Vermont’s Great Experiment

Tatro enlisted in the Guard 27 years ago .
In normal times , his unit plays at concerts , parades , and welcome ceremonies for visiting dignitaries , including the presidents of North Macedonia and Senegal .
But the National Guard in each state is also a force that the governor can activate to help in a disaster—and in Vermont , the 40th Army Band provides much of the quick-reaction capability .
In the past , this has involved filling sandbags for floods and chainsawing the occasional tree branch to remove it from the road after a hurricane .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ story of how about 70 National Guardsmen managed to transform a convention center into an alternate health-care facility in mere days shows a state community coming together to get ahead of the pandemic at a time when the federal response is faltering .
The military as a whole has struggled to adapt to the virus in its ranks—notably with the outbreak of cases on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and inconsistent guidelines to protect members across the services .
Read : An unhealthy military is struggling to fight COVID-19 But around the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are practically defying physics to relieve stressed local hospitals in record time .
The Vermont experiment stands out among similar projects across the country for its speed—and shows that at least one piece of the U.S. crisis response , specifically at the local level , is working .
Donald Trump ’ s freewheeling daily briefings are the icon of the federal response , and stimulus money and corporate bailouts are making their way around the country .
But much of the real work of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the state level , with governors managing stay-at-home orders and teaming up to coordinate regional plans .
It often falls to state actors to take care of their communities .
The pop-up hospitals aren ’ t the famous Chinese mega-constructions such as the one in Wuhan that 7,000 workers built from the ground up in about 10 days in February .
Rather , members of the U.S. military are converting existing sites around the country—schools , convention centers , other vacant buildings—into spaces for patients displaced by the influx of coronavirus cases , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Vermont isn ’ t even at a point where its hospitals are overflowing .
But state planners were observing the worrying trends elsewhere in the country , and they wanted to get ahead of what might be coming .
“ It was absolutely essential to look at that worst-case scenario and have capacity to meet it , ” says Kerry Sleeper , the interim deputy secretary for Vermont ’ s Agency of Human Services , who manages surge capacity in the state .
“ We would have been negligent had we not done @ @ @

The call from his commanding officer came on a Sunday at the end of March, when Matthew Tatro was on his couch in front of the television. His life in small-town Vermont was already being reshaped by the coronavirus; for his usual job as a high-school music teacher, he’d been puzzling through how he could teach band remotely if and when the schools closed.
But now the governor was activating the National Guard, and Tatro, as a longtime guardsman, the bandmaster of the 40th Army Band, with 28 people under his leadership, had to mobilize himself and his fellow musicians to help get medical equipment to places in need around the state. Within days, the order came down from Brigadier General David Manfredi at the Vermont National Guard’s Joint Operations Command: Tatro and dozens of other guardsmen with day jobs, including teachers, master’s students, and at least one dental hygienist, would have to help build a 400-bed hospital to prepare for a possible wave of new patients. State and military planners wanted it ready to provide care within four days after construction started—when the state’s modeling suggested that Vermont, with its limited intensive-care capacity, might start running out of room for the very sick. It was like a Habitat for Humanity blitzkrieg for the coronavirus era.
Tatro enlisted in the Guard 27 years ago. In normal times, his unit plays at concerts, parades, and welcome ceremonies for visiting dignitaries, including the presidents of North Macedonia and Senegal. But the National Guard in each state is also a force that the governor can activate to help in a disaster—and in Vermont, the 40th Army Band provides much of the quick-reaction capability. In the past, this has involved filling sandbags for floods and chainsawing the occasional tree branch to remove it from the road after a hurricane. But this was something else altogether.
The story of how about 70 National Guardsmen managed to transform a convention center into an alternate health-care facility in mere days shows a state community coming together to get ahead of the pandemic at a time when the federal response is faltering. The military as a whole has struggled to adapt to the virus in its ranks—notably with the outbreak of cases on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and inconsistent guidelines to protect members across the services.
Read: An unhealthy military is struggling to fight COVID-19
But around the country, teams like the Vermont guardsmen and members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are practically defying physics to relieve stressed local hospitals in record time. The Vermont experiment stands out among similar projects across the country for its speed—and shows that at least one piece of the U.S. crisis response, specifically at the local level, is working.
Donald Trump’s freewheeling daily briefings are the icon of the federal response, and stimulus money and corporate bailouts are making their way around the country. But much of the real work of containing the pandemic is being done at the state level, with governors managing stay-at-home orders and teaming up to coordinate regional plans. It often falls to state actors to take care of their communities.
The pop-up hospitals aren’t the famous Chinese mega-constructions such as the one in Wuhan that 7,000 workers built from the ground up in about 10 days in February. Rather, members of the U.S. military are converting existing sites around the country—schools, convention centers, other vacant buildings—into spaces for patients displaced by the influx of coronavirus cases, or even for COVID-19 patients themselves. Vermont isn’t even at a point where its hospitals are overflowing. But state planners were observing the worrying trends elsewhere in the country, and they wanted to get ahead of what might be coming. “It was absolutely essential to look at that worst-case scenario and have capacity to meet it,” says Kerry Sleeper, the interim deputy secretary for Vermont’s Agency of Human Services, who manages surge capacity in the state. “We would have been negligent had we not done that.”
The new hospital started life as the Champlain Valley Exposition Center, three buildings amounting to 74,000 square feet, not too far from I-89 and accessible from a number of other hospitals off the highway. This had been a place for kids’ soccer and lacrosse games, antique expos and quilt shows and Tuesday bingo with a full snack bar. When Tatro went to visit the space with the lead civil engineer, Major Jason Villemaire, earlier this month, he had a hard time seeing the potential in all the emptiness. “I’m walking through these rooms … they’re like big empty spaces,” Tatro told me. “Major Villemaire is telling me what needs to happen, and I’m like, ‘It can’t happen. It can’t happen at all.’”
(Julie shea / DVIDS)
Villemaire put together the blueprints himself on Wednesday, April 1, working late into the night over pizza with a team of about seven other people. You can’t just put 400 beds in an expo center. Medical planners were asking Villemaire’s team to transform it into a space with eight 50-bed pods including an isolation ward, in case it had to take coronavirus patients. Each pod was to include a nursing station and supply closet as well as a sink, each bed to get its own electrical outlets and lamp nearby. Lieutenant Colonel Chris Gookin, the deputy state surgeon in the Vermont National Guard, recalls walking through the expo center before construction started and worrying about how everything would fit. “We’re having that moment of doubt where we’re like, ‘It’s not going to be big enough,’” he told me. He was imagining filling it up with two-by-fours, nursing units, sinks, beds, emergency exits, and corridors.
Villemaire wasn’t as worried. As a full-time engineer at the Burlington Air National Guard Base, he manages the infrastructure for a facility that hosts 15 F-35 fighter jets. He’d enlisted as an air mechanic in the late 1980s, and had experience building things quickly with few resources on deployments. But the scale of this project was altogether new to him..
“I’ve never done anything of this scope all at the same time,” he told me. And normally, for a project this big, it would take more than a week just to get all the personnel in place. “We were able to do it in a matter of hours.”
The advantage of the expo center was that it already had its own power, plumbing, heating, and ventilation. Still, Villemaire’s team needed to put up dozens of walls to separate each pod from the others and to divide each into two sections, for men and women; run new electrical wiring within the walls to get power next to each bed; and run plumbing to the sinks in the nurse’s stations. This would mean erecting close to a mile’s worth of walls eight feet high, a similar length of new electrical wiring to connect to 432 different power outlets, and about 1,200 feet of plumbing.
Villemaire showed up with a few dozen people on Thursday, April 2; they knew they needed walls and where they should go, so they began hammering plywood to two-by-fours and putting them up. But it was clear by the end of the day that they’d need a lot more people to get the project done in time.
Read: Our pandemic summer
Reinforcements came on Friday, when Tatro showed up with his team. By now, the entire construction crew had grown to about 55 members. Emily Eckel, who plays the bassoon in the Guard and is a master’s student in music therapy, was one of few with a carpentry background—from a work-study job in college building sets for Godspell and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She felt, she told me, “like the stars have aligned … I knew enough to put up walls, and I could use power tools.”
(Julie Shea / DVIDS)
The construction settled into an assembly-line rhythm over 14-hour days stretching into the weekend, by which point the team had grown close to 70 people. People would nail together walls and stack them up, then move them into position; electrical came next, alongside plumbing. One big room, then another, then another.
By Sunday, when Tatro walked back through the event space, the empty halls had been transformed, and workers were covering the new walls in plastic sheeting that could be easily cleaned and sterilized. The facility was ready to receive patients.
But none actually came for another several days. Ordered to sprint to be ready on Sunday, April 5, the guardsmen didn’t see any patients until the following Friday. By that point, the Guard’s medical personnel were training the others to serve as orderlies in the new hospital, and band members were walking around trying to encourage the staff. “I’ve already had one guy with a guitar walk around and play some music for the medics,” Tatro said.
And then, last Friday, the center got its first patient, sent straight to the isolation ward. They were infected with the coronavirus.


