vox--2020-04-23--Scientists explain why it’s unlikely the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab

One of the great mysteries of the Covid-19 pandemic is how , exactly , the SARS-CoV-2 virus made the leap from wildlife into humans .
Scientists who ’ ve analyzed the virus ’ s genome believe it came from a bat , likely in China .
But Chinese epidemiologists have revealed little about how or where the first patients were infected .
One focus has been a wet market in Wuhan , where live wildlife was sold for food , because 66 percent of the first cluster of 41 cases in December 2019 had exposure to this market .
Yet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the virus could have been circulating earlier , in November .
Which means there are many other possible places it could have jumped from a bat , or from an intermediary species , to humans .
Finding the index case , or “ patient zero , ” for an infectious disease that ’ s just emerged can take months or years , if the person can even be found at all .
So it ’ s not unusual we still don ’ t have one , especially for a disease with so much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seeped a potent , speculative , and confusing discussion about the virus ’ s origin , particularly in the US , where the GOP is intensifying its efforts to blame China for the pandemic .
In March , I offered explanations from virus experts for why they dismiss two of the theories that have surfaced about the coronavirus origin : that Chinese scientists bioengineered it in a lab and/or deployed it as a bioweapon .
In this piece , I ’ ll address the theory du jour : that a Chinese researcher was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ high-containment Wuhan laboratory and accidentally spread it , after which China attempted to cover it up .
This hypothesis has been circulating in US , UK , and Chinese media since February , with fresh reporting and speculation this month in the Daily Mail , Vanity Fair , Fox News , and the Washington Post .
A Tuesday op-ed drawing solely from circumstantial evidence by chief “ labber ” Sen. Tom Cotton ( R-AR ) in the Wall Street Journal raised the question anew .
Riding the wave of these reports , President @ @ @ @ @ @ @ potential avenue for blaming China ; on April 15 , he said his government was looking into whether the virus came from the Wuhan lab .
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also said Beijing “ needs to come clean ” on what it knows about the virus ’ s origin .
Trump and the GOP ’ s motivation to establish new ways to blame China for the pandemic is clear : The president ’ s response to the pandemic has been abominable , and he faces an election in six months , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and an economy heading toward recession .
The lab-escape theory joins a variety of arguments he and his supporters are using — including scapegoating the World Health Organization and former President Barack Obama — to divert attention from his failures .
The Wuhan lab may also be the most tantalizing of the diversions , not just for Trump ’ s supporters but also for some political journalists and China hawks .
What if the catastrophe is a result not of nature but of China ’ s incompetence with handling viruses and habit for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ may seem plausible for a number of reasons : the Chinese government ’ s poor record of transparency ; the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology , a research center with facilities in the same city where the virus first appeared , was studying dangerous pathogens , including bat coronaviruses ; and US officials ’ concerns about the lab ’ s safety standards in 2018 , per the Washington Post .
Yet five scientists I interviewed , some of whom have worked extensively in China with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t logically be pinned on an accident at that lab .
( Researchers at the institute didn ’ t respond to my request for comment . )
The scientists I did speak to all acknowledge it ’ s not possible to definitively rule out the lab-escape theory .
“ The trouble with hypotheses is that they are not disprovable .
You can not prove a negative , ” said Peter Daszak , president of EcoHealth Alliance and a disease ecologist who has studied emerging infectious diseases with colleagues in China .
Yet he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ironic and preposterous.
” The scientists I spoke to also noted that all countries with high-level containment facilities , including China and the US , must be vigilant to prevent accidental leaks of dangerous diseases from labs .
“ I think we all are concerned about the increasing presence of high-consequence pathogens in laboratories and the issue of inadequate biosecurity , ” said Dennis Carroll , the former director of USAID ’ s emerging threats division who helped design Predict , a surveillance program for dangerous animal viruses that the Trump administration chose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ We ’ ve seen examples of inadvertent release in the past and I ’ m sure we will see it in the future .
So it ’ s a very major concern that we need to pay attention to.
” But scientists told me that based on what they know about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the likelihood of a natural spillover event , they didn ’ t see lab escape as probable .
And one expert added that it could be dangerous to get too preoccupied with this theory when the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from wildlife is so high .
Since politics will continue to propel this theory into the public sphere , let ’ s walk through six reasons a lab leak is unlikely .
1 ) The probability of the virus jumping from animals to humans outside the lab is much higher than the virus infecting humans inside the lab Daszak is a scientist who has spent the past 15 years collaborating with scientists in China and other emerging disease hot spots around the world to find out where dangerous viruses lurking in wildlife — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and Ebola — are , how they get into people , and how to stop people from spreading them and spiraling into pandemics .
He says he ’ s confident SARS-CoV-2 , the new coronavirus , originated in bats and jumped into people somewhere , likely in China , because he and his colleagues have established that viruses like it are out there and there are so many opportunities for this to happen .
“ If you do the math on this , it ’ s very straightforward .
... We have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Asia and about 10 percent of bats in some colonies have viruses at any one time .
So that ’ s hundreds of thousands of bats every night with viruses , ” Daszak says .
“ We also find tens of thousands of people in the wildlife trade , hunting and killing wildlife in China and Southeast Asia , and millions of people living in rural populations in Southeast Asia near bat caves.
” Next , he says , consider the data he ’ s collected on people near bat caves getting exposed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and surveyed a population in Yunnan , China — we ’ d been to bat caves and found viruses that we thought could be high risk .
So we sample people nearby , and 3 percent had antibodies to those viruses , ” he says .
“ So between the last two and three years , those people were exposed to bat coronaviruses .
If you extrapolate that population across the whole of Southeast Asia , it ’ s 1 million to 7 million people a year getting infected by bat viruses.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what we know about the labs : “ If you look at the labs in Southeast Asia that have any coronaviruses in culture , there are probably two or three and they ’ re in high security .
The Wuhan Institute of Virology does have a small number of bat coronaviruses in culture .
But they ’ re not [ the new coronavirus ] , SARS-CoV-2 .
There are probably half a dozen people that do work in those labs .
So let ’ s compare 1 million to 7 million people a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s just not logical.
” But he told me he gets why people in the US , who aren ’ t regularly exposed to bats , have a hard time understanding how great the risk is of humans getting infected with novel coronaviruses circulating in bats .
“ I understand — it ’ s a weird thing .
Bats live out there , we don ’ t see them that often , we don ’ t realize how common , how abundant , how diverse they are , ” he says @ @ @ @ @ @ @ carry their own viruses , and there ’ s just this really big interface between bats and people , every night , every day .
People live in caves , people shelter from the rain in caves , people hunt bats.
” Angela Rasmussen , a virologist at Columbia University , also sees the lab-leak theory as very unlikely .
“ This virus came from bats under unknown circumstances , ” she told me .
“ While I can not rule out the lab-accident theory , there are so many other possibilities for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could have been someone collecting bat guano for fertilizer , somebody cleaning out a barn , somebody exploring a cave .
It could be any situation like that of someone in contact with animals who then spread it to other humans .
There are so many other options than a lab leak.
” 2 ) Yes , the Wuhan lab studied bat coronaviruses and SARS-related viruses .
But there ’ s no evidence it discovered or was working on the new virus .
One of the big arguments “ labber ” theorists make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Institute of Virology of accidentally leaking the virus : Researchers there were already studying bat coronaviruses .
This is true ; they published studies on the first SARS coronavirus that infected humans in 2003 and other bat coronaviruses , noting presciently in one paper , “ it is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats , and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China.
” In 2020 , they reported on a virus called RaTG13 that they ’ d discovered in a cave @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
This virus shares 96 percent of its genome with the new coronavirus , which makes it the new virus ’ s closest known relative .
Some have speculated that perhaps the new coronavirus is derived from RaTG13 .
Yet virologists say it ’ s very unlikely : A 4 percent difference in genome is actually huge in evolutionary terms .
“ The level of genome sequence divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 is equivalent to an average of 50 years ( and at least 20 years ) of evolutionary change , ” said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ University of Sydney who has published six academic papers this year on the genome and origin of SARS-CoV-2 , in a statement .
“ Hence , SARS-CoV-2 was not derived from RaTG13.
” Another questionable assumption is that the mere existence of a related virus in the lab signals the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was also there .
Daszak , who collaborates with the Wuhan bat coronavirus researchers and has co-authored papers with them , says this is false .
He and the researchers there were indeed looking for viruses related to the first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in the hope of finding ones that might be a threat to humans .
He confirmed that they had collected samples of bat feces that contained viruses and brought them back to the Wuhan lab .
However , he said , the new coronavirus is only 80 percent similar to SARS-1 — again , a very big difference .
“ No one [ in Wuhan ] cultured viruses from those samples that were 20 percent different , i.e .
no one had SARS-CoV-2 in culture .
All of the hypotheses [ of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it in culture or bats in a lab .
No one ’ s got bats in a lab , it ’ s absolutely unnecessary and very difficult to do.
” ( Cell culture is a way of storing viruses in vitro in a lab so they can be studied over long periods of time . )
3 ) Scientists like to gossip about new viruses .
There was no chatter before the outbreak about the virus that causes Covid-19 .
Carroll , the former director of USAID ’ s emerging threats division who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disease scientists in China , agrees that there ’ s no evidence the Chinese researchers were working with a novel pathogen .
His reasoning ?
He would have heard about it .
