newyorker--2020-09-29--Despite a National Outcry, Activists in Louisville Fight the Breonna Taylor Decision Alone

When Taylor was killed , in mid-March , many cities across the country were going into lockdown .
Her cause drew relatively little attention until after May 25th , when a police officer killed George Floyd in Minneapolis .
That same day , Memorial Day , a wreath-laying ceremony was held in Taylor ’ s honor outside the apartment where she died .
On May 28th , after the Courier Journal published a transcript of Taylor ’ s boyfriend ’ s frantic 911 call , and as Minneapolis inspired marches across the country , several hundred people in Louisville took @ @ @ @ @ @ @ firing and arrest of the officers responsible .
That night , police met them with tear gas and paintballs , and seven protesters were hit with gunfire by an assailant whose identity remains unknown .
The wreath-laying ceremony last May had been organized by Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory , New York activists who were among the co-founders of the Women ’ s March in 2017 , under the auspices of a social-justice advocacy organization they founded last year called Until Freedom .
Mallory , whose speech in Minneapolis about George Floyd went @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been recruited to advocate for Taylor by Ben Crump , the attorney from Florida who represents Taylor ’ s family and the families of many other unarmed Black people killed by the police .
By June , when Until Freedom held a rally in Frankfort , the state capital , Breonna Taylor ’ s name was being chanted alongside Floyd ’ s around the country , and appending “ arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor ” to otherwise banal statements on social media became a prevalent meme of the summer .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outside of Daniel Cameron ’ s house at which eighty-seven activists were arrested .
In August , Mallory and Sarsour relocated to live in Louisville , where they have organized food deliveries , voter-registration drives , and trainings in the Kingian principles of nonviolence .
They also bring their contemporary public-relations savvy and a cozy and unapologetic relationship with celebrities .
Their collaborators include Oprah Winfrey , who funded twenty-six billboards in Louisville calling for the arrest of the officers who killed Taylor , and who put Taylor ’ s image on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ magazine , the first time in the publication ’ s history that someone other than Oprah appeared there .
They helped recruit Cardi B , Alicia Keys , and Tracee Ellis Ross for a video speaking out on behalf of Taylor , and their organization ’ s donors include Roc Nation , the entertainment agency started by Jay-Z .
Sarsour told me that using famous people is “ one of the things we do really well.
” In a speech that accompanied his announcement about the grand jury , Daniel Cameron , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Party elevated to the national stage at the convention last summer , criticized the “ celebrities , influencers , and activists who , having never lived in Kentucky , will try to tell us how to feel.
” Given Cameron ’ s own evident national ambitions , and the ways in which the Trump campaign has twisted the Movement for Black Lives into a narrative about urban chaos , this seemed hypocritical .
Still , Until Freedom ’ s success at publicizing Taylor ’ s cause on the Internet has not shielded the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from physical and legal risk .
As anticipated , local protesters took to the streets immediately after Cameron ’ s announcement .
By the end of Wednesday , police had arrested more than a hundred of them , and two police officers had been shot .
A suspect , Larynzo Johnson , was taken into custody .
( He later pleaded not guilty , and is being held on a million-dollar bond . )
National politicians quickly published their opinions .
From Washington , where he is working to push through the confirmation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the election , the Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell issued a statement about Taylor ’ s “ tragic killing ” and condemned the “ lawlessness , riots , and violence ” —wording that managed to acknowledge that the killing was wrong while also avoiding calling for accountability .
Trump sent his “ regards ” to Taylor ’ s family , prayers to the police officers , and added a predictable “ LAW & ORDER !
!
” on Twitter at midnight .
Rather than calling for charges against the officers who killed her , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to chastise the activists .
McConnell ’ s Democratic opponent , Amy McGrath , quickly posted a statement condemning the shootings of the police officers in Louisville , calling it “ unacceptable.
” Joe Biden said , in his statement on the matter , “ I know people are frustrated and they have a right to peacefully protest , but violence is never acceptable.
” For all the national attention , the daily work of direct action was a decidedly grassroots affair maintained by a relatively small but consistent group of Louisville residents @ @ @ @ @ @ @ demonstrators refer to in flyers as “ injustice square , ” is the size of a city block , and is flanked by municipal buildings .
At its center is the memorial to Taylor , meticulously tended , with paintings , flowers , and Christmas lights that blink on and off in the evenings .
On the fringes are folding tables where volunteers register voters or distribute snacks .
One had a pop-up tent on which had been written , in marker , a frequent chant during the marches : “ Breeway or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last very long .
By the time of curfew , the protesters , who likely numbered fewer than two hundred people , had taken sanctuary in the parking lot and yard of the First Unitarian Church , which had also served as a safe space the previous night .
A clause in the curfew order made an exception for people returning to and from houses of worship , but there was also the symbolism of the thing .
An eerie two hours followed .
Within minutes of the marchers ’ arrival , members @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surrounded the church , including a line of officers with their batons out who stood in a line under the streetlights at the end of an alley .
Tear gas from somewhere down the street occasionally wafted over the group , setting off coughing and sneezing .
A drone with green lights hovered overhead , and the crisp white floodlight of a helicopter passing over cast revolving shadows of trees as it circled .
The protesters were mostly young and mostly Black .
More than one had guns .
I saw one with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ backpack , and several wearing shin guards .
Most of them , however , had shown up in T-shirts and face masks , and they now seemed very vulnerable .
The amount of force there to meet them looked disproportionate , as if law enforcement had planned their logistics according to the chaos evoked on Fox News instead of this small , local reality .
Oprah wasn ’ t here , nor any national political figures .
The deluge of Twitter posts about Taylor seemed very far away .
Two white people from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ collar and the other in monk ’ s robes , crossed a parking lot to try and get information .
Activists on their phones started sharing a piece of news .
“ They arrested Shameka and Attica , ” someone announced .
Shameka Parrish-Wright is a manager at the Louisville Bail Project .
Attica Scott , a state representative who was marching through her own district , is the only Black female legislator in the Kentucky General Assembly .
Both have been prominent organizers against police brutality in Louisville since Taylor ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ Breonna ’ s Law , ” that would ban so-called no-knock warrants statewide .
Police had arrested the two , along with Scott ’ s teen-aged daughter , as they attempted to cross the street to the church .
They were later charged with first-degree rioting , a felony ; the arrest statement claimed that they had attempted to set the Louisville Free Public Library on fire .
As Scott later pointed out , to the Courier Journal , the library is in the district she represents .
“ What I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ try to get funding for—you ’ re going to accuse me of trying to set fire to it ?
” she said .
“ That ’ s ridiculous.
” The police finally allowed the protesters to go home .
When I got back to my car , the militia members were still standing around the Shell station .
Their presence after curfew , and all of their weaponry , were not deemed a threat by law enforcement .
On Friday evening , shortly before curfew , Attica Scott , who had just been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a quiet and mostly unnoticed presence in gray leggings and a T-shirt at the back of a crowd of several hundred .
Earlier that day , the union that represents the employees of the Louisville Public Library had released a statement : “ We have seen no proof that the flare thrown into the library has done any major damage , nor that Representative Scott had anything to do with it , ” it read .
I asked her how she saw the arrest .
“ They set us up , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had taken them in the previous night .
“ It was clear they were trying to box us in , give us contradictory directives , just so they could arrest us.
” She spent the night in jail , she said , with a group of seventeen women , fourteen of whom were “ Black , indigenous , or Chicana , so that says something.
” She reiterated that she would never have attempted to burn down a library in Taylor ’ s name .
The march moved through a neighborhood of pubs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ underpass that was blocked by police officers .
The police threw crowd dispersants known as flashbangs , sending marchers running in disarray .
I saw a boy and his mother holding each other in tears , panicked by the sudden chaos in what had been an otherwise calm evening .
I saw organizers loading protesters with children into cars to get them away from a situation that seemed on the verge of turning volatile .
But , a few moments later , the march regrouped , now on the sidewalk , and continued @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The death of George Floyd , in context .
• The civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson examines the frustration and despair behind the protests .
• Who , David Remnick asks , is the true agitator behind the racial unrest ?
• A sociologist examines the so-called pillars of whiteness that prevent white Americans from confronting racism .
• The Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi on what it would mean to defund police departments , and what comes next .
• The quest to transform the United States can not be limited to @ @ @ @ @

