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Category: health care

  • Profiting From Desperation: Oxygen Tanks Become an Underground Market in Mexico

    An INFRA worker refills an oxygen tank.

    Water became a commodity traded on Wall Street in December amid fear of scarcity, and now oxygen is being speculated on in Mexico.

    With most hospitals full, many Mexicans are battling COVID-19 at home. Oxygen tanks and oxygen concentrators (devices that concentrate the oxygen from a gas supply, typically the air) have become scarce, as individuals and companies are taking advantage of the pandemic and selling or renting them at extremely high prices. Others are using the situation to fraudulently sell tanks without delivering them, or to steal customers’ personal information. The situation is only compounding the debt, poverty and inequality that has worsened with the pandemic. It also portends a new wave of fraud and speculation, when vaccines arrive.

    At the time of writing, Mexico had registered 160,000 deaths from COVID-19. However, Mexico’s emergency service says the real figures are at least three times that, given how many people are dying at home, and given that testing — especially outside of the capital, Mexico City — is expensive and difficult to access.

    In Mexico City, people have been lining up for up to five hours to refill tanks, many of which only provide a few hours’ worth of oxygen. The demand for oxygen has grown by 700 percent over the past month, according to the Office of the Federal Prosecutor for the Consumer (PROFECO).

    People have turned to social networks to try to find oxygen supplies, using lists compiled informally by individuals, as the government is not providing such information. Most of the companies or names on these lists are part of an underground market, and the minister for internal affairs, Olga Sánchez, says crime networks are getting involved.

    Speculating With Human Lives

    I contacted various numbers on a list for the city of Puebla to confirm whether the owners of the listed numbers were speculating, and under what conditions they were supplying oxygen products. Many of them never replied. I wrote to someone identifying as Andres Madrid on Twitter, who was advertising oxygen concentrators for sale in Puebla. He said he was selling six-liter concentrators for 30,000 pesos (US$1,484), but when I asked if he represented a laboratory or where he got the concentrators from, he stopped replying.

    Another supplier asked for a 10,000 peso deposit (US$495) and would only accept cash, while another was selling a normal eight-liter tank for 36,000 pesos (US$1,782). Those only accepting cash likely didn’t want any records of the transactions.

    The figures represent roughly a quadrupling of prices since November. The National Alliance for Small Businesses (Anpec) stated that an oxygen refill has gone from 250 pesos in December, to 690 pesos on average today, while concentrators used to cost 11,000 pesos, and on average are being sold for 60,000 pesos. In most of Mexico, the minimum wage is 123 pesos per day, though many informal workers don’t earn that much. Such prices mean people having to pay up to 20 months’ wage for an oxygen concentrator.

    Given the demand and profit rates, it is no surprise that there have been incidences of people intercepting trucks delivering oxygen tanks and stealing all of them, and that police escorts sometimes have to be provided when oxygen is being transported.

    There are numerous Twitter accounts and fake websites selling oxygen tanks. Some are being used to commit fraud and obtain people’s personal and banking details; many involve using stolen IDs when sending quotes to customers, and others ask for an advance payment and then don’t follow through.

    PROFECO acknowledges that the situation is serious. The head of the office, Ricardo Sheffield, says the agency has already deactivated 700 Facebook profiles and 100 pages involved in the fraudulent sale of oxygen. He also noted that some companies sell industrial oxygen tanks that aren’t medical grade and thus not fit for personal use, and told people to only buy from officially recognized companies like INFRA, Linde or Air Liquide.

    INFRA is a producer and distributor of industrial gases and welding materials, but is also one of the main suppliers of medicinal oxygen. I visited one of its stores in Puebla. People were lining up in cars going back almost three blocks. I wondered what the majority of people, who don’t own cars, were doing to transport tanks — which are extremely heavy.

    One person waiting for a refill, Antonia Garcia, said, “At first, it was hard because you don’t know where to get oxygen, and then you find out about the different shops, but then you don’t have a tank to refill. We had to buy a tank — it cost 30,000 pesos. It was full, but then we have to fill it up every day, and that costs 470 pesos. We are shopkeepers and we covered the costs between the whole family, but I don’t know what other people do. You wouldn’t be able to pay it because it costs a lot.”

    Gloria Gonzalez, who was refilling a tank for her sick grandmother, said, “We asked friends and we went on social media asking for tanks. They are very hard to get, and in the end, we borrowed one. The prices keep going up. The tiny one we’re using costs 6,000 pesos and you have to refill it a few times a day. It’s very stressful, and it’s very sad.”

    Given the under-the-table nature of the underground market, and the lack of studies or reporting into the situation, it is hard to quantify the impact this is having. However, there is no doubt that many people are going into debt to buy oxygen tanks, to pay bills and rent, or even just to get COVID-19 tests. And the loans are likely coming from friends or organized crime, as government credit or banking loans are inaccessible for most.

    Local media reported that in one hospital in southern Puebla, four patients died after a private contractor didn’t provide the necessary quantity of oxygen, and around the country, 40 percent of people say that they or a family member have now lost all of their income due to the pandemic and its impacts.

    Violence and Inequality in Underground Markets

    This new underground market and the other crimes only flourish because of already existing black-market structures, organized crime and inequality. The U.S.’s Merida Initiative — an agreement with Mexico and Central America to combat cross-border crime, drug trafficking and money laundering — and the “war on drugs” saw a drastic militarization of Mexico, massive increases in drug prices, an intensification of organized gangs and cartels, increased extortion and an arms black market estimated to be worth US$100 million.

    And with unreliable water and health care systems, there are underground markets flourishing in those sectors as well. For those who can’t access any or enough water, there is a private market of water trucks selling water at elevated prices, while in 2018, Mexico had the sixth-largest medicine black market in the world.

    The pandemic has only seen that worsen, as surgeries are being canceled. There is an increased demand for cancer medications, and in Mexico City, for example, 38,000 of such medicines were stolen from storage by armed men.

    Some 57 percent of the working population are informal workers and therefore not registered for social security, and only 14 percent of second-level hospitals* attend to such people. On top of that, high levels of corruption in the sector mean health resources (from medicine to machines) are diverted into the coffers of private companies. In 2016, at least 6 billion pesos (US$295 million) worth of federal resources assigned to Seguro Popular (public health insurance that covers a wide range of services without co-pays for its affiliates) were mismanaged.

    Corruption also means many hospital buildings contracts were never completed. The disastrous state of Mexico’s health care system, combined with the pandemic and a lack of official information, means that many people feel desperate and helpless when they contract COVID-19. They often don’t investigate or ask questions, because it is better not to know, and many are highly susceptible to social media scams.

    Is the Global Vaccine Market Next?

    In Mexico, there have already been various instances of people trying to profit from the demand for vaccines. Though currently only available through a government program, Mexico has said private companies will be allowed to import the vaccine.

    Meanwhile, the federal health commission, COFEPRIS, is already worried about fake sales of the AstraZeneca vaccine. In the states of Guanajuato and Quintana Roo, there were reports of people visiting houses or calling and asking for personal information with the vaccine as the pretext. One website pretended to be Pfizer Mexico and tried to sell a fake vaccine, and people have tried to sell fake vaccines through social networks.

    This issue isn’t limited to Mexico. The inequality experienced here is also reflected on a global scale; wealthy countries hoarding vaccines will lead to insecurity and deep economic problems that will end up impacting them as well, since poorer countries tend to manufacture and produce a lot of the goods that wealthier countries use.