“ The reason I ’ m not putting a lot of weight on [ the lab-escape theory ] is there was no chatter prior to the emergence of this virus to a discovery that would have ended up bringing the virus into a lab , ” he says .
“ And if nothing else , the scientific community tends to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ novel , potentially dangerous virus which has been identified , circulating in nature , and it ’ s brought into a laboratory , there is chatter about that .
And when you look back retrospectively , there ’ s no chatter whatsoever about the discovery of a new virus.
” If nothing else , the scientific community tends to be very gossipy Carroll is confident he would have heard about it because , in his current role as head of the Global Virome Project , he has his ear to the ground and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I asked if the Chinese researchers would have kept it secret , he replied , “ People will come back and say China is China , they would have suppressed that information .
But Chinese scientists , I think , are just as gregarious as everyone else.
” Rasmussen , for her part , also thinks there ’ s no suggestion of a cover-up .
“ I haven ’ t seen evidence of a grand conspiracy to cover up that there was a lab leak of this virus , ” she said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the evidence and says “ the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural ” origin As the lab-escape theory has gotten more attention in the media , we ’ ve learned that US military and intelligence officials have also been reviewing the possibility .
On April 14 , we got a window into what those ongoing investigations have revealed so far about whether the virus leaked from a lab or jumped to people outside a lab , in nature .
“ There ’ s a lot of rumor and speculation in a wide @ @ @ @ @ @ @ etc , ” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told reporters at the Pentagon .
“ It should be no surprise to you that we ’ ve taken a keen interest in that , and we ’ ve had a lot of intelligence look at that .
And I would just say at this point , it ’ s inconclusive , although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural [ origin ] .
But we don ’ t know for certain.
” Brig .
Gen. Paul Friedrichs , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said “ there is nothing to ” the idea that the virus originated in a laboratory as a bioweapon experiment .
What ’ s more , as the New York Times reported in its sweeping April 11 review of the administration ’ s failed response , intelligence officials couldn ’ t find evidence for the lab theory after Matthew Pottinger , the deputy national security adviser who was one of the earliest advocates for Trump to refer to Covid-19 as the “ Wuhan Virus , ” pushed them to look for it : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ investigation into the theory is ongoing , so it ’ s possible it will turn up new information .
But so far , officials have looked into it , and they ’ ve said the natural origin is more likely .
There ’ s no question the Chinese government and ruling party made grave errors in managing the outbreak from the outset that contributed to its spread around the world .
And according to Nature , the government is putting in place new rules in reviewing research on the virus origin .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it to my colleague Alex Ward , “ We don ’ t know the true extent of the Chinese government ’ s complicity in the spread of the virus , and we may never have a full picture due to their obfuscation and control of information .
We do know that they lied to their own people and the world about the details and spread of the virus , and today we face a pandemic that has left no country untouched.
” But the scientists I interviewed say that we shouldn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Chinese scientists who work at the lab with the transgressions of their government .
We also have the word of one of the top virologists at the Wuhan lab , documented in news articles , that she too wondered if the virus could have originated in her lab and then took steps to verify it didn ’ t match any of the viruses they had in culture .
In this excellent article by Jane Qiu in Scientific American , we learned that the team at the Wuhan lab led by Shi Zhengli , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ woman ” for her 16 years of work collecting samples of bat viruses in caves , sequenced the genome of the new virus in early January and published it on January 23 .
Yuan Zhiming , vice director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology , also recently spoke up on Chinese state broadcaster CGTN .
“ As people who carry out viral study , we clearly know what kind of research is going on in the institute and how the institute manages viruses and samples .
As we said early on , there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us , ” he said , according to NBC News .
I asked Jim LeDuc , head of the Galveston National Laboratory , a level-4 biosafety lab in Texas , for his thoughts on Yuan ’ s statement .
“ I like to think that we can take Zhiming Yuan at his word , but he works in a very different culture with pressures we may not fully appreciate , ” he said .
In other words , we don ’ t know what kind of pressures he might be under from his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ LeDuc says the hypothesis that the animal market played a role in the virus jumping to humans also remains strong .
“ The linkage back to the market is pretty realistic , and consistent with what we saw with SARS , ” said LeDuc .
“ It ’ s a perfectly plausible and logical explanation : The virus exists in nature and , jumping hosts , finds that it like humans just fine , thank you.
“ 6 ) State Department officials worried about safety issues at the Wuhan lab in 2018 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ t prove its scientists were incompetent .
In an April 14 piece , Josh Rogin , a global opinions columnist for the Washington Post , reported that in January 2018 , the US Embassy in Beijing dispatched science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology who later sent back cables that warned of “ safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help.
” Rogin went on to cite an anonymous senior administration official ’ s belief that “ the cables provide one more piece of evidence to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.
” The article sparked a rich discussion on Twitter , with Rasmussen of Columbia pointing out , “ The bottom line is that those vague diplomatic cables do not provide any specific information suggesting that # SARSCoV2 emerged from incompetence or poor biosafety protocols or anything else.
” In a follow-up conversation with me , she reiterated : “ This line that they ’ re incompetent , it doesn ’ t hold water with me.
” Other scientists who have worked with the Wuhan Institute @ @ @ @ @ @ @ standards and practices in the face of the theory it leaked the virus .
“ I have worked in this exact laboratory at various times for the past 2 years , ” wrote Danielle Anderson , scientific director of the Duke-NUS Medical School ABSL3 Laboratory , in a March 2 post on Health Feedback , a site where scientists review the veracity of news reports .
“ I can personally attest to the strict control and containment measures implemented while working there .
The staff at WIV are incredibly competent , hardworking , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ records.
” Gerald Keusch , a professor of medicine and international health and associate director of Boston University ’ s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories , also doubts the lab would have been prone to accidents .
“ The Wuhan lab is ( as far as I know because I have never visited ) state of the art in terms of safety and security systems and protocols , and because [ the Galveston National Laboratory in the US ] helped to train many of them and has collaborations I would bet they are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of an accident remote , ” he said .
“ Is it possible ?
Yes .
Is it likely ?
In my opinion , no.
” We may never find out exactly when this virus made the leap into humans .
But focusing too much on the shoddy lab-leak theory could ultimately be dangerous .
Since there ’ s no robust evidence in support of the lab-leak theory , Daszak says he ’ s worried that it could become a conspiratorial distraction with serious consequences .
“ There is a group of people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this is a natural , unfortunate incident , ” he said .
“ And the real bad part of that is that if we don ’ t believe that we won ’ t try and stop other viruses in wildlife .
Instead , we will focus on labs and close them down when they ’ re the ones trying to develop vaccines to cure us right now .
I mean , how ironic could we go ?
” Carroll says the lab-leak theory , even if there isn ’ t evidence to support @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lab accidents can happen and that biosecurity needs attention in country studying dangerous pathogens .
But he ’ s also much more concerned with preventing the next pandemic .
Pandemics , says Carroll , do not have to happen .
“ They are a consequence of the way we live .
You can pick [ viruses ] up earlier if you ’ re really including in your surveillance those places where animals and people are having high-risk interaction , those hot spots.
” If you have that surveillance , “ you would never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
You would never get a repeat of an uncontrolled , unrecognized event.
” Which means it ’ s time for the whole world to invest in studying the viruses in the bat caves and beyond , and building up the systems to stop them from spreading in humans , so this doesn ’ t happen again .
Because otherwise , it will .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
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Editor’s note, May 24, 2021: Since this piece was originally published in April 2020, scientific consensus has shifted. Now some experts say the “lab leak” theory warrants an investigation, along with the natural origin theory, and information in this article may be out of date. For our most up-to-date coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, visit Vox’s coronavirus hub.
One of the great mysteries of the Covid-19 pandemic is how, exactly, the SARS-CoV-2 virus made the leap from wildlife into humans. Scientists who’ve analyzed the virus’s genome believe it came from a bat, likely in China. But Chinese epidemiologists have revealed little about how or where the first patients were infected.
One focus has been a wet market in Wuhan, where live wildlife was sold for food, because 66 percent of the first cluster of 41 cases in December 2019 had exposure to this market. Yet there is also genomic evidence and reports the virus could have been circulating earlier, in November. Which means there are many other possible places it could have jumped from a bat, or an intermediary species, to humans.
Finding the index case, or “patient zero,” for an infectious disease that’s just emerged can take months or years, if the person can even be found at all. So it’s not unusual we still don’t have one, especially for a disease with so much asymptomatic transmission.
Into the vacuum has seeped a potent, speculative, and confusing discussion about the virus’s origin, particularly in the US, where the GOP is intensifying its efforts to blame China for the pandemic.
In March, I offered explanations from virus experts for why they dismiss two of the theories that have surfaced about the coronavirus origin: that Chinese scientists bioengineered it in a lab and/or deployed it as a bioweapon.
In this piece, I’ll address the theory du jour: that a Chinese researcher was infected with the new virus inside a high-containment Wuhan laboratory and accidentally spread it, after which China attempted to cover it up.
This hypothesis has been circulating in US, UK, and Chinese media since February, with fresh reporting and speculation this month in the Daily Mail, Vanity Fair, Fox News, and the Washington Post. A Tuesday op-ed drawing solely from circumstantial evidence by chief “labber” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) in the Wall Street Journal raised the question anew.
Riding the wave of these reports, President Donald Trump is also now using this potential avenue for blaming China; on April 15, he said his government was looking into whether the virus came from the Wuhan lab. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also said Beijing “needs to come clean” on what it knows about the virus’s origin.
