Monthly Archives: April 2020

COVIDS WAR ON WOMEN During this plague year, there is almost never good news, only degrees of bad news. Even so, the pandemic has been different (and worse) for girls and women.

Its true that more men are dying than women from Covid-19 around the world but thats not exactly cause for celebration.

Another ambivalent data point: More workplace risk is falling on women, who are more likely to be considered essential workers. The upside to that is still having a job, but at what price? Swedens Foreign Minister Ann Linde pointed out today in a POLITICO interview that 70 percent of those working in health care and elderly care are women.

More of the daily grind tends to fall, on average, on women: From the increased cleaning and chores that come with more time spent in the home, which falls disproportionately to so many female household members, to the extra education and childcare work created through closures of school and day care, where men have also been known, on average, to skimp.

The real-life examples are heartbreaking: Alice Jorge, a woman living with a disability in Belgium who needs support from her sister and a visiting nurse, was recently asked to choose between keeping her Covid-19 positive caregiver or going without professional care. Three women bound to suffer no matter what choices they took.

Domestic violence is up sharply: A new research report by a consortium that includes Johns Hopkins University confirms this: 31 million additional cases of gender-based violence can be expected globally if lockdowns last for an average of six months.

Travel to shelters may be restricted, and a simple phone call to a helpline can itself trigger new violence. Support services are overwhelmed with requests: from a 47 percent increase in calls to Spains national hotline to a 113 percent spike at U.N.-supported hotlines in Ukraine.

We can expect 7 million unplanned pregnancies in 144 low- and middle-income countries, thanks in part to restricted access to contraception, not to mention the 2 million female genital mutilations and countless child marriages projected to increase by the United Nations population agency. The pandemic is deepening inequality, UNFPA Executive Director Natalia Kanem said, slamming the Swiss cheese of a safety net she sees in most countries.

Kanem speaks of childbirth horror stories: pregnant women unable to access caesarian procedures (many of which are unplanned) or blood pressure medication because of redeployed health care resources, or the woman gets to the clinic (and) the midwife isnt there, because theyre also redeployed or sick. Up to two-thirds of maternal and neonatal deaths globally occur because of the absence of properly trained midwives in better times.

During World War II, women on the U.S. homefront think Rosie the Riveter entered the workforce out of a call to sacrifice for the common good. During this pandemic, women are being called back but this time to the frontlines.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Of course Matthew McConaugheys mask says just keep livin. Reach out with tips: [emailprotected] or on Twitter at @renurayasam.

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In these unprecedented times, Americas biopharmaceutical companies are coming together to achieve one shared goal: beating COVID-19. We are expanding our unique manufacturing capabilities and sharing available capacity to ramp up production once a successful medicine or vaccine is developed. Explore our efforts.

THE COVID DOCTRINE For much of the nations 100 days at war with the coronavirus, Donald Trump has been a commander in chief in search of an exit strategy, Adam Cancryn writes. The president has promised the virus will simply disappear, touted unproven treatments as miracle cures and fantasized about a near future of economic resurgence and rapid return to normalcy. Yet as the White House shifts its focus away from the public health response and toward rebuilding an economy ravaged by the pandemic, there remains little clear sense even within his own administration of how close the U.S. is to victory, and what winning the war even looks like.

PINS AND NEEDLES Our executive health editor Joanne Kenen emails: Theres some good news on the vaccine front including word that the country is getting a new vaccine leader. Peter Marks has emerged as the Trump administrations unofficial vaccine czar (minus the cross and pearls) at the FDA, filling in the gap created by the abrupt ouster of Rick Bright from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. Marks will advise BARDA and other agencies on vaccine and gene therapy approval, health care reporter Sarah Owermohle reports.

News of Marks growing involvement comes amid a spate of heartening though still, we cant emphasize enough, very preliminary news about vaccine development, here and abroad. Oxford has a candidate vaccine thats safe in humans; its still testing whether it can create a strong enough immune response to combat the coronavirus. Three other companies have announced accelerations of clinical trials, though widespread availability in the best possible scenario is still months away.

Even if we get a vaccine, Joanne writes, big questions have to be answered.

Who gets it second? First responders will get it first. But how are we going to define a first responder? Anyone who works at a hospital? Only doctors and nurses? Doctors in the community? Police? Firefighters? The military?

But then who gets it second? The elderly and immune compromised because they are vulnerable? The young and healthy because they transmit it? Essential workers because theyre essential? The well-connected? And who decides?

Its possible several vaccines will come on the market at around the same time in different countries, so there could be multiple answers to this question. But this is going to be a huge bioethical knot, colliding with geopolitics. Theres no guarantee that a U.S. company will get to market first and if the World Health Organization has a role in vaccine allocation, we can anticipate some obvious conflicts.

How effective is it? If we get a good but not great vaccine like the seasonal flu shots it will still reduce transmission, but it wont wipe out the virus completely. Well still have to deal with Covid-19, though on a more manageable scale.

Who pays for it? Even if insurers, governments or, in countries other than our own, national health systems pay for immunization, the costs can be passed on indirectly through higher taxes or higher premiums.

How much does it cost? Some of the companies say they dont plan to make a profit, but vaccines are expensive. In the U.S., Trump has largely shunned national approaches, leaving states to fend for themselves as they try to acquire lab testing supplies, protective gear, ventilators and other essential pandemic-fighting goods. A similarly fragmented approach could make vaccine acquisition more expensive and complicated.

How do we make enough of it? One of BARDAs roles is to help ramp up production, and theyve started addressing this. But to make 7 billion vaccines, enough for everyone around the globe, will require commitment, creativity and cooperation that the world hasnt been very good at of late.

How fast will poor countries get access? Good question.

Will the anti-vaxxers take it? Well see. Best guess is that some will, and some wont, because not everybody who opposes vaccines does so for the same reasons or with the same intensity. Some people who dont want their child to get a measles shot may weigh the costs and the benefits differently for a coronavirus vaccine. Amid rising fears of bioterrorism after 9/11, a poll found deep but not overwhelming support for a smallpox vaccination campaign. But that was a hypothetical threat. This one is all too real.

A SMALL BREAKTHROUGH More than three decades ago, researchers made their first big breakthrough against HIV, when they showed that the drug AZT could slow the progression of the virus. Its a moment that Anthony Fauci compared to todays results about the drug remdesivir, which a clinical trial showed could help Covid patients recover more quickly.