False Prophet

In the conservative media , talking heads and talk-radio hosts have labored to convince their audiences that—despite what they may have heard—the president never doubted the gravity of the coronavirus .
Central to this case is Trump ’ s decision in late January to restrict travel from China , when the severity of the outbreak in Wuhan was becoming clear .
Skeptics on both the right and the left have dismissed the move as a token measure that did little to prepare the U.S. for an imminent outbreak .
A more generous assessment may be that while restricting travel from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the West Coast , Trump ’ s delay in restricting travel from Europe helped turn New York into the pandemic ’ s global epicenter .
In any case , the policy is cited incessantly on Fox News as proof of Trump ’ s prescience .
Sean Hannity has predicted that it will “ go down as the single most consequential decision in history , ” and mused , “ How [ much ] worse could this have been if the president didn ’ t act that quickly ?
” To sharpen their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ taken to juxtaposing his travel restriction with cherry-picked clips of journalists downplaying the threat of the virus earlier this year .
Donald Trump Jr. recently shared such a supercut with his 2.6 million Instagram followers alongside an all-caps message : “ THE MEDIA WANTS YOU TO THINK MY DAD DID N'T TAKE CHINA VIRUS SERIOUSLY .
WELL LISTEN TO THIS.
” Perhaps the strangest subplot in the crusade to vindicate the president has revolved around a once-obscure anti-malaria drug .
Last month , Trump latched onto the idea that chloroquine , and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ combatting the coronavirus .
This theory had little evidence to support it beyond a handful of anecdotes and flawed studies .
But the drug was being touted by Dr. Mehmet Oz , a TV star and Fox News regular , as well as Rudy Giuliani—and the allure of a miracle cure was apparently too tempting to resist .
The president hyped the drug in one briefing after another , dubbing it a potential “ game-changer , ” and urging sick patients to take it .
“ What do you have to lose ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ prescriptions drew criticism from some in the medical community—who noted , among other things , the drug ’ s potentially fatal side effects—Trump was defiant .
Overnight , hydroxychloroquine was transformed into a right-wing weapon of culture war .
The drug became a prime-time staple on Fox News , and a fixation of MAGA memes .
A conservative group called the Job Creators Network launched a digital campaign to promote the drug using targeted texts and Facebook ads .
As the drug grew more controversial , false claims about its effectiveness circulated widely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the chatter was coming from , Graphika—a data firm that tracks online disinformation—used suspicious Twitter accounts identified by an independent security researcher named Eric Ellason to map the conversation .
The firm told me that the drug appears to be especially interesting to conspiracy theorists : Among those discussing hydroxychloroquine in the U.S. , the most common hashtags included # Gates , # Soros , and # darktolight , a QAnon rallying cry .
But the “ vast majority ” of the conversation , Graphika found , was taking place among right-wing users @ @ @ @ @ @ @ making the president look like a visionary .

Media-bashing robocalls, chloroquine Twitter trolls, briefing-room propaganda—how the president and his allies are trying to convince America he was right all along.
On February 28, Donald Trump stood before a crowd of supporters in South Carolina and told them to pay no attention to the growing warnings of a coronavirus outbreak in America. The press was “in hysteria mode,” the president said. The Democrats were playing politics. This new virus was nothing compared with the seasonal flu—and anyone who said otherwise was just trying to hurt him. “This is their new hoax,” Trump proclaimed, squinting out from behind a podium adorned with the presidential seal.
Six weeks later, the coronavirus has killed more than 25,000 Americans, the U.S. economy has been crippled—and Trump is recasting himself as a pandemic prophet. At Monday’s White House briefing, the president responded to questions about his handling of the crisis by dimming the lights and playing an Orwellian campaign-style video: “THE MEDIA MINIMIZED THE RISK FROM THE START,” the onscreen text read, “WHILE THE PRESIDENT TOOK DECISIVE ACTION.”
This flagrant recasting of recent events wasn’t a fluke. For the past several months, I’ve been reporting on the “disinformation architecture” that Trump’s coalition of partisan media, propagandists, operatives, and trolls are relying on to reelect him. Their strategy has always been to drown out inconvenient facts with a noisy barrage of distortions—to “flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon once put it. But in recent weeks, the president and his allies have been waging a dystopian campaign of revisionist history more brazen than anything they’ve attempted before.
If you’ve tuned in to one of the daily coronavirus-task-force briefings, you’ve likely seen Trump himself make the case. “I knew it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” the president boasted last month. “I knew everything,” he reiterated a couple of weeks later. Asked to assess his response to the virus, he responded emphatically, “I’d rate it at 10.”
Read: The real point of Trump’s coronavirus press conferences
Cable-news outlets have struggled with how to responsibly handle these briefings, which intersperse valuable updates from public-health officials with the president’s free-wheeling insult-comedy and medical misinformation. But the briefings command huge ratings—viewership at times rivals that of The Bachelor, as Trump has gleefully noted—and coverage of them trickles down into local newscasts and social media.
This dynamic has effectively enabled the president to narrate America’s national trauma, while editing his own role in it. There are signs that his efforts are working: One Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to describe private research, told me that when voters were shown 90 seconds of a recent Trump briefing, his performance in a general-election matchup against Joe Biden improved by more than two percentage points.
Meanwhile, Trump and the party he’s remade in his image are working overtime to undermine the journalists who are uncovering damaging details of his pandemic response. Late last month, as shelter-in-place orders went into effect across the country, people began to receive robocalls purporting to administer a “poll” focused on press coverage of the president. After giving their answers, respondents heard a sympathetic female voice express frustration with the media’s unfair treatment of Trump. The call was described to me by a 64-year-old woman in rural Texas who believed at first that she was talking to a real person.
When I asked Transaction Network Services, which tracks robocalls, to look into it, the company traced the call back to the National Republican Congressional Committee, and said it had been sent to 120,000 numbers over a three-day period. (Reached for comment, a spokesman for the NRCC confirmed it was responsible for the call but declined to play the audio for me. He said it was intended to identify prospective donors.)
Media-bashing is nothing new for the president, but in recent weeks it’s taken on a more frenzied quality. Trump now routinely derails his daily briefings by barking at White House reporters to rephrase their questions in more flattering ways. On Twitter, he has giddily celebrated recent declines in advertising revenue at disfavored outlets. And his campaign—apparently eager to memory-hole his now-infamous “hoax” sound bite—has started to send menacing cease-and-desist letters to local TV stations that air an attack ad highlighting the comment. (The campaign contends that the ad, created by a liberal super PAC, takes the clip so far out of context as to make it defamatory; fact-checkers aren’t so sure.)
In the conservative media, talking heads and talk-radio hosts have labored to convince their audiences that—despite what they may have heard—the president never doubted the gravity of the coronavirus. Central to this case is Trump’s decision in late January to restrict travel from China, when the severity of the outbreak in Wuhan was becoming clear.
Skeptics on both the right and the left have dismissed the move as a token measure that did little to prepare the U.S. for an imminent outbreak. A more generous assessment may be that while restricting travel from China slowed the spread of the virus on the West Coast, Trump’s delay in restricting travel from Europe helped turn New York into the pandemic’s global epicenter. In any case, the policy is cited incessantly on Fox News as proof of Trump’s prescience. Sean Hannity has predicted that it will “go down as the single most consequential decision in history,” and mused, “How [much] worse could this have been if the president didn’t act that quickly?”
To sharpen their narrative, Trump’s allies have taken to juxtaposing his travel restriction with cherry-picked clips of journalists downplaying the threat of the virus earlier this year. Donald Trump Jr. recently shared such a supercut with his 2.6 million Instagram followers alongside an all-caps message: “THE MEDIA WANTS YOU TO THINK MY DAD DIDN'T TAKE CHINA VIRUS SERIOUSLY. WELL LISTEN TO THIS.”
Perhaps the strangest subplot in the crusade to vindicate the president has revolved around a once-obscure anti-malaria drug. Last month, Trump latched onto the idea that chloroquine, and the related hydroxychloroquine, held the key to combatting the coronavirus. This theory had little evidence to support it beyond a handful of anecdotes and flawed studies. But the drug was being touted by Dr. Mehmet Oz, a TV star and Fox News regular, as well as Rudy Giuliani—and the allure of a miracle cure was apparently too tempting to resist. The president hyped the drug in one briefing after another, dubbing it a potential “game-changer,” and urging sick patients to take it. “What do you have to lose?” he mused.
When these presidential prescriptions drew criticism from some in the medical community—who noted, among other things, the drug’s potentially fatal side effects—Trump was defiant. Overnight, hydroxychloroquine was transformed into a right-wing weapon of culture war. The drug became a prime-time staple on Fox News, and a fixation of MAGA memes. A conservative group called the Job Creators Network launched a digital campaign to promote the drug using targeted texts and Facebook ads.
As the drug grew more controversial, false claims about its effectiveness circulated widely on social media. To see where the chatter was coming from, Graphika—a data firm that tracks online disinformation—used suspicious Twitter accounts identified by an independent security researcher named Eric Ellason to map the conversation. The firm told me that the drug appears to be especially interesting to conspiracy theorists: Among those discussing hydroxychloroquine in the U.S., the most common hashtags included #Gates, #Soros, and #darktolight, a QAnon rallying cry. But the “vast majority” of the conversation, Graphika found, was taking place among right-wing users, many of whom are invested in making the president look like a visionary.
Read: Trump’s dangerously effective coronavirus propaganda
For now, the facts on the ground remain the greatest obstacle to Trump’s revisionists. In Detroit, people are dying in emergency-room hallways. In New York City, bodies are loaded into refrigerated trucks and buried in mass graves. Field hospitals have sprouted up in parks and convention centers. Meanwhile, damning reports in the press detail how Trump’s stubbornly cavalier attitude toward the pandemic hobbled his administration’s response.
As reality continues to assert itself in the coming months—whether in the form of rising death tolls, or clinical drug trials, or shifting White House policy—Trump’s information warriors will likely retreat from some of their current positions. (They may also notch a few “wins” as the facts catch up to their narratives.) In the meantime, they are staying cautiously on message.
In a recent episode of his Fox News show, Tucker Carlson—who was ahead of the curve on this story—ridiculed The New York Times’ coverage of the virus, while ignoring his own network’s failures and giving the president a pass. “As you know, the establishment media has been screwing up coronavirus stories from day one,” he told his viewers.
Hannity concluded his own takedown of the “media mob” with a carefully caveated declaration of victory: “They were wrong. The president—on January 31st—was right.”
While these shows generally don’t mention that Trump and Fox News were playing down the pandemic long after the mainstream media realized its danger, that fact hasn’t been entirely forgotten.“I want to defend every single person who was wrong on this,” Greg Gutfeld, a co-host of The Five, said last week. “Because I think the best analogy for dealing with this pandemic is a sports car. You have to shift gears depending on the terrain.”
Related Podcast
Listen to McKay Coppins discuss this story on an episode of Social Distance, The Atlantic’s podcast about living through a pandemic:


theatlantic--2020-04-15--The Atlantic Politics Daily: Trump’s Revisionist History