Last Thursday evening, downtown Louisville looked deserted. The boarded up windows of hotels, theatres, and restaurants faced empty pedestrian malls, and the scent of new plywood hung in the air. Sand-colored Humvees blocked off intersections and police checkpoints kept cars from breaching the perimeter of the city center. The fortification had started earlier in the week, on September 21th, when the Louisville Metro Police Department declared a state of emergency in anticipation of an announcement about a grand-jury proceeding into the death of Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old Black emergency-room technician who was shot and killed by members of the Louisville Metro Police Department, during a raid on her apartment on March 13th. On Wednesday, Daniel Cameron, the Republican attorney general of Kentucky, announced that no charges would be filed against Myles Cosgrove and Jonathan Mattingly, two of the three officers responsible for Taylor’s death. The third officer, Brett Hankison, the only one of the three who has lost his job, was charged with a felony count of reckless endangerment for firing his gun without a line of sight.
When Taylor was killed, in mid-March, many cities across the country were going into lockdown. Her cause drew relatively little attention until after May 25th, when a police officer killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. That same day, Memorial Day, a wreath-laying ceremony was held in Taylor’s honor outside the apartment where she died. On May 28th, after the Courier Journal published a transcript of Taylor’s boyfriend’s frantic 911 call, and as Minneapolis inspired marches across the country, several hundred people in Louisville took to the streets to call for the firing and arrest of the officers responsible. That night, police met them with tear gas and paintballs, and seven protesters were hit with gunfire by an assailant whose identity remains unknown.
The wreath-laying ceremony last May had been organized by Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory, New York activists who were among the co-founders of the Women’s March in 2017, under the auspices of a social-justice advocacy organization they founded last year called Until Freedom. Mallory, whose speech in Minneapolis about George Floyd went viral a few days later, had been recruited to advocate for Taylor by Ben Crump, the attorney from Florida who represents Taylor’s family and the families of many other unarmed Black people killed by the police. By June, when Until Freedom held a rally in Frankfort, the state capital, Breonna Taylor’s name was being chanted alongside Floyd’s around the country, and appending “arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor” to otherwise banal statements on social media became a prevalent meme of the summer. In July, Until Freedom held a protest outside of Daniel Cameron’s house at which eighty-seven activists were arrested. In August, Mallory and Sarsour relocated to live in Louisville, where they have organized food deliveries, voter-registration drives, and trainings in the Kingian principles of nonviolence. They also bring their contemporary public-relations savvy and a cozy and unapologetic relationship with celebrities. Their collaborators include Oprah Winfrey, who funded twenty-six billboards in Louisville calling for the arrest of the officers who killed Taylor, and who put Taylor’s image on the cover of the August issue of O magazine, the first time in the publication’s history that someone other than Oprah appeared there. They helped recruit Cardi B, Alicia Keys, and Tracee Ellis Ross for a video speaking out on behalf of Taylor, and their organization’s donors include Roc Nation, the entertainment agency started by Jay-Z. Sarsour told me that using famous people is “one of the things we do really well.”
In a speech that accompanied his announcement about the grand jury, Daniel Cameron, a protégé of Mitch McConnell whom the Republican Party elevated to the national stage at the convention last summer, criticized the “celebrities, influencers, and activists who, having never lived in Kentucky, will try to tell us how to feel.” Given Cameron’s own evident national ambitions, and the ways in which the Trump campaign has twisted the Movement for Black Lives into a narrative about urban chaos, this seemed hypocritical. Still, Until Freedom’s success at publicizing Taylor’s cause on the Internet has not shielded the beleaguered activists on the ground in Louisville from physical and legal risk.
As anticipated, local protesters took to the streets immediately after Cameron’s announcement. By the end of Wednesday, police had arrested more than a hundred of them, and two police officers had been shot. A suspect, Larynzo Johnson, was taken into custody. (He later pleaded not guilty, and is being held on a million-dollar bond.) National politicians quickly published their opinions. From Washington, where he is working to push through the confirmation of a new Supreme Court Justice before the election, the Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell issued a statement about Taylor’s “tragic killing” and condemned the “lawlessness, riots, and violence”—wording that managed to acknowledge that the killing was wrong while also avoiding calling for accountability. Trump sent his “regards” to Taylor’s family, prayers to the police officers, and added a predictable “LAW & ORDER!!” on Twitter at midnight. Rather than calling for charges against the officers who killed her, the Democrats appeared a little too eager to chastise the activists. McConnell’s Democratic opponent, Amy McGrath, quickly posted a statement condemning the shootings of the police officers in Louisville, calling it “unacceptable.” Joe Biden said, in his statement on the matter, “I know people are frustrated and they have a right to peacefully protest, but violence is never acceptable.”
For all the national attention, the daily work of direct action was a decidedly grassroots affair maintained by a relatively small but consistent group of Louisville residents. Jefferson Square Park, which the demonstrators refer to in flyers as “injustice square,” is the size of a city block, and is flanked by municipal buildings. At its center is the memorial to Taylor, meticulously tended, with paintings, flowers, and Christmas lights that blink on and off in the evenings. On the fringes are folding tables where volunteers register voters or distribute snacks. One had a pop-up tent on which had been written, in marker, a frequent chant during the marches: “Breeway or the freeway.”
I arrived in downtown Louisville on Thursday night, as another march began. Street parking had been prohibited by police order, and I hastily parked my car in the lot of a Hampton Inn in order to catch up with a group of activists who had just walked past. I noticed only as I left the lot a group of armed militia members standing around their cars. More armed men wearing Kevlar vests, who, according to the Daily Beast, belonged to the far-right group the Oath Keepers, surrounded the perimeter of a Shell gas station across the street. It was shortly after eight o’clock in the evening. I caught up with the activists as their phones blared with an emergency alert announcing a nine o’clock curfew. They moved swiftly through the dark streets, monitored by helicopters above. We passed a modernist building, the Louisville Free Public Library, where I heard someone bludgeon a window. “Not the library!” someone yelled out.
The march did not last very long. By the time of curfew, the protesters, who likely numbered fewer than two hundred people, had taken sanctuary in the parking lot and yard of the First Unitarian Church, which had also served as a safe space the previous night. A clause in the curfew order made an exception for people returning to and from houses of worship, but there was also the symbolism of the thing.
An eerie two hours followed. Within minutes of the marchers’ arrival, members of law enforcement with armored vehicles had surrounded the church, including a line of officers with their batons out who stood in a line under the streetlights at the end of an alley. Tear gas from somewhere down the street occasionally wafted over the group, setting off coughing and sneezing. A drone with green lights hovered overhead, and the crisp white floodlight of a helicopter passing over cast revolving shadows of trees as it circled. The protesters were mostly young and mostly Black. More than one had guns. I saw one with an aluminum baseball bat tucked in her backpack, and several wearing shin guards. Most of them, however, had shown up in T-shirts and face masks, and they now seemed very vulnerable. The amount of force there to meet them looked disproportionate, as if law enforcement had planned their logistics according to the chaos evoked on Fox News instead of this small, local reality. Oprah wasn’t here, nor any national political figures. The deluge of Twitter posts about Taylor seemed very far away. Two white people from the church, one in a clerical collar and the other in monk’s robes, crossed a parking lot to try and get information.
Activists on their phones started sharing a piece of news. “They arrested Shameka and Attica,” someone announced. Shameka Parrish-Wright is a manager at the Louisville Bail Project. Attica Scott, a state representative who was marching through her own district, is the only Black female legislator in the Kentucky General Assembly. Both have been prominent organizers against police brutality in Louisville since Taylor’s death. Scott had introduced a bill, “Breonna’s Law,” that would ban so-called no-knock warrants statewide. Police had arrested the two, along with Scott’s teen-aged daughter, as they attempted to cross the street to the church. They were later charged with first-degree rioting, a felony; the arrest statement claimed that they had attempted to set the Louisville Free Public Library on fire. As Scott later pointed out, to the Courier Journal, the library is in the district she represents. “What I have done nothing but fight for and try to get funding for—you’re going to accuse me of trying to set fire to it?” she said. “That’s ridiculous.”
The police finally allowed the protesters to go home. When I got back to my car, the militia members were still standing around the Shell station. Their presence after curfew, and all of their weaponry, were not deemed a threat by law enforcement.
The marches, rallies, and press conferences continued on Friday. In the morning, in Jefferson Square Park, members of the national media gathered for an announcement from Taylor’s family and Ben Crump. Wearing a face mask with Taylor’s name on it, Crump called for the release of the transcripts of the grand-jury trial, which Cameron had not made public. (After a legal complaint filed by an anonymous member of the grand jury on Monday challenged this decision, he has since announced that he would release a recording of their deliberation.) The harshest criticism for Cameron, who is Black, came from Tamika Mallory: “We have no respect for you,” she said. “No respect for your black skin. Because all our skin folk ain’t our kin folk, and you do not belong to Black people at all.” The conference concluded with a ceremonial releasing of butterflies. Later, the University of Louisville men’s basketball team led a march from Cardinal Stadium. A group of faith leaders held a press conference at the First Unitarian Church to express their support.
On Friday evening, shortly before curfew, Attica Scott, who had just been released from jail, returned to march, a quiet and mostly unnoticed presence in gray leggings and a T-shirt at the back of a crowd of several hundred. Earlier that day, the union that represents the employees of the Louisville Public Library had released a statement: “We have seen no proof that the flare thrown into the library has done any major damage, nor that Representative Scott had anything to do with it,” it read. I asked her how she saw the arrest. “They set us up,” she said of the police officers who had taken them in the previous night. “It was clear they were trying to box us in, give us contradictory directives, just so they could arrest us.” She spent the night in jail, she said, with a group of seventeen women, fourteen of whom were “Black, indigenous, or Chicana, so that says something.” She reiterated that she would never have attempted to burn down a library in Taylor’s name.
The march moved through a neighborhood of pubs and restaurants, then reached a highway underpass that was blocked by police officers. The police threw crowd dispersants known as flashbangs, sending marchers running in disarray. I saw a boy and his mother holding each other in tears, panicked by the sudden chaos in what had been an otherwise calm evening. I saw organizers loading protesters with children into cars to get them away from a situation that seemed on the verge of turning volatile. But, a few moments later, the march regrouped, now on the sidewalk, and continued back to Jefferson Square Park.
Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests


newyorker--2020-09-29--Chinese Citizens Are Already Receiving a Coronavirus Vaccine