Faucis reference to AZT was a bit like a secret code, Sarah Owermohle tells us. He was suggesting that the remdesivir results were a breakthrough, but a modest one. AZT is the shorthand for azidothymidine, a drug that won FDA approval in March 1987, when HIV patients were desperate for any treatment even one with rough side effects that was dogged by questions about whether it actually extended life. It took another decade before the development of drugs that turned HIV from a death sentence into a chronic condition.

HIV and Covid-19 are complex, but distinctly different, viruses, and drug development times are a lot faster now than they were in the 1980s and 90s. But Faucis implication was clear: Remdesivir could be a good first step in fighting Covid, but probably isnt a miracle drug.

A SICK ECONOMY The U.S. economy shrank at a 4.8 percent annual rate last quarter as the pandemic shut down much of the country. A huge percentage of the decline came from the health care industry, with a halt in elective procedures harming profits.

CLAIMS DENIED As businesses in Georgia, Texas and other states throw open their doors, many employees are scared that their employers arent taking proper health precautions. Yet if they refuse offers to return to their jobs theyll be ineligible for unemployment, reporter Megan Cassella tells us.

Trump has declared meatpacking plants essential businesses even as they spawn outbreaks across the country. Frontline health workers are having trouble getting masks, gloves, gowns and other protection equipment, so what hope do nail salons and restaurants have of getting the gear they need?

But for now, Covid fears arent a valid reason not to go back to work.

Some states are trying to take steps so that workers who feel unsafe arent forced to choose a paycheck over their health. Colorado and New York are looking at how to give workers more flexibility. In Georgia, the state labor agency is encouraging employers to negotiate back-to-work plans with employees so that if a business partially reopens, workers who feel unsafe can continue to collect unemployment. In Texas, advocates are asking the workforce commission to add voluntarily leaving work due to COVID-19 as a valid reason to claim assistance.

But other states, like South Carolina and Tennessee, are telling workers they will lose unemployment aid the same week they turn down an offer.

Even in boom times, states reject a high share of unemployment claims. Well probably learn Thursday that another 3.5 million people filed for unemployment assistance last week. Thats on top of the 26 million whove already lost their jobs in the past five weeks.

Our question for readers this week: Seeing any interesting, fun or meaningful signs related to the coronavirus? Snap a photo sometime this week and send it to Renu at [emailprotected], and well share the best ones on Friday.

GRAND OLD PACHYDERM Matt Wuerker dives into an old question on partisan symbols in the latest edition of Punchlines: Why is the elephant the symbol of the Republican Party?

MASS HYSTERIA Italian politicians clash with the Catholic clergy at their own peril, and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has risked doing just that by keeping churches closed because of coronavirus. The prime minister's decision to extend the ban on all religious ceremonies until further notice, except for funerals, has infuriated religious officials. When the lockdown started, most priests quietly accepted the need to suspend services and found alternative ways to connect with their flocks, such as holding ceremonies by video or taking confession by the roadside. But now that other places are gradually reopening, the clergy don't see why they should be last on the list.

82,000

The number of job losses forecast in the bus industry, according to a report released last week by the American Bus Association. The industry could see losses of up to $14 billion. Many of the 3,000 private bus companies in the U.S. are small, serving a range of uses from taking kids to school, sporting events and field trips, ferrying seniors on weekend getaways and connecting small towns with major destinations. (h/t transportation reporter Tanya Snyder)

Portuguese army chief of staff Gen. Jos Nunes da Fonseca attends a briefing of school workers on disinfection procedures. | Armando Franca/AP Photo

DEEP FRIED STATE Belgium, the North Sea homeland of moules frites and mayonnaise, is the world's biggest exporter of frozen fries, but it has been hammered by the pandemics trade slowdown. The Belgian potato industry has warned that more than 750,000 tons of potatoes could be thrown away more than 40 percent of the harvest. And though Belgium's potato industry has urged patriots to take a high-calorie hit for the team by heading down to their local friteries twice a week to help reduce the spud surplus, it's increasingly clear that 11 million Belgians won't be able to handle the deep-fried mission alone. With restaurants and bars closed, and large summer events canceled, fries wont be as ubiquitous as they often are this summer. "Our entire sector is facing a big crisis. We don't just invite all Belgians to eat more fries, but the entire world," said Ward Claerbout from Agristo, a potato processing company in the west of Belgium.

Correction: Tuesdays edition of POLITICO Nightly incorrectly stated which tracks Iowa will open without spectators. The state will reopen certain race tracks without spectators but not horse and dog tracks. We regret the error.

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Covid's war on women - Politico

A pregnant Native American woman incarcerated in a federal prison in Texas was diagnosed with coronavirus and died in federal custody on Tuesday, officials said.

Andrea Circle Bear, 30, had been sentenced to more than two years in prison on a drug charge this January. She delivered her baby by caesarean section while on a ventilator in a Texas hospital on 1 April, and died there on 28 April.

Circle Bears child survived, but officials declined to provide any additional information on the babys condition or where the child is now, out of respect for the family and for privacy reasons, a Bureau of Prisons spokesman said.

The 30-year-old woman had a pre-existing medical condition that made her more at risk for a severe case of coronavirus, according to federal officials, who did not specify what the condition was.

Andrea should never have been in jail in the first place. Period, the Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Pressley said Wednesday during a discussion hosted by The Appeal, a criminal justice news site.

That she was there at all is cruel and negligent, Pressley said, calling Circle Bear one of many people trapped inside of prison systems because of systemic inequities and a failed war on drugs.

Circle Bear had admitted to selling 5.5 grams of methamphetamine to a confidential informant in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, over two different days in April 2018, according to court documents. She pled guilty to the charge of maintaining a drug-involved premises.

This January, Circle Bear, who was already five months pregnant, according to court documents, was sentenced to 26 months in federal prison by Judge Roberto A Lange.

Her sentencing documents note that Circle Bear had a history of substance abuse and recommended her as a candidate for a prison substance abuse treatment program. The documents also recommended that she be placed in a prison medical facility, given that she was pregnant, and due to deliver her child in early May.