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theatlantic--2020-04-14--Anthony Fauci, Lightning Rod

Anthony Fauci, Lightning Rod

In at least two private White House meetings , Navarro has clashed with Fauci .
In the Situation Room on January 28 , Fauci argued that there was no evidence that travel restrictions work , said a person familiar with the matter , who , like others we talked with , spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to share their views more candidly .
Navarro balked at Fauci ’ s position .
( According to the Times , Fauci and other top public-health officials changed their minds on the wisdom of restrictions within days . )
Earlier this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the Situation Room about the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine , which Trump has touted as a potential “ game-changer.
” When Fauci reiterated a point he had made publicly , that accounts of the drug ’ s effectiveness were merely anecdotal , his comment sparked a rebuke from Navarro , according to a report in Axios .
Outside the White House , one notable outpost of Fauci criticism is a daily podcast and radio/TV show co-hosted by Steve Bannon , the president ’ s former chief strategist , who , like Navarro , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s economic-nationalist wing .
Bannon has faulted Fauci on his show for delivering briefings that he says are too vague and imprecise , while generally praising Trump ’ s management of the disaster .
“ We want accuracy and accountability when it comes to Dr. Fauci , ” said Jason Miller , a former Trump-campaign adviser and Bannon ’ s co-host .
“ No one is saying that this response is his fault , and no one is saying that something is ‘ on him.
’ It ’ s How do we go @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that pandemics are navigated by imperfect leaders relying on imperfect information .
That includes Miller ’ s and Navarro ’ s champion , Trump—and the widely admired Fauci .
In the case of the novel coronavirus , Fauci was notably sanguine at first about how the outbreak was likely to play out in the United States , even though he describes his approach to his work as assuming the worst-case scenario and aiming to avert it .
In his many interviews and public statements , Fauci has given critics occasional fodder to argue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his characterizations of the coronavirus threat and the White House ’ s response to the outbreak .
In another interview Fauci gave on Sunday , for example , he said it “ became clear ” to him by “ the middle to end of January ” that “ we were in real trouble , ” as evidence emerged that the virus was spreading undetected from one person to another within communities .
Critics point out , however , that at least in his public remarks , Fauci argued through January and much of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pose a major threat to the United States .
Consider comments Fauci made in mid-February , when he described the threat of the coronavirus as “ minuscule ” relative to that of the seasonal flu .
For weeks by that point , Chinese authorities had been restricting the movements of millions of people ; COVID-19 had been circulating under the radar in the United States ; and some public-health experts , both inside and outside government , had been warning that the country was dangerously unprepared for a coming outbreak .

Anthony Fauci considers himself a no-nonsense fact-finder, a servant of science rather than politics or ideology. “No matter what happens to me, I’m going to keep” telling the truth, Fauci told us recently.
He’s so allergic to telling the president what he wants to hear (as opposed to what he needs to know) that he has cited, as a “dictum to live by,” the advice he once received from a Nixon-administration official: Be prepared for each visit to the White House to be your last.
It’s a professional credo that helps explain how the 79-year-old doctor has managed to stick around as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases through six American presidents of both parties, beginning with Ronald Reagan, whom he alerted to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. But the traits upon which Fauci built his reputation during past administrations could be his undoing in this one, as he guides Donald Trump through the worst pandemic in a century.
Fauci seems to have emerged as a convenient proxy for those who are upset about the rolling tragedy but are loath to blame Trump. Fauci is a safer target: a career public-health official. Trump allies who want to see him win in November but are also uneasy about spiraling infections and dwindling stock prices; the fiasco over COVID-19 testing; and the failure to track, trace, and limit the virus’s spread can redirect their anger toward Fauci.
Which is how it came to be that when Fauci strode into the White House yesterday for yet another briefing by the coronavirus task force, everyone was asking the question he may often ask himself: Would this be his last time there?
Read: Anthony Fauci’s plan to stay honest
The scientist had committed what in Trumpworld is a potentially unforgivable sin: suggesting that the president had erred. In a CNN interview on Sunday, Fauci said he’d faced “a lot of pushback” internally when he called for imposing tougher measures to stop the virus’s spread.
Fauci’s message clashed with Trump’s repeated claim that his handling of the outbreak has been flawless. Stoking a running drama about Fauci’s status—one that took off after Fauci face-palmed as Trump was talking at a press briefing last month—the president retweeted a former Republican congressional candidate’s hashtag: #FireFauci. Privately, Fauci asked the task-force team if he could make a statement at Trump’s daily news conference about the CNN spot. He tried to disabuse Americans of the notion that there was tension inside the White House: “Pushback,” Fauci told the press yesterday, was the wrong word to describe the normal give-and-take among government aides. He bristled when a reporter asked if someone had compelled him to clarify his position. “Please. Don’t even imply that,” he said, shooting a brief and uncharacteristic glare at the reporter.
The pandemic has plunked Fauci into a White House that has long been a cauldron of rivalrous aides with competing agendas. It’s an odd fit. Fauci is mixed in with ideologues who are suspicious of “deep state” bureaucrats; free-marketeers who want to quickly reopen the country and minimize the economic wreckage; and Trump loyalists who owe their jobs to one man.
Inside the building, some aides are sympathetic to his predicament, others suspicious of his advice. Outside it, partisans on the right scour his statements for any hint of disloyalty to Trump, while the left looks for clues that he might get fed up with the president and bolt.
One White House official voiced impatience with anyone who might want Fauci to depart. “I guess I don’t understand why people want Dr. Fauci to quit or be fired,” the official told us. “Do you want more body bags? Do you want more disruption in the task force’s work? We’re all working overtime. Everyone else is home sitting on their asses telecommuting. I’m sure they’re working too, but we’re here every day, seven days a week.”
An occasional, prominent adversary inside the White House is Peter Navarro, the Trump trade adviser and China hawk who has been wrangling medical supplies needed in the crisis. Navarro gave an interview to The New York Times in which he criticized unnamed “medical experts and pundits” who weren’t attentive to the full societal damage that would spring from “an extended economic shutdown.”
In at least two private White House meetings, Navarro has clashed with Fauci. In the Situation Room on January 28, Fauci argued that there was no evidence that travel restrictions work, said a person familiar with the matter, who, like others we talked with, spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to share their views more candidly. Navarro balked at Fauci’s position. (According to the Times, Fauci and other top public-health officials changed their minds on the wisdom of restrictions within days.) Earlier this month, Fauci and Navarro sparred again in the Situation Room about the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which Trump has touted as a potential “game-changer.” When Fauci reiterated a point he had made publicly, that accounts of the drug’s effectiveness were merely anecdotal, his comment sparked a rebuke from Navarro, according to a report in Axios.
Outside the White House, one notable outpost of Fauci criticism is a daily podcast and radio/TV show co-hosted by Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, who, like Navarro, was part of the White House’s economic-nationalist wing. Bannon has faulted Fauci on his show for delivering briefings that he says are too vague and imprecise, while generally praising Trump’s management of the disaster. “We want accuracy and accountability when it comes to Dr. Fauci,” said Jason Miller, a former Trump-campaign adviser and Bannon’s co-host. “No one is saying that this response is his fault, and no one is saying that something is ‘on him.’ It’s How do we go forward?”
Read: We were warned
The unsettling truth is that pandemics are navigated by imperfect leaders relying on imperfect information. That includes Miller’s and Navarro’s champion, Trump—and the widely admired Fauci.
In the case of the novel coronavirus, Fauci was notably sanguine at first about how the outbreak was likely to play out in the United States, even though he describes his approach to his work as assuming the worst-case scenario and aiming to avert it. In his many interviews and public statements, Fauci has given critics occasional fodder to argue that he’s been inconsistent in his characterizations of the coronavirus threat and the White House’s response to the outbreak.
In another interview Fauci gave on Sunday, for example, he said it “became clear” to him by “the middle to end of January” that “we were in real trouble,” as evidence emerged that the virus was spreading undetected from one person to another within communities.
Critics point out, however, that at least in his public remarks, Fauci argued through January and much of February that the coronavirus didn’t pose a major threat to the United States. Consider comments Fauci made in mid-February, when he described the threat of the coronavirus as “minuscule” relative to that of the seasonal flu. For weeks by that point, Chinese authorities had been restricting the movements of millions of people; COVID-19 had been circulating under the radar in the United States; and some public-health experts, both inside and outside government, had been warning that the country was dangerously unprepared for a coming outbreak.
Fauci has said that his views evolved as he and the government’s other top experts learned more about the spread of the disease within the United States, and news reports suggest that he issued darker warnings in private as February progressed. All of his remarks, moreover, were couched in the trademark carefulness of a public-health official. He repeatedly emphasized early on that while the virus didn’t present significant risks to Americans at that very moment, that didn’t mean it wasn’t a serious global health hazard and couldn’t endanger the United States in the future.
Public-health officials strive to not get ahead of the scientific evidence they’ve collected and to avoid warning of nightmare scenarios that might not materialize, which would undermine their credibility during the next crisis, John Auerbach, who was a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2011 to 2017, told us. (Auerbach is married to the Atlantic senior editor Corby Kummer.)
“Was there a period of time when … [Fauci was] saying things that may not have been accurate if more information [had been] gathered? I’m sure that was true,” he said. “But I think the goal in a situation like this is to gather as much information as you can” and make decisions based on the available data. That, he argued, is what Fauci did.
As for whether Fauci is being sensitive enough to the economic fallout of social distancing, Auerbach maintained that that’s not the role of public-health officials. They’re focused on “what will save the most lives,” he noted; they’re “not experts in deciding what’s good for the economy.” It falls to the president and vice president to hear from both health and economic experts and make the difficult trade-offs.
Ultimately, many Americans, buoyed by the idea that there’s a steady, expert hand at the rudder of the U.S. government at this tumultuous time, may be expecting too much of Fauci alone. Auerbach, who now leads the nonprofit Trust for America’s Health, noted that Fauci’s employer, the National Institutes of Health, is not the federal agency tasked with responding to public-health crises. That’s typically the CDC’s role. Fauci is “a researcher, and an incredibly smart and skilled one on infectious disease, but it’s not the same as having the thousands” of emergency responders that the CDC has at its disposal, he said.
Read: The real point of Trump’s coronavirus press conferences
No one working for Trump, aside from his family members, is untouchable. The president has a history of purging and humiliating high-ranking appointees he perceives as disloyal. Fauci could meet a similar fate. But amid a pandemic, that would go down as perhaps Trump’s most self-defeating move to date. Fauci’s credibility is a precious asset. A Quinnipiac poll earlier this month showed that 78 percent of Americans approved of Fauci’s handling of the outbreak, a higher rating than New York’s Andrew Cuomo and other governors in cities with large outbreaks received. Only 46 percent approved of Trump’s response.
Another White House official told us that Fauci deserves some latitude, given the demands on his time. “We’ve asked the guy to go out and do a lot of interviews,” the official said. “Somewhere along the line, there’s going to be mixed messaging, or, in today’s reality, a reporter who tries to play gotcha. I think he’s in good standing.”
We recently spoke with Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and confidant of Trump, about the difficult choices ahead in reopening the country and sending people back to work. Even as others in his party want the economy rebooted swiftly, Graham had a piece of advice for the president: Make sure Fauci is on board.
If Trump’s decision is ultimately “backed up by Fauci” and Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, Graham told us, “then his political exposure will be very limited.”


