hosted tens of thousands of speaker programs and related events under the guise of providing educational content, when in fact the events served as nothing more than a means to provide bribes to doctors.”

Novartis would repeatedly host the same doctors at promotional programs for the same drugs, the government said. Company records show that “more than 19,235 doctors attended programs with the exact same title three or more times in a six-month period,” the government said.

In Rockford, Illinois, for example, Novartis held 124 speaker programs over eight years with the same 10 doctors, or a subset, as the only people attending. Novartis paid one doctor to speak at 102 of the events.

Novartis created a compliance department in 1999, the government said, but until 2001 it had only one person on staff. The company didn’t conduct a full-blown audit of speaker events until 2008, the settlement said, but its compliance training materials discouraged sending emails about the activities, in part, because they put Novartis at risk. The settlement noted that Novartis’ chief compliance officer told company trainees in presentations: “If you don’t have to write it, don’t. Consider using the phone.”

Every quarter, Novartis would require its sales representatives to spend a budgeted amount, say, $5,000 apiece, on doctor speaker programs, Bilotta said. The funds were allocated immediately.

But finding enough practitioners to attend the programs was difficult, and sometimes money allotted for the programs wasn’t spent. Then there’d be hell to pay, Bilotta said.

“I had situations where my sales were good and for some reason I didn’t spend all my money and they would threaten my job,” he said. “They had a specific return on investment they attached to the money they spent.”

The government said one set of speaker programs generated a 1,200 percent return on investment among the doctors who attended.

Occasionally, Bilotta had interactions with patients, in a doctor’s waiting room for example, and they’d complain about the high costs of their medications. The conversations upset him, he said, given what he knew about Novartis’ payoffs to doctors and how they increased health care costs. “It was depressing,” he said. “You felt like you were hurting patients.”

In the mid- to later 2000s, he said, the situation became untenable. “By 2008, I saw this was just a bunch of schemes,” he said. He contemplated leaving Novartis, but job prospects were few during the Great Recession.

In 2010, Bilotta went to a manager and told him that he had evidence of fraud. He said the manager replied: “I’m sure we could find something on you.”

“I had to do something, but I didn’t feel there was any avenue,” he said.

Later that year, he saw a fraud case against another big pharmaceutical company and decided to contact whistleblower lawyers. By early 2011, he’d been debriefed by law enforcement, and before he filed suit, he began wearing a wire to record conversations with six doctors in his territory. Two took $500 each in cash, and the others confirmed receiving prior inducements or being willing to do so in the future.

Law enforcement was “stunned to hear that doctors were taking cash bribes,” Bilotta said. “They asked: ‘Can you get this on tape?’ I paused momentarily — that’s when the nature of the case really revealed itself to me.”

At first the case was under seal, but when Bilotta’s name emerged, he started to get death threats and online taunts. He felt he had to move his family out of the New York area, but he said the support he got from peers and strangers far outpaced the criticism. After taking medical retirement from Novartis in 2013 because of Meniere’s disease, he began living on a partial salary and medical insurance.

Under its settlement with the government, Novartis has agreed to make significant changes to its doctor speaker programs. Going forward, the programs will be in a virtual format only. They may not take place in restaurants, and alcohol can’t be offered. Future programs may occur only for the first 18 months after a new drug or a new indication is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and the company is limited to paying a total of $100,000 to all speakers for each drug or indication, or $10,000 per physician.

The changes signify the impact of the Novartis case, said one of Bilotta’s attorneys, James E. Miller, a partner at Shepherd Finkelman Miller & Shah.

“These limits, as opposed to the tens of millions of dollars often spent by pharmaceutical companies on speaker programs, will substantially diminish the opportunity for a physician’s prescription-writing to be influenced by the payments the physician is receiving from pharmaceutical companies,” Miller said. “We hope that this settlement will serve as a model on how to put a stop once and for all to the mischief and illegal behavior that we believe is rife in pharmaceutical speaker programs — despite the industry’s persistent claims to the contrary.”

Bilotta said that with the settlement finalized, he wants to work to change health care practices and laws that harm patients and taxpayers. Allowing the reimportation of drugs and letting the government negotiate drug prices would save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, he said, and he plans to work on promoting those changes.

“My intention is to keep this good momentum up and benefit the taxpayers,” he said.

While Bilotta’s decision to blow the whistle at Novartis has yielded positive results, he said the process isn’t for everyone.

“It is not an easy road — it’s very psychologically taxing,” Bilotta said. “You have to be very sincere in what you’re doing and be prepared to be opened up to a tremendous amount of scrutiny. Go with your convictions, but if you’re doing it for financial gain, it’s a mistake.”

URL = NYTIMES.com

transcript was exported on Jun 15 2020 – view
Speaker 1:
( silence)

Speaker 1:
Before they drive off, he’s parked righthere, its a fake bill from

Kueng:
The driver in there ?

Lane: The blue Benz?

Speaker 1:
Which one?

Speaker 3 :
That blue one over there .

Kueng
Which one?

Lane:
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yup-yup Justhead back in. They’re moving around alot. Letmesee yourhands. George Floyd:
Hey,man.I’m sorry! Lane:
Stayinthe car,letmeseeyourotherhand. George Floyd:
I’m sorry,I’m sorry! Lane:
Letmeseeyourother hand! George Floyd:
Please, Mr.Officer. Lane:
Both hands. George Floyd:
I didn’t do nothing. Lane:
Put your fuckinghandsup rightnow ! Letme see your other hand. Shawanda Hill:
lethim seeyourotherhand George Floyd :
All right.WhatIdothough?WhatwedoMrOfficer? Lane:
Putyourhand up there.Putyour fuckinghandupthere! Jesus Christ,keep your fucking handson the wheel
George Floyd:
got Lane:
Axon
crosstalk 00:02:00).
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the Gentlemen , sorry.