The Department of Justice touted Circle Bears sentencing in a January press release. Dont let yourself or your property get mixed up in the world of illegal drugs. It ends badly, the US attorney Ron Parsons said in a statement.

Circle Bear is the 29th federal inmate to die in the Bureau of Prisons custody since late March. As of Tuesday, more than 1,700 federal inmates have tested positive for Covid-19. About 400 of those inmates have recovered.

On 20 March, Circle Bear had been transferred from a local jail in South Dakota, to FMC Carswell, a federal prison medical facility in Fort Worth, Texas, officials said.

The prison medical facility was more than 1,000 miles away from Circle Bears home of Eagle Butte, South Dakota, which is part of the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian reservation.

As a new inmate in the federal prison system, Circle Bear was quarantined as part of the Bureau of Prisons plan to slow the spread of the coronavirus, according to a press release from the bureau.

Eight days after she arrived, she was taken to a local hospital for potential concerns regarding her pregnancy, but was discharged from the hospital the same day and brought back to the prison, officials said. Three days later, prison medical staff members decided she should be brought back to the hospital after she developed a fever, dry cough and other symptoms, according to the Bureau of Prisons.

Circle Bear was put on a ventilator the same day she arrived at the hospital and her baby was born the next day, officials said. She tested positive for Covid-19 days later.

Federal and state prison records listed Circle Bears race as Native American. A spokesperson for the Cheyenne River Sioux tribal government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

An attorney who represented Circle Bear also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Circle Bears pregnancy made her high risk for the virus, but she would not be considered priority for release under the Bureau of Prisons and justice department guidelines on releasing prisoners to home confinement to help stop the spread. She was already on a ventilator when an expanded home confinement memo was handed down by the justice department in early April.

William Barr, the US attorney general, ordered the increased use of home confinement and the expedited release of eligible inmates by the Bureau of Prisons, with priority for those at low- or medium-security prisons, starting with virus hot spots. Under the Bureau of Prisons guidelines, the agency is prioritizing the release of those who have served half of their sentence or inmates who have 18 months or less left and who served at least 25% of their time.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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US inmate with coronavirus dies weeks after giving birth on a ventilator - The Guardian

After weeks of downplaying the threat posed by COVID-19 as it spread across the world and into the United States, President Donald Trump was finally taking it seriously on March 18.

"I view it as, in a sense, as a wartime president," he told reporters in the White House's briefing room that day. "I mean, that's what we're fighting," he said, before invoking a now-oft-repeated metaphor about the virus as "an invisible enemy."

Framing the pandemic as a war serves mostly as a way for the presidentand the government more generallyto sweep aside skepticism and dodge difficult questions about handling the crisis. Should we think twice before imposing export restrictions that will weaken global resilience to the virus? No time, this is a war! Should the government be able to order workers to stay home, then order them back to work against their will? Generally no, but this is war! Can we protect privacy while building a massive surveillance apparatus to track the spread of the disease? That might be nice, but this is war!

Some of that might make sense during an actual waryou don't want your domestic manufacturers selling goods to your enemies, for onebut it misses the point in our current crisis. There is no us-versus-them happening here. A virus cannot be cowed. It doesn't want our land or to change our regime, and it cannot be forced to surrender by throwing bodies at it.

As Daniel Larison noted in an excellent piece for The American Conservative earlier this month, "declaring war on abstractions and inanimate objects has become a bad habit" for the American government.

Indeed, America has spent 20 years fighting an amorphous "war on terror" that's outlived all of our initial enemies, consumed trillions of taxpayer dollars, and actually created new enemies by destabilizing the Middle East and North Africa. The federal government's "wars" on poverty and drugs have been equally unsuccessful and now serve mostly as federal jobs programs for bureaucrats and cops.

Less than three months after the first American died of COVID-19, and six weeks after Trump declared himself a wartime president, the disease has now claimed more than 58,318 American livesthe number that perished in the Vietnam War. Passing that symbolic threshold provides a useful way to comprehend the severity of the disease, but it doesn't make the war analogy useful.

Writing at The Bulwark, Jonathan Last notes that both the Vietnam War and the COVID-19 pandemic were made worse by incompetent government officials who lied to the American people. That's a worthwhile observation. Both crises undermined Americans' trust in institutions and presidents, and both overlapped and amplified existing cultural faultlines.

But the metaphor's usefulness ends there. For starters, Vietnam killed mostly young Americans, while COVID-19 is mostly killing the olda distinction that might seem callous, but one that nevertheless changes how the crisis effects the national psyche. In many other senses, the war metaphor actually primes Americans to expect more bad government. Unlike an actual war, we shouldn't be calling for the government to do whatever it takes to keep us safe. Not only can it not actually do that, but its record of trying to is also rather bad.

"Comparing the pandemic to war is also somewhat demoralizing when we reflect on our government's record of waging war over the last half-century. There are scarcely any true successes in that record that we can point to that would give us confidence that the government can 'win' now," Larison writes. "Unfortunately, the only things that the government's response has in common with previous war efforts is that the U.S. was badly unprepared for what came next and the president had an unrealistic expectation of how quickly the problem would be taken care of."

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No, COVID-19 Isn't Like the Vietnam War. It Isn't Like Any War. - Reason

Having been a war correspondent much of my life, I cant shake the feeling that the war against the coronavirus is a lot like the real thing.

Normally, I would avoid using a war metaphor for a medical disaster, if only because it has been so loosely applied by so many politicians doomed to failure: Consider Lyndon Johnsons war on poverty, Nixons war on cancer and his war on drugs, which Ronald Reagan escalated, making it an unending war to this day.

But the coronavirus war is something new, if only in the terrible toll it has taken in lives and the way it has altered the lives of the rest of us.

Like so many others in New York, to which I retreated months ago for surgery and a long recuperation, I now suddenly find myself in quarantine to be sure I dont acquire the coronavirus. Not since the siege of Sarajevo three decades ago have I been forcibly cooped up in the same building for weeks, afraid to step outside for fear of some life-changing or life-ending encounter.

And I live with the same sense that my personal liberty, freedom of movement and right to life have been stripped from me.

Having covered most of the major wars since Cambodia in 1979, I do feel as if Im in a war, or at least in a war zone. In Sarajevo, if you stepped out the door, Serbian snipers would put a bullet in you, always aiming for the head. And so you just stared at the door and yearned to go through it, but didnt dare.