theatlantic--2020-04-14--‘I Am Stunned’: Wisconsin Democrats’ Improbable Victory

By the day of the election , Democrats were handcuffed : They had ceased all efforts to turn out voters in person , and it was too late to push more supporters to request ballots by mail .
“ We ’ ll find out if Republicans succeeded in stealing the election by weaponizing the pandemic , ” declared Ben Wikler , the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin , on a conference call with reporters before the results were released yesterday .
He urged Wisconsinites who may have been disenfranchised to keep records of their attempt to vote , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ challenge the legitimacy of the election in court .
A few hours later , fears of a grand electoral larceny had swiftly melted away : Karofsky had won , and with a nearly 11-point margin in a state Donald Trump had carried by less than a single percentage point in 2016 , it wasn ’ t even close .
“ I am stunned , ” Wikler told me when we spoke by phone shortly before midnight last night .
The party ’ s internal polls had forecast “ a close election , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had won .
Republicans won a narrow victory in a supreme-court race last year , but the scheduling of this year ’ s election on the same day as the Democratic presidential primary—when the GOP had no competitive nomination fight to boost turnout—gave Karofsky a significant advantage .
The parties had poured money into the judicial race , which would determine whether conservatives would maintain a 5–2 advantage on the supreme court or whether liberals would narrow it to 4–3 .
The outcome could also have a direct impact on the November election @ @ @ @ @ @ @ divided in a case it will likely have to decide , over whether more than 200,000 voters are dropped from the state ’ s rolls .
Then came the pandemic , which scrambled everything .
The Democrats ’ panic over holding the election ; the closure of all but five polling places in Milwaukee , where the party has its largest concentration of votes ; and the GOP ’ s insistence that the election go forward gave way to assumptions that Kelly would coast to victory .
“ There was an array of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Wikler said .
Were the Democrats crying wolf over a catastrophe that didn ’ t happen ?
Were Republicans actually more disadvantaged by the reduction in in-person voting , because it was their base of older voters who couldn ’ t get to the polls and was unfamiliar with the requirements for voting by mail ?
Or did the GOP ’ s refusal to encourage more participation or postpone the election motivate Wisconsinites to turn out and punish it ?
“ The Republicans ’ effort to suppress turned people out to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hall , a Milwaukee activist who runs a group devoted to organizing young voters of color .
As for older voters who might have been forced to risk their health to cast a ballot , Hall says : “ They conspired against their own base .
”

Updated at 3:23 p.m. ET on April 14
How could Democrats win a statewide election that they had seemingly conceded—that they had tried in vain to prevent from even taking place?
That was the question in Wisconsin this morning, after the party celebrated the unlikely ouster of a conservative justice in a crucial race for a seat on the state’s highest court. With former Vice President Joe Biden now the presumptive Democratic nominee, following Senator Bernie Sanders’s withdrawal from the presidential race, the results of the party primary had become moot. The far more consequential race was the judicial election, and Judge Jill Karofsky’s defeat of incumbent Justice Daniel Kelly gave Democrats an important victory—delayed by nearly a week as a deluge of absentee ballots was counted—in what was essentially a trial run for the November election in the closely divided swing state.
But the bigger mystery was how it had happened at all.
In the days leading up to last Tuesday’s vote, Democrats had done all they could to call off in-person balloting in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, either by switching to an all-mail election or by postponing the vote until June. Republicans had rebuffed them at every turn, insisting that the election go on as scheduled, even if it meant voters would have to risk their health—and violate a statewide stay-at-home directive—to cast a ballot at the few polling places that had enough workers to staff them. (In Milwaukee, the state’s largest city, just five out of 180 polling places were open.) When Democratic Governor Tony Evers issued a last-minute order to postpone the election, Republicans persuaded conservatives on both the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court to block him.
Read: Wisconsin’s warning for the November election
By the day of the election, Democrats were handcuffed: They had ceased all efforts to turn out voters in person, and it was too late to push more supporters to request ballots by mail.
“We’ll find out if Republicans succeeded in stealing the election by weaponizing the pandemic,” declared Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, on a conference call with reporters before the results were released yesterday. He urged Wisconsinites who may have been disenfranchised to keep records of their attempt to vote, suggesting that they or the party could challenge the legitimacy of the election in court.
A few hours later, fears of a grand electoral larceny had swiftly melted away: Karofsky had won, and with a nearly 11-point margin in a state Donald Trump had carried by less than a single percentage point in 2016, it wasn’t even close.
“I am stunned,” Wikler told me when we spoke by phone shortly before midnight last night. The party’s internal polls had forecast “a close election,” he said—nothing like the relative romp Karofsky had won.
Republicans won a narrow victory in a supreme-court race last year, but the scheduling of this year’s election on the same day as the Democratic presidential primary—when the GOP had no competitive nomination fight to boost turnout—gave Karofsky a significant advantage. The parties had poured money into the judicial race, which would determine whether conservatives would maintain a 5–2 advantage on the supreme court or whether liberals would narrow it to 4–3. The outcome could also have a direct impact on the November election in Wisconsin, since the court appeared divided in a case it will likely have to decide, over whether more than 200,000 voters are dropped from the state’s rolls.
Then came the pandemic, which scrambled everything. The Democrats’ panic over holding the election; the closure of all but five polling places in Milwaukee, where the party has its largest concentration of votes; and the GOP’s insistence that the election go forward gave way to assumptions that Kelly would coast to victory.
“There was an array of very powerful factors blowing in opposite directions,” Wikler said.
Were the Democrats crying wolf over a catastrophe that didn’t happen? Were Republicans actually more disadvantaged by the reduction in in-person voting, because it was their base of older voters who couldn’t get to the polls and was unfamiliar with the requirements for voting by mail? Or did the GOP’s refusal to encourage more participation or postpone the election motivate Wisconsinites to turn out and punish it?
“The Republicans’ effort to suppress turned people out to vote against them,” says Dakota Hall, a Milwaukee activist who runs a group devoted to organizing young voters of color. As for older voters who might have been forced to risk their health to cast a ballot, Hall says: “They conspired against their own base.”
Wisconsin Republicans chalked up Kelly’s loss to the fact that the Democratic presidential primary, which was still nominally competitive, drove a one-sided turnout advantage for Democrats. Andrew Hitt, the state Republican Party chairman, rejected the suggestion that voters had punished Republicans for opposing changes to the election. “The lesson to learn is we can have an election in this scenario,” Hitt told me this afternoon, “and we will be even more prepared to encourage early vote, absentee voting and making sure our people are able to vote” in the fall. He said Republicans had “no problem” with early and absentee voting but opposed Democrats’ push to implement an entirely vote-by-mail system in Wisconsin.
Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, told me this morning that GOP leaders in Wisconsin had made “a tactical mistake” in fostering confusion and chaos in the run-up to the election. “They should learn that chaos is bad,” said Potter, who is also a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises, a group trying to protect the November vote from a range of threats. “It’s bad for their voters just as much as the Democratic voters, maybe in Wisconsin more so.”
He noted that the party’s recent opposition to absentee vote by mail—bolstered by denunciations of the format by President Trump—was perplexing given that it has traditionally been an area of strength for Republicans, and particularly for their base of older voters.
Yet even an unexpected victory brought mixed emotions for Democrats. Turnout was higher than it was in 2019, and perhaps higher than feared given the pandemic, but it still fell far short of the turnout for the presidential primary in 2016. Thousands of voters may have been disenfranchised on both sides, and especially in places such as Milwaukee, which is home to 70 percent of Wisconsin’s African American population.
“It was a national disgrace,” Hall told me. He said Milwaukee’s turnout fell off by more than one-third from 2016; while the use of absentee balloting surged across the city and state, it disadvantaged college students and voters of color in particular. “Those numbers are really shocking to me, and I don’t blame people,” Hall said. “They prioritized their health over their vote, which is absolutely fair and valid in this moment.”
Hall did vote—or at least he tried to. He didn’t receive his absentee ballot until the Saturday before the election, six days after he requested it. He doesn’t know if the clerk’s office received it in time. “I’m still wondering if my vote has been cast,” Hall said.
The clear results in the marquee court race brought some relief not to only to Democratic partisans but to voting-rights advocates who feared that a narrow margin would sow distrust in the election system and prompt an even larger court battle over the validity of the outcome. “We’re lucky that democracy didn’t completely fail. It came close to it, unfortunately, in a really serious way,” says Edward Foley, another task-force member, who runs the election-law department at Ohio State University. “But the good news is, it seems the voters, despite all the problems, got the winner that they wanted, and that’s ultimately what matters.”
Foley warns, however, that the results in Wisconsin should not slow momentum in the push for other big swing states, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, to build out their election infrastructure in preparation for a surge of vote-by-mail requests this fall.
“Just because you miss one disaster, because you get lucky, doesn’t mean you’re ready for the next one,” he says. “Don’t let the landslide in Wisconsin make you think everything is okay. Every voter who is disenfranchised is wrongly disenfranchised, whether it’s a landslide or not.”