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Keep your fucking hands on thewheel. George Floyd:
Yes, sir. I’m sorry , officer crosstalk 00:02:03) Lane:
Who else is in the ? George Floyd:
Thismy friend. Lane:
Put your foot back in George Floyd:
I’m sorry, so sorry.Goddangman.Man, got,i shotthesamewayMrOfficer,before. Lane:
Okay. Wellwhen I say “Letmesee yourhands,” youput yourfucking handsup. George Floyd :
Iam sosorry,Mrofficer.Dangman. Lane:
You got him ? Put your hands on top ofyour head. George Floyd :
Lasttime gotshotlikethatMrOfficer itwasthesamething Lane:
Filedin DistrictCourt State ofMinnesota 7/7/2020 11:00 AM
Handsontopofyourhead.Handson topofyearhead.Stepoutofthevehicle,andstepawayfromme, allright?
George Floyd:
Yes, sir. Lane:
Step out and face away. Step outand face away . George Floyd:
Okay,Mr.Officer,pleasedon’tshootme. Please,man. Lane:
I’m not going to shoot you. Step out and away George Floyd:
I’lllookatyou eye-to-eyeman.Pleasedon’tshootme,man. Lane:
I’m notshootingyou,man. George Floyd
I justlostmymom ,man. Lane
320 were taking one out. Step out and face away . George Floyd:
Man, I’m so sorry. Lane
Step out and face away .
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George Floyd:
Pleasedon’tshootme,Mr.Officer.Please, don’tshootmeman.Please. Can younotshootme,man? Lane:
Step out and faceaway. I’m not shooting. Step out and face away. George Floyd:
Okay, okay, okay. Please. Please, man. Please. Please. I didn’tknow man. Lane:
Get outofthe car. George Floyd:
I didn’tknow,ididn’tknowMr.Officer. ShawandaRenee Hill
Stop resisting Floyd! Lane:
Put your fucking hands behind yourback. Putyour handsbehind your back rightnow ! Kueng:
Stopmoving. Stop! Put your handsbehind your back then ! Lane
Filedin DistrictCourt State ofMinnesota 7/7/2020 11:00 AM
Get his other arm George Floyd:
I’m notgoingtodonothing. Kueng:
Hey you come back ! Stay in the car! George Floyd
00:03:24.
I’m sorryMr.Officer, Shawanda Renee Hill
What did you say sir? George Floyd:
On man Kueng
Stop resisting then . George Floyd:
I’m not Kueng:
Yes, you are. George Floyd
getonmykneeswhatever.
Ididn’t donothingwrongman.[inaudible00:03:38]. Kueng
Stand up! George Floyd
Please, please,man. Lane:
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Against thewall. Shawanda Renee Hill
Whome? Lane:
Yes.
Shawanda Renee Hill
What I do ? Lane:
We’re figuring out what’s going on Drop the bag. ShawandaRenee Hill:
Figure out what’s going on 00:03:54 . Lane:
What’s the problem ? Shawanda Renee Hill:
Somebody said something to him , it ain’t us. Speaker 7:
Wewas getting aride, sir. Shawanda Renee Hill:
just gotmy phone fixed. crosstalk 00:04:00 ). Speaker 7:
You can ask Adam about us, Adam know me. Lane:
Are you good? crosstalk 00:04:06 ]. You got ID Shawanda Renee Hill
Come and getme, girl they going took Floyd to Jail, guna take Floyd to jail.
Comeandgetme Speaker 7:
YoucanaskMr.Adamaboutussir.YoucanaskMrAdamaboutme, coo.l Lane:
DoyouhaveID? Shawanda Renee Hill:
I’m on 38th and Chicago. 38th and Chicago. Lane:
320 for code four Speaker 7
YoucanaskMr.Adam aboutme,sir.Ijustcameandboughtatablet.AndwhenIboughtthetablet,it didn’twork orwhatever.
Shawanda Renee Hill:
OhmyGod,hedidn’t evendonothing. Speaker 7
Here you go sir. Lane:
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Do you haveID ShawandaRenee Hill
No I don’t.Myname’s Shawanda ReneeHill. Fuck, no. Lane :
Okay . Speaker 7:
Sirher andi were justgetting aride, MrAdam ,MrAdam knowsmeman. Shawanda Renee Hill
justcameovertogetmyphone.Yousee don’thaveapurseornothing,andmydaughterisonher wayto getme
Lane:
What’s his deal? Shawanda Renee Hill:
I don’tknow Speaker 7
Mr.Adam knowsme,sir. crosstalk 00:04:50 Shawanda Renee Hill:
That’smyex. Idon’tknow . Lane:
Why’shegetting allsquirrelly and not showing us his hands, and justbeingallweird like that ? Shawanda Renee Hill:
i have no clue, because he’s been shot before . Lane:
Well get that,butstillwhen officers say,”Getoutofthe car.” Ishedrunk, isheonsomething? Shawanda Renee Hill:
No,hegotathinggoing on,I’m tellingyouaboutthepolice. Lane:
What does thatmean ? Shawanda Renee Hill
Hehave problems all the timewhen they come, especially when that man put that gun likethat. It’s been one.
Filedin DistrictCourt State ofMinnesota 7/7/2020 11:00 AM
Lane:
What’s your firstname? Shawanda Renee Hill:
His name isGeorge Floyd. Lane:
What isit? Speaker 7
He’s a good guy. George Floyd she said. Lane:
Can you spell that? Speaker 7:
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I don’tknow how to spellGeorgesir. Lane:
Hername. ShawandaReneeHill
Ohmyname? Lane:
Yeah , yeah ShawandaReneeHill:
ShawandaReneeHil.l Lane:
Can you spell it? Shawanda ReneeHill
S-H-A-W -A-N-D-A. Lane:
S-H-A-W ShawandaReneeHill
A-N-D-A. Speaker 7
Heallrightsir.Like said,butMr.Adams ShawandaReneeHill
Yeah, heok. Lane:
Kueng,justputhim in thecar.Shawandawhat? ShawandaRenee Hill
Hill,orRenee, R-E-N-E-E. Lane:
What’syourlastname? ShawandaRenee Hill
Hill, H-I-L-L. Lane:
And your date of birth ? Shawanda Renee Hill
isya’llcomingto getme. 1/27/75. Okay. Lane:
– view latest version here.
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Okaywellso here’sthething, someonepasseda fakebillin there.Wecomeoverhere,he starts grabbingforthekeysandallthatstuff, startsgettingweird,notshowingushishands.Idon’tknow
what’s goingon, so you’re comingoutofthe car. So, just hang tightrighthere. Stayright here, please. George Floyd:
Ouch, ouchman! Lane:
What areyou on somethingrightnow ? George Floyd
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No, nothing. Kueng:
Because you acting a little erratic. Lane:
Let’s go. Let’s go George Floyd:
I’m scared ,man Lane:
Let’s go Kueng:
You got foam around yourmouth , too ? George Floyd:
Yes, I was just hooping earlier . Lane:
Let’s go George Floyd:
Man,allrightletmecalm downnow.I’m feelingbetternow. Lane :
Keep walking . George Floyd:
Can youdomeonefavorman? Lane:
No, when we get to the car. Let’s get to the carman, comeon. Kueng:
Stopmoving around George Floyd:
man,Goddon’tleavememan.Pleaseman,pleaseman. Lane:
Here.Iwanttowatch thatcartoo, so justgethim in. Kueng:
Standup,stopfallingdown!Standup Stayonyourfeetandfacethecar door! George Floyd:
Im claustrophobic man, please man , please . Lane
you get a search on him Kueng
No,notyet. George Floyd:
just want totalk toyouman.Please,letmetalk to you.Please. Lane
Kueng
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You ain’t listening to nothing we’re saying. George Floyd
know Speaker 8
So we’re not going to listen to nothing you saying. Lane:
Can you watch thatcar? Just make sure no one goes in it. George Floyd
Im claustrophobic . Kueng:
hear you, but you are going to face this door right now . Lane:
Listen up, stop! George Floyd:
illdoanything,illdoanythingy’alltellmetooman.I’m notresistingman.I’mnot!I’mnot!Youcanask him , they know me.
Lane:
check that side. George Floyd :
Godman, won’t do nothinglike that.Why is this going on like this? Look at mywrist Mr.Officer, I’m not thatkind ofguy
Lane:
Check the other side. George Floyd:
Mr.Officer,MrOfficer,I’m notthatkindofguy. Lane:
Stop
George Floyd:
Please, I’m not that kind of guy,Mr.Officer. Please! Lane:
Just face away George Floyd:
Please,man. Don’t leavemebymyselfman, please, I’m just claustrophobic that’s it. Lane:
Well, you’re still going in the car. Kueng
Anything sharp on you? George Floyd:
Iwon’t donothing to hurt you,MrOfficer. Kueng
Do you have anything sharp on you ? George Floyd:
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No, sir. Kueng:
Not even like a comb or nothing George Floyd:
Filedin DistrictCourt State ofMinnesota 7/7/2020 11:00 AM
I don’thavenothing. Why y’alldoingmelikethis Mr.Officer? Please crack thewindow formeandstuff.
am claustrophobicfor rea,lMr.Officer. Lane:
You got him ? George Floyd:
Could you please crack it for me, please? Lane:
Yes, I’llcrack it.Iwill George Floyd
Pleasestaywithmeman,thankyou.God,man.Ididn’tknow allthiswasgoingtohappenman.Please
man 00:08:05 . I don’t want to do nothing to y’allman, nothing. Lane:
You gotit? Kueng:
yougettheinsideinnerpocketrealquickon yourside.I’m listening. George Floyd:
understandthatpeopledo stuff,and Lane:
Allright,he’sgood. justlookingforguns and whatever. George Floyd:
Okay, okay, okay. Lane:
grab aseat. George Floyd:
Okay. Kueng:
Why are you having trouble walking George Floyd:
Because officer, inaudible 00:08:31]. Lane:
I’llrollthe windowsdown, okay ? George Floyd:
Please man, please don’t do this! Kueng:
Take a seat! George Floyd
I’m going in,Mr.Officer, I’m going in .
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Kueng:
No, you’renot! George Floyd:
I’m gunagoin! Kueng:
Take a seat! Lane:
Grab a seat,man. George Floyd
Why don’t y’all believeme, Mr.Officer? Kueng:
Take a seat ! George Floyd:
I’mnotthatkindofguy!I’m notthatkindofguy,man! Kueng:
Takea seat! George Floyd
Y’all goingto dieinhere! goingto die,man! Kueng:
You need to take a seat right now ! George Floyd:
And I just had man, don’t want to go back to that. Lane:
Okay, rollthe windowsdown.Hey, listen ! George Floyd:
Dang, man Lane:
Listen ! George Floyd:
I’m notthatkindofguy. Lane:
I’llrollthewindowsdownifyouputyour legsin allright? George Floyd:
[ inaudible 00:08:57 ] look at that , look at that . Look at it ! Speaker 8
putthe air on.
You’re not even listening.Wecan fix it, butnotwhile you’re standing out here. George Floyd:
Okay,man.God,y’alldomebadman.Man, I don’twant to try to twin to try to win.
Speaker 9
Quit resistingbro. George Floyd:
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I don’t want to win . I’m claustrophobic, and i gotanxiety, I don’twant to do nothing to them ! Lane
I’llroll window down. George Floyd:
Man, I’m scared as fuckman . Speaker 9
That’s okay, 00:09:12 . George Floyd:
inaudible 00:09:12 ]when I startbreathing it’s going to go off onme,man. Lane:
Filedin DistrictCourt State ofMinnesota 7/7/2020 11:00 AM
Pullyourlegsin George Floyd :
Okay, okay, letme countto three. Letme count to three andthen Speaker 9:
going in, please.
You can’t win ! George Floyd:
I’m not trying to win! man, he know it
Lane:
I’llgo to the other side inaudible 00:09:21 George Floyd:
Heknow ittooMr.Officerdon’tdomelikethat,man. Kueng
Getin the car.
George Floyd :
Can Italk to youplease? Kueng
Ifyougetin this car,wecan talk! George Floyd:
I’m claustrophobic Kueng
I’m hearingyou,butyou’renotworkingwithme! George Floyd:
God, claustrophobic. Lane:
Plant your butt overhere, Kueng:
Get in the car ! George Floyd:
CanIgetin thefront,please? Kueng
No, you’re not getting in the front.
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get on the ground , anything. I’ll get crosstalk 00:09:14 I can’t stand this shit
going to pullyou in.
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George Floyd:
I’m claustrophobic,Mr.Officer. Kueng
Getin the car! George Floyd:
Okay,man,okay!I’m notabadguyman! Kueng:
Get in the car ! George Floyd:
I’m nota bad guy! Man, [inaudible 00:10:02 . Please, Mr.Officer! Please ! Kueng:
Take a seat ! George Floyd :
Please! Please! No, inaudible 00:10:10 . Kueng:
Take a seat. George Floyd:
I can’t choke,Ican’t breatheMr.Officer!Please! Please! Kueng:
Fine.
George Floyd
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Mywrist,mywristman. Okay, okay. I want to layon the ground.I want to layon the ground. I want to layon the ground!
Lane:
your getting in the squad. George Floyd :
want to lay on the ground ! I’m going down, Kueng:
Take asquat George Floyd
I’m going down Speaker 9
going down, I’m going down.
Bro, you about tohave aheartattack and shitman,get in the car! George Floyd:
I know I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe crosstalk 00:10:18 ] . Lane:
Get him on the ground . George Floyd:
Let go ofmeman , I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Lane:
Take a seat George Floyd:
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Please,man. Please listen to me. Chauvin :
Ishegoingto jail? George Floyd: Pleaselisten to me.
Kueng
He’s under arrest rightnow for forgery. George Floyd:
Forgery forwhat? for what ? Lane:
Let’stakehim outandjustMRE. George Floyd:
can’t fucking breatheman.I can’t fucking breathe. Kueng:
Here, Comeon out! George Floyd:
inaudible 00:11:10) thank you. Thank you. Thao:
Justlayhim ontheground. Lane:
Can you just get up on the, I appreciate that, I do. Chauvin :
Do you got your ah, restraint, Hobble? George Floyd:
I can’tbreathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Lane:
Jesus Christ. George Floyd:
can’t breathe. Lane:
Thank you. George Floyd:
I can’tbreathe. Kueng
Stop moving George Floyd:
Mama,mama, mama, mama. Kueng:
[inaudible 00:11:45] one of the frontpouches George Floyd:
Mama,mama, mama. Kueng:
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…on my right side bag. George Floyd:
Mama,mama,mama. Lane:
320 Can we get EMScode2, for one bleedingfrom themouth. Chauvin :
Filedin DistrictCourt State ofMinnesota 7/7/2020 11:00 AM
Your under arrest guy. George Floyd:
Allright, allright. OhmyGod. I can’tbelievethis.I Chauvin :
So your goingto jai.l Lane:
Affirm . George Floyd:
believe this.
I can’t believe this man. Mom , I love you. [ Reese 00:12:09] I love you. Lane:
You got 00:12:10). George Floyd:
TellmykidsIlovethem.I’m dead Lane:
Mine’sinmy side,it’s listed, it’s labeled. Itsays hobble, it’s in the top. George Floyd:
Ican’tbreatheornothingman.Thiscold bloodedman.Ah- Chauvin :
You’re doing a lotoftalking,man . George Floyd
Mama, I love you. I can’t do nothing. Kueng:
EMSison their way
welldo you wantahobbleatthis point then? Lane:
!Ah-Ah!Ah-Ah!
Um ok , allriggt George Floyd:
Myface is gone.
can’t breathe. Lane:
Can you getupon the sidewalkplease, onesideorthe other please? George Floyd:
Myface is getting it bad. Lane:
Here, should we gethis legs up, or is this good?
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00:12:33 . I can’t breathe man. Please! Please, letmestand. Please,man
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Chauvin
Leave him Kueng:
Just leave him yep Chauvin :
Just leave him Lane:
Filedin DistrictCourt State ofMinnesota 7/7/2020 11:00 AM
Allright.HopefullyPark’sstillsitting onthecar.Theywere,Hewasactingrealshadylikesomething’sin there .
Thao
Ishehighon something? Lane:
I’m assuming so Kueng:
Ibelieve so,we found a pipe. Lane:
Hewouldn’t get outof the car. He wasn’t following instructions. [crosstalk 00:13:10). Yeah, it’s across the street Park’s watching it, two other people with him .
George Floyd:
Please, I can’tbreathe. Please,man. Pleaseman! Thao:DoyouhaveEMScoming code3?
Lane:
Ahcode2,wecanprobably stepitupthen. Yougotit?(crosstalk00:13:29 . George Floyd:
Please ,man ! Thao:
Relax! George Floyd:
can’t breathe. Kueng
You’re fine, you’re talking fine. Lane:
Your talken , Deep breath . George Floyd:
I can’t breathe. Ican’t breathe. Ah! I’llprobably just die this way. Thao:
Relax
George Floyd :
can’t breathemy face. Lane :
He’s got to be on something. Thao
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What areyou on? George Floyd :
breathe.Please, inaudible00:14:00 Speaker 9
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breathe.Shit.
Filedin DistrictCourt State ofMinnesota 7/7/2020 11:00 AM
Wellgetup andgetin thecar,man.Getupandgetinthecar. George Floyd:
I will I can’tmove. Speaker 9:
Lethim getinthecar. Lane :
Wefoundaweed pipeonhim,theremightbesomethingelse,theremightbelikePCPorsomething.Is that the shaking of the eyesrightis PCP ?
George Floyd :
Myknee,myneck. Lane:
Where their eyes like shakeback and forth really fast? George Floyd:
Im through, through. I’m claustrophobic. Mystomach hurts. Myneckhurts. Everythinghurts. Ineed
somewater or something, please. Please ?I can’t breathe officer. Chauvin :
Then stop talking, stop yelling. George Floyd:
You’re going to killme,man. Chauvin :
Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk . George Floyd:
Comeon,man.Oh, oh. crosstalk 00:15:03].I cannotbreathe.I cannotbreathe. Ah! They’llkillme. They’ll killme. I can’t breathe. I can’tbreathe. !
Speaker 8
We tried that for 10minutes. George Floyd :
Ah! Ah! Please. Please. Please. Lane:
Shouldwerollhim on hisside? Chauvin
No,he’s stayingputwherewegothim . Lane:
Okay. justworry aboutthe excited delirium orwhatever. Chauvin
Well that’s why wegot the ambulance coming. Lane:
Okay, isuppose.
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Speaker 13:
Filedin DistrictCourt State ofMinnesota
7/7/2020 11:00 AM
Gethim offtheground,bro.Gethim offtheground crosstalk00:16:16.Heain’tdoanyofthatshit.He a fuckingbum bro, he enjoyingthat shit rightnow bro. You couldhavefuckingputhim in the car by
now,bro.He’snotresistingarrestornothing. inaudible00:16:48] bodylanguageiscrazy. crosstalk
00:16:48] dudes at the academybro. you know thatbogusrightnow bro. Youknow it’sbogus. Youcan’t
even look atmelike amanbecauseyou now bro.
ShawandaReneeHill:
He’s aboutto passout. Lane:
I thinkhe’spassingout. Speaker 13
He’snotevenbreathingright 00:16:58]
Chauvin :
you guys alright though ? Lane:
00:16:48] bro. He’s not even resistingarrest right
He’s breathing Kueng
He’s breathing. crosstalk 00:17:26). Chauvin :
Don’t comeover here. Don’t comeover here. Lane:
Up on the sidewalk! Kueng :
Weneedyoutokeepsomedistance. Speaker 14
Ishe responsive? Chauvin :
yea, we have an ambulance coming Speaker 14
Doeshehave a pulse? Speaker 8
Get off crosstalk 00:17:42 . Lane:
Should we rollhim on his side? Speaker 13
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bro, you thinkthat’scool?Youthinkthat’scoo,lright?[crosstalk
Yeah, Imeanmykneemightbea little scratched,butI’llsurvive. Speaker 13
You’re a bum bro, you’re a bum for that. Can’t you be aman and see here he’s notbreathing rightnow . Lane:
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He’s notresponsive rightnow, bro. Speaker 14
Doeshe have a pulse? Speaker 13
No, bro . Look at him , he’snot responsive right now , bro. Bro, are you serious? Lane:
you gotone? Speaker 14:
Letme see a pulse. Kueng
i couldn’t fine one Speaker 13
Filedin DistrictCourt State ofMinnesota 7/7/2020 11:00 AM
Is he breathingright now ? Check his pulse. Check his pulse. Check his pulse. inaudible 00:18:19 check
hispulse. crosstalk 00:18:19). Check hispulse, bro. inaudible 00:18:21] drugs bro. What you think that is? crosstalk 00:18:25). Youcallwhat youdoingokay?[inaudible00:18:25 .
Speaker 14
Yes, I am from Minneapolis. Speaker 15
Okay, get off the sidewalk . Speaker 14:
Showmehispulse. Check itrightfucking now . Speaker 15:
Getback on the sidewalk. [crosstalk 00:18:33). Speaker 14
He’s notmoving! Speaker 13:
Bro, you’re a bum bro. You’re a bum bro. Speaker 14
Checkhispulserightnow andtellmewhatitis. Tellmewhathispulseisrightnow. Speaker 13:
Check his pulse. Bro, he has not moved ( crosstalk 00:19:43). Lane:
What ?
Dispatch: Squad 330 EMSis at Portland and 36th theywere advised of code 3. Lane:
Therewere advisedwhat?
Kueng
Ofcode 3 Chauvin :
Acknowledge that Dispatch:
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Copy i was just giving you their updated location, they are en route. Lane:
Filedin DistrictCourt State ofMinnesota 7/7/2020 11:00 AM
Therewego. Speaker 13
Bro , he was just moving when I walked up
[inaudible 00:19:43 ]. Speaker 16:
crosstalk 00:19:43 ]. Bro, he’s not fucking moving! Bro
Get the fuck off of him what are you doing? crosstalk 00:19:43 . dying bro, what are you doing ? Lane:
He’s not responsive right now , you guys probably want to crosstalk 00:19:44 ]. Yeah. Speaker 16
Get off him ! crosstalk 00:19:53 . Lane:
Should we get another car?Another car just for the crowd. inaudible 00:20:06 ) Chauvin :
Let’s get him on inaudible 00:20:11 . Speaker 13
inaudible 00:20:14 bro inaudible 00:20:16] like that. inaudible 00:20:17 thatman in front ofyou, bro ?He’s noteven fuckingmoving rightnow,bro. crosstalk 00:20:23).
Lane:
yourlightson again Speaker 17
Youguys can get out oftheway. [crosstalk 00:21:11.
Lane:
Youwantoneofusto ridewith? Kueng:
Yeah . Lane :
Ridewith? Okay. Idon’t havemyphone so I’llbeBaker (crosstalk 00:21:48].What’sthat? Chauvin:
Gelt them belted Down Kueng:
Help getbelted down. Chauvin :
Getbelted down Lane:
yup, where we going ? Speaker 17
We’re justgoing to be downthe street. Lane :
Okay
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Speaker 17
You guyswantto shutthedoors, getout ofhere, andwe’re goingtogodownthe street. Lane:
Filedin DistrictCourt State ofMinnesota 7/7/2020 11:00 AM
Doyouwanthere orno? Speaker 17:
Yeah , go to something, 40th , Tell fire where to go . Lane:
Okay.Doyouwantmein thereorno? Speaker 17
yea. Lane:
Allright. Oops. Speaker 17:
You’re fine. Kueng:
Lane ? Lane :
Yep Kueng:
This yours ? Lane:
Yeah,nope. Speaker 17:
All rightwhatwas going on ? Lane:
Itwas forgery report Speaker 17:
Yep Lane:
And he was just notcompliant with getting outof the car. Speaker 17
Okay Lane:
Weweretryingtogethim inthebackofthesquad,andhe Speaker 17:
Yep. Lane:
justbasicallyresisting.
Hewasn’tshowingushishandsatfirst.Thenweweretryingto gethim intothesquad,hekickedhis way out,he was kickingon there. And we cameout the other side, and hewas fighting us, andwewere
justbasicallyrestrainedhim untilyouguysgot . Speaker 17
Okay . You do CPR
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Lane:
Allright. You wantmedoing just compressions? Speaker 17:
Just compressions for now please, thank you. Speaker 17:
Okay.slide under. All right, keep doing compressions. Lane:
Keep checking airway or just constant Speaker 17:
Constant compressions. Lane:
Constant compressions, all right. Speaker 17
I can do an airwaycheckifyouwant inaudible00:23:53].Hehadtobedetained,physicalforce,and inaudible 00:24:05 .
Lane:
You got his arm in it? You good? Speaker 17
Yep, just getthis bar uphere. Pullitout, inaudible00:24:41] there you go. Lane:
Filedin DistrictCourt State ofMinnesota 11:00 AM
Wantmetopullitout?Whatdoyouneed?Ithinkit’sthecloth which waydoesithook?Therewego, therewego. Fuck,sorry
Speaker 17
You told inaudible 00:24:54 right? Thank you. [ inaudible 00:24:54 . Lane:
Should i still be touching him , or is that going to, electric go . Speaker 17
Tell him to come code three we’re working an arrest. Do you need inaudible00:26:10 location 00:26:11].
Dispatch:
Squad 320 , if you would let know that EMS, Fire needs to go to Park and 36th, patient in full arrest now .
Speaker 17:
I told her. Oh (inaudible 00:26:34 Lane:
Yeah Dispatch:
320 Lane:
320 . Dispatch:
Canyouadvisethe
department inaudible00:26:49).
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Lane:
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7/7/2020 11:00 AM
320BakertoAble,canyou,ifyou’restillonscene, withEMS,canyouadviseFire?Youguysneedme to do anything?
Speaker 17
You’re good, glove up why don’t you. Lane:
Yeah. Youneedme to hold his airway or? Speaker 17
No, onesecond Lane
Okay . Speaker 17
Okay, do this about every Lane:
One pump? Speaker 17
Every time this lights up give it a squeeze. Lane:
One pump? Speaker 17
Yep . Lane:
All right Speaker 17
Washe fighting with you guys for a long time? Lane :
No.Imean littlebit,butnotalongtime,maybeaminuteortwo.Wewerejusttryingtogethim inthe
squad, and then he cameout the other end, so wewere likewe’lljustwait. Speaker 17:
A lot of activity prior? Lane:
It took a bit to get him , I mean we got him out of the car and handcuffed him , and were walking him over there,walkingacrossthestreet. Youneedmeto trade places?
Speaker 17
Yeah inaudible 00:29:28 Lane:
You guysneedmehere stiller? Speaker 17
You’re good,we’re good thankyou. Lane:
Okay . Speaker 17:
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There’s abagover Lane:
320 Baker to Able, Speaker 19:
00:30:09
Lane:
Oh. That’s fine, that’s good. Speaker 19
Okay. inaudible 00:30:27 . So whathappened,more drama at Cup Foods? Lane:
Cup Foods, yeah . It was just a forgery report, and that was the guy that they said was the person that had given them a fake bill. Wewent over there , and yeah just …
Speaker 19:
Wentbananas? Lane:
be at Park and 36 when you’re done there. What’s that?Okay
watch the foot pedal it’s down there [ inaudible 00:30:22 .
Yeah.Imeanhewas… weretryingtogethim outofthecar,hekepthishandlikethisbasically, wasn’t showingmehis hands. So I’m like, “Letmesee yourother hand ” I gave him a couple commands forthat,hewouldn’tdoit,andthenhefinallydid.Sothenwe’relikeallrightwe’regoingtogethim out
ofthecarrightnow.Becausehekeptlookingforthekey,Ithoughthewasgoingtotry anddriveoff. Speaker 19:
geez. Lane :
Yep . Speaker 19
Man. Yeah, wedidn’t understand because itwas like come to the, so we’re there and the officers there are likenonono, andyeah, the crowdwasa little, yeah.
Lane:
Yeah Speaker 19
Man, yuck. Lane:
Notsure ifmycohort is cominghere. I gavemylocation. Otherwise, Imightjust ridewith them them there.
Speaker 19
Okay, Yeah. Lane:
Was there a big crowd there then ? Speaker 19
and help
Yeah,moreinside.Wewaited…ournewSOPsareto ,towaitlikeifihavecootiesgoingon,solike captainusuallygoesinandmaybebringstherookie,itkindofdepends.Andthen 00:31:49]
yeah we just waited because itwas like
sitting here I’m like now it says code three, I just don’t understand. And then we figured outwhere it
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Axon_Body_3_Video_2020-05-25_2008 ( Completed 06/10/20 )
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• This topic was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by joemad.