The current battle against a deadly virus feels just as dangerous, but without sharpshooters. The homeless panhandler who spat in my direction during my one brief foray outdoors (to a mailbox) wasnt nearly as good a shot as a Serbian sniper, thank God.

Now we all worry about stepping outside and getting coughed upon by the wrong person. One of the most horrifying pictures to come out of the pandemic so far has been of a packed subway car in the London Underground, with everyone cheek to jowl and no one wearing a mask. You could just imagine the virus jumping between people.

Then there is a comparison of leadership. A well-known adage says that even the best of plans in war does not survive the first bullet fired. Now two unprepared national leaders who have never themselves gone to war, President Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, have put their efforts to control the pandemic at least verbally on a par with the tactics of generals, as if they had comparable knowledge of combat.

Indeed, Mr. Johnson described himself as leading a wartime government even before he became a casualty of Covid-19. Now the prime minister can even be rated a veteran, mercifully released from hospital treatment to complete his recovery, and his pregnant fiance, Carrie Symonds, might be classed as collateral damage that horrible 20th-century term, having apparently contracted the disease from her wartime leader. President Trump, more clumsily, has appropriated for himself the title of wartime leader. He even trotted out the much derided Vietnam War trope that he could see light at the end of the tunnel an official lie repeated over and over again back in the 1960s to excuse repeated military failure. Evidently, Mr. Trump was unfamiliar with what the doubters said then: that any light in that tunnel was probably the headlight of an oncoming train.

More deserving of respect for their knowledge and courageous experience are the genuine heroes on the front lines in the intensive-care units and the Spaniards and French people, God bless them, who inspired many New Yorkers to publicly applaud their medical personnel daily. Unfortunately, for every self-sacrificing front-line nurse or emergency room doctor, there are also legions of government officials squabbling in an unseemly display of another truism that war brings out the best in men and women, and the worst in their governments and leaders.

See, for example, the rhetoric of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Trump. They have chillingly described their efforts as a war against an invisible enemy. So what else is new to any soldier? In war, you fight an invisible enemy whether its a guerrilla in the mountain or the sniper in his hide or a pilot at 10,000 feet, since the whole point of the exercise is to not be seen by your enemies so that you can kill them but they cant kill you. In the war against the coronavirus, this rings particularly true and will do so until we have a vaccine.

Does that make this medical war better or worse than a traditional shooting war? About the same. In both, the norms of civilized conduct among people break down and rights quickly go out the window and everyone goes along with that. On the scale of American casualties the coronavirus war is right up there with all of our recent shooting wars. Johns Hopkins has the American death toll at around 45,000 so far, which is not much less than the 20-year tally of Americans who gave their lives in Vietnam and whose names are etched in the Vietnam Memorial Wall: 58,318.

Simon Tisdall, a columnist for The Guardian, pointed out a trenchant passage from the French philosopher Albert Camuss novel The Plague: There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared. When war breaks out, people say: It wont last long, its too stupid. And war is certainly too stupid, but that doesnt prevent it from lasting. Stupidity always carries doggedly on.

Sadly, so do plagues.

In Britain, the National Health Service has called for an army of volunteers, especially medical personnel, invoking patriotic propaganda campaigns from the World War II era. Your NHS needs you! the posters read. And as in World War II, there are great hopes that American industrial will again carry the day, this time by churning out tens of thousands of ventilators, millions of face masks, perhaps even billions of quick coronavirus tests and ultimately vaccines.

So far, only bits of that have come to pass, amid complaints that front line medical personnel were having to wash their face masks by hand and use plastic trash bags for hospital gowns. When youre at war, you arm troops before they come under fire, Chris Cuomo, a CNN anchor who contracted Covid-19 and is the brother of New York States governor, Andrew Cuomo, lamented on the air.

In fact, there have been plenty of shooting wars in which soldiers complained of a lack of P.P.E. personal protective equipment a military acronym that the medical profession has now picked up.

In addition, we have seen things that would have been unthinkable only a year ago, such as government measures that have millions of people, most of them poor and out of work, effectively incarcerated in their homes. Such arbitrary uses of state power also feel creepily familiar from other wars, however justified they are in the efforts to stop the virus. If they work, some lives may be saved, but many more will be ruined.

Still, while some impatient voices have called for some of those restrictions to be lifted, most individuals are going along with them. That is another common feature of wars an entire society sometimes joins in supporting its government no matter how repressive its measures. Nazi Germany was the most extreme example, of course, but the populations of Serbia during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s and Russia in recent years also slavishly accepted the aggressive actions of their leaders no matter how extreme they were. The peer pressure during wartime is just so powerful that very few people can stand up to it. Its the rare citizen who speaks out against the received wisdom of the bellicose herd.

So too with the current war. There has been little challenge to an extraordinary interference by the government in its citizens lives: putting perhaps up to half of the population out of work without any right of appeal, and dubious compensation in the form of a handout check signed by President Trump in a brazen vote-buying ploy.

War is indeed stupid, and the warlike aspects of the campaign against the coronavirus are no exception. Since Mr. Trump declared war on his invisible enemy, it has only gotten worse, and weve become the country with the most cases. Yet Mr. Trump says were going to win this war with this invisible enemy when we still dont even really know all the ways in which this enemy gets from one victim to another.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Jake Nordland in Brighton, England.

Rod Nordland is The Timess bureau chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, an international correspondent at large, and has worked as a journalist in more than 150 countries during 40 years overseas.

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Is the Light at the End of This Tunnel the Beam of an Oncoming Train? - The New York Times

On the night of March 2, 2002, a team of U.S. Navy SEALs flew onto a mountaintop along the Shahikot Valley in eastern Afghanistan. They were an advance force for a large American contingent targeting Taliban leader Saifur Rahman Mansoor and his fighters occupying fortifications along the valley.

The planned assault on Mansoor was part of the Pentagons evolving High Value Target strategy, which assumes that armies, insurgencies and criminal networks depend on a small number of key leaders for their existence and that killing these leaders will collapse an organization.

The High Value Target concept is the product of and justification for a sprawling yet secretive complex of armed drones, CIA operatives, National Security Agency eavesdroppers and military Special Operations Forces that grew out of the twin crises of the War on Drugs and War on Terror and which today costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars annually while making America less safe.