theatlantic--2020-04-14--How It Feels to Lose Bernie Sanders

How It Feels to Lose Bernie Sanders

Bauer has known for weeks that Sanders likely wouldn ’ t be the Democratic nominee .
But the coronavirus pandemic , in a strange way , had renewed his optimism : Maybe , between all the calls for universal testing and affordable treatment for COVID-19 , more Americans would finally see the need for Medicare for All , he thought .
“ We were hoping that that would translate into a bump in momentum for ” Sanders , Bauer told me , “ where he could use that to his advantage in the [ remaining ] primaries.
” Instead , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Wednesday to utter the words Bauer had been dreading : “ The path toward victory is virtually impossible.
” Bauer said he was “ almost despondent ” after the senator ’ s announcement .
He immediately logged on to Facebook to write several frustrated posts about Biden and the Democratic Party .
In the comments , he argued with people who called him a crybaby .
But mostly , he commiserated with his fellow Medicare for All advocates , who , he told me , share an overwhelming sense of despair .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ : The day Sanders exited the race , Twitter and Facebook were replete with desperate posts from people about their chronic illnesses , their expensive medications , and their inability to afford them .
Sanders “ was our best hope to get these things passed , and now that he ’ s no longer in the race , it ’ s hard to imagine those policies becoming a reality , ” Bauer told me .
“ We lost out on something that was really huge.
” The Democratic Party ’ s presumptive nominee @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to health care ; Biden ’ s agenda is in some ways more liberal than Hillary Clinton ’ s was .
He campaigned on a promise to expand the Affordable Care Act—legislation he pushed for as vice president—and to offer free coverage to low-income Americans who live in states that haven ’ t yet expanded Medicaid .
As a recent concession to progressives , Biden has also proposed lowering the Medicare-eligibility age from 65 to 60 .
But throughout his presidential campaign , Biden has been adamantly opposed to Medicare for All , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trillion price tag .
Last month , he suggested that he might hesitate to sign the bill if it came across his desk .
To Bauer , Biden ’ s plans to improve access aren ’ t nearly good enough .
“ If Joe Biden becomes president , I honestly have very little hope that any of this will change , ” Bauer said , referencing his own situation .
“ He opposes everything that Bernie stands for—and those are the things that I need to survive.
” Former President Barack Obama is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ yesterday Sanders did the same , securing a promise that , as president , Biden would push for a nationwide $ 15 minimum wage .
Health care was discussed only briefly in their live-streamed conversation .
The biggest question of the primary race now is whether Sanders ’ s supporters will make the same endorsement .
Many concerned Democrats have joined together to issue one deafening demand to the senator ’ s fans : Vote for Biden , or Trump wins again .
Some Sanders supporters have already vowed to keep pushing Biden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ determined that the revolution will continue without the Vermont senator at the helm .
But others are still busy grieving a future that , just weeks ago , they thought was attainable .
Bauer says he ’ s voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1990 , including four years ago , when Clinton went up against Donald Trump .
But he doesn ’ t plan on doing so again .
“ Either I will write in Bernie or I will vote for [ the ] Green Party , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the only thing I can justify at this point .
”

On a good day, when he’s feeling sturdy, Andrew Bauer can run simple errands, like going to Walmart to pick up groceries. On a bad day, which is most days, the stabbing pain in his back and neck leaves the 48-year-old lying prostrate in bed, where he composes long, emotion-filled Facebook posts about politics and tweets about Duke basketball. Sometimes the pain is so intense that the left side of his body feels like it’s burning, like he’s being slowly consumed by an invisible flame.
Bauer, who lives in Durham, North Carolina, has suffered from chronic pain for most of his life, but complications from a recent cervical-spine surgery have made that pain immeasurably worse—and left him completely broke. He can barely pay his bills, and he can’t afford the follow-up treatments and surgeries that doctors have recommended. Since 2015, when Bernie Sanders first popularized the idea of Medicare for All, Bauer has daydreamed about the money that a single-payer health-care system might save him, the freedom from premiums and high deductibles, the kind of life he might someday be able to have.
But Sanders, the only remaining presidential candidate advocating for such a system, suspended his presidential campaign last week. Bauer was crushed. Medicare for All “would have immensely improved my life,” he told me last week. “To look forward and realize that those things are probably not gonna happen … it doesn’t really bode well for my future or the future of anybody like me.”
For loyal fans of political candidates, the feeling associated with the end of a campaign is a specific strain of disappointment: It’s the grief over lost potential, the heartbreak of an unfulfilled vision. But for Sanders supporters like Bauer, that disappointment seems to register as something much more profound. These voters are mourning not only his departure from the race but the loss of something much bigger: hope.
If that sounds dramatic, well, that’s because it is. Since Sanders first brought Medicare for All to the fore, many of his voters have trusted—truly believed—that electing him would not just make their lives better, but could help ensure their survival. Of course, even if Sanders had been elected president, it’s not at all likely that Democrats would have been able or even willing to pass such sweeping changes to America’s health-care system. But desperation guides belief, and there’s a point at which the line between hope and reality blurs. The most essential part of Sanders’s candidacy, for so many of his supporters, was the hope.
Read: Where does Bernie Sanders’s movement go from here?
Bauer, who lives with his brother in a double-wide trailer just outside of town, has been out of work since August. For six years he worked as a wafer-fabrication operator at a local electronics company, making $12.82 an hour. But he told me he was fired after his spinal surgery forced him to go over the company’s 180-day time-off limit for disability. Bauer, who has health insurance, has been struggling to settle $30,000 in medical debt, and he’s got credit-card debt now too, from trying to pay it off. His long-term-disability insurance never quite gets him through the month, he said, and he’s hoping to qualify soon for Social Security Disability Insurance. He’s tried to use GoFundMe twice to pay bills, but he hasn’t raised much; he’s tweeted at a philanthropist asking for help; and he’s sold things—DVDs, comic books—to make extra cash. Living in constant pain is terrible, but worse is the financial pressure. “The stress is absolutely just insane,” Bauer said.
Roughly 137 million Americans reported facing medical financial hardship in the previous year, according to a 2019 study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Another, published in Health Affairs, found that one in six Americans have at least one past-due medical bill on their credit report. GoFundMe hosts more than 250,000 fundraising campaigns for medical bills every year. Sanders supporters argue that Medicare for All, which would raise taxes but eliminate all other premiums and out-of-pocket expenses, is the only solution that matches the scale of the problem.
Read: When GoFundMe gets ugly
With Medicare for All, “every surgery or procedure or injection that I need, I could have done for free without having to worry about the cost or having debt,” Bauer said. He’s spent the past few years channeling his financial stress into progressive activism, joining multiple online groups for people struggling with medical bills, and writing about single-payer health care.
Bauer has known for weeks that Sanders likely wouldn’t be the Democratic nominee. But the coronavirus pandemic, in a strange way, had renewed his optimism: Maybe, between all the calls for universal testing and affordable treatment for COVID-19, more Americans would finally see the need for Medicare for All, he thought. “We were hoping that that would translate into a bump in momentum for” Sanders, Bauer told me, “where he could use that to his advantage in the [remaining] primaries.” Instead, his candidate appeared in a live-stream video on Wednesday to utter the words Bauer had been dreading: “The path toward victory is virtually impossible.”
Read: Bernie Sanders gets a rude awakening
Bauer said he was “almost despondent” after the senator’s announcement. He immediately logged on to Facebook to write several frustrated posts about Biden and the Democratic Party. In the comments, he argued with people who called him a crybaby. But mostly, he commiserated with his fellow Medicare for All advocates, who, he told me, share an overwhelming sense of despair. That anguish was clear across social media: The day Sanders exited the race, Twitter and Facebook were replete with desperate posts from people about their chronic illnesses, their expensive medications, and their inability to afford them.
Sanders “was our best hope to get these things passed, and now that he’s no longer in the race, it’s hard to imagine those policies becoming a reality,” Bauer told me. “We lost out on something that was really huge.”
The Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee is hardly a conservative when it comes to health care; Biden’s agenda is in some ways more liberal than Hillary Clinton’s was. He campaigned on a promise to expand the Affordable Care Act—legislation he pushed for as vice president—and to offer free coverage to low-income Americans who live in states that haven’t yet expanded Medicaid. As a recent concession to progressives, Biden has also proposed lowering the Medicare-eligibility age from 65 to 60.
But throughout his presidential campaign, Biden has been adamantly opposed to Medicare for All, citing the proposal’s $30 trillion price tag. Last month, he suggested that he might hesitate to sign the bill if it came across his desk. To Bauer, Biden’s plans to improve access aren’t nearly good enough. “If Joe Biden becomes president, I honestly have very little hope that any of this will change,” Bauer said, referencing his own situation. “He opposes everything that Bernie stands for—and those are the things that I need to survive.”
Former President Barack Obama is expected to endorse Biden today, and yesterday Sanders did the same, securing a promise that, as president, Biden would push for a nationwide $15 minimum wage. Health care was discussed only briefly in their live-streamed conversation. The biggest question of the primary race now is whether Sanders’s supporters will make the same endorsement. Many concerned Democrats have joined together to issue one deafening demand to the senator’s fans: Vote for Biden, or Trump wins again. Some Sanders supporters have already vowed to keep pushing Biden to the left; they’re determined that the revolution will continue without the Vermont senator at the helm.
But others are still busy grieving a future that, just weeks ago, they thought was attainable.
Bauer says he’s voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1990, including four years ago, when Clinton went up against Donald Trump. But he doesn’t plan on doing so again.
“Either I will write in Bernie or I will vote for [the] Green Party,” he said. “It’s the only thing I can justify at this point.”