    Interpol warned of the potential for organized crime related to vaccines, as the pandemic has “already triggered unprecedented opportunistic and predatory criminal behavior.”

    Already, 2 billion people globally lack access to medicines and medical devices, which leaves a gap that is often filled by substandard and falsified products. Up to 169,000 children die yearly from pneumonia after receiving counterfeit drugs, and the figure is similar for adults for fake anti-malarial medication.

    While high-income countries so far have 60 percent of the vaccines (but only 16 percent of the world’s population), the European Union has confirmed it will control vaccine exports in order to put its citizens first. But World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu says, “We will not end the pandemic anywhere until we end it everywhere.”

    * Mexico has three levels of health care. The first is preventative, emergency etc. The second is the biggest area and covers most health issues that involve hospitalization, such as surgeries, urgent care, as well as children and gynecology. The third level is specialist care.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Growing Vaccine Corps of Medical Students Could Aid Underserved Areas

    Nurses administer The Vaccine

    The U.S. faces one of the most consequential public health campaigns in history right now: to vaccinate the population against COVID-19 and, especially, to get shots into the arms of people who cannot easily navigate getting vaccinated on their own.

    Time is of the essence. As new, potentially more dangerous variants of this coronavirus spread to new regions, widespread vaccination is one of the most powerful and effective ways to slow, if not stop, the virus’s spread.

    Mobilizing large “vaccine corps” could help to meet this urgent need.

    We’re testing that concept right now at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where I am the chancellor. So far, 500 of our students and hundreds of community members have volunteered for vaccine corps roles. Our graduate nursing and medical students, under the direction of local public health leaders, have already been vaccinating first responders and vulnerable populations, demonstrating that a vaccine corps can be a force multiplier for resource-strained departments of public health.

    On Feb. 16, we will help to launch a large-scale vaccination site in Worcester, where as many as 2,000 people could be inoculated per day.

    Importantly, a large vaccination corps that includes local medical and public health students could help reach residents who might be missed by public campaigns and hospital outreach efforts. Students often represent their region’s races, ethnicities and backgrounds, which can make it easier for them to connect with communities that are hard to reach and might not trust vaccination.

    What a Vaccine Corps Looks Like

    The problem of getting people vaccinated quickly isn’t just about supply – it’s also about having enough people to carry out vaccinations, particularly in hard-to-reach communities.

    If quickly mobilized on a large scale, a vaccine corps could directly meet three important challenges: accelerating the nationwide rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, ensuring that doses are distributed equitably to all and delivering on the promise that all Americans are able to benefit from major medical and public health advances.

    Medical, nursing, pharmacy and other health students, as well as retired or unemployed clinicians, could deliver shots, monitor people who were just vaccinated or schedule the second doses that are required for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to be fully effective.

    Reaching Underserved Communities – Including Their Own

    In particular, a large, well-organized vaccine corps could play a crucial role in reaching out to communities that are underserved, overlooked or hard to reach.

    Corps members could staff phone banks to help people who lack internet or struggle to use online scheduling systems find vaccines in their areas and make appointments.

    Our students in the vaccine corps have already helped administer vaccines in public housing complexes and homeless and domestic violence shelters. They could also provide transportation to vaccination sites or take doses directly to homebound elders who cannot safely venture out. In Alaska, for example, vaccine providers have been going out by plane and sled to remote villages to reach thousands of residents.

    Members of a vaccination corps who share race or ethnicity with the community can also have an impact on overcoming people’s concerns about getting the vaccine. That’s important.

    A poll released Feb. 10, conducted by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found that only 57% of Black U.S. residents said they had either gotten or would definitely or probably get the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to 65% of Americans who identified as Hispanic and 68% as white. Fewer than half of Black Americans surveyed in a separate Kaiser Family Foundation poll in late January believed the needs of Black people were being taken into account.

    Rural areas face similar concerns, as well as the geographical challenges of reaching people in remote areas. The Kaiser Family Foundation has found that people who live in rural areas are “among the most vaccine hesitant groups.” In mid-January, it found that 29% of rural Americans surveyed either definitely did not want to get the vaccine or said they would do so only if required.

    If we extrapolate these survey results, suggesting that as many as three or four out of every 10 Americans may avoid inoculation, public health officials’ hopes of reaching herd immunity will be in jeopardy.

    The Potential for Scaling Up

    The U.S. has a long history of creating health corps. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government launched the volunteer Medical Reserve Corps to mobilize current and former medical professionals and others with needed health skills during emergencies. Several Medical Reserve Corps units around the country are now assisting vaccination efforts.

    This concept could be expanded, including by partnering with universities, to have wider, game-changing reach. The model of service our students are testing opens up many possibilities, limited only by a lack of will and imagination.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Plans to Rescind Trump-Era Medicaid Work Requirements

    Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Seema Verma listens as President Trump speaks in the Brady Briefing Room at the White House on April 7, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

    The Biden administration on Friday is expected to begin the process of rescinding a Trump policy allowing states to impose punitive work requirements on Medicaid recipients, a move celebrated as a crucial step toward reversing one of the former president’s most vicious attacks on the poor and vulnerable.

    According to the Washington Post, which obtained a draft of the Biden administration’s plan, federal health officials on Friday “will withdraw their predecessors’ invitation to states to apply for approval to impose such work requirements and will notify 10 states granted permission that it is about to be retracted.”

    The brainchild of Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under Trump, the work requirements initiative began in 2018 with guidance allowing states to apply for a waiver to significantly alter Medicaid eligibility requirements. Several Republican-led states quickly jumped at the offer; Arkansas, the first and only state to fully implement Medicaid work requirements, threw at least 18,000 people off the healthcare program over a period of several months in 2018.

    While the destructive efforts of Arkansas and other states were largely stymied by federal court interventions, the Biden administration’s plan to roll back the Trump work requirements guidance was applauded as key progress toward definitively ending one of the former president’s most prominent efforts to strip healthcare from low-income people.

    “We worked so very hard for this,” Matthew Cortland, an attorney and disability rights activist, said of the effort to defeat the work requirements. “We celebrate this win — this win that we made happen — even while mourning the loss of every person who relied on Medicaid and didn’t survive the calamity of Trump’s disastrous administration.”

    Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, argued in a series of tweets late Thursday that “the Trump administration’s Medicaid work requirement policy was never really about work,” noting that “93% of Medicaid beneficiaries who are not on Medicare or SSI are already working, taking care of a family member, going to school, or not working due to illness.”

    “Medicaid work requirements have roots in the ideology that healthcare under Medicaid should be considered welfare for the deserving poor rather than a right,” Levitt added.

    In a last-ditch effort to preserve the work requirements policy during the final weeks of the Trump administration, Verma “asked states to sign contracts that would establish a lengthy process for unwinding work requirements and other conservative changes to their Medicaid programs,” Politico reported Thursday.

    “Medicaid experts have questioned whether those contracts are legally enforceable,” the outlet noted.

    The Biden administration’s plan — which points to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic as a major reason to end the Trump era guidance — will come over a month before the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a case on the legality of the Medicaid work requirements. According to the the Wall Street Journal, Biden health officials are “expected to move quickly to end work requirements in Medicaid… because doing so could moot” the Supreme Court case.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Millions of Counterfeit N95 Masks Have Made Their Way to Hospitals

    A health care worker holds up an N95 mask in the ER at Oakbend Medical Center in Richmond, Texas, on July 15, 2020.