And its the subject of an important book. Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins, by Harpers journalist Andrew Cockburn, should be required reading alongside Robert Greniers CIA memoir 88 Days to Kandahar.

As Cockburns captivating, terrifying book explains, the SEALs in Shahikot were assassins, following orders to preemptively kill a man that U.S. policymakers had decided might somehow eventually pose a threat to the United States.

It was a faulty assumption. Mansoor was actually trying to make peace with the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul when the Pentagon and CIA targeted him. But then, High Value Target operations often proceed from bad intelligence, as Cockburn repeatedly illustrates in Kill Chain.

And thats in part because targeted killing relies heavily on drones those ostensibly precise, remote, robotic spies and killers that, in fact, are manpower-intensive and mechanically unreliable and whose sensors are sometimes so imprecise that their operators cannot readily distinguish innocent civilians from insurgents and terrorists.

Indeed, Kill Chain opens with a detailed recounting of a 2011 incident in Afghanistan in which a U.S. Air Force drone crew, in its eagerness to strike insurgents, accidentally killed 23 civilians including two young boys. Every murder of a civilian and every clumsy, pointless targeted killing fuels the fire of resistance that guarantees the United States will always be at war.

America isnt supposed to assassinate people Pres. Ronald Reagan had banned the practice. But after the 9/11 attacks, Washington started doing a lot of things it isnt supposed to do. Assassination targeted killing, in government parlance was already standard practice in Americas disastrous campaign against Latin American drug kingpins when it also began driving post-9/11 counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies.

But as Cockburn spells out, assassinating enemy leaders usually backfires even when the targets are legitimately bad dudes. If it had been paying attention, the U.S. government would have noticed that targeting drug kingpins in the 1990s actually increased narcotics supply by making room for younger, crueler drug lords and more of them. The same principle applies to terrorists and insurgents.

Still, drones have made assassination easier and easier for the government to defend. Question a government official about some robotic strike, as Cockburn did several times, and the official might show you a blurry drone video that proves the killing was legal and necessary.

But drones cant see very well. Shoddy robot intel was one reason that, on that Afghan night 13 years ago, the U.S. assassins became the targets. Hundreds of Taliban fighters far more than the Americans had expected opened fire on the SEALs and a follow-on force of Army Rangers.

The hills blocked long-range radios and senior commanders all over the globe issued competing, fragmentary orders. From such a great distance, no one could coordinate the warplanes orbiting over the valley.

The SEALs and Rangers survived Shahikot well, most of them did, anyway thanks in part to timely intervention by a pair of Air Force pilots in low- and slow-flying A-10 Warthog attack jets. The flyboys in their ugly warplanes coordinated the air support that helped save the men on the ground.

A-10 flyer Capt. Scott Campbell and his wingman didnt depend on some drone operator thousands of miles away to describe the world and the enemy to them. They became a two-man air traffic control center, relaying frantic calls for help from the ground to the circling planes while warning bombers off strikes that might hit friendly positions, Cockburns writes.

Staring out the canopy of their heavily-armored planes, the pilots had their own fingertip feel of the battlefield.

And in so doing, Campbell and his wingman embodied an older, more moral and far more effective mode of warfare one that Cockburn casts as the opposite of the High Value Target strategy with its bad assumptions, poor intel and worse results.

Its worth noting that today the Air Force is desperately trying to retire many of its roughly 300 A-10s over Congresss repeated objections. But the drones and SEALs are going strong. And nobody dares touch the CIAs funding.

Time was, America gathered intelligence firsthand without depending overmuch on expensive technology that rarely works. Time was, America sent highly-trained warriors into battle to confront, and defeat, our enemies only after looking them in the eye, proverbially speaking.

Time was, America didnt kill people with the push of a button merely because some flimsy theory proposes that a few murders followed by a few more, and a few more after that, ad infinitum -- can somehow negate ideology, rewrite human nature and eliminate uncertainty from the world.

Cockburn mourns that times passing and expertly describes the era weve made, the one were stuck with until we change our ways. The era of high-tech, self-defeating assassins.

David Axe is defense editor at The National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad.

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Drone Killings Don't Work, According to This Book - The National Interest

Photo: The Canadian Press

Many of us are shaking our heads at images of Americans protesting in the streets to open up the country in the middle of a pandemic.

For people who lovetheir freedom so much, its surprising Americans havent pushed for the right to grow and smoke pot without getting thrown in jail. In fact, keeping cannabis on the wrong side of the law is to the countrys fiscal detriment.

Legalizing cannabis across the U.S. would be a major financial boon for the country. Analysts from Cowen & Co. estimate the U.S. cannabis market is worth about $56 billion and about 90% of sales are going untaxed in the illegal market.

For those states lucky enough to have legal markets, retail stores are in a major slump. After seeing strong sales at the start of the shutdown similar to Canada where consumers stocked up at the start of isolation stores are now struggling without tourists flashing their debit and credit cards.

Themajor disconnect between the legal states and a federal government that still considers the whole industry as illegal means legal cannabis companies, declared in some areas as an essential service in the pandemic, cant access any federal aid.

Cannabis sales in Colorado have reportedly tumbled more than 20 per cent compared to a year ago, and in Nevada theyve dropped about 15 per cent. Analysts expect sales to get even worse before they get better, especially with U.S. unemployment claims hitting about 26.5 million.

It seems counterintuitive, but COVID-19 may end up being a catalyst for federal legalization.

The chairman of Curaleaf, a major U.S. cannabis company that has entered intoa deal to merge with Canadas Canopy Growthif and when cannabis legalizes federally in the U.S., said there happens to be a precedent-setting event.

Boris Jordantold CNBCthat right after the Great Depression, the U.S. government put a priority on tax revenue generation.

They lifted prohibition on alcohol and therefore started to tax it and it became a major revenue generator for both the federal and the local governments around the country, he said.

Jordan said post-COVID-19, governments will again be looking for ways to generate revenue. And cannabis is a significant revenue generator that is largely untapped in the U.S.

There is of course a major barrier to federal legalization across the border politicians.

Still, if theres one thing that can make a staunch politician more pliable its an election year. With the U.S. set to vote on Nov. 3, cannabis is likely to be a key issue.