Trump and the GOP’s motivation to establish new ways to blame China for the pandemic is clear: The president’s response to the pandemic has been abominable, and he faces an election in six months, with more than 22 million people unemployed and an economy heading toward recession. The lab-escape theory joins a variety of arguments he and his supporters are using — including scapegoating the World Health Organization and former President Barack Obama — to divert attention from his failures.
The Wuhan lab may also be the most tantalizing of the diversions, not just for Trump’s supporters but also for some political journalists and China hawks. What if the catastrophe is a result not of nature but of China’s incompetence with handling viruses and habit for suppressing information?
Such a spy-novel-worthy plot may seem plausible for a number of reasons: the Chinese government’s poor record of transparency; the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research center with facilities in the same city where the virus first appeared, was studying dangerous pathogens, including bat coronaviruses; and US officials’ concerns about the lab’s safety standards in 2018, per the Washington Post.
Yet five scientists I interviewed, some of whom have worked extensively in China with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, say the pandemic can’t logically be pinned on an accident at that lab. (Researchers at the institute didn’t respond to my request for comment.)
The scientists I did speak to all acknowledge it’s not possible to definitively rule out the lab-escape theory. “The trouble with hypotheses is that they are not disprovable. You cannot prove a negative,” said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a disease ecologist who has studied emerging infectious diseases with colleagues in China. Yet he also sees the lab-escape theory as “ironic and preposterous.”
The scientists I spoke to also noted that all countries with high-level containment facilities, including China and the US, must be vigilant to prevent accidental leaks of dangerous diseases from labs. “I think we all are concerned about the increasing presence of high-consequence pathogens in laboratories and the issue of inadequate biosecurity,” said Dennis Carroll, the former director of USAID’s emerging threats division who helped design Predict, a surveillance program for dangerous animal viruses that the Trump administration chose to shut down in October. “We’ve seen examples of inadvertent release in the past and I’m sure we will see it in the future. So it’s a very major concern that we need to pay attention to.”
But scientists told me that based on what they know about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the likelihood of a natural spillover event, they didn’t see lab escape as probable. And one expert added that it could be dangerous to get too preoccupied with this theory when the threat of another disease with pandemic potential from wildlife is so high.
Since politics will continue to propel this theory into the public sphere, let’s walk through six reasons a lab leak is unlikely.
1) The probability of the virus jumping from animals to humans outside the lab is much higher than the virus infecting humans inside the lab
Daszak is a scientist who has spent the past 15 years collaborating with scientists in China and other emerging disease hot spots around the world to find out where dangerous viruses lurking in wildlife — like the first SARS virus, MERS, and Ebola — are, how they get into people, and how to stop people from spreading them and spiraling into pandemics.
He says he’s confident SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus, originated in bats and jumped into people somewhere, likely in China, because he and his colleagues have established that viruses like it are out there and there are so many opportunities for this to happen.
“If you do the math on this, it’s very straightforward. ... We have hundreds of millions of bats in Southeast Asia and about 10 percent of bats in some colonies have viruses at any one time. So that’s hundreds of thousands of bats every night with viruses,” Daszak says. “We also find tens of thousands of people in the wildlife trade, hunting and killing wildlife in China and Southeast Asia, and millions of people living in rural populations in Southeast Asia near bat caves.”
Next, he says, consider the data he’s collected on people near bat caves getting exposed to viruses: “We went out and surveyed a population in Yunnan, China — we’d been to bat caves and found viruses that we thought could be high risk. So we sample people nearby, and 3 percent had antibodies to those viruses,” he says. “So between the last two and three years, those people were exposed to bat coronaviruses. If you extrapolate that population across the whole of Southeast Asia, it’s 1 million to 7 million people a year getting infected by bat viruses.”
Compare that, he says, to what we know about the labs: “If you look at the labs in Southeast Asia that have any coronaviruses in culture, there are probably two or three and they’re in high security. The Wuhan Institute of Virology does have a small number of bat coronaviruses in culture. But they’re not [the new coronavirus], SARS-CoV-2. There are probably half a dozen people that do work in those labs. So let’s compare 1 million to 7 million people a year to half a dozen people; it’s just not logical.”
But he told me he gets why people in the US, who aren’t regularly exposed to bats, have a hard time understanding how great the risk is of humans getting infected with novel coronaviruses circulating in bats.
“I understand — it’s a weird thing. Bats live out there, we don’t see them that often, we don’t realize how common, how abundant, how diverse they are,” he says. “In Southeast Asia, they carry their own viruses, and there’s just this really big interface between bats and people, every night, every day. People live in caves, people shelter from the rain in caves, people hunt bats.”
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, also sees the lab-leak theory as very unlikely. “This virus came from bats under unknown circumstances,” she told me. “While I cannot rule out the lab-accident theory, there are so many other possibilities for how it could have happened. It could have been someone collecting bat guano for fertilizer, somebody cleaning out a barn, somebody exploring a cave. It could be any situation like that of someone in contact with animals who then spread it to other humans. There are so many other options than a lab leak.”
2) Yes, the Wuhan lab studied bat coronaviruses and SARS-related viruses. But there’s no evidence it discovered or was working on the new virus.
One of the big arguments “labber” theorists make for why we should suspect the Wuhan Institute of Virology of accidentally leaking the virus: Researchers there were already studying bat coronaviruses.
This is true; they published studies on the first SARS coronavirus that infected humans in 2003 and other bat coronaviruses, noting presciently in one paper, “it is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China.”
In 2020, they reported on a virus called RaTG13 that they’d discovered in a cave in Yunnan, China, in 2013. This virus shares 96 percent of its genome with the new coronavirus, which makes it the new virus’s closest known relative.
Some have speculated that perhaps the new coronavirus is derived from RaTG13. Yet virologists say it’s very unlikely: A 4 percent difference in genome is actually huge in evolutionary terms.
“The level of genome sequence divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 is equivalent to an average of 50 years (and at least 20 years) of evolutionary change,” said Edward Holmes, a professor at the University of Sydney who has published six academic papers this year on the genome and origin of SARS-CoV-2, in a statement. “Hence, SARS-CoV-2 was not derived from RaTG13.”
Another questionable assumption is that the mere existence of a related virus in the lab signals the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was also there.
Daszak, who collaborates with the Wuhan bat coronavirus researchers and has co-authored papers with them, says this is false. He and the researchers there were indeed looking for viruses related to the first SARS virus, also known as SARS-1, in the hope of finding ones that might be a threat to humans. He confirmed that they had collected samples of bat feces that contained viruses and brought them back to the Wuhan lab.
However, he said, the new coronavirus is only 80 percent similar to SARS-1 — again, a very big difference. “No one [in Wuhan] cultured viruses from those samples that were 20 percent different, i.e., no one had SARS-CoV-2 in culture. All of the hypotheses [of lab release] depend on them having it in culture or bats in a lab. No one’s got bats in a lab, it’s absolutely unnecessary and very difficult to do.” (Cell culture is a way of storing viruses in vitro in a lab so they can be studied over long periods.)
3) Scientists like to gossip about new viruses. There was no chatter before the outbreak about the virus that causes Covid-19.
Carroll, the former director of USAID’s emerging threats division who also spent years working with emerging infectious disease scientists in China, agrees that there’s no evidence the Chinese researchers were working with a novel pathogen. His reasoning? He would have heard about it.
“The reason I’m not putting a lot of weight on [the lab-escape theory] is there was no chatter prior to the emergence of this virus to a discovery that would have ended up bringing the virus into a lab,” he says. “And if nothing else, the scientific community tends to be very gossipy. If there is a novel, potentially dangerous virus which has been identified, circulating in nature, and it’s brought into a laboratory, there is chatter about that. And when you look back retrospectively, there’s no chatter whatsoever about the discovery of a new virus.”
“If nothing else, the scientific community tends to be very gossipy”
Carroll is confident he would have heard about it because, in his current role as head of the Global Virome Project, he has his ear to the ground and remains active in the community.
When I asked if the Chinese researchers would have kept it secret, he replied, “People will come back and say China is China, they would have suppressed that information. But Chinese scientists, I think, are just as gregarious as everyone else.”
Rasmussen, for her part, also thinks there’s no suggestion of a cover-up. “I haven’t seen evidence of a grand conspiracy to cover up that there was a lab leak of this virus,” she said.
4) The US military chief reviewed the evidence and says “the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural” origin
As the lab-escape theory has gotten more attention in the media, we’ve learned that US military and intelligence officials have also been reviewing the possibility.
On April 14, we got a window into what those ongoing investigations have revealed so far about whether the virus leaked from a lab or jumped to people outside a lab, in nature.
“There’s a lot of rumor and speculation in a wide variety of media, blog sites, etc,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told reporters at the Pentagon. “It should be no surprise to you that we’ve taken a keen interest in that, and we’ve had a lot of intelligence look at that. And I would just say at this point, it’s inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural [origin]. But we don’t know for certain.”
Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, has also said “there is nothing to” the idea that the virus originated in a laboratory as a bioweapon experiment.