theatlantic--2020-04-14--The Atlantic Politics Daily: How Democrats Won an Improbable Victory in Wisconsin

What happens as this pandemic spring turns into summer ?
Ed Yong explores the various paths the U.S. can take : As I wrote last month , the only viable endgame is to play whack-a-mole with the coronavirus , suppressing it until a vaccine can be produced .
With luck , that will take 18 to 24 months .
During that time , new outbreaks will probably arise .
Much about that period is unclear , but the dozens of experts whom I have interviewed agree that life as most people knew it can not fully return .
“ I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this isn ’ t about the next couple of weeks , ” said Michael Osterholm , an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota .
“ This is about the next two years.
” The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire .
It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11 .
Such disasters are confined in time and space .
The SARS-CoV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world .
“ Everyone wants to know when this will end , ” said Devi Sridhar , a public-health @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ That ’ s not the right question .
The right question is : How do we continue ?
” New data from 29 states confirm the extent of the racial disparities of those dying of COVID-19 , Ibram X. Kendi writes : Over the past two weeks , each answer led to new questions .
Should states be collecting racial data ?
Yes .
Do those data show racial disparities ?
They do .
And that led to the question Americans have been arguing over since the beginning of the republic : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are black people generally being infected and dying at higher rates than other racial groups ?
This is the question of the hour .
And too many Americans are answering this new question in the old , familiar way .
They are blaming poverty , but refusing to recognize how racism distinguishes black poverty from white poverty , and makes black poverty more vulnerable to a lethal contagion … Without question , African Americans suffer disproportionately from chronic diseases such as hypertension , cardiovascular disease , diabetes , lung disease , obesity , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for them to survive COVID-19 .
But if Cassidy were looking at science , then he ’ d also be asking : Why are African American suffering more from these chronic diseases ?
Why are African Americans more likely to be obese than Latinos and whites ?
Read the full argument and explore the data here .
Before COVID-19 sent families across the U.S. into lockdown , our senior editor Kate Julian began reporting a story for the latest issue of our magazine about children ’ s declining mental health , focusing on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but also weirdly hopeful—and very relevant to this moment .
The kids are not all right , but : The good news is that new forms of treatment for children ’ s anxiety disorders are emerging—and , as we ’ ll see , that treatment can forestall a host of later problems .
Even so , there is a problem with much of the anxiety about children ’ s anxiety , and it brings us closer to the heart of the matter .
Anxiety disorders are well worth preventing , but anxiety itself @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It is a universal and necessary response to stress and uncertainty .
I heard repeatedly from therapists and researchers while reporting this piece that anxiety is uncomfortable but , as with most discomfort , we can learn to tolerate it .
Yet we are doing the opposite : Far too often , we insulate our children from distress and discomfort entirely .
And children who don ’ t learn to cope with distress face a rough path to adulthood .
A growing number of middle- and high-school students appear to be avoiding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some have stopped attending entirely .
As a symptom of deteriorating mental health , experts say , “ school refusal ” is the equivalent of a four-alarm fire , both because it signals profound distress and because it can lead to so-called failure to launch—seen in the rising share of young adults who don ’ t work or attend school and who are dependent on their parents .
You can keep up with The Atlantic ’ s most crucial coronavirus coverage here .
Today ’ s newsletter was written by Kaila Philo , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by Shan Wang , who oversees newsletters .
You can reply directly to this newsletter with questions or comments , or send a note to politicsdaily @ theatlantic.com .
Your support makes our journalism possible .
Subscribe here .

The far more consequential race was the judicial election, and Judge Jill Karofsky’s defeat of incumbent Justice Daniel Kelly gave Democrats an important victory—delayed by nearly a week as a deluge of absentee ballots was counted—in what was essentially a trial run for the November election in the closely divided swing state.
But the bigger mystery was how it had happened at all.
In the days leading up to last Tuesday’s vote, Democrats had done all they could to call off in-person balloting in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, either by switching to an all-mail election or by postponing the vote until June. Republicans had rebuffed them at every turn, insisting that the election go on as scheduled, even if it meant voters would have to risk their health—and violate a statewide stay-at-home directive—to cast a ballot at the few polling places that had enough workers to staff them. (In Milwaukee, the state’s largest city, just five out of 180 polling places were open.) When Democratic Governor Tony Evers issued a last-minute order to postpone the election, Republicans persuaded conservatives on both the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court to block him.


theatlantic--2020-04-13--What Biden Learned the Last Time the World Stopped

Indeed , the story of how a longtime legislator , who had never run anything larger than a Senate committee staff , managed to marshal a government-wide campaign may offer a preview of how a President Biden would approach the coronavirus pandemic , and the global economic contraction it has already spawned .
Paradoxically , though , it ’ s a story that ’ s hard for the presumptive Democratic nominee to share with voters at the moment , because he , like so many Americans , is stuck at home .
“ What I found was you have to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Biden said during a recent CNN town hall , after he was asked what his experience handling the recovery had taught him about the qualities needed in a president in times of crisis .
“ And so it ’ s about management .
It ’ s about day to day to day .
And I give you my word that for the better part of that 18 months , I was literally on the phone at least three to four hours a day with my team , talking about the detailed implementation .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ What do we do ?
Who do we go to ?
Who do we ask for ?
” To the degree that there was criticism of Biden ’ s management of the Recovery Act—and there was some—it mirrored the current critique of the former vice president ’ s pragmatic brand of politics .
Critics on the left faulted him and Obama for not making the stimulus package bigger ( though keeping it below $ 1 trillion was the price of winning necessary Republican votes for its passage in the Senate ) .
Republicans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ priorities and not working harder to win GOP support .
“ The stimulus represented the original sin of the Obama administration to congressional Republicans , ” said Michael Steel , who was then a senior aide to the House Republican leader , John Boehner .
“ It set the tone for the next eight years .
House Republicans would have been pretty cheap dates—and it wouldn ’ t have taken that much to get a fair number of moderates on board—if the White House had reached out more.
” The Democratic viewpoint is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Obama White House , the House GOP ’ s lockstep opposition to the plan—before Obama even made his first trip to Capitol Hill to press for it—was what set the tone for the next eight years .
In this version of the story , Biden ’ s successful lobbying of three Senate Republicans—Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine , and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania—made possible the passage of any program at all .
“ We needed three Republican votes , and he went and he got the three Republican votes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s chief of staff and now a campaign adviser .
“ People say , ‘ It was a different time , and he couldn ’ t do that again.
’ But a lot of people said he couldn ’ t do it back in 2009.
” In January of that year , the month Obama took office , the country lost some 800,000 jobs , as unemployment edged toward 8 percent .
That capped the worst three months of jobs numbers since defense factories ceased operating at the end of World War @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was a mix of tax cuts , tax credits for business , aid to state and local governments , an expansion of food stamps , and a raft of infrastructure programs .