I copied and pasted the article below but it looks wonky. The link has interactive graphics so that is the best way to read the article. ..

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-covid-vaccine.html

A vaccine would be the ultimate weapon against the coronavirus and the best route back to normal life. Officials like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert on the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, estimate a vaccine could arrive in at least 12 to 18 months.

The grim truth behind this rosy forecast is that a vaccine probably won’t arrive any time soon. Clinical trials almost never succeed. We’ve never released a coronavirus vaccine for humans before. Our record for developing an entirely new vaccine is at least four years — more time than the public or the economy can tolerate social-distancing orders.

But if there was any time to fast-track a vaccine, it is now. So Times Opinion asked vaccine experts how we could condense the timeline and get a vaccine in the next few months instead of years.

Here’s how we might achieve the impossible.

Assume We Already Understand the Coronavirus
Options to shorten the timeline
Start trials early
Rely on work from studying SARS and MERS to shorten preparations before clinical trials
Click to turn on
Don’t wait for academic research
Skip to clinical phases using what we know about the coronavirus so far
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Normally, researchers need years to secure funding, get approvals and study results piece by piece. But these are not normal times.

There are already at least 254 therapies and 95 vaccines related to Covid-19 being explored.

“If you want to make that 18-month timeframe, one way to do that is put as many horses in the race as you can,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

Companies with vaccine trials underway
Dozens of vaccines are starting clinical trials. Many use experimental RNA and DNA technology, which provides the body with instructions to produce its own antibodies against the virus.

Select vaccines by clinical trial start date

RNA and DNA vaccines

Other vaccine types

2020

Feb.

March

April

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Dec.

CanSino and the A.M.M.S.

Moderna

BioNTech and Pfizer

Inovio Pharmaceuticals

Sinovac

Wuhan Institute and Sinopharm

U. of Oxford

Uses 1 microgram of

mRNA, meaning it

could be more easily

mass produced

Imperial College

Novavax

CureVac

Sanofi and GSK

Exploring a new form of

oral vaccine, which has

never been licensed

Vaxart

Altimmune

Janssen

Note: Clinical trial start dates are approximate. Compiled by Robert van Exan.
Despite the unprecedented push for a vaccine, researchers caution that less than 10 percent of drugs that enter clinical trials are ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The rest fail in one way or another: They are not effective, don’t perform better than existing drugs or have too many side effects.

Less than 10 percent of drug trials are ultimately approved
Probability of success at each phase of research

37% fail

Phase 1

69% fail

Phase 2

42% fail

Phase 3

15% fail

New Drug

Application

Approved

Note: Between 2006 and 2015. Source: Biotechnology Innovation Organization, Biomedtracker, Amplion.
Fortunately, we already have a head start on the first phase of vaccine development: research. The outbreaks of SARS and MERS, which are also caused by coronaviruses, spurred lots of research. SARS and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, are roughly 80 percent identical, and both use so-called spike proteins to grab onto a specific receptor found on cells in human lungs. This helps explain how scientists developed a test for Covid-19 so quickly.