What’s more, as the New York Times reported in its sweeping April 11 review of the administration’s failed coronavirus response, intelligence officials couldn’t find evidence for the lab theory after Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser who was one of the earliest advocates for Trump to refer to Covid-19 as the “Wuhan virus,” pushed them to look for it:
With his skeptical — some might even say conspiratorial — view of China’s ruling Communist Party, Mr. Pottinger initially suspected that President Xi Jinping’s government was keeping a dark secret: that the virus may have originated in one of the laboratories in Wuhan studying deadly pathogens. In his view, it might have even been a deadly accident unleashed on an unsuspecting Chinese population. During meetings and telephone calls, Mr. Pottinger asked intelligence agencies — including officers at the C.I.A. working on Asia and on weapons of mass destruction — to search for evidence that might bolster his theory. They didn’t have any evidence. Intelligence agencies did not detect any alarm inside the Chinese government that analysts presumed would accompany the accidental leak of a deadly virus from a government laboratory.
Newsweek reported April 27 that in March the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a report that “reveals that U.S. intelligence revised its January assessment in which it ‘judged that the outbreak probably occurred naturally’ to now include the possibility that the new coronavirus emerged ‘accidentally’ due to ‘unsafe laboratory practices’ in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.”
Again, the US government’s investigation into the theory is ongoing, so it’s possible it will turn up new information. But so far, the reports we do have suggest the natural origin is more likely.
5) Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists deny a lab leak
There’s no question the Chinese government and ruling party made grave errors in managing the outbreak from the outset that contributed to its spread around the world. And according to Nature, the government is putting in place new rules in reviewing research on the virus origin.
As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) put it to my colleague Alex Ward, “We don’t know the true extent of the Chinese government’s complicity in the spread of the virus, and we may never have a full picture due to their obfuscation and control of information. We do know that they lied to their own people and the world about the details and spread of the virus, and today we face a pandemic that has left no country untouched.”
Related 12 experts on how the US should hold China accountable for the coronavirus
And China should, as the Washington Post’s David Ignatius pointed out on April 23, “promptly begin a serious, credible investigation into how the Covid-19 pandemic began.”
But the scientists I interviewed say that we still shouldn’t immediately conflate the work of the highly regarded Chinese scientists who work at the lab with the transgressions of their government.
We also have the word of one of the top virologists at the Wuhan lab, documented in news articles, that she too wondered if the virus could have originated in her lab and then took steps to verify it didn’t match any of the viruses they had in culture.
In this excellent article by Jane Qiu in Scientific American, we learned that the team at the Wuhan lab led by Shi Zhengli, known as China’s “bat woman” for her 16 years of work collecting samples of bat viruses in caves, sequenced the genome of the new virus in early January and published it on January 23:
Shi instructed her team to repeat the tests and, at the same time, sent the samples to another laboratory to sequence the full viral genomes. Meanwhile she frantically went through her own laboratory’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”
Yuan Zhiming, vice director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, also recently spoke up on Chinese state broadcaster CGTN. “As people who carry out viral study, we clearly know what kind of research is going on in the institute and how the institute manages viruses and samples. As we said early on, there is no way this virus came from us,” he said, according to NBC News.
I asked Jim LeDuc, head of the Galveston National Laboratory, a level-4 biosafety lab in Texas, for his thoughts on Yuan’s statement. “I like to think that we can take Zhiming Yuan at his word, but he works in a very different culture with pressures we may not fully appreciate,” he said. In other words, we don’t know what kind of pressures he might be under from his government to make such a statement.
LeDuc says the hypothesis that the animal market played a role in the virus jumping to humans also remains strong. “The linkage back to the market is pretty realistic, and consistent with what we saw with SARS,” said LeDuc. “It’s a perfectly plausible and logical explanation: The virus exists in nature and, jumping hosts, finds that it likes humans just fine, thank you.“
6) State Department officials worried about safety issues at the Wuhan lab in 2018. This is concerning but doesn’t prove its scientists were incompetent.
In an April 14 piece, Josh Rogin, a global opinions columnist for the Washington Post, reported that in January 2018, the US Embassy in Beijing dispatched science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology who later sent back cables that warned of “safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help.”
Rogin went on to cite an anonymous senior administration official’s belief that “the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.”
The article sparked a rich discussion on Twitter, with Rasmussen of Columbia pointing out, “The bottom line is that those vague diplomatic cables do not provide any specific information suggesting that #SARSCoV2 emerged from incompetence or poor biosafety protocols or anything else.”
I had a great exchange with @JeremyKonyndyk about the state department cables reported yesterday by @joshrogin and the credence they supposedly lend to the "lab accident" origin story of #SARSCoV2. Jeremy distilled this into the perfect meme: https://t.co/2CiWvbtt8l — Dr. Angela Rasmussen (@angie_rasmussen) April 15, 2020
In a follow-up conversation with me, she reiterated: “This line that they’re incompetent, it doesn’t hold water with me.”
Other scientists who have worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology have spoken up about its standards and practices in the face of the theory it leaked the virus.
“I have worked in this exact laboratory at various times for the past 2 years,” wrote Danielle Anderson, scientific director of the Duke-NUS Medical School ABSL3 Laboratory, in a March 2 post on Health Feedback, a site where scientists review the veracity of news reports. “I can personally attest to the strict control and containment measures implemented while working there. The staff at WIV are incredibly competent, hardworking, and are excellent scientists with superb track records.”
Gerald Keusch, a professor of medicine and international health and associate director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, also doubts the lab would have been prone to accidents.
“The Wuhan lab is (as far as I know because I have never visited) state of the art in terms of safety and security systems and protocols, and because [the Galveston National Laboratory in the US] helped to train many of them and has collaborations I would bet they are highly professional, which makes the likelihood of an accident remote,” he said. “Is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? In my opinion, no.”
We may never find out exactly when this virus made the leap into humans. But focusing too much on the lab-leak theory could ultimately be dangerous.
Since there’s no robust evidence in support of the lab-leak theory, Daszak says he’s worried that it could become a conspiratorial distraction with serious consequences.
“There is a group of people who do not want to believe that this is a natural, unfortunate incident,” he said. “And the real bad part of that is that if we don’t believe that we won’t try and stop other viruses in wildlife. Instead, we will focus on labs and close them down when they’re the ones trying to develop vaccines to cure us right now. I mean, how ironic could we go?”
Carroll says the lab-leak theory, even if there isn’t evidence to support it, is a healthy reminder that lab accidents can happen and that biosecurity needs attention in country studying dangerous pathogens. But he’s also much more concerned with preventing the next pandemic.
Pandemics, says Carroll, do not have to happen. “They are a consequence of the way we live. You can pick [viruses] up earlier if you’re really including in your surveillance those places where animals and people are having high-risk interaction, those hot spots.”
If you have that surveillance, “you would never get a virus sweeping out of hand. You would never get a repeat of an uncontrolled, unrecognized event.”
Which means it’s time for the whole world to invest in studying the viruses in the bat caves and beyond, and building up the systems to stop them from spreading in humans, so this doesn’t happen again. Because otherwise, it will.


vox--2020-04-23--Justice Alito’s jurisprudence of white racial innocence

On Monday , the Supreme Court held , 6-3 , in Ramos v. Louisiana that criminal defendants in state court may be convicted only by a unanimous jury .
The practical impact of Ramos is small — until recently , only two states , Louisiana and Oregon , permitted a non-unanimous jury to convict a defendant .
And Louisiana recently amended its constitution to eliminate this practice .
But advocates saw in the ruling a big symbolic change in favor of racial justice .
As the Court ’ s lead opinion pointed out , non-unanimous juries are a practice rooted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ umbrage with that invocation of racism : Justice Samuel Alito .
His dissent was the latest in a string of opinions bristling at the idea that racism still shapes many policymakers ’ decisions today , and that the legacy of past racism still affects people of color .
In the most noteworthy of those opinions , 2018 ’ s Abbott v. Perez , Alito convinced a majority of his colleagues to write such a strong presumption of white racial innocence into the law governing racial voter discrimination that it is now virtually impossible @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state lawmakers acted with racist intent .
Alito does not appear driven by broad skepticism of racial issues .
While he has repeatedly lashed out at the mere suggestion that white policymakers may have been motivated by racism , he took a drastically different tone in Ricci v. DeStefano ( 2009 ) .
In that case , Alito wrote a lengthy concurring opinion suggesting that a cohort of mostly white firefighters were denied promotions due to a conspiracy between New Haven Mayor John DeStefano and a local black preacher .
In other words @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been on the receiving end of allegedly racist treatment , Alito preaches that we shouldn ’ t jump to such conclusions ; yet in a case where white people were allegedly harmed , he wasn ’ t so cautious .
With his Ramos opinion , Alito continues to build a distinctive profile as a jurist : He has emerged as the Court ’ s foremost defender of white racial innocence .
Alito scolded his fellow Republican justices for pointing to the legacy of racism Alito sometimes scolds liberals for attributing modern-day policy outcomes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much of his vitriol was directed at two of his fellow Republican justices .
Indeed , the racist origins of non-unanimous juries were discussed prominently in the Court ’ s lead opinion in Ramos , which was authored by conservative Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch .
In his opinion , Gorsuch offered a brief history of how the practice of allowing non-unanimous juries to decide a defendant ’ s fate is rooted in white supremacy .
The delegates who drafted Louisiana ’ s 1898 constitution , Gorsuch argues , “ sought to undermine African-American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to resolve cases in a 10 to 2 verdict ( the idea was that only a small number of black jurors were likely to serve on the jury in the first place ) .