“ Chinese officials are thinking that Donald Trump might approve a U.S. vaccine before the election , ” Yiwu He , the chief innovation officer at the University of Hong Kong , who has many years of experience in vaccine development in China , told me recently .
“ So their goal is to have a vaccine approved before that.
” He expects that China National Biotec Group , or C.N.B.G.
, a Beijing-based pharmaceutical company that is the country ’ s largest vaccine manufacturer , will announce some level of approval for a coronavirus vaccine in October .
A @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , having neared the end of Phase III trials with two different versions of its vaccine , is currently filing application materials with China ’ s regulatory commission .
In normal times , approval could take between six months and a year , but people in the industry told me that the process will be accelerated because of pressures related to both the pandemic and politics .
( C.N.B.G .
did not respond to a request for comment . )
In the meantime , many Chinese citizens haven ’ t waited for full @ @ @ @ @ @ @ press has reported that hundreds of thousands have already been vaccinated by C.N.B.G.
, under an emergency-use approval granted by the government .
The volunteers include many government officials and pharmaceutical executives who received the two-stage vaccination .
“ I know a few government officials personally , and they told me that they took the vaccine , ” Yiwu He said .
“ It ’ s middle-level officials—vice-ministers , mayors , vice-mayors.
” He estimated that more than a hundred Communist Party cadres roughly at the level of juzhang , or director , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ executives at C.N.B.G .
and its parent company , Sinopharm , which is the largest pharmaceutical firm in China .
“ Every senior executive in Sinopharm and C.N.B.G .
has been vaccinated , ” He said , “ including the C.E.O .
of Sinopharm , the chairman of the board , every vice-president—everyone.
” For people in the United States and Europe , the idea of so many Chinese being vaccinated prior to full approval is shocking .
“ In the West , it would be considered anti-science , ” He told me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s viewed very positively.
” He described it as a way for officials and executives to show confidence , and he said that , having worked with C.N.B.G .
in the past , he has been offered the vaccine himself .
At the university , though He is currently coördinating with investors in the hopes of establishing a manufacturing plant for a different vaccine in Hong Kong , he said that he would take the C.N.B.G .
vaccine now if it were offered locally .
“ But I can ’ t travel to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ days , when I talk to people in the Chinese pharmaceutical and medical industries , I always ask , “ Have you been vaccinated ?
” Especially in Beijing and Shanghai , it ’ s not unusual for somebody in the field to have had access to a vaccine from either C.N.B.G .
or CanSino , another Chinese company that is also conducting Phase III trials .
Jiang Xilin , a Shanghai native currently studying genomic medicine and statistics at Oxford University , told me that he has arranged for a vaccination when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ school break .
The Beijing biotech investor said that he will probably wait another month before he takes his first dose .
He considers himself to be conservative , and he isn ’ t travelling much , so he doesn ’ t see any reason to rush .
But many of his friends and colleagues have already been vaccinated .
“ Some of these friends used to work at Sinopharm , and they ’ ve seen people they trust at the company vaccinate themselves , ” he said , explaining that such individuals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The investor didn ’ t find this inappropriate , because participation was voluntary .
He pointed out that Gu Fangzhou , the scientist who developed China ’ s first live polio vaccine , in 1960 , had administered it to his infant son before mass trials were carried out .
In the United States , Jonas Salk had done the same thing with his own polio vaccine .
At the University of Pittsburgh , Salk ’ s wife and three sons were voluntarily injected in 1953 , two years before the vaccine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
A thirty-four-year-old in Beijing told me that he was offered the C.N.B.G .
vaccine because his company engaged in business with Sinopharm .
This seems to be a uniquely Chinese addition to the Pittsburgh model—from what I can tell , there ’ s nothing on the historical record about Jonas Salk building guanxi dose by dose .
But , to the young man in Beijing , the offer was appealing for a couple of reasons .
“ I studied the results online from their Phase II trial , and they looked good @ @ @ @ @ @ @ phone interview .
“ And I wanted to help the country.
” He received his first dose in June and then another , twenty-eight days later , in July .
He experienced no reactions or side effects , and he said that the main warnings were to avoid spicy foods and alcohol on the evening of injection .
He signed a waiver agreeing not to speak publicly about the trial .
“ They told me that it should be effective for six months and maybe longer , ” he said .
“ They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lasts , but from the early reports it looks like it might be something that you take once a year.
” In China , such participants might contribute to useful data about side effects , but they won ’ t reveal much about the vaccine ’ s efficacy , given that the country has largely eliminated COVID-19 cases since the spring .
As a result , C.N.B.G .
had to go far from home in order to carry out a Phase III trial .
The company enrolled more than fifty thousand subjects in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and other countries in South America and the Middle East that are currently suffering outbreaks .
Earlier this month , Nawal al-Kaabi , the head of the U.A.E.
’ s COVID-19 Clinical Management Committee , said that , of thirty-one thousand volunteers who took the Chinese vaccine , none experienced serious side effects .
On September 14th , the U.A.E .
announced emergency approval of the vaccine for at-risk professions .
C.N.B.G .
is the first coronavirus-vaccine manufacturer to receive approval for use in a foreign country .
That ’ s something else @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a vaccine : this is not Russia .
While Russian efforts to fast-track a vaccine have been met with widespread skepticism , people in the field take Chinese technology and professionalism seriously .
After a series of vaccine-related scandals in the twenty-tens , China tightened regulations , and the standards for a Phase III trial are similar to those in the United States .
During the last decade , China joined the International Council for Harmonisation , a pharmaceutical-regulatory organization with strict requirements .
C.N.B.G .
is a state-owned company , and , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nearly eighty per cent of China ’ s vaccines ; it has received almost unlimited government support in its current project .
It has also benefitted from a history of international collaboration .
In the twenty-tens , the Gates Foundation chose C.N.B.G .
as a partner in its effort to eradicate polio around the world .
The foundation provided grants and technical assistance to help C.N.B.G .
develop a polio-vaccine production line that was capable of exporting at scale .
Yiwu He , who served as a deputy director at the Gates Foundation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ University of Hong Kong , told me that he personally escorted Bill Gates on a tour of C.N.B.G .
facilities—a detail that is certain to delight conspiracy theorists if the Chinese firm indeed beats the American election .
“ We made that investment because they promised to produce a hundred million doses of the polio vaccine annually for developing countries , including many in Africa , ” He told me .
“ We were really happy with it .
The company delivered the polio vaccine to developing countries and that really helped with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Now it is very , very close to getting eradicated.
” The scale of that polio project helped prepare C.N.B.G .
for its work on COVID-19 , and some of the new project ’ s global orientation is also similar : increasingly , China seems to be looking toward the developing world .
In China , there has never been an expectation that the country will produce a coronavirus vaccine for the West , or that anything discovered in the West will be made quickly available to the Chinese .
Back in May @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Shanghai , he explained that tensions between the U.S. and China had led to a stark sense of self-reliance .
“ If you talk to general health-care professionals in this country , they don ’ t believe that any vaccine developed in the U.S. will be used here , ” he said .
“ The first priority will be in the U.S. , and then they will prioritize U.S. allies , then Africa and other places .
China will be at the bottom of the list .
”