    Thousands of counterfeit 3M respirators have slipped past U.S. investigators in recent months, making it to the cheeks and chins of health care workers and perplexing experts who say their quality is not vastly inferior to the real thing.

    N95 masks are prized for their ability to filter out 95% of the minuscule particles that can carry covid-19. Yet the fakes pouring into the country have fooled health care leaders from coast to coast. As many as 1.9 million counterfeit 3M masks made their way to about 40 hospitals in Washington state, according to the state hospital association, spurring officials to alert staff members and pull them off the shelf. The elite Cleveland Clinic recently conceded that, since November, it had inadvertently distributed 3M counterfeits to hospital staffers. A Minnesota hospital made a similar admission.

    Nurses at Jersey Shore University Medical Center have been highly suspicious since November that the misshapen and odd-smelling “3M” masks they were given are knockoffs, their concerns fueled by mask lot numbers matching those the company listed online as possible fakes.

    “People have been terrified for the last 2½ months,” said Daniel Hayes, a nurse and union vice president at the New Jersey hospital. “They felt like they were taking their lives in their hands, and they don’t have anything else to wear.”

    According to 3M, the leading U.S. producer of N95s, more than 10 million counterfeits have been seized since the pandemic began and the company has fielded 10,500 queries about the authenticity of N95s. The company said in a Jan. 20 letter that its work in recent months led to the seizure of fake 3M masks “sold or offered to government agencies” in at least six states. After KHN sent photos of the masks the New Jersey nurses questioned, a 3M spokesperson referred to them as “the counterfeits you identified.”

    At KHN’s request, ECRI agreed to test the masks that sparked the New Jersey nurses’ concern. Tests of a dozen masks showed they filtered out 95% or more of the 0.3-micron particles they’re expected to catch. (ECRI is a nonprofit that helps health providers assess the quality of medical technology.)

    ECRI engineering director Chris Lavanchy said several health organizations across the U.S. have recently made similar requests for tests of apparently fake 3M masks that the company warned about.

    Lavanchy said the results have shown similarly high filtration levels, but also higher breathing resistance than expected. He said such resistance can fatigue the person wearing the mask or cause it to lift off the face, letting in unfiltered air.

    “We’re kind of scratching our heads trying to understand this situation, because it’s not as black-and-white as I would have expected,” Lavanchy said. “I’ve looked at other masks we knew were counterfeit and they usually perform terribly.”

    3M spokesperson Jennifer Ehrlich said a critical feature of N95 masks, aside from filtration, is how well they fit.

    “Without a proper seal and fit, respirators are not filtering [properly] — gaps could allow air to enter,” Ehrlich said via email.

    The materials management team for Hackensack Meridian Health, which owns the Jersey Shore hospital, is “working with an independent lab on validating the quality and compliance of specific lot numbers of 3M N95 respirators the company identified as potentially problematic,” according to a company statement.

    When the Washington State Hospital Association purchased 300,000 N95s in December, it sent samples to hospital leaders, who said they appeared legitimate.

    “It’s not like we just ordered them sight unseen,” said Beth Zborowski, spokesperson for the association. “We had two major medical centers in Seattle … look at the quality, straps, cut them open and decide ‘This looks like it’s the real deal’ before they bought them.”

    She said major hospital systems in the state bought more on their own, adding up to 1.9 million.

    Throughout the pandemic, workers have also been provided with Chinese-made KN95 masks — approved by U.S. regulators on an emergency basis — that turned out to be far less effective than billed.

    In April, the Food and Drug Administration, responding to dire shortages of high-quality masks for health care workers, opened the door to KN95s, which are supposed to offer the same level of protection as N95s.

    Yet, as months passed, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Harvard, MIT and ECRI discovered that KN95s did not meet the high standard: 40% to 70% of the KN95s failed their tests and some filtered out only 30% of the tiny particles.

    More than 3,400 front-line health care workers have died during the pandemic, KHN and The Guardian have found in the ongoing Lost on the Frontline project, and many families have raised concerns about inadequate protective gear. Yet the actual harm that any substandard or knockoff device presents remains difficult to assess.

    Researchers say it’s unethical to conduct a study that involves giving health workers a product they know is less protective than another when lives are at stake. And short of performing in-depth genome sequencing on each worker’s viral strain, it’s hard to know exactly how any person got sick.

    At the U.S. border, safeguarding the medical gear supply is a high priority, said Michael Rose, a section chief in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s global trade division.

    His job for the past year has been investigating a wide variety of covid-related scams. Of all those cases, Rose said, the flood of fake 3M masks from China has been the most consistent.

    “It’s definitely cat and mouse,” Rose said. “Where we might get better [at intercepting counterfeits], they can ship elsewhere, change the name of the company and keep going.”

    Many investigations lead to seizures in the nation’s massive ports of entry, where enormous cargo ships and planes carry giant containers of goods. There, agents might spot a dead giveaway like a box just off a ship from Shenzhen, China, marked “3M” and “Made in the USA.”

    “I’d like to say that makes it easier, and it does, but the sheer volume of them coming in …” he said. “It’s like a needle in a stack of needles.”

    The demand for highly protective masks has surged twelvefold during the pandemic, said Chaun Powell, vice president of disaster response for Premier, a major hospital supply company. The national medical use of N95s used to be about 25 million a year, but it soared to 300 million last year, he said.

    That meant hospitals and other health providers couldn’t rely on their usual sources of products to meet their need for personal protective gear.

    Health care providers “had to find alternatives,” Powell said, “and that created opportunities for fraudulent manufacturers to be opportunistic and sneak in.”

    Many of Rose’s investigations originate from customer complaints about apparent fakes to 3M, which forwards reports to his team. Others come from hospitals, health systems or eagle-eyed first responders who email Covid19fraud@dhs.gov.

    Border Patrol agents, working with Rose’s team and anticipating shipments from known counterfeiters, have seized thousands of fake N95s in recent weeks, including 100,080 at a port of entry near El Paso, Texas, in December and 144,000 flown from Hong Kong to New York. In all, federal officials say, they have seized more than 14.5 million masks, many fake 3Ms but other counterfeit cloth or surgical masks as well.

    In New Jersey, staff members began complaining in November about their masks to union leaders at Jersey Shore University Medical Center, said Kendra McCann, president of the hospital’s Health Professionals and Allied Employees union local.

    The masks, which seemed flimsy and made some workers’ faces burn, were turning up in every unit of the hospital. After a union member discovered a letter on the 3M website pinpointing their mask lots as potentially fake, managers began to remove the masks but suspected fakes continued to turn up, McCann said.

    Hackensack Meridian said a daily call with hospital leaders includes “reminders to report any suspect PPE so that it can be removed immediately and evaluated.”

    The episode added stress to caregivers who are terrified about getting infected and bringing the virus into their own homes.

    “Nurses are scared to death,” McCann said in mid-January as the masks continued to pop up, “because they’re not being provided with the proper PPE.”

    Eli Cahan contributed to this report.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pandemic Response Inherited From Trump Was “More Dire” Than Biden Thought

    President Joe Biden speaks in the South Court Auditorium of the White House complex on January 25, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    President Joe Biden appeared in his first network television interview with CBS News since taking office, and provided insight into the COVID-19 pandemic plan his administration inherited from the Trump administration.