Gorsuch also argues that Oregon ’ s use of non-unanimous juries “ can be similarly traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and efforts to dilute ‘ the influence of racial , ethnic , and religious minorities on Oregon juries.
’ ” Gorsuch ’ s decision to invoke this dark history produced a livid response from Alito @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Court tars Louisiana and Oregon with the charge of racism for permitting nonunanimous verdicts , ” Alito writes in the introduction to his dissent .
He adds that “ too much public discourse today is sullied by ad hominem rhetoric , that is , attempts to discredit an argument not by proving that it is unsound but by attacking the character or motives of the argument ’ s proponents , ” and accuses the majority of his colleagues of engaging in such rhetoric .
Alito goes on to make a fair @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have originally permitted non-unanimous jury verdicts to advance white supremacy , “ both States readopted their rules under different circumstances in later years.
” Louisiana , for example , originally provided for non-unanimous juries at an 1898 constitutional convention dominated by white supremacists .
But the state “ adopted a new , narrower rule ” at a new constitutional convention in 1974 .
Alito suggests that it is unfair to attribute the results of the 1974 convention to racism , if the delegates to that particular convention were not actually motivated by racism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whether he applies a similarly forgiving rule in a pending case alleging that provision of Montana ’ s 1972 constitution is tainted by 19th-century anti-Catholic bias .
( It ’ s also worth noting that liberal Justice Elena Kagan joined most of Alito ’ s opinion , most likely because Kagan is the Court ’ s most stalwart defender of the idea that the justices should be reluctant to overrule precedents , and Ramos overruled a 1972 decision . )
But Alito ’ s Ramos dissent also fits into a broader pattern .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ there is clear evidence that modern-day lawmakers acted with invidious racial intentions , Alito treats the mere suggestion that anti-black or anti-brown racism may still play a role in policymaking with contempt .
Alito ’ s brand of racial resentment is unique on the Supreme Court It ’ s notable that both Gorsuch and Justice Brett Kavanaugh penned opinions in Ramos that acknowledged what Kavanaugh described as “ the racist origins of the non-unanimous jury.
” And then there ’ s the Court ’ s other white conservative , Chief Justice John Roberts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ animated by his belief that any legal acknowledgment of race is odious , regardless of whether the purpose of a race-conscious law is to foster white supremacy or to tear it down .
“ The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race , ” Roberts famously wrote in an opinion arguing that two race-conscious plans to desegregate public schools were unconstitutional .
Roberts ’ s form of color-blindness is often actively hostile to civil rights laws .
Hence his decision in that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decision in Shelby County v. Holder ( 2013 ) , which struck down much of the Voting Rights Act .
And yet , there is daylight between Roberts and Alito .
Though Roberts joined Alito ’ s opinion in Ramos , he did not join Alito ’ s Ricci concurrence .
And Roberts broke rather sharply with Alito in a recent dispute about whether the Trump administration could add a question to the 2020 census form that would have discouraged many immigrants from participating in the census .
Department of Commerce v. New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ administration ’ s attempt to add a question to the 2020 census form asking whether each respondent is a US citizen .
The idea of adding a citizenship question to the main census form is opposed by prominent census experts in both parties .
As top Census officials from the Reagan and Bush I administration warned , adding such a question “ could seriously jeopardize the accuracy of the census , ” because “ people who are undocumented immigrants may either avoid the census altogether or deliberately misreport themselves as legal residents.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that it added this question to help enforce the Voting Rights Act — a statute this administration has shown little interest in enforcing .
But , while the New York case was pending before the Supreme Court , leaked documents revealed that the administration may have had a very different motive .
A late Republican strategist , Thomas Hofeller , who urged the Trump administration to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census form , had determined that such a question would ” clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats ” and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” In any event , a 5-4 Supreme Court struck down the citizenship question , with Roberts coming very close to accusing the Trump administration of lying .
The claim that a citizenship question was needed to enforce the Voting Right Act , Roberts concluded , “ rested on a pretextual basis.
” Alito began his dissent with characteristic anger at the idea that anyone would dare accuse the Trump administration of racism .
In a preview of the sort of rhetoric he later deployed in his Ramos dissent , Alito wrote that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time that the inclusion of a question about citizenship on the census has become a subject of bitter public controversy and has led to today ’ s regrettable decision ” in the opening paragraph of his New York dissent .
For Alito , it was fundamentally wrong to attack “ the decision to place such a question on the 2020 census questionnaire ... as racist.
” Yet , while Alito ’ s jurisprudence of white racial innocence is distinct , Alito ’ s views on race still overlap a great deal with his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Alito ’ s efforts to write white innocence into the law came in Abbott v. Perez , where Alito wrote the majority opinion .
The facts of Perez are , to say the least , complicated .
In 2011 , Texas ’ s Republican-controlled legislature drew congressional maps that , as a federal court eventually determined , included some districts that were illegally racially gerrymandered .
These maps never took effect , in large part because a different federal court determined that they violated the Voting Rights Act .
That left Texas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the state still had no lawful maps that it could use in its upcoming congressional elections , and the state ’ s primaries for these congressional races were just a few months away .
As a stopgap measure , a federal court in Texas drew interim maps that the state could use in its 2012 elections .
Many of the districts in these hastily drawn interim maps closely resembled the racially gerrymandered districts drawn by the Texas legislature in 2011 .
The court , moreover , emphasized that “ this interim map @ @ @ @ @ @ @ merits of any claims ” that some parts of the map were illegal racial gerrymanders .
The court , in other words , would allow Texas to use imperfect maps for one election only , given the risk that Texas would not be able to hold an election otherwise .
But the court was also equally clear that it might strike down some of the state ’ s racially gerrymandered districts at a later date .
Nevertheless , in 2013 , the Texas legislature passed a new law ratifying these interim maps as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were still being challenged as racial gerrymanders .
And Alito ’ s Perez opinion held that this new law reenacting the racial gerrymanders should be upheld .
“ The primary question ” in Perez , according to Alito , “ is whether the Texas court erred when it required the State to show that the 2013 Legislature somehow purged the ‘ taint ’ that the court attributed to the defunct and never-used plans enacted by a prior legislature in 2011.
” According to Alito , courts must apply a strong presumption that lawmakers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even under the unusual facts that existed in the Perez case .
“ Whenever a challenger claims that a state law was enacted with discriminatory intent , ” Alito wrote , “ the burden of proof lies with the challenger , not the State.
” Having laid out this standard , Alito then swiftly absolved the Texas legislature of any racial guilt .
“ The only direct evidence brought to our attention suggests that the 2013 Legislature ’ s intent was legitimate , ” Alito wrote in Perez .
“ It wanted to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s districting plans to an end as expeditiously as possible.
” Alito ’ s argument , in other words , is that the 2013 maps weren ’ t enacted to preserve a racial gerrymander ; they were enacted to shut down litigation challenging a racial gerrymander .
And this distinction is sufficient to cleanse the state legislature of any allegation of racism .
It ’ s as if the school districts on the losing end of Brown v Board of Education ( 1954 ) had passed a new law recreating the same racially @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Brown litigation , but claimed that these segregated schools should be upheld because the new law had a legitimate purpose — to bring the litigation challenging public school segregation to an end as expeditiously as possible .
Alito sees a racial conspiracy when white people are the alleged victims The common thread animating Alito ’ s opinions in Ramos , New York , and Perez is that he views allegations of racial animus with extreme skepticism .
Someone who reads these cases in isolation , in other words , could easily conclude that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the sort of color-blindness favored by Chief Justice Roberts .
But then there is Alito ’ s opinion in Ricci v. DeStefano .
Ricci was a difficult case involving the exam that New Haven , Connecticut used to determine which firefighters would be eligible for promotion to lieutenant or captain .
The 2003 exam produced significant racial disparities .
As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg laid out in her Ricci dissent , “ the pass rate for African-American candidates was about one-half the rate for Caucasian candidates ” on the lieutenant exam , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was even lower.
” On the captain exam , “ both African-American and Hispanic candidates passed at about half the rate of their Caucasian counterparts.
” These results led to allegations that the test itself was racially biased , and the city eventually decided to disregard the examinations .
After a cohort of firefighters who performed well on the exam sued , the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to reinstate the tests .
Alito joined the majority , but he also wrote a separate concurring opinion suggesting that the city decided to discard the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ concern that the tests ’ disparate impact on racial minorities arose from a flaw in the test , but because of a conspiracy involving the mayor and a prominent local black activist .
Alito ’ s concurring opinion describes , at length , the relationship between then-Mayor John DeStefano and the Reverend Boise Kimber , whom Alito described as “ a politically powerful New Haven pastor and a self-professed ‘ kingmaker.
’ ” Alito quotes DeStefano ’ s former campaign manager , who described Kimber as “ very good at organizing people and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ result of his ties to labor , his prominence in the religious community and his long-standing commitment to roots , ” and Alito also claims that “ Rev .
Kimber adamantly opposed certification of the test results—a fact that he or someone in the Mayor ’ s office eventually conveyed to the Mayor.
” The implication of Alito ’ s opinion , in other words , is that the tests were scuttled due to a corrupt bargain between the city mayor and a local black activist that DeStefano needed to turn out votes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bit .
His ultimate conclusion is that “ a reasonable jury ” could conclude that the city tossed out the exams due to pressure from Kimber .
But Alito ’ s Ricci opinion shows none of the caution — and certainly none of the anger — that Alito musters when someone suggests that a white policymaker might have been motivated by racism against people of color .