In the race to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus, one deadline has been defined with a precision that, if not scientific, has the clarity of an equation: the first Tuesday in November. Throughout the fall, Donald Trump has frequently intimated that a vaccine might be approved before the election. The President may turn out to be correct, although the product that’s most likely to beat November 3rd is called Xinxing Guanzhuang Bingdu Miehuo Yimiao (Vero Xibao).
“Chinese officials are thinking that Donald Trump might approve a U.S. vaccine before the election,” Yiwu He, the chief innovation officer at the University of Hong Kong, who has many years of experience in vaccine development in China, told me recently. “So their goal is to have a vaccine approved before that.” He expects that China National Biotec Group, or C.N.B.G., a Beijing-based pharmaceutical company that is the country’s largest vaccine manufacturer, will announce some level of approval for a coronavirus vaccine in October. A Beijing-based biotech investor told me that C.N.B.G., having neared the end of Phase III trials with two different versions of its vaccine, is currently filing application materials with China’s regulatory commission. In normal times, approval could take between six months and a year, but people in the industry told me that the process will be accelerated because of pressures related to both the pandemic and politics. (C.N.B.G. did not respond to a request for comment.)
In the meantime, many Chinese citizens haven’t waited for full approval before getting injected. The state press has reported that hundreds of thousands have already been vaccinated by C.N.B.G., under an emergency-use approval granted by the government. The volunteers include many government officials and pharmaceutical executives who received the two-stage vaccination. “I know a few government officials personally, and they told me that they took the vaccine,” Yiwu He said. “It’s middle-level officials—vice-ministers, mayors, vice-mayors.” He estimated that more than a hundred Communist Party cadres roughly at the level of juzhang, or director, have been vaccinated, along with many executives at C.N.B.G. and its parent company, Sinopharm, which is the largest pharmaceutical firm in China. “Every senior executive in Sinopharm and C.N.B.G. has been vaccinated,” He said, “including the C.E.O. of Sinopharm, the chairman of the board, every vice-president—everyone.”
For people in the United States and Europe, the idea of so many Chinese being vaccinated prior to full approval is shocking. “In the West, it would be considered anti-science,” He told me. “But in China it’s viewed very positively.” He described it as a way for officials and executives to show confidence, and he said that, having worked with C.N.B.G. in the past, he has been offered the vaccine himself. At the university, though He is currently coördinating with investors in the hopes of establishing a manufacturing plant for a different vaccine in Hong Kong, he said that he would take the C.N.B.G. vaccine now if it were offered locally. “But I can’t travel to China without a fourteen-day quarantine.”
These days, when I talk to people in the Chinese pharmaceutical and medical industries, I always ask, “Have you been vaccinated?” Especially in Beijing and Shanghai, it’s not unusual for somebody in the field to have had access to a vaccine from either C.N.B.G. or CanSino, another Chinese company that is also conducting Phase III trials. Jiang Xilin, a Shanghai native currently studying genomic medicine and statistics at Oxford University, told me that he has arranged for a vaccination when he returns to China during the winter school break. The Beijing biotech investor said that he will probably wait another month before he takes his first dose. He considers himself to be conservative, and he isn’t travelling much, so he doesn’t see any reason to rush. But many of his friends and colleagues have already been vaccinated. “Some of these friends used to work at Sinopharm, and they’ve seen people they trust at the company vaccinate themselves,” he said, explaining that such individuals would have early access to clinical results. The investor didn’t find this inappropriate, because participation was voluntary. He pointed out that Gu Fangzhou, the scientist who developed China’s first live polio vaccine, in 1960, had administered it to his infant son before mass trials were carried out. In the United States, Jonas Salk had done the same thing with his own polio vaccine. At the University of Pittsburgh, Salk’s wife and three sons were voluntarily injected in 1953, two years before the vaccine was declared to be safe and effective.
A thirty-four-year-old in Beijing told me that he was offered the C.N.B.G. vaccine because his company engaged in business with Sinopharm. This seems to be a uniquely Chinese addition to the Pittsburgh model—from what I can tell, there’s nothing on the historical record about Jonas Salk building guanxi dose by dose. But, to the young man in Beijing, the offer was appealing for a couple of reasons. “I studied the results online from their Phase II trial, and they looked good,” he said, in a phone interview. “And I wanted to help the country.” He received his first dose in June and then another, twenty-eight days later, in July. He experienced no reactions or side effects, and he said that the main warnings were to avoid spicy foods and alcohol on the evening of injection. He signed a waiver agreeing not to speak publicly about the trial. “They told me that it should be effective for six months and maybe longer,” he said. “They don’t know how long it lasts, but from the early reports it looks like it might be something that you take once a year.”
In China, such participants might contribute to useful data about side effects, but they won’t reveal much about the vaccine’s efficacy, given that the country has largely eliminated COVID-19 cases since the spring. As a result, C.N.B.G. had to go far from home in order to carry out a Phase III trial. The company enrolled more than fifty thousand subjects in the United Arab Emirates, Peru, and other countries in South America and the Middle East that are currently suffering outbreaks. Earlier this month, Nawal al-Kaabi, the head of the U.A.E.’s COVID-19 Clinical Management Committee, said that, of thirty-one thousand volunteers who took the Chinese vaccine, none experienced serious side effects. On September 14th, the U.A.E. announced emergency approval of the vaccine for at-risk professions. C.N.B.G. is the first coronavirus-vaccine manufacturer to receive approval for use in a foreign country.
That’s something else to understand about the Chinese push for a vaccine: this is not Russia. While Russian efforts to fast-track a vaccine have been met with widespread skepticism, people in the field take Chinese technology and professionalism seriously. After a series of vaccine-related scandals in the twenty-tens, China tightened regulations, and the standards for a Phase III trial are similar to those in the United States. During the last decade, China joined the International Council for Harmonisation, a pharmaceutical-regulatory organization with strict requirements. C.N.B.G. is a state-owned company, and, in recent years, it has produced nearly eighty per cent of China’s vaccines; it has received almost unlimited government support in its current project. It has also benefitted from a history of international collaboration. In the twenty-tens, the Gates Foundation chose C.N.B.G. as a partner in its effort to eradicate polio around the world. The foundation provided grants and technical assistance to help C.N.B.G. develop a polio-vaccine production line that was capable of exporting at scale. Yiwu He, who served as a deputy director at the Gates Foundation before taking his current position at the University of Hong Kong, told me that he personally escorted Bill Gates on a tour of C.N.B.G. facilities—a detail that is certain to delight conspiracy theorists if the Chinese firm indeed beats the American election.


newyorker--2020-09-29--Can Joe Biden Make the First Presidential Debate About More than Donald Trump?

Even by the outsized standards of the past five years , the political news over the weekend before the first Presidential debate had a totalizing quality .
Nothing defied its grip .
President Donald Trump announced his nominee for the Supreme Court , the deeply conservative Amy Coney Barrett , and said he thought it is “ certainly possible ” that the full Court would overturn Roe v. Wade .
He followed the pick by insisting that his rival Joe Biden , the seventy-seven-year-old former Vice-President , was taking drugs to sharpen his public performance , and demanding that both @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they take the stage , on Tuesday .
Brad Parscale , the six-foot-eight , Ferrari-driving Web-development professional who , until earlier this summer , had been working as Trump ’ s campaign manager , was taken into police custody in South Florida , after his wife fled their mansion and called 911 , saying that Parscale was armed and threatening to hurt himself .
On Sunday evening , the Times published perhaps the biggest investigative story of the Trump era , revealing that the President , by most estimates a billionaire , had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ten of the fifteen years before 2016 ; that the I.R.S .
is investigating the legitimacy of a $ 72.9-million tax refund he claimed in 2010 ; and that , in 2016 , as he was campaigning for the Presidency as a paragon of business success and a friend of the common man , he was paying precisely seven hundred and fifty dollars in taxes .
All this took place just a few days after Trump had refused to commit to transferring power should he lose the election .
Viewers tuning in to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , might have a faint feeling that they have been here before .
News of the “ Access Hollywood ” tape broke on October 7 , 2016 , just two days before the second Presidential debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton .
To deflect attention , Trump first claimed that Bill Clinton had “ said far worse to me on the golf course ” and then held a press conference with three women who had accused President Clinton of sexual misconduct .
The polls taken after the debate found that viewers thought Clinton @ @ @ @ @ @ @ victory turned out to have a shorter half-life than Trump ’ s bullying performance .
Trump interrupted Clinton to say that , if he were President , “ you ’ d be in jail.
” The central image from the event , and perhaps the entire campaign , remains the moment when Trump left his lectern to stand directly behind Clinton as she spoke , looming over her .
Clinton might have outperformed Trump , but she hadn ’ t moved him out of the center of the screen .
The debate , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about him .
This year , little is new in the Trump campaign .
As he prepared for the debate , in which he means to stand for the conservative heartland against the élitism of big cities , he surrounded himself with familiar advisers : his son-in-law Jared Kushner ; the disgraced former New Jersey governor Chris Christie ; Christie ’ s former aide Bill Stepien , who is now Trump ’ s campaign manager ; and Jason Miller , a communications official from the first Trump campaign , who resigned after impregnating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pushing for an abortion .
( Miller has denied the latter claim . )
As in 2016 , Trump has been staging large celebratory rallies ; his allies have used news footage of Black Lives Matter protests to suggest that the mob would rule in “ Biden ’ s America , ” as if Trump were not currently the one in charge .
By warning repeatedly that the election would be stolen , and refusing to commit to a transition of power , Trump has made it easy to imagine a very dark @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to picture the next four years .
If the first Trump campaign had the effect of crowding out the American past , the second has had the effect of dimming the future , so that all that is left is an overwhelming present , with a revolving set of subjects but a familiar pair of antagonists .
That has been the central experience of the Trump era ; it also reflects the format of cable news .
A difference between the 2016 and 2020 campaigns is that the real world keeps intruding on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did four years ago .
Tuesday night ’ s debate will be held in Cleveland , where , outside the makeshift studio , the number of families seeking food weekly from the Greater Cleveland Food Bank has nearly doubled since the end of July , when the federal supplement to unemployment benefits ran out .
Meanwhile , the Cleveland Clinic is leading an extraordinary effort against the coronavirus—swab teams sent to the sites of small outbreaks , to quickly test for the virus ’ s spread , and a community-testing program ( assisted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ohio National Guard ) meant to insure that hospitals are not missing potential sites of transmission has led to a statewide positivity rate of 2.8 per cent .
None of this suffering or accomplishment has made it onto the main stage of the Trump events I ’ ve watched .
There have been no celebrations of first responders , no discussions of the children kept from an education because of the stringent lockdowns that the President opposes , no emphasis on the many acts of charity that have helped to alleviate suffering .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Toledo airport , the President insisted that COVID-19 “ affects elderly people with heart problems and other problems.
” Beyond that , he went on , “ it affects virtually nobody.
” Two hundred and five thousand people have died in the United States .
The President is not trying to spin the pandemic so much as ignore it .
Trump wants voters to forget about or disbelieve the facts of the pandemic .
Biden , by contrast , has emphasized them .
But there is a deeper strategic tension between the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stage so encompassing that it subsumes the experience of a suffering country , while Biden wants to open the windows and let the news of the rest of the world in .
The Times ’ tax investigation provides a helpful gloss on what Trump did well in the years when he was becoming a political figure and also what he didn ’ t .
In that time span , the Times found , Trump had invested in “ a collection of businesses , mostly golf courses , that in the years since have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to sustain the losses because of his success as a TV producer—his half-share of “ The Apprentice ” made him four hundred and twenty-seven million dollars .
It hasn ’ t been widely noticed , because his campaign has been one of the quietest in modern history , but Joe Biden has been good lately .
Plenty of Republicans ( mockingly ) and Democrats ( anxiously ) have wondered about what the former Vice-President has been doing while spending so much of the spring and summer assiduously obeying coronavirus restrictions in his Delaware @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been watching the President .
“ Oh , he loves his rallies , but the next time he holds one look closely , ” Biden said last week , in Manitowoc , Wisconsin , in a speech that seemed an obvious trial run for the debate .
“ Trump keeps his distance from anyone in the rally .
The folks who come are packed in tight as they can be .
.
.
but not Trump.
” Without naming her , Biden cited Olivia Troye , a former national-security adviser to Mike Pence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ President said a good thing about the pandemic was that he no longer had to shake his supporters ’ hands .
“ Now we know what he really thinks of the people who come to his rallies , ” Biden said .