He oversaw the 2009 economic recovery for Barack Obama. If he wins the presidency, his first task will be to perform an encore on an even more daunting scale.
It was by far the largest enterprise Joe Biden had ever led: a nearly $800 billion government-spending program intended to rescue the country from the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. It involved more than 100,000 projects—275 programs within 28 federal agencies. “If we do everything right, there’s still a 30 percent chance we’re going to get it wrong,” Biden himself said at the time.
But in overseeing the 2009 Recovery Act as Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden shepherded an effort now seen as an effective and remarkably fraud-free response to the financial crisis, even if it won little praise or political credit at the time. If Biden has the good—or bad—luck to win the presidency in November, his first task will be to perform an encore on an even more daunting scale.
It wasn’t a glamorous job, involving as it did minding hundreds of minor details and scores of bureaucracies, and some public officials doubtless would have found it boring. But it was the kind of close work that’s required for good management in any crisis, and Biden seemed to take to it with an enthusiasm that those who were there in the trenches with him recall with pride.
“He would be the most battle-tested president to come into office that we’ve ever had in this regard,” said Biden’s longtime economic adviser Jared Bernstein, a progressive expert on income inequality who would doubtless have a role in a Biden administration. “FDR did amazing work on the Great Depression, but he was throwing noodles at the wall. Biden would bring a unique experience to the office, having been the implementer in chief last time.”
Indeed, the story of how a longtime legislator, who had never run anything larger than a Senate committee staff, managed to marshal a government-wide campaign may offer a preview of how a President Biden would approach the coronavirus pandemic, and the global economic contraction it has already spawned. Paradoxically, though, it’s a story that’s hard for the presumptive Democratic nominee to share with voters at the moment, because he, like so many Americans, is stuck at home.
Read: The long arc of Joe Biden
“What I found was you have to manage it every single day,” Biden said during a recent CNN town hall, after he was asked what his experience handling the recovery had taught him about the qualities needed in a president in times of crisis. “And so it’s about management. It’s about day to day to day. And I give you my word that for the better part of that 18 months, I was literally on the phone at least three to four hours a day with my team, talking about the detailed implementation. How do we get the money? What do we do? Who do we go to? Who do we ask for?”
To the degree that there was criticism of Biden’s management of the Recovery Act—and there was some—it mirrored the current critique of the former vice president’s pragmatic brand of politics. Critics on the left faulted him and Obama for not making the stimulus package bigger (though keeping it below $1 trillion was the price of winning necessary Republican votes for its passage in the Senate). Republicans attacked the administration for defaulting to Democratic priorities and not working harder to win GOP support.
“The stimulus represented the original sin of the Obama administration to congressional Republicans,” said Michael Steel, who was then a senior aide to the House Republican leader, John Boehner. “It set the tone for the next eight years. House Republicans would have been pretty cheap dates—and it wouldn’t have taken that much to get a fair number of moderates on board—if the White House had reached out more.”
The Democratic viewpoint is precisely the opposite. For Biden and the Obama White House, the House GOP’s lockstep opposition to the plan—before Obama even made his first trip to Capitol Hill to press for it—was what set the tone for the next eight years. In this version of the story, Biden’s successful lobbying of three Senate Republicans—Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania—made possible the passage of any program at all.
“We needed three Republican votes, and he went and he got the three Republican votes,” recalled Ron Klain, then Biden’s chief of staff and now a campaign adviser. “People say, ‘It was a different time, and he couldn’t do that again.’ But a lot of people said he couldn’t do it back in 2009.”
In January of that year, the month Obama took office, the country lost some 800,000 jobs, as unemployment edged toward 8 percent. That capped the worst three months of jobs numbers since defense factories ceased operating at the end of World War II. The stimulus that Obama proposed was a mix of tax cuts, tax credits for business, aid to state and local governments, an expansion of food stamps, and a raft of infrastructure programs.
In his memoir, Believer, Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod conceded that “to a cynical public, it looked less like ‘Change We Can Believe In’ than ‘Dollars We Can’t Afford,’ which was another way of saying business as usual.” But from the beginning, Obama White House veterans recall, the president told staff that the program should be run as efficiently as possible. Biden drafted a memo outlining how he thought the project should be managed and presented it to Obama over lunch in February 2009. As the author Michael Grunwald recounts in his admiring 2012 history of the Recovery Act, The New New Deal, Obama scanned the memo, flipped it back across the table to Biden, and said, “Great, do it.”
“He wanted me to be the bastard at the family picnic,” Biden would later say, “which, politely, I am.”
Biden made the program a typically personal, “high-touch management” project, because he knew so much, including his own reputation, was riding on it, Klain told me. Although Biden himself had never held a big executive job in his long career in public life, he was known in the Senate for hiring and promoting highly competent staffers, and he relied on the same strategy in this assignment. As Grunwald notes, over the first two years of the administration, Biden convened 22 Cabinet meetings on the recovery program (highly unusual for a vice president, and more than the president had held on all other topics), visited 56 project sites, and hosted 57 conference calls with governors and mayors. He also blocked 260 projects that seemed suspect as political pork or that had been proposed by contractors with sketchy backgrounds, Klain recalled.
Read: The four rules of pandemic economics
“This was not a McKinsey project,” Klain told me, referring to the consulting company known for its empirical analysis and cold-blooded management advice. “This was a Joe Biden project. Very hands-on. It was very personal to him, the way he interacted with people.”
Biden promised state and local officials who had questions about the program that they would get answers within 24 hours, and he rode herd on his staff to make sure they did. He drafted Earl Devaney, the former head of the Secret Service’s fraud division and the ex-inspector general of the Interior Department, to root out suspected waste, and Ed DeSeve, a veteran of the Clinton administration’s Office of Management and Budget, to run the program day to day. One particular challenge, as Grunwald’s book explains, was that tiny bureaucracies within federal agencies were tasked with dispensing huge sums. For example, a Commerce Department unit with a $19 million budget was responsible for distributing $4.5 billion in grants for building broadband connections.
Ray LaHood, a former Republican representative from central Illinois who was Obama’s first transportation secretary, praised the task force that Biden assembled, and commended the way he would run “roughshod over everybody to make sure” the work “was done right.” “We put hundreds and hundreds of people to work building roads, building bridges, building rail,” LaHood continued.
But he conceded that the program won little public or political praise. “Part of the problem was the Republicans didn’t like it,” he said, “and they bad-mouthed it at every turn.”
In hindsight, Klain told me, he has sometimes wondered whether the program was too sprawling and complicated. It was made up of so many scattered projects—many of them advertised by roadside signs—that envisioning the overall effort as a coordinated plan with an identifiable mission was hard for the public. It didn’t have the visibility of, say, the Works Progress Administration’s construction of thousands of public buildings, or the Civilian Conservation Corps’s creation of parks and highways during the Depression. And the concern about preventing fraud sometimes slowed the flow of dollars. “Maybe we would have been better off to just send everybody a check,” Klain said. “I think as fast as it was, it still took a while.”
Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner lamented the recovery’s branding problem in his memoir, Stress Test. “‘Things are getting worse at a much slower rate’ is not a convincing message of hope,” Geithner wrote in a passage about the public’s reluctance to embrace the program as effective. “Neither is, ‘Things would have been much worse if we hadn’t acted.’ It’s hard to inspire the public with counterfactuals.” By the end of the summer of 2009, unemployment still stood at 9.6 percent.
Read: What you need to know about the coronavirus
If he should take office next year, Biden would be forced to multitask on an extreme level, not only grappling with how to restore some degree of normalcy whenever required social distancing ends, but also handling the economic and health aftereffects that are sure to linger long after the immediate crisis abates. Terrell McSweeny, who was Biden’s chief domestic-policy adviser at the time, recalls that after the Recovery Act’s initial passage, Obama had many other pressing issues on his agenda, including his overhaul of the health-insurance system, so he relied on his vice president. This time around, Biden would have to find a Biden of his own. “What Biden was able to do was take on these incredibly wide-ranging investments and set of programs across the board,” McSweeny said, “and keep all of that in process with a relatively small staff coordinating deeply—and using his ability at the top of government to constantly keep the pressure on.”
Perhaps the biggest difference from a decade ago is the sheer scale of the current problem. “I think the idea that we get the all-clear sign from the medical community and the economy is fine at that point is really misguided,” Bernstein said. He cited forecasts that unemployment could be at 15 percent by this fall, more than 8 percent in January, and still well over 6 percent by the fourth quarter of 2021. The Great Recession of 2008 upended the economy, sparked by the housing bubble and resulting turmoil in financial markets. This crisis has a different, more deadly cause and is already proving more far-reaching.
Complicating Biden’s task further is an even more toxic partisan political divide in Washington than existed a decade ago. House Democrats are in a standoff with Senate Republicans over what next steps to take, if any, following the just-passed $2 trillion coronavirus-relief plan.
In 2009, congressional Democrats, who at that time were also led by Nancy Pelosi, paid a serious public-relations price for initially attempting to freight the Recovery Act with unrelated liberal priorities—such as measures for smoking cessation and STD prevention—that had been stymied during the George W. Bush administration. (Those amendments never made it into the final bill.) Pent-up progressive demand for change, on policies including taxes and health care, is likely even more intense today, after three years of Donald Trump’s presidency. And Biden would take office in the face of deep skepticism from many segments of his own party’s left wing.
Still, Biden’s allies insist he’d have the temperament to manage it well. “What I experienced firsthand was that the vice president took to this like a duck to water,” Bernstein said. “I sat with him on dozens of calls to mayors and governors where mayors of small towns couldn’t believe they were talking to the vice president, who was getting into granular detail about precisely what they were going to do.”
Bernstein remembers being at the site of a bridge project in rural Pennsylvania with Biden and a state official, who was talking about what they planned to do. “Biden says, ‘Can I see the plans?’ And the guy goes and pops open his trunk and they look at the plans” together, Bernstein recalled. “We had this whole motorcade, sitting there in the middle of nowhere. It was surreal.”