    In the interview with Norah O’Donnell, she asked if the Super Bowl would have a full stadium next year.

    “It’s my hope and expectation if we’re able to put together and make up for all the lost time in fighting COVID that’s occurred,” Biden said, indicating that the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic was “more dire than we thought.”

    “One of the disappointments was when we came into office is the circumstance relating to how the [former] administration was handling COVID was even more dire than we thought,” Biden said. “We thought that it had indicated there was a lot more vaccine available and it didn’t turn out to be the case.”

    Biden added that’s why his administration has “ramped up every way we can.”

    Biden took office promising to aid the nationwide rollout of vaccines, with a focus on getting them to marginalized populations who have been hit the hardest by COVID-19. To do this, the Biden administration set a goal to reach 100 million vaccinations in its first 100 days of office. The administration has increased its weekly vaccine supply to states and is purchasing an additional 100 million doses of both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to quicken the pace of the roll-out throughout the summer. The purchases will provide enough supply to vaccinate nearly 300 million Americans by the end of the summer.

    Last week, the Biden administration also announced that it will start shipping vaccine doses to retail pharmacies across the nation; this move is separate from an ongoing federal program to have Walgreens and CVS vaccinate residents of long-term care facilities.

    “The Centers for Disease Control, which has quite a bit of experience working with pharmacies, is making sure that we are picking pharmacies in that first phase that are located in areas that are harder to reach to ensure that we have equitable distribution of the pharmacy doses,” said Jeff Zients , White House coronavirus response coordinator, adding that the first couple of weeks will be a dry run. “Eventually, as we’re able to increase supply, up to 40,000 pharmacies nationwide could provide COVID-19 vaccinations.”

    Biden calling the vaccine situation “dire” during the CBS interview didn’t come exactly as a surprise. Politico previously reported that the Biden administration arrived at the White House ready to hit the ground running, but had to spend much of their first week trying to locate 20 million missing vaccines — a consequence of the Trump administration’s infrastructure that failed to track the route vaccines took once they left the federal government’s storage spaces.

    “Nobody had a complete picture,” said Julie Morita, a member of the Biden transition team and executive vice president at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to Politico. “The plans that were being made were being made with the assumption that more information would be available and be revealed once they got into the White House.”

    The Biden administration is also gearing up to use sports stadiums as mass vaccine sites across the country, which Biden spoke about in the CBS interview. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell offered the league’s 30 stadiums as potential vaccination sites.

    When asked if the Biden administration would accept the offer, Biden said, “Absolutely, we will.”

    “Let me put it this way, I’m gonna tell my team they’re available and I believe we’ll use them,” Biden said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In Push for Global Vaccine Equity, US AIDS Program PEPFAR Offers Blueprint

    In Push for Global Vaccine Equity, U.S. AIDS Program Offers Blueprint

    As the U.S. COVID death toll tops 450,000, the Biden administration is attempting to ramp up its vaccination campaign to slow the spread of new coronavirus variants. Meanwhile, health experts warn any vaccination progress in the United States will be threatened without global vaccine equity. “We need to, as quickly as possible, expand access to the vaccines, both in this country, in the United States, as well as around the world,” says Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, director of the ICAP at Columbia University and professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. She argues that the U.S. needs to do more to supply the world with COVID-19 vaccines, as it did with HIV medications. “This is a model that can be emulated at this point in time in recognition of the fact that viruses know no borders.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 has passed 450,000. Over 3,900 people died of the disease just Wednesday alone. In another major milestone, data gathered by the COVID Tracking Project shows vaccinations in the United States have eclipsed the number of people who have been infected with the coronavirus. More than 27 million have received a first shot, and nearly 6 million have been given both vaccine doses. This comes the Biden administration says it still expects to reach its target of 100 million vaccines in his first 100 days, and the number of deaths and people hospitalized continues to fall. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, warned Wednesday new COVID-19 variants may reverse this trend.

    DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY: Although we have seen declines in cases and admissions and a recent slowing of deaths, cases remain extraordinarily high, still twice as high as the peak number of cases over the summer. And the continued proliferation of variants, variants that likely have increased transmissibility, that spread more easily, threatens to reverse these recent trends.

    AMY GOODMAN: As multiple new strains of the coronavirus spread across the United States, the government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said Monday people must be vaccinated as quickly as possible to stop more mutations from emerging.

    DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: You need to get vaccinated when it becomes available as quickly and as expeditiously as possible throughout the country. And the reason for that is that there is a fact that permeates virology, and that is that viruses cannot mutate if they don’t replicate.

    AMY GOODMAN: This comes as health experts warn any vaccination progress in the United States will be threatened without global vaccine equity.

    For more, we’re joined by Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and director of ICAP at Columbia University. She recently co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times headlined “The World Is Desperate for More Covid Vaccines,” that argues, “Two decades ago, the U.S. launched a program to help supply the world with H.I.V. medication. It should take a similar approach to Covid.”

    Doctor, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. I wanted to start with this watershed moment that we are in, facing the race between the vaccines and the virus. Explain what’s happening.

    DR. WAFAA EL-SADR: Well, thank you. First of all, thank you very much for having me today.

    I think we are exactly at this watershed moment because what we have is the potential for garnering the benefits of the vaccines we have discovered thus far, while at the same time we’re also seeing the growth in terms of the numbers of new COVID cases, as well as also the identification of these new variants, these new mutations in the virus, that potentially could threaten the effectiveness of even our vaccines.

    So I think what this means is that we have to do two things at the same time. We need to, as quickly as possible, expand access to the vaccines, both in this country, in the United States, as well as also around the world. That’s number one. And number two, we must continue to make every effort to stop transmission from one person to the next, because this is exactly what generates these mutations, these new variants. And that must continue to be done by the usual public health preventive measures that we are all familiar with. The physical distancing, the masking is critically important, avoiding large congregations of people, avoiding socializing at this point in time. So, I think we have to be working on these two pathways: scale up of vaccines locally and globally, and at the same time do everything we can to stop transmission of the virus.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. El-Sadr, you talked about vaccine access, the importance of vaccine access, in this New York Times op-ed, where you point out that it was Dr. Fauci himself — regarding the HIV and AIDS virus, it was Dr. Fauci at the time who persuaded then-President George W. Bush to start PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, that made AIDS/HIV medication accessible to large numbers of people around the world, saving up to 18 million lives, as you write. What is it that you’re advocating the Biden administration do to enable access globally to the COVID vaccines in a similar way?

    DR. WAFAA EL-SADR: Yes, I think we do have this historic precedent that I think is probably one of — people do recognize that PEPFAR, the global HIV program that’s supported by the United States government, is probably one of the most successful ever foreign assistance programs, that has received bipartisan support for decades now. And I think this is a model that can be emulated at this point in time in recognition of the fact that viruses know no borders, and that what happens in a country in sub-Saharan Africa has — with regards to COVID, has an impact on what happens right here in our own country.