Even by the outsized standards of the past five years, the political news over the weekend before the first Presidential debate had a totalizing quality. Nothing defied its grip. President Donald Trump announced his nominee for the Supreme Court, the deeply conservative Amy Coney Barrett, and said he thought it is “certainly possible” that the full Court would overturn Roe v. Wade. He followed the pick by insisting that his rival Joe Biden, the seventy-seven-year-old former Vice-President, was taking drugs to sharpen his public performance, and demanding that both candidates submit to a drug test before they take the stage, on Tuesday. Brad Parscale, the six-foot-eight, Ferrari-driving Web-development professional who, until earlier this summer, had been working as Trump’s campaign manager, was taken into police custody in South Florida, after his wife fled their mansion and called 911, saying that Parscale was armed and threatening to hurt himself. On Sunday evening, the Times published perhaps the biggest investigative story of the Trump era, revealing that the President, by most estimates a billionaire, had not paid any federal income taxes in ten of the fifteen years before 2016; that the I.R.S. is investigating the legitimacy of a $72.9-million tax refund he claimed in 2010; and that, in 2016, as he was campaigning for the Presidency as a paragon of business success and a friend of the common man, he was paying precisely seven hundred and fifty dollars in taxes. All this took place just a few days after Trump had refused to commit to transferring power should he lose the election.
Viewers tuning in to the first Presidential debate, on Tuesday, might have a faint feeling that they have been here before. News of the “Access Hollywood” tape broke on October 7, 2016, just two days before the second Presidential debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton. To deflect attention, Trump first claimed that Bill Clinton had “said far worse to me on the golf course” and then held a press conference with three women who had accused President Clinton of sexual misconduct. The polls taken after the debate found that viewers thought Clinton had “won,” but the victory turned out to have a shorter half-life than Trump’s bullying performance. Trump interrupted Clinton to say that, if he were President, “you’d be in jail.” The central image from the event, and perhaps the entire campaign, remains the moment when Trump left his lectern to stand directly behind Clinton as she spoke, looming over her. Clinton might have outperformed Trump, but she hadn’t moved him out of the center of the screen. The debate, and the election, were still all about him.
This year, little is new in the Trump campaign. As he prepared for the debate, in which he means to stand for the conservative heartland against the élitism of big cities, he surrounded himself with familiar advisers: his son-in-law Jared Kushner; the disgraced former New Jersey governor Chris Christie; Christie’s former aide Bill Stepien, who is now Trump’s campaign manager; and Jason Miller, a communications official from the first Trump campaign, who resigned after impregnating a subordinate and then alienating her by pushing for an abortion. (Miller has denied the latter claim.) As in 2016, Trump has been staging large celebratory rallies; his allies have used news footage of Black Lives Matter protests to suggest that the mob would rule in “Biden’s America,” as if Trump were not currently the one in charge. By warning repeatedly that the election would be stolen, and refusing to commit to a transition of power, Trump has made it easy to imagine a very dark November; he has made it hard to picture the next four years. If the first Trump campaign had the effect of crowding out the American past, the second has had the effect of dimming the future, so that all that is left is an overwhelming present, with a revolving set of subjects but a familiar pair of antagonists. That has been the central experience of the Trump era; it also reflects the format of cable news.
A difference between the 2016 and 2020 campaigns is that the real world keeps intruding on this one in a way it rarely did four years ago. Tuesday night’s debate will be held in Cleveland, where, outside the makeshift studio, the number of families seeking food weekly from the Greater Cleveland Food Bank has nearly doubled since the end of July, when the federal supplement to unemployment benefits ran out. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Clinic is leading an extraordinary effort against the coronavirus—swab teams sent to the sites of small outbreaks, to quickly test for the virus’s spread, and a community-testing program (assisted by church and community leaders and the Ohio National Guard) meant to insure that hospitals are not missing potential sites of transmission has led to a statewide positivity rate of 2.8 per cent. None of this suffering or accomplishment has made it onto the main stage of the Trump events I’ve watched. There have been no celebrations of first responders, no discussions of the children kept from an education because of the stringent lockdowns that the President opposes, no emphasis on the many acts of charity that have helped to alleviate suffering. Last week, at a rally at the Toledo airport, the President insisted that COVID-19 “affects elderly people with heart problems and other problems.” Beyond that, he went on, “it affects virtually nobody.” Two hundred and five thousand people have died in the United States. The President is not trying to spin the pandemic so much as ignore it.
Trump wants voters to forget about or disbelieve the facts of the pandemic. Biden, by contrast, has emphasized them. But there is a deeper strategic tension between the two campaigns. Trump wants a television stage so encompassing that it subsumes the experience of a suffering country, while Biden wants to open the windows and let the news of the rest of the world in. The Times’ tax investigation provides a helpful gloss on what Trump did well in the years when he was becoming a political figure and also what he didn’t. In that time span, the Times found, Trump had invested in “a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash.” He was able to sustain the losses because of his success as a TV producer—his half-share of “The Apprentice” made him four hundred and twenty-seven million dollars.
It hasn’t been widely noticed, because his campaign has been one of the quietest in modern history, but Joe Biden has been good lately. Plenty of Republicans (mockingly) and Democrats (anxiously) have wondered about what the former Vice-President has been doing while spending so much of the spring and summer assiduously obeying coronavirus restrictions in his Delaware home. It turns out he has been watching the President. “Oh, he loves his rallies, but the next time he holds one look closely,” Biden said last week, in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in a speech that seemed an obvious trial run for the debate. “Trump keeps his distance from anyone in the rally. The folks who come are packed in tight as they can be . . . but not Trump.” Without naming her, Biden cited Olivia Troye, a former national-security adviser to Mike Pence, who has told reporters that the President said a good thing about the pandemic was that he no longer had to shake his supporters’ hands. “Now we know what he really thinks of the people who come to his rallies,” Biden said.
In Manitowoc, the audience was characteristically small (citing the pandemic, the Biden campaign has generally limited his crowds to fewer than twenty-five), and the candidate spoke through a thin, blue surgical mask, which drew attention to his small, worried eyes. What Biden seemed to have realized by that time was that, even if he talked only about the coronavirus, he could say everything about Trump that he wanted to say. It wasn’t just an issue of Trump being incompetent, or hostile to science. “You think, like Trump, that fifteen dollars an hour is too much for America’s essential workers?” Biden asked. “You try to take away health care from twenty million Americans in the middle of this pandemic?” Biden dwelled on Trump’s insistence, to Bob Woodward, that he had kept quiet this winter about what he knew of the virus—that it was lethal and would spread widely—because he was afraid of causing panic. Biden argued that the “panic” Trump was most worried about was a panic in the market, which might imperil his Presidency. The virus gave Biden a way to talk about the constant blur of the news, and of what it obscures. “What worries me now is, we’ve been living with this pandemic for so long, I worry we’re risking becoming numb to the toll it has taken on us and our country and communities,” Biden said. “We can’t lose the ability to feel the sorrow and the loss and the anger for so many lives lost.”
Five weeks before the election, it’s become a little easier to see Biden’s strategy. His campaign is focussed on the Midwestern belt where the Clinton campaign, by most accounts, lost the election. The polls look promising in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Two polls last week put Biden slightly ahead of Trump in Ohio, a state that Clinton lost by eight points. Biden will travel there on a train tour after Tuesday night’s debate, a trip that will also take him through western Pennsylvania. Ever since a CNN town hall that he did in his home town earlier this month, Biden has been contrasting his upbringing with Trump’s gilded one: “Scranton versus Park Avenue.” It may not be the most original closing pitch, but it is the reason that Democratic primary voters picked Biden, when more transformative possibilities were available. An important question in any Presidential debate is how the challenger will be defined. In this case, is Biden a defender of the pressured middle class or just a representative of the Democratic establishment? Win that argument, and Biden can make a second one: that the material stakes of this election are bigger than the symbolic ones, and that not all events in American life can be processed in the frenetic format of cable news. There are many more meaningful ways to frame this election than whether you are for or against Trump.
Read More About the 2020 Election