There’s a cost to moving so quickly, however. The potential Covid-19 vaccines now in the pipeline might be more likely to fail because of the swift march through the research phase, said Robert van Exan, a cell biologist who has worked in the vaccine industry for decades. He predicts we won’t see a vaccine approved until at least 2021 or 2022, and even then, “this is very optimistic and of relatively low probability.”

And yet, he said, this kind of fast-tracking is “worth the try — maybe we will get lucky.”

Years and years, at minimum
The vaccine development process has typically taken a decade or longer.

Varicella

28 years

FluMist

28

Human papillomavirus

15

Rotavirus

15

Pediatric combination

11

Covid-19 goal

18 months

Note: Rotavirus and HPV vaccines include time from filing of the first investigational new drug to approval. Source: “Plotkin’s Vaccines” (7th edition)
The next step in the process is pre-clinical and preparation work, where a pilot factory is readied to produce enough vaccine for trials. Researchers relying on groundwork from the SARS and MERS outbreaks could theoretically move through planning steps swiftly.

Sanofi, a French biopharmaceutical company, expects to begin clinical trials late this year for a Covid-19 vaccine that it repurposed from work on a SARS vaccine. If successful, the vaccine could be ready by late 2021.

Move at ‘Pandemic Speed’ Through Trials
Options to shorten the timeline
Use ‘pandemic speed’ timeline
Start subsequent steps before previous phases are completed
Push to large-scale tests sooner
Move more swiftly to Phase 3 trials by combining phases
Use emergency provision
Vaccinate front-line and essential workers early
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As a rule, researchers don’t begin jabbing people with experimental vaccines until after rigorous safety checks.

They test the vaccine first on small batches of people — a few dozen during Phase 1, then a few hundred in Phase 2, then thousands in Phase 3. Months normally pass between phases so that researchers can review the findings and get approvals for subsequent phases.

But “if we do it the conventional way, there’s no way we’re going to be reaching that timeline of 18 months,” said Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at Yale University School of Medicine and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

There are ways to slash time off this process by combining several phases and testing vaccines on more people without as much waiting.

Last week the National Academy of Sciences showed an overlapping timeline, describing it as moving at “pandemic speed.”

It’s here that talk of fast-tracking the timeline meets the messiness of real life: What if a promising vaccine actually makes it easier to catch the virus, or makes the disease worse after someone’s infected?

That’s been the case for a few H.I.V. drugs and vaccines for dengue fever, because of a process called vaccine-induced enhancement, in which the body reacts unexpectedly and makes the disease more dangerous.

Researchers can’t easily infect vaccinated participants with the coronavirus to see how the body behaves. They normally wait until some volunteers contract the virus naturally. That means dosing people in regions hit hardest by the virus, like New York, or vaccinating family members of an infected person to see if they get the virus next. If the pandemic subsides, this step could be slowed.

“That’s why vaccines take such a long time,” said Dr. Iwasaki. “But we’re making everything very short. Hopefully we can evaluate these risks as they occur, as soon as possible.”

This is where the vaccine timelines start to diverge depending on who you are, and where some people might get left behind.

If a vaccine proves successful in early trials, regulators could issue an emergency-use provision so that doctors, nurses and other essential workers could get vaccinated right away — even before the end of the year. Researchers at Oxford announced this week that their coronavirus vaccine could be ready for emergency use by September if trials prove successful.

So researchers might produce a viable vaccine in just 12 to 18 months, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get it. Millions of people could be in line before you. And that’s only if the United States finds a vaccine first. If another country, like China, beats us to it, we could wait even longer while it doses its citizens first.

You might be glad of that, though, if it turned out that the fast-tracked vaccine caused unexpected problems. Only after hundreds or thousands are vaccinated would researchers be able to see if a fast-tracked vaccine led to problems like vaccine-induced enhancement.

“It’s true that any new technology comes with a learning curve,” said Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “And sometimes that learning curve has a human price.”

Start Preparing Factories Now
Options to shorten the timeline
Make vaccines early
Build and manufacture early, anticipating that factories will be useful for a future vaccine and that the product will clear regulatory hurdles
Take a bet on a successful mRNA vaccine
This experimental technology may be faster to produce than traditional vaccines
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Once we have a working vaccine in hand, companies will need to start producing millions — perhaps billions — of doses, in addition to the millions of vaccine doses that are already made each year for mumps, measles and other illnesses. It’s an undertaking almost unimaginable in scope.

Companies normally build new facilities perfectly tailored to any given vaccine because each vaccine requires different equipment. Some flu vaccines are produced using chicken eggs, using large facilities where a version of the virus is incubated and harvested. Other vaccines require vats in which a virus is cultured in a broth of animal cells and later inactivated and purified.

Those factories follow strict guidelines governing biological facilities and usually take around five years to build, costing at least three times more than conventional pharmaceutical factories. Manufacturers may be able to speed this up by creating or repurposing existing facilities in the middle of clinical trials, long before the vaccine in question receives F.D.A. approval.

“They just can’t wait,” said Dr. Iwasaki. “If it turns out to be a terrible vaccine, they won’t distribute it. But at least they’ll have the capability” to do so if the vaccine is successful.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says it will build factories for seven different vaccines. “Even though we’ll end up picking at most two of them, we’re going to fund factories for all seven, just so that we don’t waste time,” Bill Gates said during an appearance on “The Daily Show.”

In the end, the United States will have the capacity to mass-produce only two or three vaccines, said Vijay Samant, the former head of vaccine manufacturing at Merck.

“The manufacturing task is insurmountable,” Mr. Samant said. “I get sleepless nights thinking about it.”

Consider just one seemingly simple step: putting the vaccine into vials. Manufacturers need to procure billions of vials, and billions of stoppers to seal them. Sophisticated machines are needed to fill them precisely, and each vial is inspected on a high-speed line. Then vials are stored, shipped and released to the public using a chain of temperature-controlled facilities and trucks. At each of these stages, producers are already stretched to meet existing demands, Mr. Samant said.

It’s a bottleneck similar to the one that caused a dearth of ventilators, masks and other personal protective equipment just as Covid-19 surged across America.

If you talk about vaccines long enough, a new type of vaccine, called Messenger RNA (or mRNA for short), inevitably comes up. There are hopes it could be manufactured at a record clip. Mr. Gates even included it on his Time magazine list of six innovations that could change the world. Is it the miracle we’re waiting for?

Rather than injecting subjects with disease-specific antigens to stimulate antibody production, mRNA vaccines give the body instructions to create those antigens itself. Because mRNA vaccines don’t need to be cultured in large quantities and then purified, they are much faster to produce. They could change the course of the fight against Covid-19.

“On the other hand,” said Dr. van Exan, “no one has ever made an RNA vaccine for humans.”

Researchers conducting dozens of trials hope to change that, including one by the pharmaceutical company Moderna. Backed by investor capital and spurred by federal funding of up to $483 million to tackle Covid-19, Moderna has already fast-tracked an mRNA vaccine. It’s entering Phase 1 trials this year and the company says it could have a vaccine ready for front-line workers later this year.

“Could it work? Yeah, it could work,” said Dr. Fred Ledley, a professor of natural biology and applied sciences at Bentley University. “But in terms of the probability of success, what our data says is that there’s a lower chance of approval and the trials take longer.”

The technology is decades old, yet mRNA is not very stable and can break down inside the body.

“At this point, I’m hoping for anything to work,” said Dr. Iwasaki. “If it does work, wonderful, that’s great. We just don’t know.”

The fixation on mRNA shows the allure of new and untested treatments during a medical crisis. Faced with the unsatisfying reality that our standard arsenal takes years to progress, the mRNA vaccine offers an enticing story mixed with hope and a hint of mystery. But it’s riskier than other established approaches.

Speed Up Regulatory Approvals
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Fast-track federal approvals
Shorten approval window from a year to six months
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Imagine that the fateful day arrives. Scientists have created a successful vaccine. They’ve manufactured huge quantities of it. People are dying. The economy is crumbling. It’s time to start injecting people.

But first, the federal government wants to take a peek.

That might seem like a bureaucratic nightmare, a rubber stamp that could cost lives. There’s even a common gripe among researchers: For every scientist employed by the F.D.A., there are three lawyers. And all they care about is liability.

Yet F.D.A. approvals are no mere formality. Approvals typically take a full year, during which time scientists and advisory committees review the studies to make sure that the vaccine is as safe and effective as drug makers say it is.

While some steps in the vaccine timeline can be fast-tracked or skipped entirely, approvals aren’t one of them. There are horror stories from the past where vaccines were not properly tested. In the 1950s, for example, a poorly produced batch of a polio vaccine was approved in a few hours. It contained a version of the virus that wasn’t quite dead, so patients who got it actually contracted polio. Several children died.

The same scenario playing out today could be devastating for Covid-19, with the anti-vaccination movement and online conspiracy theorists eager to disrupt the public health response. So while the F.D.A. might do this as fast as possible, expect months to pass before any vaccine gets a green light for mass public use.

At this point you might be asking: Why are all these research teams announcing such optimistic forecasts when so many experts are skeptical about even an 18-month timeline? Perhaps because it’s not just the public listening — it’s investors, too.

“These biotechs are putting out all these press announcements,” said Dr. Hotez. “You just need to recognize they’re writing this for their shareholders, not for the purposes of public health.”