theatlantic--2020-04-12--How China Deceived the WHO

How China Deceived the WHO

This , we now know , was catastrophically untrue , and in the months since , the global pandemic has put much of the world under an unprecedented lockdown and killed more than 100,000 people .
Read : The pandemic will cleave America in two The U.S. was also slow to recognize the seriousness of this new coronavirus , which caught the entire country unprepared .
President Donald Trump has blamed the catastrophe on any number of different actors , most recently , singling out the WHO .
“ They missed the call , ” Trump said about the body @ @ @ @ @ @ @ They could have called it months earlier.
” Trump may well be looking to deflect blame for his own missed calls , but inherent structural problems at the WHO do make the organization vulnerable to misinformation and political influence , especially at a moment when China has invested considerable resources cultivating influence in international organizations whose value the Trump administration has questioned .
( Trump just in March announced he would nominate someone to fill the U.S. seat on the WHO ’ s Executive Board , which has been vacant since 2018 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ authorities were downplaying the extent of the virus , doctors at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan reportedly observed human-to-human transmission , not least by contracting the disease themselves .
In the most famous example , Dr. Li Wenliang was censured for “ spreading rumors ” after trying to alert other doctors of the new respiratory ailment ; he later died of the virus himself at age 33 .
China now claims him as a martyr .
Asked about Li ’ s case at a press conference , the executive director of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Michael Ryan , said , “ We all mourn the loss of a fellow physician and colleague ” but stopped short of condemning China for accusing him .
“ There is an understandable confusion that occurs at the beginning of an epidemic , ” Ryan added .
“ So we need to be careful to label misunderstanding versus misinformation ; there 's a difference .
People can misunderstand and they can overreact.
” Those lost early weeks also coincided with the Chinese New Year , for which millions of people travel to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s when millions of Wuhan people were misinformed , ” Xiao said .
“ Then they traveled all over China , all over the world.
” The WHO , meanwhile , was getting its information from the same Chinese authorities who were misinforming their own public , and then offering it to the world with its own imprimatur .
On January 20 , a Chinese official confirmed publicly for the first time that the virus could indeed spread among humans , and within days locked down Wuhan .
But by then it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ week for the WHO to declare the spread of the virus a global health emergency—during which time Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus , the WHO ’ s director-general , visited China and praised the country ’ s leadership for “ setting a new standard for outbreak response.
” Another month and a half went by before the WHO called COVID-19 a pandemic , at which point the virus had killed more than 4,000 people , and had infected 118,000 people across nearly every continent .

Back in January, when the pandemic now consuming the world was still gathering force, a Berkeley research scientist named Xiao Qiang was monitoring China’s official statements about a new coronavirus then spreading through Wuhan and noticed something disturbing. Statements made by the World Health Organization, the international body that advises the world on handling health crises, often echoed China’s messages. “Particularly at the beginning, it was shocking when I again and again saw WHO’s [director-general], when he spoke to the press … almost directly quoting what I read on the Chinese government’s statements,” he told me.
The most notorious example came in the form of a single tweet from the WHO account on January 14: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus.” That same day, the Wuhan Health Commission’s public bulletin declared, “We have not found proof for human-to-human transmission.” But by that point even the Chinese government was offering caveats not included in the WHO tweet. “The possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be excluded,” the bulletin said, “but the risk of sustained transmission is low.”
This, we now know, was catastrophically untrue, and in the months since, the global pandemic has put much of the world under an unprecedented lockdown and killed more than 100,000 people.
Read: The pandemic will cleave America in two
The U.S. was also slow to recognize the seriousness of this new coronavirus, which caught the entire country unprepared. President Donald Trump has blamed the catastrophe on any number of different actors, most recently, singling out the WHO. “They missed the call,” Trump said about the body at a briefing this week. “They could have called it months earlier.”
Trump may well be looking to deflect blame for his own missed calls, but inherent structural problems at the WHO do make the organization vulnerable to misinformation and political influence, especially at a moment when China has invested considerable resources cultivating influence in international organizations whose value the Trump administration has questioned. (Trump just in March announced he would nominate someone to fill the U.S. seat on the WHO’s Executive Board, which has been vacant since 2018.)
Even in January, when Chinese authorities were downplaying the extent of the virus, doctors at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan reportedly observed human-to-human transmission, not least by contracting the disease themselves. In the most famous example, Dr. Li Wenliang was censured for “spreading rumors” after trying to alert other doctors of the new respiratory ailment; he later died of the virus himself at age 33. China now claims him as a martyr. Asked about Li’s case at a press conference, the executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, Michael Ryan, said, “We all mourn the loss of a fellow physician and colleague” but stopped short of condemning China for accusing him. “There is an understandable confusion that occurs at the beginning of an epidemic,” Ryan added. “So we need to be careful to label misunderstanding versus misinformation; there's a difference. People can misunderstand and they can overreact.”
Those lost early weeks also coincided with the Chinese New Year, for which millions of people travel to visit family and friends. “That’s when millions of Wuhan people were misinformed,” Xiao said. “Then they traveled all over China, all over the world.”
Read: China hawks are calling the coronavirus a ‘wake-up call’
The WHO, meanwhile, was getting its information from the same Chinese authorities who were misinforming their own public, and then offering it to the world with its own imprimatur. On January 20, a Chinese official confirmed publicly for the first time that the virus could indeed spread among humans, and within days locked down Wuhan. But by then it was too late.
It took another week for the WHO to declare the spread of the virus a global health emergency—during which time Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, visited China and praised the country’s leadership for “setting a new standard for outbreak response.” Another month and a half went by before the WHO called COVID-19 a pandemic, at which point the virus had killed more than 4,000 people, and had infected 118,000 people across nearly every continent.
The organization’s detractors are now seizing on these missteps and delays to condemn the WHO (for which the U.S. is the largest donor), call for cutting the organization’s funding, or demand Tedros’s resignation. At the White House, Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro has been a sharp critic.
“Even as the WHO under Tedros refused to brand the outbreak as a pandemic for precious weeks and WHO officials repeatedly praised the [Chinese Communist Party] for what we now know was China’s coordinated effort to hide the dangers of the Wuhan virus from the world, the virus spread like wildfire, in no small part because thousands of Chinese citizens continued to travel around the world,” Navarro wrote to me in an email. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently said the administration was “reevaluating our funding with respect to the World Health Organization;” Trump has said an announcement on the matter will come next week. On the Hill, Republican Senators Martha McSally of Arizona and Rick Scott of Florida are both seeking an investigation of the WHO’s performance in the crisis and whether China somehow manipulated the organization. “Anybody who’s clear-eyed about it understands that Communist China has been covering up the realities of the coronavirus from Day 1,” McSally, who has called for Tedros to resign, told me. “We don’t expect the WHO to parrot that kind of propaganda.” Scott told me he wants to know whether the WHO followed their own procedures for handling a pandemic and why the organization hasn’t been forceful in condemning China’s missteps.
Asked for comment, a representative from the WHO pointed to a press conference Tedros gave this week. “Please quarantine politicizing COVID,” Tedros said then. “We will have many body bags in front of us if we don’t behave … The United States and China should come together and fight this dangerous enemy.” Even in early January, when it was still describing the disease as a mysterious new pneumonia, the WHO was publishing regular guidance for countries and health-care workers on how to mitigate its spread. And the organization says it has now shipped millions of pieces of protective gear to 75 countries, sent tests to more than 126, and offered training materials for health-care workers.
In any case, it’s not the WHO’s fault if China obscured the problem early on, says Charles Clift, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House’s Center for Universal Health who worked at the WHO from 2004 to 2006. “We’d like more transparency, that’s true, but if countries find reasons to not be transparent, it’s difficult to know what we can do about it.” The organization’s major structural weakness is that it relies on information from its member countries—and the WHO team that visited China in February to evaluate the response did so jointly with China’s representatives. The resulting report did not mention delays in information-sharing, but did say that “China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic.” The mission came back telling reporters they were largely satisfied with the information China was giving them.
Read: The problem with China’s victory lap
If this is something short of complicity in a Chinese cover-up—which is what former National Security Adviser John Bolton has alleged of the WHO—it does point to a big vulnerability: The group’s membership includes transparent democracies and authoritarian states and systems in between, which means the information the WHO puts out is only as good as what it’s getting from the likes of Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. North Korea, for instance, has reported absolutely no coronavirus cases, and the WHO isn’t really in a position to say otherwise.
The structure also gives WHO leaders like Tedros an incentive not to anger member states, and this is as true of China as it is of countries with significantly less financial clout. During the Ebola epidemic in 2014, Clift said, WHO took months to declare a public-health emergency. “That’s three very small West African countries, and WHO didn’t want to upset them,” Clift said. “WHO didn’t cover itself in glory in that one.” The response this time has been much faster and better, in Clift’s observation. “It doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be examined afterwards to see what they could have done better,” he said. “And one should really investigate the origins of what happened in China.”
The WHO has also shown, however, that it can walk the line between the need for cooperation and information-sharing from member states and the need to hold them accountable for mistakes. During the SARS outbreak in 2003, a WHO spokesman criticized China for its lack of transparency and preparation, which had allowed the virus to spread unchecked. China even later admitted to mistakes in handling the outbreak.
No such critique has been forthcoming this time. One study found that China could have limited its own infections by up to 95 percent had the government acted in that early period when doctors were first raising the alarm and the Chinese Communist Party was still denying the extent of the problem. “The WHO at that time didn’t do their job,” Xiao said. “The opposite: They actually compounded Chinese authorities’ misinformation for a few weeks. That is, to me, unforgivable.”