newyorker--2020-09-29--Mourning the Autumn in New York City That Could Have Been

Earlier this month , a friend invited me for a rooftop picnic near the southern tip of Manhattan .
A spectacular sunset gave way to the sparkle and glitter of the island at night when viewed from a great height : the empty glass skyscrapers , their lights always on , looking like see-through doll houses ; car headlights and tail-lights melding together , turning northbound avenues into red ribbons and southbound avenues into white ones .
“ It ’ s Christmas every day , ” my friend said , referring to the illumination .
The invocation of December and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time socializing outside in relative comfort is ending ; this is the eve of our city ’ s next long , dark winter .
I felt for a moment like I did when I was a child , in the Soviet Union .
Every September , after a summer spent away from Moscow , I heard endless talk about the beginning of a new , eventful school year , but all I could see stretching ahead of me were months of cold , darkness , and loneliness .
Returning to the city was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life was being reduced , once again , to a bare existence .
This September in New York , amid different if still incessant talk about returning to school , I find myself filled with that old , familiar dread .
It ’ s worse than when I was a kid , though , because this time I know that it didn ’ t have to be this way .
Ever since the city ’ s lockdown began , in March , most of its response has boiled down to going without : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leaving the house ; parenting without help or a witness ; communicating without warmth ; living without serendipity .
But what if , once New Yorkers had made it through the grief and despair of the spring , we had seen in the pandemic an urgent call for creative problem-solving—for new , inventive thinking ?
What if we ’ d refused to settle for less in every area of our lives ?
Imagine what this September might look like then .
First off , those empty skyscrapers—including the tallest of them all , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ offices of The New Yorker are normally housed—have been converted into schoolhouses .
Their up-to-date , well-maintained ventilation systems , which most existing school buildings lack , provide students with clean air to breathe .
The vast amount of space allows every child in Manhattan to attend school in-person , every day , while maintaining safe physical distance .
( In real life , my older children attend high schools that are considered gems of the city system .
Currently , one is housed entirely two levels below grade—there are no windows anywhere @ @ @ @ @ @ @ large metal , shipping-container-style shed , in a parking lot .
Yes , the entire school is in the shed . )
The teachers instructing our children in these new spaces are different , too .
There are more of them , because classes are smaller , and they are all younger than fifty—most of them are recent college graduates .
There has been a massive effort , in the spirit of the Works Progress Administration , to recruit new college grads and the recently unemployed as teachers , teachers ’ aides , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over the summer , so that they could help in the citywide drive to get children back to school safely .
Older and at-risk teachers have been approved to work from home ; some are teaching students who , for health or family reasons , are completely remote , but most are providing their younger replacements with virtual support , effectively conducting an apprenticeship program of unprecedented scale and ambition .
Although we don ’ t know how many of these young people will continue as teachers after the pandemic is over , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Yorkers who have worked in the public schools—an experience that will change their conceptions of citizenship and the city and which will transform our politics for years to come .
( In real life , during an August Zoom meeting with parents , the principal of my youngest child ’ s school wondered out loud how the city expected it effectively to double the number of classes that it offers without hiring any new teachers—not even to replace the two who had retired and the one who had died . )
These teaching @ @ @ @ @ @ @ jobs created during the pandemic and funded by a new wealth tax .
The billionaires and hundred-millionaires of New York , along with the rest of the city ’ s population , supported the institution of this tax .
It seemed the only logical political consequence of the spectacle of the rich getting richer—largely thanks to the actions of the Federal Reserve in propping up the stock market—even as millions of people lost their jobs in the first two months of the pandemic .
The new tax income funded the retrofitting of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; meanwhile , the people who used to populate these buildings continue to work remotely , as they have for the past six months .
New city and state legislation has enabled organizations to break their office leases—a godsend for , among others , New York ’ s legion of nonprofit organizations , fund-raising for which cratered when in-person events became impossible and the economy slowed down .
Following the success of the federal enhanced unemployment program , New York City has piloted several universal-basic-income projects .
These efforts are concentrated in neighborhoods @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have been the hardest hit by the pandemic and because they have the highest concentration of residents with jobs that can not be performed remotely .
The guaranteed income has allowed higher-risk people to stay home while younger , healthier people go to work .
In some cases , it has also enabled multi-generation households to reconfigure their living arrangements to improve the safety of vulnerable relatives .
As in other places where U.B.I .
experiments have been conducted , the positive effect on people ’ s mental health was observed almost immediately @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s mental health is exercise .
Since April , alternating avenues have been closed to car traffic .
New Yorkers have embraced bicycles and kick scooters .
The new Citi Bike tandems have been a hit—many families now use them to commute to school .
With all the two- and three-wheel commuting , and all those other people working remotely , the subway and buses , both of which have been free since March , when fares were suspended , are half empty even at rush hour , which makes them safer .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ towers into schools , the city ’ s new retrofitting construction crews—still funded by the wealth tax—went to work turning hotels and other office towers into mixed-use , mixed-age housing .
The pandemic has forced a reckoning with the city ’ s homelessness problem .
For some , it was the realization that a large number of New Yorkers couldn ’ t obey the city ’ s early stay-at-home orders , because they had no home to stay in .
For others , it was understanding that the current system of shelters is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dangerous , because it aids the spread of infection .
And , once people experiencing homelessness moved into some of the empty hotels , it was politically impossible for city officials to kick them out , back into the streets and shelters .
New York had to become a city where everyone has a permanent address .
And so on .
I shared some of these what-could-have-been fantasies with my friend , during our rooftop picnic .
“ Americans can never do any of that , ” she told me .
“ They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can ’ t even talk to them about taxation , for example.
” My friend is , like me , a queer ethnic-minority émigré from what used to be the Soviet Union .
You would think that if anyone should be afraid of socialism it ’ s us .
True enough , except socialism as we knew it was a regime of indifference , incompetence , and disregard for human life .
It wasn ’ t socialism but totalitarianism that produced the lonely , anxious , atomized state that we remember from childhood @

Earlier this month, a friend invited me to a rooftop picnic near the southern tip of Manhattan. A spectacular sunset gave way to the sparkle and glitter of the island at night when viewed from a great height: the empty glass skyscrapers, their lights always on, looking like see-through doll houses; car headlights and tail-lights melding together, turning northbound avenues into red ribbons and southbound avenues into white ones. “It’s Christmas every day,” my friend said, referring to the illumination. The invocation of December and a piercing wind reminded me that our time socializing outside in relative comfort is ending; this is the eve of our city’s next long, dark winter. I felt for a moment like I did when I was a child, in the Soviet Union. Every September, after a summer spent away from Moscow, I heard endless talk about the beginning of a new, eventful school year, but all I could see stretching ahead of me were months of cold, darkness, and loneliness. Returning to the city was the opposite of reclaiming a life—instead, life was being reduced, once again, to a bare existence. This September in New York, amid different if still incessant talk about returning to school, I find myself filled with that old, familiar dread. It’s worse than when I was a kid, though, because this time I know that it didn’t have to be this way.
Ever since the city’s lockdown began, in March, most of its response has boiled down to going without: working, teaching, and learning without leaving the house; parenting without help or a witness; communicating without warmth; living without serendipity. But what if, once New Yorkers had made it through the grief and despair of the spring, we had seen in the pandemic an urgent call for creative problem-solving—for new, inventive thinking? What if we’d refused to settle for less in every area of our lives? Imagine what this September might look like then.
First off, those empty skyscrapers—including the tallest of them all, One World Trade Center, where the offices of The New Yorker are normally located—have been converted into schoolhouses. Their up-to-date, well-maintained ventilation systems, which most existing school buildings lack, provide students with clean air to breathe. The vast amount of space allows every child in Manhattan to attend school in person, every day, while maintaining safe physical distance. (In real life, my older children attended high schools that are considered gems of the city system. Currently, one is housed entirely two levels below grade—there are no windows anywhere. The other is situated in a large metal, shipping-container-style shed, in a parking lot. Yes, the entire school is in the shed.)
The teachers instructing our children in these new spaces are different, too. There are more of them, because classes are smaller, and they are all younger than fifty—most of them are recent college graduates. There has been a tremendous effort, in the spirit of the Works Progress Administration, to recruit new college grads and the recently unemployed as teachers, teachers’ aides, and paraprofessionals—they all received crash courses, over the summer, so that they could help in the citywide drive to get children back to school safely. Older and at-risk teachers have been approved to work from home; some are teaching students who, for health or family reasons, are completely remote, but most are providing their younger replacements with virtual support, effectively conducting an apprenticeship program of unprecedented scale and ambition. Although we don’t know how many of these young people will continue as teachers after the pandemic is over, we are creating a generation of New Yorkers who have worked in the public schools—an experience that will change their conceptions of citizenship and the city and which will transform our politics for years to come. (In real life, during an August Zoom meeting with parents, the principal of my youngest child’s school wondered out loud how the city expected it effectively to double the number of classes that it offers without hiring any new teachers—not even to replace the two who had retired and the one who had died.)
These teaching positions are just some of the new jobs created during the pandemic and funded by a new wealth tax. The billionaires and hundred-millionaires of New York, along with the rest of the city’s population, supported the institution of this tax. It seemed the only logical political consequence of the spectacle of the rich getting richer—largely thanks to the actions of the Federal Reserve in propping up the stock market—even as millions of people lost their jobs in the first two months of the pandemic. The new tax income funded the retrofitting of the city’s office buildings as schools; meanwhile, the people who used to populate these buildings continue to work remotely, as they have for the past six months. New city and state legislation has enabled organizations to break their office leases—a godsend for, among others, New York’s legion of nonprofit organizations, fund-raising for which cratered when in-person events became impossible and the economy slowed down.
Following the success of the federal enhanced unemployment program, New York City has piloted several universal-basic-income projects. These efforts are concentrated in neighborhoods with lower average incomes, because they have been the hardest hit by the pandemic and because they have the highest concentration of residents with jobs that cannot be performed remotely. The guaranteed income has allowed higher-risk people to stay home while younger, healthier people go to work. In some cases, it has also enabled multi-generation households to reconfigure their living arrangements to improve the safety of vulnerable relatives. As in other places where U.B.I. experiments have been conducted, the positive effect on people’s mental health was observed almost immediately.
Another boon to the city’s mental health is exercise. Since April, alternating avenues have been closed to car traffic. New Yorkers have embraced bicycles and kick scooters. The new Citi Bike tandems have been a hit—many families now use them to commute to school. With all the two- and three-wheel commuting, and all those other people working remotely, the subway and buses, both of which have been free since March, when fares were suspended, are half empty even at rush hour, which makes them safer.
After they’d finished turning office towers into schools, the city’s new retrofitting construction crews—still funded by the wealth tax—went to work turning hotels and other office towers into mixed-use, mixed-age housing. The pandemic has forced a reckoning with the city’s homelessness problem. For some, it was the realization that a large number of New Yorkers couldn’t obey the city’s early stay-at-home orders because they had no home to stay in. For others, it was understanding that the current system of shelters is not only inhumane and insufficient but also dangerous, because it aids the spread of infection. And, once people experiencing homelessness moved into some of the empty hotels, it was politically impossible for city officials to kick them out, back into the streets and shelters. New York had to become a city where everyone has a permanent address.
And so on. I shared some of these what-could-have-been fantasies with my friend during our rooftop picnic. “Americans can never do any of that,” she told me. “They are too afraid of socialism. You can’t even talk to them about taxation, for example.” My friend is, like me, a queer ethnic-minority émigré from what used to be the Soviet Union. You would think that if anyone should be afraid of socialism it’s us. True enough, except socialism as we knew it was a regime of indifference, incompetence, and disregard for human life. It wasn’t socialism but totalitarianism that produced the lonely, anxious, atomized state that we remember from childhood.
Hannah Arendt once wrote that all that separates us from the ever-real threat of totalitarianism is “the great capacity of men to start something new.” Little is new in this city now. Its office towers stand empty, its streets are once again full of cars, its schools are struggling (and struggling unequally), its unhoused citizens are getting kicked out of the Upper West Side hotels where they had been temporarily sheltered, the rich are getting richer, the wind is getting colder, and there is but one coronavirus-era invention that the city has decided to adopt: expanded outdoor dining.
More on the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-09-29--The First Abortion Case Before a Post-Ginsburg Supreme Court