Alito raises his allegations of a racially motivated conspiracy , moreover , despite the fact that there is considerable reason to reject this theory of why @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Among other things , as Ginsburg points out in her dissent , “ the decision against certification of the exams was made neither by Kimber nor by the mayor and his staff.
” Rather , “ the relevant decision was made by the [ New Haven Civil Service Board ] , an unelected , politically insulated body.
” It is still possible that the Civil Service Board felt pressured to throw out the test by the mayor , and it is equally possible that the mayor acted the way he did due to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opinion does not reject Alito ’ s theory outright — though it does express a great deal of skepticism .
As mentioned above , Ricci was a tough case .
And it ’ s doubtful we ’ ll ever know with certainty why the city decided to discard the tests .
But if there were plausible reasons to suspect that invidious racial motives played a role in Ricci , there was far more reason to suspect such motives in Abbott v. Perez .
Both cases required judges who were , at the very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ racial animus tainted the government ’ s decisions .
Alito is not that judge .
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Earlier this year, the Supreme Court held, 6-3, in Ramos v. Louisiana that criminal defendants in state court may be convicted only by a unanimous jury.
The practical impact of Ramos is small — until recently, only two states, Louisiana and Oregon, permitted a non-unanimous jury to convict a defendant. And Louisiana recently amended its constitution to eliminate this practice. But advocates saw in the ruling a big symbolic change in favor of racial justice. As the Court’s lead opinion pointed out, non-unanimous juries are a practice rooted in white supremacy.
One justice took umbrage with that invocation of racism: Justice Samuel Alito. His dissent was the latest in a string of opinions bristling at the idea that racism still shapes many policymakers’ decisions today, and that the legacy of past racism still affects people of color. In the most noteworthy of those opinions, 2018’s Abbott v. Perez, Alito convinced a majority of his colleagues to write such a strong presumption of white racial innocence into the law governing racial voter discrimination that it is now virtually impossible for voting rights plaintiffs to prove that state lawmakers acted with racist intent.
Alito does not appear driven by broad skepticism of racial issues. While he has repeatedly lashed out at the mere suggestion that white policymakers may have been motivated by racism, he took a drastically different tone in Ricci v. DeStefano (2009). In that case, Alito wrote a lengthy concurring opinion suggesting that a cohort of mostly white firefighters were denied promotions due to a conspiracy between New Haven Mayor John DeStefano and a local black preacher.
In other words, when black or brown people have been on the receiving end of allegedly racist treatment, Alito preaches that we shouldn’t jump to such conclusions; yet in a case where white people were allegedly harmed, he wasn’t so cautious.
With his Ramos opinion, Alito continues to build a distinctive profile as a jurist: He has emerged as the Court’s foremost defender of white racial innocence.
Alito scolded his fellow Republican justices for pointing to the legacy of racism
Alito sometimes scolds liberals for attributing modern-day policy outcomes to racism. But in Ramos, much of his vitriol was directed at two of his fellow Republican justices. Indeed, the racist origins of non-unanimous juries were discussed prominently in the Court’s lead opinion in Ramos, which was authored by conservative Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch.
In his opinion, Gorsuch offered a brief history of how the practice of allowing non-unanimous juries to decide a defendant’s fate is rooted in white supremacy. The delegates who drafted Louisiana’s 1898 constitution, Gorsuch argues, “sought to undermine African-American participation on juries” by allowing juries to resolve cases in a 10 to 2 verdict (the idea was that only a small number of black jurors were likely to serve on the jury in the first place).
Gorsuch also argues that Oregon’s use of non-unanimous juries “can be similarly traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and efforts to dilute ‘the influence of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities on Oregon juries.’”
Gorsuch’s decision to invoke this dark history produced a livid response from Alito. “To add insult to injury, the Court tars Louisiana and Oregon with the charge of racism for permitting nonunanimous verdicts,” Alito writes in the introduction to his dissent. He adds that “too much public discourse today is sullied by ad hominem rhetoric, that is, attempts to discredit an argument not by proving that it is unsound but by attacking the character or motives of the argument’s proponents,” and accuses the majority of his colleagues of engaging in such rhetoric.
Alito goes on to make a fair point. Though Louisiana and Oregon may have originally permitted non-unanimous jury verdicts to advance white supremacy, “both States readopted their rules under different circumstances in later years.” Louisiana, for example, originally provided for non-unanimous juries at an 1898 constitutional convention dominated by white supremacists. But the state “adopted a new, narrower rule” at a new constitutional convention in 1974.
Alito suggests that it is unfair to attribute the results of the 1974 convention to racism, if the delegates to that particular convention were not actually motivated by racism. It will be interesting to see whether he applies a similarly forgiving rule in a pending case alleging that provision of Montana’s 1972 constitution is tainted by 19th-century anti-Catholic bias. (It’s also worth noting that liberal Justice Elena Kagan joined most of Alito’s opinion, most likely because Kagan is the Court’s most stalwart defender of the idea that the justices should be reluctant to overrule precedents, and Ramos overruled a 1972 decision.)
But Alito’s Ramos dissent also fits into a broader pattern. In multiple cases, including cases where there is clear evidence that modern-day lawmakers acted with invidious racial intentions, Alito treats the mere suggestion that anti-black or anti-brown racism may still play a role in policymaking with contempt.
Alito’s brand of racial resentment is unique on the Supreme Court
It’s notable that both Gorsuch and Justice Brett Kavanaugh penned opinions in Ramos that acknowledged what Kavanaugh described as “the racist origins of the non-unanimous jury.”
And then there’s the Court’s other white conservative, Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts’s race opinions are animated by his belief that any legal acknowledgment of race is odious, regardless of whether the purpose of a race-conscious law is to foster white supremacy or to tear it down. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts famously wrote in an opinion arguing that two race-conscious plans to desegregate public schools were unconstitutional.
Roberts’s form of color-blindness is often actively hostile to civil rights laws. Hence his decision in that school segregation case, and his later decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which struck down much of the Voting Rights Act.
And yet, there is daylight between Roberts and Alito. Though Roberts joined Alito’s opinion in Ramos, he did not join Alito’s Ricci concurrence.
And Roberts broke rather sharply with Alito in a recent dispute about whether the Trump administration could add a question to the 2020 census form that would have discouraged many immigrants from participating in the census. Department of Commerce v. New York (2019) involved the Trump administration’s attempt to add a question to the 2020 census form asking whether each respondent is a US citizen.
The idea of adding a citizenship question to the main census form is opposed by prominent census experts in both parties. As top Census officials from the Reagan and Bush I administration warned, adding such a question “could seriously jeopardize the accuracy of the census,” because “people who are undocumented immigrants may either avoid the census altogether or deliberately misreport themselves as legal residents.”
The Trump administration made the implausible claim that it added this question to help enforce the Voting Rights Act — a statute this administration has shown little interest in enforcing. But, while the New York case was pending before the Supreme Court, leaked documents revealed that the administration may have had a very different motive. A late Republican strategist, Thomas Hofeller, who urged the Trump administration to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census form, had determined that such a question would ”clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”
In any event, a 5-4 Supreme Court struck down the citizenship question, with Roberts coming very close to accusing the Trump administration of lying. The claim that a citizenship question was needed to enforce the Voting Right Act, Roberts concluded, “rested on a pretextual basis.”
Alito began his dissent with characteristic anger at the idea that anyone would dare accuse the Trump administration of racism. In a preview of the sort of rhetoric he later deployed in his Ramos dissent, Alito wrote that “it is a sign of our time that the inclusion of a question about citizenship on the census has become a subject of bitter public controversy and has led to today’s regrettable decision” in the opening paragraph of his New York dissent. For Alito, it was fundamentally wrong to attack “the decision to place such a question on the 2020 census questionnaire ... as racist.”
No other justice joined Alito’s dissent.
Alito’s racial views have fundamentally reshaped American voting rights law
Yet, while Alito’s jurisprudence of white racial innocence is distinct, Alito’s views on race still overlap a great deal with his fellow Republican justices. The greatest triumph of Alito’s efforts to write white innocence into the law came in Abbott v. Perez, where Alito wrote the majority opinion.
The facts of Perez are, to say the least, complicated. In 2011, Texas’s Republican-controlled legislature drew congressional maps that, as a federal court eventually determined, included some districts that were illegally racially gerrymandered. These maps never took effect, in large part because a different federal court determined that they violated the Voting Rights Act.
That left Texas in a bind. In early 2012, the state still had no lawful maps that it could use in its upcoming congressional elections, and the state’s primaries for these congressional races were just a few months away.
As a stopgap measure, a federal court in Texas drew interim maps that the state could use in its 2012 elections. Many of the districts in these hastily drawn interim maps closely resembled the racially gerrymandered districts drawn by the Texas legislature in 2011. The court, moreover, emphasized that “this interim map is not a final ruling on the merits of any claims” that some parts of the map were illegal racial gerrymanders.
The court, in other words, would allow Texas to use imperfect maps for one election only, given the risk that Texas would not be able to hold an election otherwise. But the court was also equally clear that it might strike down some of the state’s racially gerrymandered districts at a later date.
Nevertheless, in 2013, the Texas legislature passed a new law ratifying these interim maps as its own — including the districts that were still being challenged as racial gerrymanders. And Alito’s Perez opinion held that this new law reenacting the racial gerrymanders should be upheld.