    So, the model is the importance of prioritizing the procurement, the support for the development of these vaccines around the world so that they can actually reach the largest numbers of people possible, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. So it’s both making available the vaccines themselves or making available the technology that supports the development of these vaccines, at the same time also investment, investing the resources to be able to support vaccination programs. We know that you need the vaccines, obviously, but we also need to have effective, large-scale vaccination programs in order to get the benefits of these vaccines anywhere.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. El-Sadr, you also say in the same piece that the mRNA vaccines, which both Moderna and Pfizer use, are easier and faster to manufacture than most other vaccine technologies. But, of course, these vaccines are extremely difficult to transport and to store, given the temperatures at which they have to be kept. Could you talk about what you think — I mean, the Russia vaccine, Sputnik V, has just been shown to have 92% efficacy. There are other vaccines that developing countries are attempting to access, the China vaccines, Sinopharm, Sinovac. How easy or difficult is it, given the technologies those vaccines use, to manufacture and produce and disseminate widely and quickly?

    DR. WAFAA EL-SADR: I think, in the end, we’re going to need really a mix of different types of vaccines. And it depends, really, on the setting. There are some settings where it is quite feasible to be able to keep some of these mRNA vaccines available, if there are freezers, for example, refrigerators and so on. And then there are other settings where it is going to be very difficult because of the lack of these kinds of resources. So, in the end, I think it’s going to depend on the setting and the location within different countries and so on.

    So I do think we need to be flexible. We need to be cognizant of the realities on the ground and do the very best that we can to enable that, in the end, countries would have different options, that they can then seek whatever option fits best within their reality and that fits best within their own context. I think there’s not going to be one answer, but I think there needs to be work on all fronts to enable, ultimately, that people from these countries have access to the vaccine, because it is the right thing to do, but it also is in the self-interest of our own country, as well.

    AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, can you address the issue of those concerned about the vaccine? A new study has come out today from Monmouth University that says in the United States maybe half the people plan to get vaccinated as soon as they can, but a quarter say they never will. We see very little information about negative side effects of these vaccines, though millions have gotten them. Would it help people to believe more in the vaccine if we heard about the thousands of, well, complaints and concerns that people have with the vaccine?

    DR. WAFAA EL-SADR: I think that, absolutely, I think we are all very — as public health professionals and researchers, we’re very concerned about what has been called vaccine hesitancy, which is — it could be because simply people don’t have the accurate information about the vaccine itself. So that’s very important, just disseminating information about the vaccine and how it was developed and what it does and what it doesn’t do.

    I think another aspect of hesitancy sometimes is because of a legacy of mistrust, for example, among certain groups of our own population and global populations in terms of mistrust of government, mistrust of research. And for that, we need to engage individuals from these same communities, trusted messengers, trusted champions, who can talk to their peers about what the vaccines do and what they don’t do.

    We also need, at the same time, to also share information as information arises, in terms of any side effects from these vaccines and the magnitude of such side effects. I think it’s really important to be transmitting the information, thinking about what are the best channels for transmitting the information. And very important is being very transparent about the information that we have.

    We’re very fortunate that, thus far, with all of the vaccines for which we’ve seen results, have been, first of all, remarkably effective — they work — and also have been remarkably safe. The safety profile has been very comforting, and I think that’s really of great importance.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, why do you think it is, Dr. El-Sadr, that perhaps up to a third of healthcare professionals say they will not take the vaccine? That does not inspire confidence. And what is the reasoning?

    DR. WAFAA EL-SADR: There are multiple reasons for this. I think, again, healthcare workers are not — are also a part of our society, our community. And there are, again, many people who are from certain subsets of our communities, particularly amongst African Americans, for example, Hispanics and Latinx populations in this country, who, because of the legacy I mentioned, the legacy of mistrust and prior abuses in research, are leery of anything that comes from the government, including these very valuable vaccines.

    And I think it’s going to take a lot of work for us to be able to gain their trust and keep sharing the information. But most importantly, beyond the knowledge, it is really reaching people from the same communities who can then talk about their own experiences, why they were vaccinated, and then demonstrate to others that it is in their interest and the interests of their families and communities to be vaccinated. It’s not going to happen overnight, but we need to be working on this very diligently, engaging with the communities that have the fear of these vaccines, so that we can gain their trust. It will take a lot of work, a lot of partnerships, a lot of commitment, and being willing to listen to their concerns and answer their concerns.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr. El-Sadr, as I’m sure you’re aware, vaccine hesitancy is not just a problem in the U.S., but also across the world. France has one of the highest rates, but also places like South Africa and Kuwait. So, could you talk about how views of vaccination and why views of vaccination have changed in this way, and what the implications are if large numbers of people, or even significant numbers of people, around the world refuse the vaccine when it’s made available to them?

    DR. WAFAA EL-SADR: I think that’s an issue, globally, of great concern. Like you said, it’s not just in the U.S.; it’s in almost every corner of this globe. And people are — you know, when you think about, when you ask individuals, they’re on a spectrum. There are people who are ready and willing to get vaccinated. As soon as they’re eligible, they’re going to really be at the front of the line. They are convinced. They’re ready to act. And then, on the other extreme are people who simply don’t believe in vaccines, for a variety of different reasons — vaccines overall, not just this COVID vaccine. And then, most people are somewhere in the middle. And they are seeking answers to their questions. They are seeking reassurance. They’re seeking — they’re looking for others like them to have been vaccinated.

    And I think we’re now focusing on these individuals who are on the spectrum of these people who have concerns, who have issues, who have certain beliefs, and working with them diligently to try to overcome some of the myths they may believe, and also to try, like I said, to engage people whom they trust. This is very important. What I’m seeing now is some of the narratives, storytelling around the vaccines, people who are standing up from some of these same communities and saying, “You know, I went and I got vaccinated because I did it for my family. I did it for my community.” And that can be a very powerful statement coming from someone from these same communities. And we need to be doing this in the U.S., as well as around the world, as well.

    And I think, in this day and age, it’s particularly important to do this very actively, because, of course, of social media and the ability to disseminate sometimes erroneous information about side effects of vaccines. And I think we need to be very nimble to be able to, again, respond to some of this erroneous messaging very quickly.

    AMY GOODMAN: Dr. El-Sadr, I wanted to ask you about the current controversy in the United States. This is CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, speaking during a briefing with reporters Wednesday about the reopening of schools and vaccines for teachers.

    DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY: I would also say that safe reopening of schools is not — that vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for safe reopening of schools.

    AMY GOODMAN: President Biden has said he wants to reopen a majority of K-8 schools in his first hundred days. But during a meeting with teachers’ unions last Thursday, Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said it may not happen.

    DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: That may not happen, because there may be mitigating circumstances.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, can you, Dr. El-Sadr, address this issue of whether parents, teachers and kids should be concerned about in-person learning, and what it means for Dr. Walensky to say, yes, people should go back to school, even if teachers are not fully vaccinated?

    DR. WAFAA EL-SADR: Well, I think we have data now that are very reassuring. So, over the past year, since the beginning of this pandemic, there’s been accumulating data that have shown again and again that transmission in schools is not the problem. It is not that schools have been breeding grounds for transmission of COVID-19. This has been shown in a variety of different programs around this country and around the world, for a lot of different reasons. One is that we have some data that transmission from children to adults seems to be less efficient than from adults to adults, so that’s important, and also that there are data that have shown that the rates of transmission within schools, again, are very limited. Most of the infections amongst teachers and so on and other school personnel have been acquired in the community; they’ve not been acquired in the schools themselves.