The Food and Drug Administration first approved medical , or medication , abortion twenty years ago this week .
Patients seeking to end a pregnancy during the first ten weeks of gestation take a pill called mifepristone , followed a day or two later by one called misoprostol , which together induce a miscarriage .
This “ abortion pill ” method has come to account for a steadily increasing percentage of abortions in the United States : thirty-nine per cent of all such procedures , according to 2017 data from the Guttmacher Institute , a nonprofit reproductive-health research and policy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cent of those occurring in the first ten weeks .
While surgical abortions are performed in clinics , and accessing them can require women to take time off from work , secure child care , travel—sometimes across state lines—to a provider who offers the service , and sometimes to negotiate a gantlet of anti-abortion demonstrators once they get there , medical abortion can be done in privacy , on a patient ’ s own schedule .
For anyone seeking an abortion after ten weeks of pregnancy , the surgical method is the only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clinic setting .
But in recent years medication abortion “ really has been transforming the landscape of abortion and abortion access in the U.S. , ” Megan Donovan , a policy expert with Guttmacher , said .
Moreover , twenty years of medical abortion ’ s use in the United States—by some four million women—have produced twenty years of data confirming its reliability .
In 2016 , the F.D.A .
concluded that the method ’ s “ efficacy and safety have become well-established by both research and experience , and serious complications have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ assessment led the agency to issue new guidelines for the pills—notably , it lifted a rule , which had been in place since 2000 , under which patients had to return to a clinic or doctor ’ s office to take their second dose , the misoprostol .
Now it was deemed safe for them to do so so on their own , at home or wherever they liked .
In 2017 , a group of reproductive-health experts writing in The New England Journal of Medicine noted that studies of more than four @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world who had undergone medical abortions reported that rates of significant adverse events “ such as hospital admission , blood transfusion , or serious infection , range from 0.01 to 0.7 % , and these events are almost always treatable without permanent sequelae.
” The authors recommended that the F.D.A .
lift some of the other unusual rules still in effect for mifepristone , including the requirement that it be obtained in person from a doctor , rather than through a prescription at a pharmacy or by mail .
Outside of a political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is safe , legal , and stigmatized—where reliable abortion care is available , but a significant power bloc would like to make it as difficult as possible for women to access it—such a regulation makes little sense .
If complications do occur during a medication abortion , it isn ’ t when patients get the pills , but after they take them .
Mifepristone remains in a seemingly arbitrary class of its own : of some twenty thousand drugs that the F.D.A .
has approved , it ’ s the only one that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ professional ’ s supervision , but must be dispensed in person .
Medications for erectile dysfunction “ are estimated to be associated with death in up to 0.004 % of users , ” The New England Journal article notes , but they are not subject to the regulations , known as REMS ( for Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies ) , which constrain mifepristone .
The article adds that “ antibiotics , antihypertensive agents , and insulin also can induce immediate serious or fatal reactions shortly after use , ” but they aren @ @ @ @ @ @ @ either .
Last spring , the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists , which represents more than ninety per cent of all doctors practicing in those specialties , asked the F.D.A .
to suspend the in-person requirements for mifepristone during the pandemic , when compelling those seeking medical abortions to show up in person , perhaps taking public transportation to do so , put them , as well as medical staff , at unnecessary risk .
When the agency declined , the A.C.O.G .
sued .
Other organizations joined the suit , including @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Collective , which is based in Atlanta .
The plaintiffs were represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union , who argued that the requirement disproportionately hit low-income people and people of color , because they constitute the majority of those seeking abortion care and are also at higher risk of exposure to and death from COVID-19 .
The lawyers pointed out that , during the pandemic , the Department of Health and Human Services and the F.D.A .
had taken extraordinary public-health measures to encourage the use of telemedicine whenever possible @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for other drugs .
The Secretary of Health and Human Services , Alex Azar , worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration to suspend in-person drug requirements for dangerous controlled substances such as opioids .
On July 13th , a U.S. District Court in Maryland agreed with them , holding that the in-person requirement should be suspended until thirty days after the end of the public-health emergency .
Judge Theodore D. Chuang wrote , “ By causing certain patients to decide between forgoing or substantially delaying abortion care , or risking exposure to COVID-19 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ family members , the In-Person Requirements present a serious burden to many abortion patients.
” The Trump Administration immediately challenged the ruling , asking that in-person pill pickups be reinstated pending an appeal .
On August 13th , a unanimous panel of the Fourth Circuit denied that request .
Now the Administration has gone to the Supreme Court , asking it to block Chuang ’ s order , and arguing , in part , that the F.D.A .
requirements are not a substantial burden to people seeking to terminate pregnancies during the pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surgical abortion .
( That , of course , would not only obviate many people ’ s preferences for the medical method , but would put them at greater risk for transmitting or contracting Covid-19 . )
In the past few weeks , eighteen other medical organizations , including the American Medical Association , the American Academy of Family Physicians , and the American Academy of Pediatrics have filed amicus briefs supporting the plaintiffs .
Graham Chelius , a family-medicine practitioner in Hawaii , is a plaintiff in another lawsuit , filed in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for mifepristone .
Chelius ’ s hope is that someday he will be able to write mifepristone prescriptions for his patients , who will fill them at a pharmacy and take the pills at home , and that he , as their regular doctor , will be available with advice and follow-up care , as he might with any other medication or procedure .
Because there are no abortion providers on Kaua ’ i , the island on which he lives and works , Chelius has to tell patients that they must to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get an abortion—an exigency that , he stated in a legal declaration , costs them “ in money and time ” and may cause them to miss the ten-week deadline for the medication method .
“ For some patients , ” he wrote , “ many of whom are already experiencing significant anxiety as a result of the unwanted pregnancy , and some of whom are also struggling with the challenges and traumas of poverty , drug addiction , joblessness , and/or domestic violence—this news is simply devastating.
” Under the current F.D.A @ @ @ @ @ @ @ offer medical abortions , he would have to procure and stock the pills in his clinic , which he says would cause tension with people on his staff who are opposed to abortion , and , in the small community in which they live , would be likely to put patient privacy at risk , too .
He finds it “ completely baffling ” that , during a public-health emergency , he is allowed to prescribe Suboxone for people who have opioid dependencies without ever having seen them in person , but can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Why would you change restrictions for necessary—but less safe medications—but not this one ?
” he asked .
“ Because they are political.
” In March , the government of the United Kingdom lifted , for the duration of the pandemic , its own requirement that women take mifepristone on clinic premises ; the decision was uncontroversial .
Patients are now able to get a health and gestational-age assessment , as well as counselling about other options for their pregnancy , a home-safety check , and information about contraception through a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or a midwife , after which the pills are delivered to them .
( Medication abortions accounted for most of the abortions in England and Wales even before the pandemic . )
An organization called the British Pregnancy Advisory Service , which pushed for the change , collected data on more 16,910 people who used the new system , known as Pills by Post , and found that the risk of complications , including continuing pregnancy ( in rare cases , the pills do not induce a miscarriage ) was actually lower when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than when they ’ d had to show up in person , perhaps because “ women have been given greater control over the timing of the medication use.
” The study concluded that , “ overall , the risk of major complication fell by 2/3rds from 0.09 % to 0.03 % , and the risk of a minor complication fell by 40 % from 3.2 % to 1.96 % .
” Of those who participated , seventy-one per cent said that , if they had another abortion , they ’ d choose the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opponents , the expansion of the medication method is a source of particular frustration—in part because it means that patients can increasingly self-manage abortions , rendering their provision more dispersed , less visible , and that much harder for anti-abortion activists to target .
Several organizations in the United States now assist patients with the process of obtaining mifepristone pills directly , through online pharmacies .
Often , the drugs are manufactured in India , where , according to research by the Guttmacher Institute , eighty-one per cent of abortions are done with @ @