There have been rumblings that President Donald Trump is considering making federal legalization one of his pet election issues.

On the other side of the spectrum, Democrats have selected one of theirleast cannabis friendly candidatesas the presumptive nominee: former vice president Joe Biden.

Hes spent much of his political career as a general in the war on drugs, insisting that cannabis is a gateway drug. In 2010, hetoldABC News it would be a mistake to legalize.

Now with an election looming and Bernie Sanders having a large chunk of support within the party,Biden has softened his stance.While he continues to oppose legalization, Biden said he does support more modest reforms such as decriminalizing possession, expunging past records, allowing medical cannabis and letting states set their own laws without federal interference.

What is clear right now is that laws across the U.S. are a hazy unfair patchwork in some states, people are incarcerated for selling weed, and in others, people are getting rich off it.

For it to truly be the land of the free, that has to change.

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Weed in the USA - By the ounce - Castanet.net

The mind tends to wander when the body shelters in place. Lately, mine has been returning to Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose, a postmodern murder mystery set in a 14th-century Benedictine monastery. The main detective, William of Baskerville, tries desperately to connect wildly disparate dots in order to find some pattern, some overarching meaning, among widespread destruction and death. In the end, he fails. No coherent pattern emerges, only coincidence and confusion alongside a few simple acts of kindness.

How much meaning can and should be found in a pandemic that has strewn indiscriminate fear and loss across the globe? Or better, what kind of meaning should people be looking for? According to the medical doctor and ethicist Lydia Dugdal, our country currently lacks a common existential narrative, a shared story that can illuminate the meaning of widespread suffering and death. I think shes right, with one exceptionthe meaning we find in war.

President Trump has declared COVID-19 the war of our time and decreed himself a wartime president. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders beat him by a number of days, as each compared confronting this virus to the waging of a war. French president Emmanuel Macron was one of the first and most direct. We are at war, he repeatedly declared when ordering his citizens to stay in their homes.

War language is the language of power. After early forays into glib optimism and empty assurances, politicians are now invoking war to exhibit clear resolve, to demonstrate that they are girding their loins to prepare for battle.

Yet much of the work ahead of us will be the far less unilateral work of patiently waiting out this infectious storm, learning to care for the infected and affected, and grieving the loss of loved ones. There is much that we will need to bear and survive rather than conquer and control. War language may be not only irrelevant to these efforts but also rather counterproductive.

I think of the week immediately following the attacks of 9/11. There was widespread fear and confusion, but there were also countless makeshift memorials, solidarity vigils, and instances of people spontaneously helping strangers. There was an affectionate, palpable patriotism of the most profound kind. It was as if the whole nation were sitting shivah, purposely persisting in our grief while we waited on one another.

That week was incredibly meaningful, whether we were watching images on television or roaming New York like a giant prayer labyrinth. But even if it was pregnant with meaning, none of it meant any one thing. Because we couldnt situate 9/11 within a well-defined framework of understanding, we didnt know what it meant, which became part of the very enigma that we were so devotedly circling around.

And then we declared war. As journalist Chris Hedges puts it, war is a force that gives us meaning. Americans know war; we know how to make sense of things when we are at war. We honor the fallen, pray for soldiers, hang flags, and supplement the national anthem with America the Beautiful, color guards, and flyovers.

President Bushs declaration of war had the almost magical effect of transforming victims into heroes, our passive mourning into active resolution, and our collective dread before God-knows-what into a clear mission to rid the world of evil. There was some collateral damage; for example, most of the international community collected their things and quietly departed. But by and large, to be at war was much more understandable and reassuring than the meaning-soaked yet meaningless grief from which we were emerging.

For the record, I hope that we beat COVID-19, kicking the crap out of each small set of genes enclosed in fatty lipid molecules and armored with protein spikes. At the same time, Im concerned about the collateral damage to our collective character and individual dispositions that might result from using the language of war.

The language of war mostly carries out its mission in garnering collective resolve and justifying the moral righteousness of those engaged in battle. But sometimes it carries out other missions too.

Those who have engaged in warfare know that its easier to kill people if youve first dehumanized them. From Vietnam to the War on Drugs, weve seen this play out through the deliberate use of racial slurs. Trump has insisted on calling the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 the Chinese virus. If attacking a virus depends on its racialization and conquering an enemy requires dehumanization, its a short step to demonizing all Chinese people.

The language of war can also cause us to focus excessively on the future without attending to how were living in the present. Theologian Deanna Thompson was diagnosed with stage IV cancer more than a decade ago. In Glimpsing Resurrection, she writes about how those living with cancer are often cast in the role of warriors, enlisted to do battle with their cancer (whether they like that metaphor or not). She suggests setting aside the war language in order to ask what it would mean to negotiate life with a serious illness, to live well with loss.

Following Thompsons lead, we might ask: What will it mean for our country and world to live well with this pandemic? Will we be patient and kind? Will we be able to truthfully accept and faithfully bear this tragedy, even as we try to conquer it? How will we care for those who cannot be cureda question made painfully difficult by the six or more feet of space that separates the dying from their families? How well will we grieveprivately in our homes, locally in shifts of ten, and collectively as a human race?

Conquering the virus or going down fighting are not the only meaningful stories available to us as we try to make meaning in this pandemic. Christians have a number of scripts for living well with loss. Theyre there in the raw lamentations of Job and the Psalms, in Jesuss difficult concession to death culminating with his cry from the cross, in Ash Wednesdays acceptance of mortality and the self-examination that follows throughout Lent.

For its part, Chinese culture cultivates valley spirit, balancing an aggressive, masculine Yang with supple, feminine Yin. Indeed, according to Daoists, the most powerful action is spontaneous nonaction, or wu weithe way of water, which cuts through rock by yielding so masterfully to it.

In a journal that I have been keeping, I noted the beauty of the first day of spring. The sun came out late in the day, its light dispersing throughout the sky at twilight. It was that time of day when everything becomes more pronounced against the setting sunalmost surreal, as if we were cast in a colorized movie.

There may be more meaning against the horizon of this meaningless pandemic than any of us is able to take in.

A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title At war with a virus?

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Are we really at war with the coronavirus? - The Christian Century

IRVINE Welsh says he is "glad he took loads of drugs" and has "absolutely no regrets" as he insists the world does not have a substance problem.