What if It Takes Even Longer Than the Pessimists Predict?
Covid-19 lives in the shadow of the most vexing virus we’ve ever faced: H.I.V. After nearly 40 years of work, here is what we have to show for our vaccine efforts: a few Phase 3 clinical trials, one of which actually made the disease worse, and another with a success rate of just 30 percent.

Deaths per year
The number of deaths from Covid-19 in 2020 has surpassed the number of deaths per year from H.I.V./AIDS during the height of the crisis in the 1990s.

60k deaths

Deaths from

Covid-19 in

the U.S.

50k

40k

Deaths from

H.I.V./AIDS

in the U.S.

30k

20k

10k

0

1990

2000

2010

2020

Note: No H.I.V. death data available after 2018. Covid-19 deaths as of April 29. Source: Mortality Informatics and Research Analytics.
Researchers say they don’t expect a successful H.I.V. vaccine until 2030 or later, putting the timeline at around 50 years.

That’s unlikely to be the case for Covid-19, because, as opposed to H.I.V., it doesn’t appear to mutate significantly and exists within a family of familiar respiratory viruses. Even still, any delay will be difficult to bear.

But the history of H.I.V. offers a glimmer of hope for how life could continue even without a vaccine. Researchers developed a litany of antiviral drugs that lowered the death rate and improved health outcomes for people living with AIDS. Today’s drugs can lower the viral load in an H.I.V.-positive person so the virus can’t be transmitted through sex.

Therapeutic drugs, rather than vaccines, might likewise change the fight against Covid-19. The World Health Organization began a global search for drugs to treat Covid-19 patients in March. If successful, those drugs could lower the number of hospital admissions and help people recover faster from home while narrowing the infection window so fewer people catch the virus.

Combine that with rigorous testing and contact tracing — where infected patients are identified and their recent contacts notified and quarantined — and the future starts looking a little brighter. So far, the United States is conducting fewer than half the number of tests required and we need to recruit more than 300,000 contact-tracers. But other countries have started reopening following exactly these steps.

If all those things come together, life might return to normal long before a vaccine is ready to shoot into your arm.

Stuart A. Thompson is a writer and the graphics director for Times Opinion.

Source: Clinical trial medians from “Development Times and Approval Success Rates for Drugs to Treat Infectious Diseases”

Stuart A. Thompson is a writer and the graphics director for Times Opinion.

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• This topic was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by nittany ram.

‘Like leaning into a left hook’: coronavirus calamity unfolds across divided US
In a week that saw the worst day on record for new cases, Trump shrugs as experts warn Americans not to follow his lead

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/27/coronavirus-cases-us-trump-politics-masks

A disaster is unfolding in Montgomery, Alabama, where Martin Luther King preached and where Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Hospitals are running short of drugs to treat Covid-19, intensive care units are close to capacity, and ventilators are running short.

Between 85% and 90% of the very sick and dying are African American.

Amid this gathering storm, the city council met to decide whether to require people to wear masks, a basic protection the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) strongly recommends. Doctors lined up to plead their case.

“This is beyond an epidemic in this area,” said the pulmonologist Bill Saliski. “Our units are full of critically ill covid patients. We have to slow this down.”

His colleague, Nina Nelson-Garrett, described watching undertakers carrying out corpses, 30 minutes apart.

“Something as simple as a mask can save someone’s life,” she said.

Dr Kim McGlothan recounted how she was frequently stopped by white people asking, “Is the media sensationalizing this, is it really as bad as they are making out?”

McGlothan told the council: “People don’t believe the hype. Until you mandate masks, we won’t be able to stop this – we just won’t.”

Then a black resident stood up. Six of his relatives had died from Covid-19. His brother was on a ventilator. “This is not about masks,” he said. “The question on the table is, ‘Do black lives matter?’ I lost six of my family to Covid. How would it feel if it was your family?”

The council debated for two hours. White council members asked if young children could get carbon monoxide poisoning from masks – no, the doctors firmly told them – and spoke portentously about individual rights.

“At the end of the day,” said councilman Brantley Lyons, “if a pandemic comes through, we do not throw our constitutional rights out the window.”

When the vote was called, it divided on largely racial lines. Black members voted for masks, in order to prevent more families losing six loved ones. White members voted against masks, to preserve the fundamental right not to attach a cloth to your face.

In a 4-4 tie, the ordinance failed. As he left the chamber, Dr Saliski uttered just one word: “Unbelievable.”

Unbelievable accurately describes America today. The country is on the brink of a huge surge of Covid-19, as the virus tears through the heartlands while the president praises himself for having done “a great job” and blithely predicts the scourge will “fade away”.

Ask Alabama whether the virus is fading away. Or Arizona, Florida, South Carolina or Texas. The disease is venting its fury on these states, which all reopened their economies – with Donald Trump’s avid blessing – before the contagion was contained.

“Opening while cases are increasing is like leaning into a left hook,” said Tom Frieden, a former CDC director. “You are basically asking to get hit – and that’s what these states did.”

Alabama is enduring a pummeling. It has recorded 32,000 cases and its curve is on a steep upward path.

The Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who ushered in one of the earliest and most aggressive reopenings, insisted a few days ago that his state “remains wide-open for business”. Yet he has been unable to ignore reality: that the virus has spread its lethal tentacles to every corner of the state overwhelming hospitals to the point that Houston medical centers are running out of ICU beds. Now, once again, Texas’ bars are closing. One town, near Houston, has even brought in a curfew.

The Lone Star state recorded 6,584 cases on Wednesday alone – a heart-sinking figure that makes its curve look almost vertical.

Florida’s malaise would be wryly amusing were so many lives not at stake. On 20 May the conservative magazine the National Review ran the gloating headline: “Where Does Ron DeSantis Go to Get His Apology?” The article scolded liberal critics of the Republican governor’s lax approach to coronavirus – he famously allowed beaches to remain open in spring break and has permitted shops and restaurants to get back to business – for having got it wrong: there was no spike in Florida.

On 20 May, Florida’s daily infection load stood at 527 new cases. Five weeks later, it reported a record 8,942 on Friday and broke the record again on Saturday with 9,585.

‘It’s getting worse, not better’

Though states such as Florida and Texas are bearing the brunt of the beating, this is not a catastrophe that can be dismissed as the problem of just a few places. Across the nation, at terrifying speed, a similar picture is revealing itself.

Every important data point, including positivity rates and hospitalizations, is surging across most states. A map produced by a team of epidemiologists and health experts, Covid Act Now, shows only four states, all in the north-east, including New York, which used to be at the center of the pandemic but has wrestled it under control, as being on track to contain the disease. Twenty-one states are at risk or facing active or imminent outbreaks.

It is troubling enough that the US now has 2.4m confirmed cases – double the number of the next highest country in the world, Brazil, and almost certainly a huge underestimate. The death toll has passed 125,000, with another 20,000 at least expected this month.

The death rate is still trending downwards – one bit of positive news in this sorry picture. But deaths lag behind confirmed cases by a month, and that spells trouble ahead.

One crumb of comfort had been that for almost three months the daily rate of new infections held steady at around 20,000 cases a day. Then, two weeks ago, the monster began to stir.

The tally of new cases ticked upwards, and on Thursday it reached a stomach-churning 40,000 – the worst day on record since the pandemic began.

“It’s getting worse, not better,” said Frieden, who now heads the global health initiative Resolve to Save Lives. “The contrast with other countries is striking. South Korea had 30 cases a day and they flipped out. The US now has 30,000 cases a day and there are people shrugging and saying ‘It’s no big deal’.”

Trump is shrugger-in-chief. When the president lured thousands of non-mask wearing supporters to a viral incubation party – he called it a rally – in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last Saturday, he told them that in his view testing for coronavirus was a “double-edged sword… When you do testing you are going to find more cases. So I told my people, slow the testing down.”

Despite White House efforts to pass the comment off as a joke, it encapsulates the Trump administration’s approach towards this devastating crisis. Early on, Trump failed to marshal the full weight of the most powerful government on Earth against the virus. He lost six critical weeks.

Even today, the 500,000 tests being carried out each day falls woefully short of the scale needed. Contact tracing – another crucial tool – is patchy at best, with signs that a growing number of Americans are unwilling to cooperate.

Leading public health experts have watched aghast as Trump has done exactly what he said he would: put a dampener on data-driven efforts that could, over the course of the pandemic, potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives.

“Everybody agrees we need a lot more testing,” said Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “But when the conversation turns to, ‘Why can’t we ramp up the testing?’ there’s always the sense that the White House is not going to be happy to do what’s necessary. There’s real pushback against scientific leaders calling for action.”

Evidence for such a pushback isn’t hard to find. There’s this week’s announcement that the Trump administration will soon end federal funding for 13 testing sites – seven in ravaged Texas.

Then there’s the ghostlike absence of the CDC, one of the world’s leading public health agencies, which has fallen mute at the moment it is most needed. Frieden has become so frustrated by the booming silence of the institution he led for almost eight years, until Trump entered the White House, he has taken to publicising CDC research himself, in a desperate attempt to fill the void.

When the Guardian put it to him that this was an extraordinary state of affairs, Frieden replied: “It feels a bit like North Korea, doesn’t it?”

The most worrying aspect of the tone being set by Trump is that it is starting to shift the mindset of ordinary Americans. Everywhere you look there are anecdotal signs of people falling in line with the president – shrugging and saying it’s no big deal.