    So the most important thing is to make sure that the schools are safe. And that means, of course, paying attention to ventilation, to the spacing between the students, to face covering if they’re of the right age and can wear a mask. And I think we have — again, we have the evidence that said that this has kept our schools as safe environments. Certainly, again, teachers who are involved in in-classroom instruction, they are part — at least in New York state, they are part of the group that is eligible to get vaccinated. But, again, the data, overall, are quite reassuring about the situation itself of COVID in schools even without the vaccine. So the vaccine can be an additive protective measure, but it’s not necessary to restrict return to school until every — not just teacher, but every staff person at a school is vaccinated.

    AMY GOODMAN:

    AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, we want to thank for being with us, professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. We’ll link to your piece in The New York Times, “The World Is Desperate for More Covid Vaccines.”

    When we come back, we look at China’s crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang province, as reports emerge of mass rapes and sweeping surveillance. Stay with us.

    [break]

    AMY GOODMAN: “Dark Eyes” by Lila Downs. To see our interview with her and her performance in our studio, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Never Ending COVID Crisis

    It was in early 2020 that the word COVID-19 entered the lexicon. In the past year more than 440,000 people in the United States have died from this disease. The impact of shutdowns meant to end the spread of disease have cost millions of people their jobs, and businesses large and small no longer exist at all. COVID-19 has proven that the political system is devoted to the interests of the billionaire class and is therefore incapable of acting in the interests of the people.

    The vaccines which hold some promise are distributed by the same for-profit entities that run what passes for a health care system in this country. They are distributed by criteria that each state has developed, resulting in a patchwork of 50 different rules.

    The post The Never Ending COVID Crisis appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • I Was Shackled to My Bed After Giving Birth. Then They Took My Baby Away.

    A prisoner looks at a photo of a baby while imagining touching their face

    I’m R87914. Even though I’m no longer in prison, that number, just like my social security number and name, will never change. I’m also a proud mom and a new one at that. There were no balloons or cards, no flowers or family allowed in the delivery room at the time of my daughter Aniela’s birth.

    The prison where I was incarcerated wouldn’t allow mothers-to-be to go into labor naturally. Too inconvenient. Each birth was scheduled ahead of time. Mothers were not told until the morning of their scheduled labor day that they were being taken to the hospital and induced. Families of the women were not told until after the baby was born; a three-minute phone call was allowed after the birth, per discretion of the officer.

    During my 36 hours of labor, an officer would sit on the couch, and watch me, and make occasional small talk and sometimes even pretend like they cared. Their shift, just like any other person’s, would end and eager to go home, they would leave, a new officer would walk in.

    Pregnant women in Illinois and a few other states are not allowed to be shackled, only handcuffed. I can’t imagine having to waddle in shackles eight or nine months pregnant. But so many of the guards in Illinois complain about not being able to use the shackles during pregnancy.

    After birth, women can be shackled — regardless of any pain from stitches one may have, or the women with C-sections. Once the baby is born, all restraints are once again an option, per discretion of the officer.

    So, there I was. Still in tears, both from being happy and also in pain, with my first born in my arms, an officer still on the couch and my feet shackled to the hospital bed, all the time knowing that in less than 48 hours my daughter would be taken from my arms and I would be driven back to the prison, handcuffed and shackled the entire ride.

    I cried the whole drive back to the prison after I was pulled away from my daughter. I closed my eyes and just tried to keep seeing her face.

    Although I could not breastfeed my daughter, I was the first person in my prison to be able to pump milk while incarcerated. Before that, the Illinois Department of Corrections said that any kind of breastfeeding or pumping by inmates was out the question. They said a breast pump was a safety risk. But after a struggle, activists finally got the Department of Corrections to allow breast pumps in Logan Prison. Until I started last year, using a breast pump in an Illinois prison without the baby being at the facility had never been done.

    Still there was no funding for a breast pump. Further efforts led to the donation of three breast pumps, along with the other supplies needed to save and freeze milk.

    So, when I got back to prison, there were two of us women who had just given birth the day before. I chose to use a breast pump and send home milk. She decided against it when we found out that if we used the breast pump, we would be restricted to staying only in the health care unit of the prison until further notice. (In some ways, that was kind of living in a prison inside of a prison.)

    Keeley Schenwar with her baby.
    Keeley Schenwar with her baby.

    For the next month and a half, I stayed in the health care unit and pumped every two to three hours — that is, of course, after we were done mixing up pieces to the different pumps and finally got one of them set up correctly. I had a picture of my daughter that had been taken at the hospital, and I looked at it while I pumped. I labeled bags of breast milk with the time and date, and every two weeks my family would have to drive four hours to the prison and pick them up, which ended up not really being possible. Milk would be wasted if it was brought out before visitors were allowed to leave. All visitors need to be escorted in and out of the prison at set times, and no coolers can be brought in to help preserve the milk, so some of the milk was spoiled. On top of this, for most women, it is not possible for their families to come and pick up breast milk.

    I was taken out of the health care unit after a month and a half. The breast pump stayed in the health care unit. I was allowed to go there every three hours during the day, but I was not allowed to go at night. That meant I couldn’t pump at night. A month after that happened, I stopped being able to produce milk, not long before I went home to my baby. That felt like a lot of pumping for no reason. In the end, I was not able to breastfeed my daughter when I came home.

    Here’s another thing that’s important to mention: After I was taken out of health care, one day they called me back in. Another woman was about to start using the breast pump. They called me in to find out how to put the second breast pump together. It wasn’t because I knew a lot about setting up a breast pump — it was because they knew so little. There was no one at the prison who could really support people in using the pump.

    So, it’s a good thing that breast pumps are now allowed at the prison, but it’s not enough. If they even had one person in the prison who knew what they were doing, and knew what was going on, it would make a difference. It wouldn’t need to be someone’s full-time job. More people just need to know what’s going on. When I told the male guards, “I need to use the breast pump,” they laughed at me and had no idea what I was talking about. Also, prisons need reliable pumps that are not old, donated pumps with scattered pieces, and mothers need to have access to the pump at all times.

    But also, when it comes down to it, my question is why we need to be thinking about breast pumps in prison in the first place. Why are all these moms sitting in prison when their babies are on the outside missing them?

    If new mothers are incarcerated, they need to have access to breast pumps. But really, no breast pump can replace being with your baby. No one should ever have to be handcuffed, shackled and pulled away from their newborn child.

    Note: This essay was written in 2014.

    Truthout has launched the Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize, which will be awarded to a formerly incarcerated writer. More information is here.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Medicare For All Reaches The Crossroads

    In 2021 the U.S. healthcare crisis has, again, reached a boiling point. It was already simmering in 2019 when the number of uninsured grew to 33 million. Covid then triggered a job crisis that added anywhere from 15 to 27 million to the ranks of the uninsured. The still-growing job crisis has pushed the number of uninsured near or beyond the 49 million uninsured that existed prior to Obamacare, whose goal was “universal healthcare.”

    It’s no surprise then that Medicare For All emerged, pre-Covid, as the most popular policy during the Presidential Democratic primaries. But after the Democratic Party organized, once again, to crush Bernie Sanders’ campaign, Biden tried to push discourse away from Medicare For All with plans to “improve Obamacare” a goal as ambitious as “patching up the Hindenburg.”