The first abortion case that the Supreme Court will consider after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn’t likely to overturn Roe v. Wade, but it could severely curtail access to safe, effective, early abortion during the pandemic. It would also clearly signal that the Court is willing to upend its own previous jurisprudence holding that laws and regulations cannot place an undue burden on those who are seeking abortions.
The Food and Drug Administration first approved medical, or medication, abortion twenty years ago this week. Patients seeking to end a pregnancy during the first ten weeks of gestation take a pill called mifepristone, followed a day or two later by one called misoprostol, which together induce a miscarriage. This “abortion pill” method has come to account for a steadily increasing percentage of abortions in the United States: thirty-nine per cent of all such procedures, according to 2017 data from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit reproductive-health research and policy organization, and an estimated sixty per cent of those occurring in the first ten weeks. While surgical abortions are performed in clinics, and accessing them can require women to take time off from work, secure child care, travel—sometimes across state lines—to a provider who offers the service, and sometimes to negotiate a gantlet of anti-abortion demonstrators once they get there, medical abortion can be done in privacy, on a patient’s own schedule. For anyone seeking an abortion after ten weeks of pregnancy, the surgical method is the only option, and some patients prefer the clinic setting. But in recent years medication abortion “really has been transforming the landscape of abortion and abortion access in the U.S.,” Megan Donovan, a policy expert with Guttmacher, said.
Moreover, twenty years of medical abortion’s use in the United States—by some four million women—have produced twenty years of data confirming its reliability. In 2016, the F.D.A. concluded that the method’s “efficacy and safety have become well-established by both research and experience, and serious complications have proven to be extremely rare.” That assessment led the agency to issue new guidelines for the pills—notably, it lifted a rule, which had been in place since 2000, under which patients had to return to a clinic or doctor’s office to take their second dose, the misoprostol. Now it was deemed safe for them to do so so on their own, at home or wherever they liked. In 2017, a group of reproductive-health experts writing in The New England Journal of Medicine noted that studies of more than four hundred and twenty-three thousand women around the world who had undergone medical abortions reported that rates of significant adverse events “such as hospital admission, blood transfusion, or serious infection, range from 0.01 to 0.7%, and these events are almost always treatable without permanent sequelae.” The authors recommended that the F.D.A. lift some of the other unusual rules still in effect for mifepristone, including the requirement that it be obtained in person from a doctor, rather than through a prescription at a pharmacy or by mail.
Outside of a political context like ours, in which abortion is safe, legal, and stigmatized—where reliable abortion care is available, but a significant power bloc would like to make it as difficult as possible for women to access it—such a regulation makes little sense. If complications do occur during a medication abortion, it isn’t when patients get the pills but after they take them. Mifepristone remains in a seemingly arbitrary class of its own: of some twenty thousand drugs that the F.D.A. has approved, it’s the only one that can be self-administered, without a medical professional’s supervision, but must be dispensed in person. Medications for erectile dysfunction “are estimated to be associated with death in up to 0.004% of users,” The New England Journal article notes, but they are not subject to the regulations, known as REMS (for Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies), which constrain mifepristone. The article adds that “antibiotics, antihypertensive agents, and insulin also can induce immediate serious or fatal reactions shortly after use,” but they aren’t subject to such restrictions, either.
Last spring, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which represents more than ninety per cent of all doctors practicing in those specialties, asked the F.D.A. to suspend the in-person requirements for mifepristone during the pandemic, when compelling those seeking medical abortions to show up in person, perhaps taking public transportation to do so, put them, as well as medical staff, at unnecessary risk. When the agency declined, the A.C.O.G. sued. Other organizations joined the suit, including the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, which is based in Atlanta. The plaintiffs were represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, who argued that the requirement disproportionately hit low-income people and people of color, because they constitute the majority of those seeking abortion care and are also at higher risk of exposure to and death from COVID-19. The lawyers pointed out that, during the pandemic, the Department of Health and Human Services and the F.D.A. had taken extraordinary public-health measures to encourage the use of telemedicine whenever possible, and had temporarily lifted in-person requirements for other drugs. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration to suspend in-person drug requirements for dangerous controlled substances such as opioids.
On July 13th, a U.S. District Court in Maryland agreed with them, holding that the in-person requirement should be suspended until thirty days after the end of the public-health emergency. Judge Theodore D. Chuang wrote, “By causing certain patients to decide between forgoing or substantially delaying abortion care, or risking exposure to COVID-19 for themselves, their children, and family members, the In-Person Requirements present a serious burden to many abortion patients.” The Trump Administration immediately challenged the ruling, asking that in-person pill pickups be reinstated pending an appeal. On August 13th, a unanimous panel of the Fourth Circuit denied that request. Now the Administration has gone to the Supreme Court, asking it to block Chuang’s order, and arguing, in part, that the F.D.A. requirements are not a substantial burden to people seeking to terminate pregnancies during the pandemic because they could still get a surgical abortion. (That, of course, would not only obviate many people’s preferences for the medical method but would put them at greater risk for transmitting or contracting Covid-19.) In the past few weeks, eighteen other medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American Academy of Pediatrics have filed amicus briefs supporting the plaintiffs.
Graham Chelius, a family-medicine practitioner in Hawaii, is a plaintiff in another lawsuit, filed in 2017, seeking to remove the REMs for mifepristone. Chelius’s hope is that someday he will be able to write mifepristone prescriptions for his patients, who will fill them at a pharmacy and take the pills at home, and that he, as their regular doctor, will be available with advice and follow-up care, as he might with any other medication or procedure. Because there are no abortion providers on Kaua’i, the island on which he lives and works, Chelius has to tell patients that they must to fly to O’ahu in order get an abortion—an exigency that, he stated in a legal declaration, costs them “in money and time” and may cause them to miss the ten-week deadline for the medication method. “For some patients,” he wrote, “many of whom are already experiencing significant anxiety as a result of the unwanted pregnancy, and some of whom are also struggling with the challenges and traumas of poverty, drug addiction, joblessness, and/or domestic violence—this news is simply devastating.” Under the current F.D.A. regimen, if Chelius wanted to offer medical abortions, he would have to procure and stock the pills in his clinic, which he says would cause tension with people on his staff who are opposed to abortion, and, in the small community in which they live, would be likely to put patient privacy at risk, too. He finds it “completely baffling” that, during a public-health emergency, he is allowed to prescribe Suboxone for people who have opioid dependencies without ever having seen them in person, but can’t prescribe mifepristone the same way. “Why would you change restrictions for necessary—but less safe—medications, but not this one?” he asked. “Because they are political.”
In March, the government of the United Kingdom lifted, for the duration of the pandemic, its own requirement that women take mifepristone on clinic premises; the decision was uncontroversial. Patients are now able to get a health and gestational-age assessment, as well as counselling about other options for their pregnancy, a home-safety check, and information about contraception through a telemedicine or video-link appointment with a nurse or a midwife, after which the pills are delivered to them. (Medication abortions accounted for most of the abortions in England and Wales even before the pandemic.) An organization called the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, which pushed for the change, collected data on more than 16,910 people who used the new system, known as Pills by Post, and found that the risk of complications, including continuing pregnancy (in rare cases, the pills do not induce a miscarriage), was actually lower when people got the pills sent to them than when they’d had to show up in person, perhaps because “women have been given greater control over the timing of the medication use.” The study concluded that, “overall, the risk of major complication fell by 2/3rds from 0.09% to 0.03%, and the risk of a minor complication fell by 40% from 3.2% to 1.96%.” Of those who participated, seventy-one per cent said that, if they had another abortion, they’d choose the Pills by Post method.


newyorker--2020-09-29--Fox News Reports That Biden Paid No Porn Stars

NEW YORK ( The Borowitz Report ) —Dropping a bombshell that could radically alter the playing field of the 2020 @ @ @ @ @ has reported that Joe Biden paid no porn stars over the past five decades .
@ @ @ @ @ stunning revelations on his prime-time show , calling Biden ’ s history of avoiding paying @ @ @ @ @ someone seeking the nation ’ s highest office.
” “ We have obtained Joe Biden @ @ @ @ @ back to 1973 , and there is no evidence—I repeat , no evidence—of any payments @ @ @ @ @ Carlson said .
“ Joe Biden has a lot of explaining to do.
” At @ @ @ @ @ J. Trump called Biden ’ s record of not paying porn stars “ disgraceful ” @ @ @ @ @ disqualify him from serving as President .
“ Joe Biden says he ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ but this proves he ’ s a fake , ” Trump said .
“ The @ @ @ @ @ thousands to porn stars each year .
”

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Dropping a bombshell that could radically alter the playing field of the 2020 election, Fox News Channel has reported that Joe Biden paid no porn stars over the past five decades.
Tucker Carlson first reported the stunning revelations on his prime-time show, calling Biden’s history of avoiding paying porn stars “unbecoming of someone seeking the nation’s highest office.”
“We have obtained Joe Biden’s banking records going back to 1973, and there is no evidence—I repeat, no evidence—of any payments to porn stars,” Carlson said. “Joe Biden has a lot of explaining to do.”
At the White House, Donald J. Trump called Biden’s record of not paying porn stars “disgraceful” and claimed that it should disqualify him from serving as President.
“Joe Biden says he’s a man of the people, but this proves he’s a fake,” Trump said. “The average, hard-working American pays thousands to porn stars each year.”