That trend is very visible in Montgomery. In the end, the town’s African American mayor, Steven Reed, overruled the city council’s white members and introduced mandatory mask-wearing by executive fiat.

But it will be an uphill battle persuading white townsfolk to abide by the ordinance. Brad Harper, a reporter with the Montgomery Advertiser, says he is struck whenever he goes into a Target or Walmart that almost all white shoppers go unmasked while black shoppers have their faces covered.

On social media, people rant about masks as “muzzles” and “badges of submission”. “People get really angry about it, resisting even their doctors asking them to wear it,” Harper said. “They don’t see a protective device, as something that can save the people around you, they see it as an instrument of control.”

All across the country, similar acts of personal rebellion are playing out. Residents of Palm Beach, Florida, erupted in anger against a mandatory mask order, calling it the “devil’s law” and an affront to “God’s breathing system”.

Further up the Florida coast, in Jacksonville Beach, 16 friends decided to have a night out at an Irish pub – the entire group came down with the virus, as well as seven bar workers. A surprise birthday party in Texas led to 18 members of one family being infected.

Crowds of unmasked people have been gathering in Las Vegas’s reopened casinos, and Covid-19 cases have soared. In Arizona, the Republican sheriff of Pinal county vowed not to enforce the lockdown on grounds of individual liberty, and promptly contracted the disease himself. Not to mention Cruisin’ Chubbys Gentleman’s Club, a strip club in Wisconsin that had its very own outbreak.

‘If you divide people, you allow divide and conquer’

Everywhere you look there are indications America’s social contract – the idea that if we stand united we can defeat this terrible affliction – is breaking down.

“If you divide people, you allow divide and conquer,” Frieden said. “This is us against them, humans against microbes. The more we are divided, the more microbes will conquer.”

Wändi Bruine de Bruin, provost professor of public policy, psychology and behavioral science at the University of Southern California, has been tracking the changing public response since March. Through a rolling survey of 7,000 adults, she has found that most Americans – about 71% – still say they avoid public spaces and crowds. But the proportion is falling, fast, down from 92% in April.

She puts the slide down to unclear messaging. “Messages and policies are no longer consistent. Some businesses are allowed to open, others not, and it’s not clear why. That leads to confusion, and anger. Some people start to think it’s not fair, others start to assume it’s not that important.”

Jha said it was vital to acknowledge that most Americans, including many Republicans, have so far been compliant with stay-at-home orders. But he frets that a mindset is taking hold that the virus is somebody else’s problem.

“I worry that it will take large numbers of people getting very sick, the hospitals filling up, for people to realise this is a pandemic, not a disease outbreak in New York or New Orleans. I hope it doesn’t come to that. I worry that it will.”

The Guardian asked whether he was concerned about possible public resistance to renewed lockdown orders, should some states be forced back into extreme measures in the face of a Covid-19 explosion.

“I do fear that,” he said. “For months there has been a concerted effort by a small minority to argue that this is overblown or a hoax. It will be difficult for Republican leaders to get people to change their views on this.”

Jha checked himself, then added: “It’s a tiny minority. Unfortunately, it includes the president of the United States.”

The good news is that scientists are very clear about what needs to be done. Frieden calls it the three Ws – wear a mask, wash your hands, watch your distance – combined with aggressive testing, contact tracing and isolation of the sick.

If such measures can be introduced concertedly and quickly, both at federal and state level, public health experts are confident that all is not lost. The contagion could be contained and the economy slowly and relatively safely rebooted.

But time is running out for America.

“This is a long war and we are losing a lot of battles right now, because we are not fighting them,” Frieden said. “We are going to be paying for the mistakes we make today for months, or even years, to come.”

Coronavirus is reportedly killing young people at unprecedented rates in developing countries

https://www.businessinsider.com/washington-post-coronavirus-young-people-developing-world-2020-5

Younger people are dying at unprecedented rates from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, as developing countries become new hotspots for the pandemic, The Washington Post reported.

As the coronavirus has been ravaging countries in the developing world like Brazil and India, young people make up a population of the victims and hospitalized patients at a rate unseen in previous epicenters, according to the report.

In Brazil, people under 50 account for 5% of deaths, ten times greater than that recorded in Italy or Spain, the Post reported, and in Mexico, nearly one-fourth of the dead were aged between 25 and 49. In India, another rising hotspot, officials reported this month that nearly half of the dead were younger than 60, according to the Post.

The same trends can be seen in hospitalizations for patients with extreme cases, the Post reported, like in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro state, where more than two-thirds of hospitalizations are for people younger than 49.

The Post wrote that experts point to existing issues like overwhelmed healthcare, extreme poverty, and inequality as exacerbating factors in the death tolls recorded in developing countries.

In India, the explosion of cases in Mumbai has been connected to the dense cityscape and the conditions in areas like Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, where hospitals are overwhelmed, police forces overextended, and social distancing is impossible, the New York Times reported.

Though authorities announced in the initial weeks of the pandemic that older individuals were the most at-risk of death from the novel coronavirus, the past few months have provided widespread evidence that infection and serious cases are likely to strike younger people between 20 and 44 and analysis like the Post’s highlights the grim effect socioeconomic factors have on who is more likely to dodge or survive the virus.

In the US, officials have identified sharply higher rates of coronavirus infections and deaths among non-white Americans in preliminary data that have been connected to higher rates of co-morbid diseases and other issues like limited access to healthcare.

After initial numbers from states like Michigan, Illinois, and North Carolina reported last month showed African Americans were by far the hardest hit by the coronavirus, experts clarified that the pandemic did not run through all communities equally.

A recent study by amfAR in coordination with a team of epidemiologists and clinicians from four US universities reported by CNN concluded that a wide array of “structural factors including health care access, density of households, unemployment, pervasive discrimination and others drive these disparities, not intrinsic characteristics of black communities or individual-level factors.”

—

In the developing world, the coronavirus is killing far more young people

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/coronavirus-brazil-killing-young-developing-world/2020/05/22/f76d83e8-99e9-11ea-ad79-eef7cd734641_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

RIO DE JANEIRO — When the coronavirus first came to Brazil and a call went out for volunteers to work the critical care wards, Isabella Rêllo analyzed the risks. She was 28. She lived alone. She didn’t have preexisting conditions.

So while older physicians stepped back from the front lines of the coronavirus response, Rêllo stepped up.

Soon Rêllo, a pediatrician, was treating dozens of coronavirus patients. But they weren’t who she’d expected. This patient was only 30 years old. That one was 32. Nearly half the people she was seeing were young, she said, and many were dying. The narrative seared into the global consciousness in the early months of the pandemic — that the virus spared the young and ravaged the elderly — was not what she was watching unfold in Brazil.

The young were at risk. She was at risk.

Isabella Rêllo, 28, thought her youth made her safe from the coronavirus. She was shocked to see how many younger people are dying.

“One patient was young, apparently healthy,” she said. “He was so sick, with so many complications. I thought, ‘This could be me. He could be my friend.’ The quickness that this kills people, including the young, has been a shock.”

As the coronavirus escalates its assault on the developing world, the victim profile is beginning to change. The young are dying of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, at rates unseen in wealthier countries — a development that further illustrates the unpredictable nature of the disease as it pushes into new cultural and geographic landscapes.

In Brazil, a dying man and a desperate search for an open bed

In Brazil, 15 percent of deaths have been people under 50 — a rate more than 10 times greater than in Italy or Spain. In Mexico, the trend is even more stark: Nearly one-fourth of the dead have been between 25 and 49. In India, officials reported this month that nearly half of the dead were younger than 60. In Rio de Janeiro state, more than two-thirds of hospitalizations are for people younger than 49.

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“This is new terrain compared to what’s happened in other countries,” said Daniel Soranz, the former municipal health minister in Rio de Janeiro. “Brazil is a very important country to be looking at.”

Analysts say the emerging data suggests many of the problems that have long troubled the developing world — intractable poverty, extreme inequality, fragile health systems — are increasing vulnerability to the disease. In countries with more poverty and fewer resources, people who might have survived elsewhere are instead dying.

George Gray Molina, chief economist for the United Nations Development Program, said poverty is triggering “compounding effects.” Because population density is so much higher in much of the developing world — and because so many people must keep working to survive — a far greater share of the population ends up being exposed to the virus.

The virus then spreads through a population that’s less resilient. People in the developing world grapple not only with the diseases that have long been associated with it — malaria, dengue, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS — but increasingly with those more closely associated with wealthier countries. Rates of diabetes, obesity and hypertension are surging. But treatment for many such illnesses is lacking.

When newly infected coronavirus patients already weakened by preexisting conditions seek treatment, they find hospital systems that are overwhelmed and unequipped to handle the deluge of patients.

“It all points to social economic status and poverty,” Gray Molina said. The positive benefits associated with the developing world, such as younger populations, are being “wiped out.”

“As this plays out,” he said, “we will see a balancing of the scales.”

When the coronavirus hit Brazil, it was an infection of the rich. Brought in by travelers to the United States and Europe, the coronavirus circulated primarily among the wealthy and connected. The Brazilian senate leader caught it. So did President Jair Bolsonaro’s press secretary. The Rio de Janeiro Country Club along Ipanema beach, one of Brazil’s most exclusive clubs, suffered a devastating outbreak.