    The post Medicare For All Reaches The Crossroads appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Small Amounts of All Drugs Are Now Decriminalized in Oregon

    Oregon state sign with blue sky backing

    In what justice advocates celebrated as a major shift away from the devastating and failed policies of the nation’s so-called “war on drugs,” Oregon on Monday officially became the first state to decriminalize possession of small amounts of all drugs with a new policy that also aims to boost access various related services.

    Oregon voters passed Measure 110, also called the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act, by a 17% margin in November. The ballot initiative was spearheaded by Drug Policy Action — the advocacy arm of Drug Policy Alliance — in partnership with Oregon groups and supported by over 100 local, state, and national organizations.

    “Today, the first domino of our cruel and inhumane war on drugs has fallen — setting off what we expect to be a cascade of other efforts centering health over criminalization,” said Drug Policy Alliance executive director Kassandra Frederique in a statement Monday. “For the first time in at least half a century, one place in the United States — Oregon — will show us that we can give people help without punishing them.”

    “This law is meant to protect people against persecution, harassment, and criminalization at the hands of the state for using drugs and instead [give] access to the supports they need,” Frederique explained. “Over the last year, we have been painfully reminded of the harms that come from drug war policing and the absence of necessary health services and other support systems in our communities. Today, Oregon shows us a better, more just world is possible.”

    As VICE senior editor Manisha Krishnan tweeted, it is a “historic day for drug reform,” noting that the measure is expected to reduce racial disparities in drug arrests.

    Anyone found in possession of one to three grams of heroin, one to four grams of MDMA, two to eight grams of methamphetamine, or two to eight grams of cocaine “will be charged with simple possession, a misdemeanor offense, rather than a felony,” Krishnan reported. The new lower-level possession limits are:

    • Less than one gram of heroin;
    • Less than one gram, or less than five pills, of MDMA;
    • Less than two grams of methamphetamine;
    • Less than 40 units of LSD;
    • Less than 12 grams of psilocybin;
    • Less than 40 units of methadone;
    • Less than 40 pills of oxycodone; and
    • Less than two grams of cocaine.

    Rather than a misdemeanor, drug possession as detailed above will lead to a citation that includes a phone number for recovery help. The citation will be dropped if they agree to the health assessment.

    “The options will be to pay a $100 fine or call a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week phone line and talk to a peer-support specialist and get a social services needs screening done,” Tera Hurst of the Oregon Health Justice Recovery Alliance told KPTV.

    “Services for treatment options will be funded through a portion of marijuana tax revenue and the money saved from fewer arrests,” according to KPTV. “On Monday, the law’s Oversight and Accountability Council will form. It will determine rules for the new law, and also where grants and money are distributed.”

    State projections (pdf) cited by Drug Policy Alliance show the marijuana tax revenue could fund over $100 million in services the first year and up to $129 million by 2027. The advocacy group also highlighted an Oregon Criminal Justice Commission report (pdf) from August that found racial disparities in drug arrests could drop by nearly 95% as a result of the new policy.

    Supporters of Oregon’s shift to decriminalization and a healthcare-based approach to drug use and possession hope that the measure can serve as a model for the rest of the United States.

    “I hope that we all become more enlightened across this country that substance abuse is not something that necessitates incarceration, but speaks to other social ills — lack of healthcare, lack of treatment, things of that nature,” Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) told USA Today. “If you’re white and wealthy, you get an opportunity to get a break, go home to your family, and go into some kind of healthcare environment.”

    In June 2018, Watson Coleman introduced a resolution that “expresses the sense of Congress that the war on drugs failed, and calls out the disparate treatment of individuals criminalized for drug use — frequently people of color who used crack and cocaine — to ensure that all future drug policy is based on evidence-based healthcare solutions.”

    Her resolution was endorsed by the Drug Policy Alliance as well as Amnesty International, the Justice Policy Institute, Justice Strategies, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP, and the Sentencing Project.

    Although the congresswoman, who is Black, did not say whether she plans to re-introduce the resolution now that Democrats control both chambers of Congress and the White House, she emphasized to USA Today that the war on drugs “was used as a weapon, as a tool to disrupt our communities,” adding that “it wasn’t a war on drugs, it was a war on poor brown and Black men and women, and it did terrible things to families for generations.”

    Oregon’s progress on drug policy reform comes as advocates are pushing President Joe Biden to “abandon criminalization as a means to address substance use, and instead ensure universal access to equitable evidence-based solutions rooted in racial and economic justice and compassion,” as over 200 groups wrote in a letter just before he took office last month.

    Detailing a series of policy proposals, the coalition wrote to Biden that “it is our strong hope and belief that ending the drug war that has inflicted incredible harm in communities across this nation, and centering evidence-based solutions to address the overdose crisis, could be a great catalyst for a national transformation.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The American Divide

    Unborn babies’ hearts are at risk as EPA caves to chemical companies’ 20-year effort to whitewash the science on the risks of an extremely dangerous and prevalent chemical, TCE. 

    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Lost in Transplantation (Rebroadcast)

    Quickly delivering donated organs to patients waiting for a transplant is a matter of life and death. Yet transportation errors are leading to delays in surgeries, putting patients in danger and making some organs unusable. 

    This episode originally was broadcast Feb. 8, 2020. 

    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • COVID-19 in the ER

    As the new coronavirus spreads, an ER doctor in Seattle explains how he and other front-line physicians are learning to treat patients and keep themselves safe. Plus, more than eight years after the end of the Iraq War, an Iraqi man is suing a U.S. company that ran interrogations at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.   


    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • The Dem Primary is Over, and We Need Bernie Sanders to Lead on Health Care From the Senate

    On Tuesday, I cast a joyless vote for the very much politically doomed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Illinois primary, in an elementary school where hushed whispers and fearful glances had replaced the normal din of an election day. There was no one standing just outside the perimeter hustling me to vote for this or that candidate. There were no throngs of voters with whom to share that elusory joy in exercising your basic democratic rights. It was the first, and I hope the last, ballot that I ever cast wearing latex gloves. There are, I think, very good and important questions about whether this election should have been held at all.

    But it was, and Illinois Democrats willing to risk getting the dreaded virus handed Sanders a decisive loss. Together with lopsided routs in Florida and Arizona (Ohio rescheduled its primary) this is, or should be, the end of the Sanders campaign. There are, frankly, no lessons to be learned here, nothing remotely generalizable. This was a race transformed, suddenly and inexplicably, at a critical moment by a terrible deus ex machina that threatens to inflict once-in-a-century damage on human civilization.

    Whenever we talk about 2020, it will be in terms of before and after. Before the virus, there was a lively Democratic primary that began with more than 20 hopefuls, with many of the same fault lines, grievances and fears as 2016. After the virus, the remaining centrist candidates quickly and unexpectedly coalesced around former Vice President Joe Biden and dealt Bernie Sanders an almost unthinkable series of defeats in the Super Tuesday contests. Before the virus, this was a race dominated by a seemingly endless debate about health care policy and whether the United States should opt for a fundamental and far-reaching restructuring of its system. After the virus, there was hardly room for even trembling disagreement.

    More importantly, as the scale of the Covid-19 crisis has dawned on a terrified public over the past two weeks, it became clear that a decisive majority of Democratic primary voters no longer had much of any interest in this contest. The measures put into place by states and cities, from shutting down restaurants, bars, schools, universities and public places to the shuttering of all major American pro sports, are so far outside the normal scope of imagination, so sudden in their obliteration of everyday life, so unsettling in their lack of even a rudimentary time horizon, as to annihilate all other concerns and considerations.