The Trainspotting author, 61, insists he does not have any regrets over his use of narcotics in the past - and says it enhanced his writing and his career.

And he says drug use is always symptomatic of other problems in society - with susbtances simply used to fill gaps in people's lives.

Welsh gave his forthright opinions writing for newly created lads' mag GHQ - which aims to provide '"edgy" content.

He said: "There's always an antecedent for for any phenomenon in our society. It's no different with drugs and all the baggage it carries.

"When asked about this issue, I'm not really sure that there is a drug problem. Drugs tend to be symptomatic of something else. Every time you have a society in transition, there is an epidemic of some kind.

"Our society is in transition now, as capitalism declines from its industrial high and we move into a world where all the technological development is counterintuitive to profits and paid work. Thus there is a tremendous gap in what people can do to progress their lives. Whenever theres a gap, drugs will always be there to fill it.

"In some respects, we ourselves actually justify the very existence of drugs, which are part and parcel of our humanity. Human life is about work and play, about celebration and festival. This, in turn, equals intoxication, which equals drugs. So drugs are ubiquitous across all types of human society, from native cultures to post capitalist ones, and lionized in all religions.

"It's impossible to conceive of what a world without drugs would even look like - music, art, religion and politics probably wouldn't exist as we know them."

He added: "All I can say is that I'm glad I took loads of drugs, and I've absolutely no regrets personally about it at all. It probably gave me an edge as a writer, helping me expand my consciousness and cultural awareness.

"I had loads of great adventures. But I sailed very close to the wind, and ultimately, I'm also very glad that I knew when to stop. It's a young person's game, and best suited to a life when you have scant concept of your mortality. They simply don't work as well after that, and it all becomes diminishing returns.

"You get very tired and sick and it starts to become hard work, just like having a job. And I already have one.

"But a lot of people don't, so drugs are their job. But you dont want to be working all the time. So like most things in life, maybe it is all about moderation."

The Edinburgh scribbler does feel, though, that the "war on drugs" is necessary and helpful.

He acknowledged anti-drug rhetoric is essential in keeping communities intact, but does have some suggestions for a better approach.

He added: "Anyone thats being honest and who has any critical faculties, will see the widespread hypocrisy with mainstream society and its view on drug use. I think the only thing we need more than drugs is a war against drugs.

"Anti-drug hysteria is one of the strongest drugs around. If you could bottle it and sell it, you probably wouldn't need anything else.

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"Without 'wars' on drugs, terror, black people, cops etc, our communities would probably disintegrate rather than slowly tear themselves apart. All that seems to hold our states, and indeed our culture, together now is a sense of some external threat."

He added: "Something that is always discussed is the gateway and easy access drugs - alcohol and prescription drugs. These aren't just gateways to other drugs, but also potentially dangerous drugs in themselves.

"Most people who f**k themselves up with drugs never get past those legal and readily available ones, because they don't really need to do so.

"Something that really needs to be looked into is a more logical approach to the 'war on drugs'. I personally believe that if the effort and money invested in a more relaxed approach to the drug issue, you could really be onto something. I think you have to take the both the state and criminals out of the drug scene and just leave people alone.

"A lot of places have tried more 'liberal' regimes; Spain, Portugal, Uruguay, some US states, have all adopted different but successful experiments in drug legalisation/ decriminalisation.

"It'll happen across the world one day, as it's completely irrational to have a prohibitionist policy on drugs."

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Irvine Welsh glad he took loads of drugs as he insists society does not have a substance problem - The Scottish Sun

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently reprised his advice from the 2008 financial crisis, when he said never let a good crisis go to waste. Sadly, Donald Trump is the cynical embodiment of that code. Behind the national preoccupation with the pandemic, Trump has escalated his war on U.S. governance and our democracy with his politicization of the intelligence community; his campaign against the federal governments Inspector Generals; and the reversal of President Barack Obamas legacy in the field of environmental sanity. The Congress has been virtually and pathetically silent about these actions.

T.S. Eliots April is the cruelest month has come to life for the intelligence community. Weve witnessed the removal of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI); the inspector general (IG) for the entire intelligence community; and the acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). The office of the DNI currently has no official with confirmation from the U.S. Senate, a blatant circumscription of the congressional power of advice and consent. The DNI was removed, moreover, for allowing his deputy to brief the congressional intelligence committees on Russian interference in U.S. elections; the IG was removed for forwarding a whistleblower complaint from an analyst from the Central lntelligence Agency as the law required; and the director of NCTC, an intelligence professional with several decades of experience, was replaced by a Trump loyalist.

Ironically, several weeks after the firing of the DNI, the Senate intelligence committee chaired by Senator Richard Burr (R/NC) released a bipartisan report that confirmed Trumps Russia hoax was anything but. Indeed, it appears that Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin share the goal of subverting Americans belief in our democracy. The Senate committees report corroborated the assessment of the intelligence community, which the report termed coherent and well-constructed.

Nevertheless, Attorney General William Barr continues to malign the origins of the Russia investigation and the intelligence communitys assessment, appointing the leading federal prosecutor in Connecticut to conduct acriminal investigation(emphasis added) of the CIA, which is without precedent. Barr and the special prosecutor traveled to Europe to encourage the testimony of European intelligence professionals against their CIA counterparts, which could lead to less sharing of sensitive intelligence with the United States.

On the basis of my 24 years as a CIA intelligence analyst, I can testify to the important of intelligence sharing from foreign liaison. In certain categories of intelligence, particularly those areas that concern terrorism and proliferation of weaponry, it is extremely difficult to operate without foreign liaison and intelligence sharing. Barr mindlessly has put that secret exchange at risk for no good reason other than serving the presidents paranoia.

There is typically tension between the president and the CIA, but there has never been such a wholesale presidential attack on intelligence. President John F. Kennedy demanded the resignation of CIA director Allen Dulles for the failure and embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs; President Richard Nixon fired CIA director Richard Helms for failing to cooperate in the Watergate coverup and then installed James Schlesinger to politicize the intelligence on the Vietnam War; President Ronald Reagan appointed William Casey to politicize the intelligence on the Soviet Union in order to have an intelligence justification for unneeded increases in the defense budget; and President George W. Bush made Rep. Porter Goss the CIA director to politicize intelligence and used Vice President Dick Cheney to orchestrate the CIAs cherry picking of intelligence to make the spurious case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But Donald Trump has outdone all of them in pursuing personal loyalty from the entire intelligence community and in compromising the legitimate role of oversight of the intelligence community.