“The primary question” in Perez, according to Alito, “is whether the Texas court erred when it required the State to show that the 2013 Legislature somehow purged the ‘taint’ that the court attributed to the defunct and never-used plans enacted by a prior legislature in 2011.”
According to Alito, courts must apply a strong presumption that lawmakers did not act with racist intent — even under the unusual facts that existed in the Perez case. “Whenever a challenger claims that a state law was enacted with discriminatory intent,” Alito wrote, “the burden of proof lies with the challenger, not the State.”
Having laid out this standard, Alito then swiftly absolved the Texas legislature of any racial guilt. “The only direct evidence brought to our attention suggests that the 2013 Legislature’s intent was legitimate,” Alito wrote in Perez. “It wanted to bring the litigation about the State’s districting plans to an end as expeditiously as possible.”
Alito’s argument, in other words, is that the 2013 maps weren’t enacted to preserve a racial gerrymander; they were enacted to shut down litigation challenging a racial gerrymander. And this distinction is sufficient to cleanse the state legislature of any allegation of racism.
It’s as if the school districts on the losing end of Brown v Board of Education (1954) had passed a new law recreating the same racially segregated schools that were challenged in the Brown litigation, but claimed that these segregated schools should be upheld because the new law had a legitimate purpose — to bring the litigation challenging public school segregation to an end as expeditiously as possible.
Alito sees a racial conspiracy when white people are the alleged victims
The common thread animating Alito’s opinions in Ramos, New York, and Perez is that he views allegations of racial animus with extreme skepticism. Someone who reads these cases in isolation, in other words, could easily conclude that Alito is a particularly strident defender of the sort of color-blindness favored by Chief Justice Roberts.
But then there is Alito’s opinion in Ricci v. DeStefano.
Ricci was a difficult case involving the exam that New Haven, Connecticut used to determine which firefighters would be eligible for promotion to lieutenant or captain. The 2003 exam produced significant racial disparities. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg laid out in her Ricci dissent, “the pass rate for African-American candidates was about one-half the rate for Caucasian candidates” on the lieutenant exam, and the “pass rate for Hispanic candidates was even lower.” On the captain exam, “both African-American and Hispanic candidates passed at about half the rate of their Caucasian counterparts.”
These results led to allegations that the test itself was racially biased, and the city eventually decided to disregard the examinations. After a cohort of firefighters who performed well on the exam sued, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to reinstate the tests.
Alito joined the majority, but he also wrote a separate concurring opinion suggesting that the city decided to discard the exams, not because of a good-faith concern that the tests’ disparate impact on racial minorities arose from a flaw in the test, but because of a conspiracy involving the mayor and a prominent local black activist. Alito’s concurring opinion describes, at length, the relationship between then-Mayor John DeStefano and the Reverend Boise Kimber, whom Alito described as “a politically powerful New Haven pastor and a self-professed ‘kingmaker.’”
Alito quotes DeStefano’s former campaign manager, who described Kimber as “very good at organizing people and putting together field operations, as a result of his ties to labor, his prominence in the religious community and his long-standing commitment to roots,” and Alito also claims that “Rev. Kimber adamantly opposed certification of the test results—a fact that he or someone in the Mayor’s office eventually conveyed to the Mayor.”
The implication of Alito’s opinion, in other words, is that the tests were scuttled due to a corrupt bargain between the city mayor and a local black activist that DeStefano needed to turn out votes.
Alito’s concurrence hedges a bit. His ultimate conclusion is that “a reasonable jury” could conclude that the city tossed out the exams due to pressure from Kimber. But Alito’s Ricci opinion shows none of the caution — and certainly none of the anger — that Alito musters when someone suggests that a white policymaker might have been motivated by racism against people of color.
Alito raises his allegations of a racially motivated conspiracy, moreover, despite the fact that there is considerable reason to reject this theory of why the city tossed out the tests. Among other things, as Ginsburg points out in her dissent, “the decision against certification of the exams was made neither by Kimber nor by the mayor and his staff.” Rather, “the relevant decision was made by the [New Haven Civil Service Board], an unelected, politically insulated body.”
It is still possible that the Civil Service Board felt pressured to throw out the test by the mayor, and it is equally possible that the mayor acted the way he did due to pressure from Kimber. Ginsburg’s opinion does not reject Alito’s theory outright — though it does express a great deal of skepticism. As mentioned above, Ricci was a tough case. And it’s doubtful we’ll ever know with certainty why the city decided to discard the tests.
But if there were plausible reasons to suspect that invidious racial motives played a role in Ricci, there was far more reason to suspect such motives in Abbott v. Perez. Both cases required judges who were, at the very least, open to the possibility that racial animus tainted the government’s decisions.
Alito is not that judge.


vox--2020-04-23--“I did not sign up for the military. I signed up for Walmart.”

Share All sharing options for : “ I did not sign up for the military .
I signed up for Walmart.
” A few weeks ago , Evelyn Hall asked her manager at Walmart why the store wasn ’ t giving workers gloves and masks .
The manager ’ s response , according to Hall : “ Wash your hands every 15 minutes , so you don ’ t need a glove or a mask.
” “ She just walked away from me and started laughing , like it was funny , ” Hall said .
The lack of protective @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hall , a Walmart employee for 28 years , felt unsafe at her Maryland store .
The store also wasn ’ t counting customers to maintain social distancing and prevent crowding , she said .
And she ’ d also heard from other employees that workers at her store had contracted Covid-19 — but management had never informed other employees or closed the store .
Hall is 68 years old with diabetes and high blood pressure , conditions that put her at high risk of severe illness from Covid .
With so few @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was putting her life on the line .
“ I did not sign up for the military , ” she says she told her manager .
“ I signed up for Walmart.
” She is far from alone .
Grocery workers around the country say that despite their position on the front lines of the pandemic , stores have been slow to implement policies that would keep them safe .
And the toll of the virus on the people who help feed America has already been devastating : As of April 18 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and 10 percent of the company ’ s workforce was on leave , according to the Wall Street Journal .
Workers have died at Trader Joe ’ s , Safeway , and Kroger stores around the country as well .
Stores have made some changes in recent weeks , with Walmart announcing it would require ( and provide ) masks for employees beginning April 20 .
The company also says it is limiting the number of customers in stores and has processes to inform employees if their coworkers test positive .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chains around the country , policies handed down from the top aren ’ t necessarily being put into place in actual stores .
And some say that without tighter enforcement at the federal and state level , companies have no incentive to put the safety of their employees over their profit margins .
“ It really shouldn ’ t be left to large nonunion corporations to decide unilaterally what is the appropriate level of safety precautions to take for their workers , ” John Logan , a professor of labor and employment studies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Vox .
Grocery store workers say their stores aren ’ t keeping them safe Grocery store employees have become more crucial than ever during the pandemic , as restaurants close and many Americans shelter at home .
Grocery store sales were up 83 percent for the two weeks ending March 22 , MarketWatch reports , and though some of that may have been initial panic-buying , Americans are likely to keep buying more groceries than usual as they continue cooking at home .
And they can ’ t do that without the people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cash registers .
Like the doctors and nurses who care for the sick , these are essential workers without whom the rest of America could not function .
But grocery workers are now at high risk , spending their shifts largely indoors in settings where it can be difficult to maintain the CDC-recommended 6 feet of distance between people .
And some say their employers aren ’ t doing what ’ s necessary to protect them .
“ I have not been provided with anything by the store itself in terms of PPE @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at a Ralph ’ s grocery store in Los Angeles , told Vox .
Coworkers and , once , even a customer have shared gloves with her , and she ’ s worn homemade masks , she said .
That ’ s not the only problem .
As the coronavirus began to spread more rapidly in mid-March , the store instituted crowd-control measures .
But at the end of the month , it suddenly went back to business as usual , Mueller-Reiche said .
“ Nobody was standing 6 feet apart ; there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ store , ” she said .
“ It got really , really scary.
” The stress of working under such conditions sent Mueller-Reiche into a panic attack that left her physically unable to work , she said .
She ’ s been off work since then on the advice of a doctor .
Kroger , the parent company of Ralph ’ s , has not responded to Vox ’ s request for comment .
The company announced earlier this month that it would limit occupancy at stores nationwide to 50 percent of normal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mueller-Reiche says that at her store , the occupancy limits weren ’ t shared with shoppers or employees .
And “ when we spoke out about safety concerns , ” she said , “ we were met with disbelief.
” Crowding is an issue at Walmart , too , workers say .
On one recent Sunday , “ that store was so packed , ” with “ no 6 feet distance or anything , ” Hall said .
Managers weren ’ t counting customers to make sure limits were enforced , she said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over lives , ” Cyndi Murray , an associate at the same store , told Vox .
No one is forcing companies to prioritize worker safety What Hall and Murray experienced is a nationwide pattern , Walmart workers say .
“ Across the country , management is still failing to enforce strict limits on the number of customers allowed in a store and failing to provide us with basic protective equipment , ” a group of employees wrote in a letter sent to the company ’ s board on April 16 .
Meanwhile @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has failed to tell us when one of our coworkers gets diagnosed with Covid-19 so that we can get tested ourselves or self-quarantine in order to protect ourselves , our families , and our customers.
” It ’ s not just Walmart , either .
As of April 1 , employees at Office Depot , Walgreens , and Target were being discouraged from wearing masks , sometimes because of concerns that customers might find them “ unsettling , ” according to the New York Times .