    Over the past three Tuesdays, Democratic voters have made it clear that they want to consolidate around Biden, and they have done so in such staggering numbers as to make a Sanders delegate majority close to a mathematical impossibility. With many states in the coming weeks likely to punt their primary elections to early summer, and with Biden now holding double-digit leads in national primary polling, it’s not just that Sanders has no real path to the nomination. It’s that the park containing the path is closed. The race will be frozen with Biden holding a roughly 300-delegate lead that is insurmountable given the party’s proportional allocations rules even under normal circumstances. That is a shame, because Sanders has better plans for this crisis than Biden, along with a narrative that correctly blames the long-term hollowing out of the public sector and the gross failure of the neoliberal state to prepare us for this moment. We live in a wrecked society now being held courageously together by grossly underpaid grocery store clerks, harried Amazon delivery drivers and determined health care providers. In America, only the doctors and nurses receive their due, and even they are embedded in a tragically warped system that has led us to be nearly defenseless against a crisis that scientists have been warning us about for decades.

    You don’t have to think that single-payer health care is the answer to our every problem or believe that a magic wand can be waved to bring it into existence to see that Sanders is the only candidate left in the race capable of seeing this fallen state for what it is and pursuing policies to remedy it. Sanders offers us a vision of society as it might be. Biden extends the nostalgic promise of returning us to a recent past that is already buried much deeper than he and his supporters believe it is. Think of it this way: the political class in this country is so fundamentally broken that they have already wasted precious days debating half-measures that no sensible economist believes will be remotely sufficient to prevent a massive economic collapse.

    Nevertheless, it was not meant to be for Bernie this year. There is no sensible argument for staying in the race now that he needs to win more than 63% of the delegates to get to a majority. There will be no repeat of 2008 and 2016, when trailing candidates floated the idea of flipping the so-called ‘superdelegates’ at the convention and reversing the popular will of the voters. Due in large part to pressure from the Sanders campaign itself, the DNC changed the rules so that superdelegates can’t vote on the first ballot. There isn’t going to be a second one, so there will be no one inside the party left to persuade.

    A zombie campaign premised on amassing delegates to influence the party’s platform at the convention is not worth running and is certainly not going to inspire the kind of donations he would need to compete in the remaining states. The platform itself is a hollow prize anyway. No one reads or cares about it, the nominee isn’t bound by it and before the ink is dry, Biden and his team will have taken over the party.

    More than ever, Sanders is actually needed as a progressive leader in the Senate, to help shape the coming bailouts and spending packages in a more humane direction. He himself seemed to acknowledge this obliquely yesterday, when he snapped at a reporter asking whether he would drop out: “”I’m dealing with a f—ing global crisis,” he told CNN”s Manu Raju. “Right now, I’m trying to do my best to make sure that we don’t have an economic meltdown and that people don’t die. Is that enough for you to keep me busy for today?”

    The best thing Sanders can do for the American people is dedicate himself to pushing the coming bailouts and stimulus packages and emergency response plans in as progressive direction as possible from his influential perch in the Senate. He’ll be much less effective at that if he’s halfheartedly campaigning to compete in primaries that might not happen for months. And as much as it comes as a disappointment to a progressive movement that just weeks ago seemed to be on the verge of capturing the Democratic Party’s nomination, this thing is over and the sooner Biden can start fundraising for the general election the better. He is not the ideal vehicle to lead the party through a historic crisis, but Donald Trump has proven again and again during this unfolding ordeal that there is an abyss where the president should be, a vacuum of moral, political and administrative leadership that may get hundreds of thousands or even millions of people killed. Fighting a two-front war against the president and the virus is enough. The third front – the primary – needs to be shut down, and progressives need to lick their wounds and hope there is something left of society to fight for in 2024.

    This post was originally published on Truthdig RSS – Truthdig: Expert Reporting, Current News, Provocative Columnists.

  • Containing the Coronavirus

    As the new coronavirus spreads through the U.S., we chronicle how it came to California, with the voices of first responders, experts and passengers quarantined on a cruise ship docked in San Francisco Bay. 

    Plus, we hear the story of an African American man who decades ago was shot and killed by a police officer who later became leader of the Ku Klux Klan. 

    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • The Tell-Tale Hearts

    Unborn babies’ hearts are at risk as EPA caves to chemical companies’ 20-year effort to whitewash the science on the risks of an extremely dangerous and prevalent chemical, TCE. 

    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • The honor walk

    A new ritual called an honor walk is bringing solace to families who’ve lost a loved one and consented to have organs donated. Hospitals are organizing these walks as a way to honor the gift of life that will be passed on to those who will benefit from transplants.  

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    *    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Lost in Transplantation

    Delivering donated organs quickly to patients waiting for a transplant is a matter of life and death. Yet transportation errors are leading to delays in surgeries that put patients in danger and make some organs unusable. 

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    *    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Trapped: Abuse and Neglect in Private Care

    Deep in the backroads of central Florida, hidden between trees dripping with Spanish moss, sits the campus of an infamous center for the developmentally disabled. Its story shows what can happen when families have nowhere else to find care for their loved ones.

    After years of complaints, Carlton Palms is finally being shut down. But its parent company, Bellwether Behavioral Health, is still running group homes across the country, where new allegations have arisen.

    WNYC reporter Audrey Quinn investigates the company and speaks to a family whose son was abused at two of Bellwether’s New Jersey facilities. She discovers that, with national spending on autism services expected to increase 70 percent by 2025, the company is owned by a private equity firm.

    Then, reporter Elly Yu investigates the death of a DACA recipient while at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in rural Georgia.

    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Video: Atomic vets

    Hundreds of thousands of U.S. veterans took part in nuclear tests after World War II, and into the Cold War. Many of these vets suffer long-term health issues including lung problems and cancer, and many haven’t received compensation for their injuries and feel abused, neglected and forgotten by the government and a country that exposed them to unforeseen risks. This story of the veterans who witnessed secret atomic testing is a co-production with our friends at the RetroReport.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • My Town, Chi-Town

    Chicago is experiencing a reversal of the great migration that propelled African Americans northward in search of opportunity in the first half of the 20th century. Since 2000, a quarter-million black Chicagoans have left. The reasons include decades of bad policy and broken promises on affordable housing, education and public safety.

    On this episode of Reveal, we team up with the Data Reporting Lab in Chicago to examine how trauma care teams have done more than law enforcement to reduce the gun homicide rate and with The Chicago Reporter to describe how activists are pushing back against the shutdown of 50 public schools at once.

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    Head over to revealnews.org for more of our reporting.

    Follow us on Facebook at fb.com/ThisIsReveal and on Twitter @reveal.

    And to see some of what you’re hearing, we’re also on Instagram @revealnews.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Her own devices: Is a contraceptive implant making us sick?

    In Texas, women with limited access to abortions are traveling across the border to find a drug that will induce miscarriages. In Mississippi, anti-abortion groups are opening crisis pregnancy centers across from abortion clinics to persuade women to keep their babies. And one company offers permanent birth control through the insertion of a simple device – that’s ended up causing health complications for thousands of women.

    This week, we look into pregnancy and the ways people try to prevent it, end it and save it.

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    To explore more reporting, visit revealnews.org or find us at fb.com/ThisIsReveal, on Twitter @reveal or Instagram @revealnews.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.