Trump has vilified intelligence officials and analysts who disagree with him as extremely passive and naive. Attorney General Barr has encouraged Trump to view the intelligence community of using its powers to surveil and abuse the Trump campaign. Before he was inaugurated, Trump compared intelligence professionals to German Nazis. And not long after he was inaugurated, Trump accepted President Putins word that Moscow played no role in meddling in the 2016 presidential election. He has denounced current reporting on continued Russian interference as disinformation.

Trumps attack on intelligence and the intelligence community included the censorship of the DNIs annual global threat assessment to the congress, which should have taken place in January. For the past ten years, the DNIs global threat assessment has highlighted the vulnerability of the United States to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability. Admiral Dennis Blair made this part of his assessment in 2009, General James Clapper did the same throughout the Obama administrations, and as recently as 2019 Senator Dan Coats made the same strategic warning. But, as Steven Aftergood pointed out in his newsletter for the Federation of American Scientists, the annual threat testimony to Congress was canceled, possibly to avoid conflict between intelligence testimony and White House messaging.

Trumps abrupt firing of one of the governments leading experts on vaccines, Rick Bright, the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, similarly points to the difficulty of telling truth to power. Bright was opposed to one of Trumps pet rocks, investing in malaria drugs as a treatment for Covid-19. At a press conference last week, Trump said that he had never heard of Bright, which is just as alarming as the firing.

As for Trumps own intelligence, he paraded his IQ in front of a national television audience last week when he incoherently suggested exposing Covid-19 patients to disinfectants or strong light: Suppose that we hit the body with tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light? Then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in one minute. Is there a way we can do something like that by infection inside, or almost a cleaning? It would be interesting to check that. The manufacturer for Lysol, a disinfectant spray and cleaning product, immediately issued a warning against Trumps medical bulletin.

In the final analysis, the only protection against politicization is not in the system or process of intelligence, but in the courage and integrity of intelligence analysts themselves. But analysts require independent leadership at the top, and Trumps appointment of weak CIA directors (Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel) points to no moral compass at the top of the intelligence ladder. Pompeo has moved on to become the worst secretary of state in U.S. history, while Haspels pathetic defense of her leading role in the CIAs torture and abuse program at her confirmation hearings makes her a poor candidate for telling truth to power. By maligning the entire intelligence community, Trump has not made Americans safer, and has compromised the possibility for a legitimate debate on intelligence actions abroad. The rebuilding process at the CIA and the other 16 intelligence agencies and departments will be difficult and prolonged.

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Trump Takes His War on Intelligence to a New Level - CounterPunch

If youre groping to understand the disorganization and ineptitude of Americas response to coronavirus, you might find it helpful to know theres a single word that captures the situation perfectly. That word is: normal.

The sad truth is that weve faced many crises in our history, and we almost always make a hash of them. We start with inertia, bestir ourselves to hubris, move on to bungling, and spice everything with venality. Situated far from the worlds troubles, we are invariably drugged by complacency and handicapped by federalism, the system that gives us so many levels of government to get in each others way.

Unpreparedness is a signal feature of almost every American crisis, from the Revolutionary War right up to our recent stunning lack of ventilators and masks.

In 1812, for example, Secretary of War William Eustis predicted that we needed only to send some officers into Canada and residents of the British territory would rally round our standard. In fact, American overconfidence, unreadiness and disorganization led to successive fiascoes culminating in the burning of the fledgling nations capital.

In the Civil War, a crisis if there ever was one, the Union cause was imperiled by timid generals, bad equipment, scarce supplies and rampant fraud. When World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, the United States had the worlds 18th largest army, behind even that of Portugal. In one notorious set of military training exercises, many U.S. soldiers were armed with broomsticks, yet 12 managed to get themselves killed and 200 injured despite the absence of any real enemy. The attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, came as a surprise.

The picture is just as bleak in civilian crises. John M. Barry, whose books include The Great Influenza about the 1918 pandemic, states flatly that, In the United States, national and local government and public health authorities badly mishandled the epidemic. The federal government, embarked on the crusade of the Great War, suppressed news of the outbreak as part of a draconian crackdown on dissent. Local officials participated in the deception, contributing to the growth of suspicion and breakdown of mutual aid. As the epidemic exploded, Barry tells us, officials almost daily assured the public that the worst was over.

A decade later Uncle Sam met the Great Depression with bewilderment and battled it for years with earnest ineffectuality. A bungling Federal Reserve raised interest rates when it should have lowered them and failed to backstop banks against devastating runs. FDR tried lots of things, but overall fiscal policy oscillated perversely and may have done little to shorten the nations ordeal.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, aside from a fleeting sense of unity, produced costly and inconclusive wars. And things have rarely turned out well when the government has declared war in some crisis that is not a military conflict, as in the war on drugs.

The good news is that, in our biggest crises, things usually come out right at the end, though not without a lot of unnecessary suffering and waste. With luck and leadership, we usually manage to mobilize our vast national resources and creativity to vanquish whatever has beset us.

Great crises, however mishandled initially, have also been the occasion for overdue changes. The Depression gave us Social Security, modern securities regulation and a wised-up Fed (itself the belated offspring of the Panic of 1907). The Second World War resulted in the Marshall Plan and helped propel us down the road to equality for black people, women and others. Our latest crisis may finally force us to universalize health care and find a way to rein in its costs. We might also agree that there are good reasons not to move so much manufacturing overseas. As Warren Buffett likes to say, it is never a good idea to bet against America.

Of course, in the direst crises of the past we were often blessed with great leaders including Washington, Lincoln and FDR. Donald Trump is something else again. But if we remain true to form, our fumbling will enable the virus to persist right up until Election Day and eventually outlast his presidency.

Daniel Akst, a former columnist and editor at the Los Angeles Times, is a writer in New Yorks Hudson Valley.

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Commentary: Yes, our coronavirus response has been a mess. But thats how the US always responds to crises - West Hawaii Today