Domingos Alves, a data scientist with the University of São Paulo, has been tracking the virus here since those early weeks. The pattern in Brazil at first mirrored that in the developed world: The dead were almost exclusively elderly. Coronavirus patients were flocking to private hospitals, and anyone who needed a hospital bed received one.

But by early April, as the virus began seeping into the favelas and slums of São Paulo and Rio, and the public hospital system started buckling, Alves noticed a sharp shift in the data. Younger people were being hospitalized at higher rates. People younger than 49 were dying. The disease was reaching lower into the demographic pyramid. The victim profile was changing.

Public health experts: Coronavirus could overwhelm the developing world

“Our country is made up of various smaller countries,” Alves said. “When you walk through Rio de Janeiro, you go through places that have the characteristics of Switzerland to places more like the Congo, all in the same city.”

Cátia Simone de Lima Passos, 48, has lived her entire life in a part of the city no one would confuse for Switzerland. Every day, she and her daughter, Agatha, 25, would ride crowded buses through northern Rio to the medical clinic where they worked in the favela of Maré. Lima said they did everything they could to stay safe. They doused their hands in sanitizer. They wore masks. Her asthmatic daughter stayed home from work for weeks.

But they both got the coronavirus and were hospitalized. Lima, after 10 days in the hospital, survived. Her daughter didn’t. Now Lima spends her days isolated in her house, alone and unable to grieve with loved ones, trying to understand why a virus that everyone said would kill only the elderly had taken her daughter but spared her.

The unexpected cruelty of it, she said. It’s more than she can bear.

“My house is empty,” she said. “We were partners in life.”

Bolsonaro, a global leader in minimizing the virus, repeats a mantra: Only the elderly are at risk. So the best policy is to isolate only them. He has called it “vertical isolation.”

“What has happened in the world has shown that the people at risk are older than 60,” he declared in a national address in late March. “So why close the schools?”

The contradictory messaging in Brazil — between local leaders begging people to stay inside and a president calling people to return to the streets — has fueled widespread confusion. As the virus explodes here, cresting 300,000 cases and 19,000 dead, people are increasingly ignoring isolation guidelines. The beach boardwalks in Rio de Janeiro are packed on weekends. The typical infected person infects nearly three others, according to researchers at Imperial College London, one of the world’s highest rates.

While other countries look to open up, Brazil can’t find a way to shut down

Pedro Archer, a physician at a public hospital in Rio, said his young patients have been stunned by their illness. Some had parroted Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly belittled the illness as a “gripezinha” — a little flu. Until they got sick.

“I have people say to me, ‘I really had thought this was only a gripezinha, and now I see this is serious,’ ” Archer said. “I’ve seen people dying who have said the same thing.”

Others keep going out because they must. Government aid — around $105 per month for informal workers — has for many been either blocked by bureaucratic hurdles or woefully insufficient. Buses are still filled with people heading to work. Lines of people waiting for emergency funds have snaked around banks.

“Young people are dying at a higher rate because they are coming into contact with the virus many times more, because of their working and living conditions,” said Ligia Bahia, a public health professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. “Doormen are still working. Housekeepers are still working. . . . Their viral load, their exposure, is greater.”

Marcelo Mitidieri, a 48-year-old father of two, understood the risks but continued working as a driver to support his family. He fell sick in late April. He could scarcely breathe. He had pain in his chest. His daughter took him to a medical clinic in the impoverished Rio neighborhood of Engenho de Dentro, but it had only three respirators and three hospital beds. They had no room for him. So he sat in a broken chair for 24 hours, wheezing, texting his daughter Marcela and waiting.

Limits on coronavirus testing in Brazil are hiding the true dimensions of Latin America’s largest outbreak

“They want to bring me into the emergency room,” he wrote to his daughter. “But there is no equipment.”

“Try to be calm,” pleaded Marcela, hopeful his age would save him. “Inhale and exhale. You are strong, and we are together on this.”

“I’m very ill,” he responded in his last message before his death.

Marcela now seethes. “If he’d gotten better treatment, he would be with me now,” she said.

All of it has left Rêllo, the 28-year-old pediatrician who volunteered to treat coronavirus patients, terrified. But she kept working — until earlier this week, when she started to feel ill.

A dry cough. Sneezing. Body aches. A test soon confirmed her fears: She’d caught the virus. She doesn’t know what it will do to her. She’s young, but she says she no longer believes that’s enough.

She says she thinks of others whom she treated. She knows what they looked like.

“Like me,” she said.

https://news.yahoo.com/conservative-victimhood-complex-made-america-095001554.html

The conservative victimhood complex has made America impossible to govern
The Week
Ryan Cooper
•May 14, 2020

The United States has had the worst national response to the coronavirus pandemic among rich nations largely because President Trump is an incompetent leader whose narcissism means he can focus on little beyond his own approval ratings. From the start of the crisis to today, he has completely failed to take the virus seriously, and refused to do anything meaningful to stop it. It was his job to protect America, and he can’t do the job.

But Trump’s appalling failure is only the most visible part of a vast ocean of right-wing dysfunction. For conservative zealots and media figures, the pandemic is quickly becoming just another culture war battleground — an axis of postmodern symbolic conflict, another vent for bottomless grievance, and fuel for a screeching victimhood complex. The practical effect will be to fuel infection and hamstring economic recovery. It’s a stark obstacle before fixing this or any other crisis.

Let’s take mask-wearing. As research about the coronavirus has developed, the effectiveness of masks in slowing the spread of the disease has become clear, above all in confined indoor spaces. Studies have found that being outdoors is relatively low-risk, and most infections happen when people are in proximity to each other indoors for a long time — but also that masks can drastically reduce the possibility of infecting others if you happen to be contagious. Offices, public transportation, stores, restaurants, church services, and especially homes are where most transmission happens. Wearing a mask whenever one is indoors around strangers is a cheap and no-consequence way of protecting one’s community — even if it only helps a little, it’s a minuscule inconvenience.

Yet a developing narrative on the right holds that masks are a sign of weakness and cowardice. Trump refuses to wear one even to set an example, reportedly because he thinks it will make him look bad. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) refuses to wear one even though it is not clear he is permanently immune after recovering from the disease. Vice President Pence refused to wear one even while visiting COVID-19 patients. On Fox News, Laura Ingraham defended Pence from critics, saying “They’ll say this whole mask thing is settled science just like they do with climate change. Of course, it’s not and they know it,” despite having previously endorsed wearing them. (Naturally, after two cases of coronavirus cropped up in the White House last week, all staffers are now required to wear masks when in the building.)

Further down the conservative food chain, anti-mask fulmination has gotten more extreme and much weirder. First Things editor R.R. Reno claimed on Twitter that “Masks=enforced cowardice.” A city order in Stillwater, Oklahoma requiring masks in businesses was quickly reversed when conservative lunatics threatened violence against workers trying to enforce the rule. The conservative base is taking the elite cue — in a recent poll, just 47 percent of Republicans report wearing masks in public, against 69 percent of Democrats. At New York, Ed Kilgore reports that in a suburban Georgia grocery store, conservatives glared daggers at him for wearing a mask.

Something similar is holding true with pandemic control measures like business closures. Smallish groups of mask-less protesters have swarmed state capitols across the country, demanding the economy be somehow reopened. When one Dallas salon owner refused to obey business closure rules and was locked up for a week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott quickly reversed his own action. “Throwing Texans in jail who have had their businesses shut down through no fault of their own is nonsensical, and I will not allow it to happen,” he said. The salon owner, of course, successfully claimed victimhood and collected over half a million dollars from a crowdfunding campaign (which very well might have been the entire point).

It shouldn’t be surprising that the reality of masks and other pandemic control measures is the precise opposite of the conservative agitprop line. Most masks and lockdown orders are primarily a way to protect others, not just yourself — which you would think would be exactly in line with purported conservative values of traditional masculinity. But facts have never stood in the way of the conservative persecution complex. Nothing gets their blood flowing like playing martyr before imaginary liberal tyranny. Casting oneself as Anne Frank for having to wear a two-dollar cloth mask at Walmart during the worst pandemic in a century would be a stretch for most people in the world, but not American movement conservatives.

This instinct is strengthened by how badly Trump has botched the crisis. He is the hero-president, the man before whom all Republicans must bow five times per day. His gargantuan, world-historical failure cannot be admitted, but neither can it be avoided. Therefore scapegoats and distractions must be found to relieve the cognitive dissonance. The virus is fake, or it only kills worthless old people, or it’s a Chinese conspiracy. Measures to fight it are howling liberal tyranny, even if it’s Republican governors enacting them.

Conservative media probably just can’t help itself. The entire “perpetual misinformation machine,” as Alex Pareene calls it, runs on whipping elderly white conservatives into a frothing rage over whatever is happening. Plus today, the president and half of the Republican congressional caucus are themselves eager right-wing propaganda addicts, forming a perfectly-sealed loop of insanity. It was likely inevitable that the pandemic would get sucked into the hysteria industrial complex, because that’s what right-wing media does with everything.

Already this has created an ideal coronavirus transmission pool — a critical mass of right-wing extremists who are unwilling to obey government pandemic control measures and are convinced personal measures to do so are beta male cowardice. Many will become sick as a result, and some will die — but not only conservatives, as the virus will infect any available host. This will keep the pandemic raging, and hence further delay the restoration of the economy.

A different president who wasn’t an addle-brained dolt would certainly have done something to fight the pandemic. But he or she still would have run directly into the conservative lunacy problem. It’s hard to see how America can be governed when much of the country has taken leave of its senses.