In March , a coalition representing Trader @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were not being allowed to wear gloves .
In early April , employees at MOM ’ s Organic Market in Philadelphia staged a protest , demanding that the store limit customers and take other steps to keep them safe .
“ We didn ’ t sign up to be heroes , and we certainly didn ’ t sign up to be martyrs , ” Mariane Leon , an employee , told WHYY .
As the virus has spread and workers have begun speaking out , grocery companies have been taking some steps to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 3 that , beginning the following day , it would limit store occupancy to five customers per 1,000 feet , or about 20 percent of normal .
When a Walmart employee tests positive for Covid , “ we have processes in place to inform associates within the impacted store , ” Rebecca Thomason , senior manager of corporate communications at the company , told Vox .
Meanwhile , Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen said on April 22 that the chain would begin requiring workers at all its stores to wear masks .
Kroger and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union to call on officials to designate grocery workers as emergency personnel , which could get them better access to Covid testing and protective gear , according to NPR .
But corporate policies aren ’ t necessarily trickling down to stores .
“ It ’ s one thing having a policy , it ’ s another making sure that it ’ s actually being strictly adhered to and properly enforced in individual stores , ” Logan said .
And grocery workers around the country are saying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of customers , for example , “ the limits are often not being enforced.
” The Occupational Safety and Health Administration ( OSHA ) issued guidance in March on preparing workplaces for Covid-19 .
But it is nonbinding , and while thousands of workers have filed complaints , it ’ s not clear that anything will be done about them .
That has left companies to decide for themselves how to protect their workers , and workers say they ’ re not being prioritized .
Companies “ can point to all sorts of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doing , ” Logan said , but “ they shouldn ’ t be allowed to decide for themselves what ’ s enough.
” Some parts of the country are responding to the problem more quickly than the federal government .
On April 15 , for example , California ’ s Division of Occupational Safety and Health issued new guidance for grocery stores , including limiting the number of customers and providing masks if the proper distance can not be maintained .
Those guidelines can be a model for the rest of the country @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be enforced .
“ These things have very limited value without having a proper system of enforcement , ” he said .
For Hall , in Maryland , going to work no longer feels safe .
She went out on leave after feeling ill on April 7 , and she isn ’ t sure when she ’ ll go back .
In addition to herself , she ’ s worried about bringing the virus home to her daughter , who lives with her .
“ We ’ ve got our lives on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their customers , when we could be home with our families , ” she said .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

Share All sharing options for: “I did not sign up for the military. I signed up for Walmart.”
A few weeks ago, Evelyn Hall asked her manager at Walmart why the store wasn’t giving workers gloves and masks.
The manager’s response, according to Hall: “Wash your hands every 15 minutes, so you don’t need a glove or a mask.”
“She just walked away from me and started laughing, like it was funny,” Hall said.
The lack of protective equipment wasn’t the only reason Hall, a Walmart employee for 28 years, felt unsafe at her Maryland store. The store also wasn’t counting customers to maintain social distancing and prevent crowding, she said. And she’d heard from other employees that workers at her store had contracted Covid-19 — but management had never informed other employees or closed the store.
Hall is 68 years old with diabetes and high blood pressure, conditions that put her at high risk of severe illness from the coronavirus. With so few protections in place, she felt Walmart was putting her life on the line.
“I did not sign up for the military,” she says she told her manager. “I signed up for Walmart.”
She is far from alone. Grocery workers around the country say that despite their position on the front lines of the pandemic, stores have been slow to implement policies that would keep them safe. And the toll of the virus on the people who help feed America has already been devastating: As of April 18, at least 18 Walmart employees had died, and 10 percent of the company’s workforce was on leave, according to the Wall Street Journal. Workers have died at Trader Joe’s, Safeway, and Kroger stores around the country as well.
Stores have made some changes in recent weeks, with Walmart announcing it would require (and provide) masks for employees beginning April 20. The company also says it is limiting the number of customers in stores and has processes to inform employees if their coworkers test positive.
But according to some employees at grocery store chains around the country, policies handed down from the top aren’t necessarily being put into place in actual stores. And some say that without tighter enforcement at the federal and state level, companies have no incentive to put the safety of their employees over their profit margins.
“It really shouldn’t be left to large nonunion corporations to decide unilaterally what is the appropriate level of safety precautions to take for their workers,” John Logan, a professor of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, told Vox.
Grocery store workers say their stores aren’t keeping them safe
Grocery store employees have become more crucial than ever during the pandemic, as restaurants close and many Americans shelter at home. Grocery store sales were up 83 percent for the two weeks ending March 22, MarketWatch reports, and though some of that may have been initial panic-buying, Americans are likely to keep buying more groceries than usual as they continue cooking at home. And they can’t do that without the people who stock the shelves and work the cash registers. Like the doctors and nurses who care for the sick, these are essential workers without whom the rest of America could not function.
But grocery workers are now at high risk, spending their shifts largely indoors in settings where it can be difficult to maintain the CDC-recommended 6 feet of distance between people. And some say their employers aren’t doing what’s necessary to protect them.
“I have not been provided with anything by the store itself in terms of PPE,” Mary Mueller-Reiche, a cashier at a Ralph’s grocery store in Los Angeles, told Vox. Coworkers and, once, even a customer have shared gloves with her, and she’s worn homemade masks, she said.
That’s not the only problem. As the coronavirus began to spread more rapidly in mid-March, the store instituted crowd-control measures. But at the end of the month, it suddenly went back to business as usual, Mueller-Reiche said.
“Nobody was standing 6 feet apart; there were way too many people in the store,” she said. “It got really, really scary.”
The stress of working under such conditions sent Mueller-Reiche into a panic attack that left her physically unable to work, she said. She’s been off work since then on the advice of a doctor.
Kroger, the parent company of Ralph’s, has not responded to Vox’s request for comment. The company announced earlier this month that it would limit occupancy at stores nationwide to 50 percent of normal capacity according to building codes. But Mueller-Reiche says that at her store, the occupancy limits weren’t shared with shoppers or employees. And “when we spoke out about safety concerns,” she said, “we were met with disbelief.”
Crowding is an issue at Walmart, too, workers say. On one recent Sunday, “that store was so packed,” with “no 6 feet distance or anything,” Hall said. Managers weren’t counting customers to make sure limits were enforced, she said.
“It really has become profit over lives,” Cyndi Murray, an associate at the same store, told Vox.
No one is forcing companies to prioritize worker safety
What Hall and Murray experienced is a nationwide pattern, Walmart workers say. “Across the country, management is still failing to enforce strict limits on the number of customers allowed in a store and failing to provide us with basic protective equipment,” a group of employees wrote in a letter sent to the company’s board on April 16. Meanwhile, “in many stores, management has failed to tell us when one of our coworkers gets diagnosed with Covid-19 so that we can get tested ourselves or self-quarantine in order to protect ourselves, our families, and our customers.”
It’s not just Walmart, either. As of April 1, employees at Office Depot, Walgreens, and Target were being discouraged from wearing masks, sometimes because of concerns that customers might find them “unsettling,” according to the New York Times. In March, a coalition representing Trader Joe’s workers said the employees were not being allowed to wear gloves. In early April, employees at MOM’s Organic Market in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, staged a protest demanding that the store limit customers and take other steps to keep them safe.
“We didn’t sign up to be heroes, and we certainly didn’t sign up to be martyrs,” Mariane Leon, an employee, told WHYY.
As the virus has spread and workers have begun speaking out, grocery companies have been taking some steps to protect employees. Walmart announced on April 3 that, beginning the following day, it would limit store occupancy to five customers per 1,000 feet, or about 20 percent of normal. When a Walmart employee tests positive for Covid, “we have processes in place to inform associates within the impacted store,” Rebecca Thomason, senior manager of corporate communications at the company, told Vox.
Meanwhile, Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen said on April 22 that the chain would begin requiring workers at all its stores to wear masks. Kroger and Albertson’s have also joined with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union to call on officials to designate grocery workers as emergency personnel, which could get them better access to Covid-19 testing and protective gear, according to NPR.
But corporate policies aren’t necessarily trickling down to stores. “It’s one thing having a policy, it’s another making sure that it’s actually being strictly adhered to and properly enforced in individual stores,” Logan said. And grocery workers around the country are saying that when it comes to the number of customers, for example, “the limits are often not being enforced.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued guidance in March on preparing workplaces for Covid-19. But it is nonbinding, and while thousands of workers have filed complaints, it’s not clear that anything will be done about them.
That has left companies to decide for themselves how to protect their workers, and workers say they’re not being prioritized. Companies “can point to all sorts of positive things they say they’re doing,” Logan said, but “they shouldn’t be allowed to decide for themselves what’s enough.”
Some parts of the country are responding to the problem more quickly than the federal government. On April 15, for example, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health issued new guidance for grocery stores, including limiting the number of customers and providing masks if the proper distance cannot be maintained. Those guidelines can be a model for the rest of the country, Logan said, but they have to be enforced. “These things have very limited value without having a proper system of enforcement,” he said.
For Hall, in Maryland, going to work no longer feels safe. She went on leave after feeling ill on April 7, and she isn’t sure when she’ll go back. In addition to herself, she’s worried about bringing the virus home to her daughter, who lives with her.
“We’ve got our lives on the line trying to take care of their customers, when we could be home with our families,” she said.