democracynow--2020-07-15--As COVID-19 Cases Spike, Epidemiologist Warns "The Road to an Uncertain Vaccine Is Paved in Death"

This is a rush transcript .
Copy may not be in its final form .
AMY GOODMAN : Well , we ’ re moving in on records being set every day .
Coronavirus cases worldwide have soared by more than 1 million in just five days .
The World Health Organization is warning the pandemic is raging out of control in North and South America and that the outbreak will continue to worsen if governments don ’ t take basic public health precautions .
AMY GOODMAN : Here in the United States , more than 67,000 new cases of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the highest one-day spike so far , and at least 11 states reported record hospitalizations .
More than 136,000 people in the country have now died from the disease .
During a webinar with The Journal of the American Medical Association , the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , Dr. Robert Redfield , made a dire prediction .
AMY GOODMAN : This comes as the Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers of Disease Control when they send COVID-19 patient data .
Starting today , instead @ @ @ @ @ @ @ data to the CDC , which then releases it to the public , states have been told to send it directly to a Department of Health and Human Services system that The New York Times reports is , quote , “ not open to the public , which could affect the work of scores of researchers , modelers , and health officials who rely on CDC data to make projections and crucial decisions.
” For more , we ’ re joined by Dr. Ali Khan , epidemiologist and the dean of the College @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nebraska Medical Center .
He ’ s the former director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the CDC .
He ’ s also author , with William Patrick , of The Next Pandemic : On the Front Lines Against Humankind ’ s Gravest Dangers , a book that looks at how the world ’ s public health community responded to outbreaks of the most dangerous infectious diseases over the past quarter of a century .
Dr. Khan , welcome to Democracy Now !
It ’ s great to have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ start with that new directive that no longer are hospitals to send their information on COVID-19 patient data to the CDC , but instead to bypass the CDC .
Can you talk about the significance of this ?
DR. ALI KHAN : Good morning , Amy , and thank you for the opportunity .
I think that story is a little bit more nuanced .
So , the type of data that ’ s going to the assistant secretary for preparedness and response is capacity and utilization data in terms of how many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many ICU beds are being used .
And that data has always traditionally gone to ASPR and not gone to CDC .
What we ’ re not seeing is that public health data is being rerouted to CDC — rerouted from CDC .
So , that story about where that specific bit of data is going may be a little bit nuanced , because it ’ s always gone to the assistant secretary for preparedness and response in the past .
AMY GOODMAN : But the stuff that ’ s being bypassed from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public not then being able to see it ?
DR. ALI KHAN : Now , that would be an issue if the data is no longer available to the public .
If you read the original memo , which I did , this was all about streamlining data to a single — capacity data and utilization data , so how many hospital beds are being used , how many tests are being performed in hospitals , to one site , so that multiple federal agencies are not asking hospitals for the exact same @ @ @ @ @ @ @ asked for .
They do not want to send data to multiple federal agencies .
They want to send it to one place , that is then shared everywhere else .
So , as long as the — the real test is , “ Is this data still available to the American public ?
” — is the real test .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ : Dr. Khan , there have been some issues or some criticisms about the CDC data in terms of the fact that there ’ s always at least a week @ @ @ @ @ @ @ agency gets the information and the time it ’ s released .
Do you have concerns , given the fast-moving nature of this pandemic , that there is a need for the CDC to be able to make data available more quickly ?
DR. ALI KHAN : Oh , absolutely .
This has been an issue from day one of this outbreak , which is a timely data and transparency of data .
Countries that have managed this outbreak well — South Korea , for example , Singapore — all of their data @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and they ’ re very timely in getting that data , and they use good metrics for how their response is going .
And the U.S. has never adopted that strategy to the current day .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ : And speaking about other countries , what ’ s your concern about the U.S. response to the pandemic compared to some other countries , like South Korea or New Zealand ?
DR. ALI KHAN : That ’ s an excellent question .
So , this , without a doubt , is the greatest public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ history , and it just continues to be in freefall .
So , we peaked at about 30,000 cases in mid-April , and then we squandered two months of lockdown and economic collapse by failing to get our disease contained , and now we ’ re up to 60,000 cases a day .
I mean , that ’ s completely out of step with the rest of Europe , with Oceania and East Asia .
So , many — all those countries have not only just contained their outbreaks , resumed their economies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ countries have just gone all out and said , “ We ’ re going to zero.
” So , New Zealand has eliminated disease .
Right ?
A number of other countries have eliminated disease .
China , with 1.4 billion people , has gone nine days without a domestic case .
So China is going for elimination , too .
So , we are clearly the outlier with this uncontrolled response here in the United States — failed response here in the United States .
AMY GOODMAN : Dr. Ali Khan , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ DR. ALI KHAN : So , it starts — goes right back .
So , you know , in the early days , I said it was lack of imagination .
So , you know , the U.S. had sort of been sucker-punched by this outbreak .
But at this point , it ’ s very clear : We don ’ t have a national strategy based on the four principles that everybody else has used to get rid of this outbreak .
Simple four principles , right ?
So , the first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
So that ’ s integrated , whole-of-government leadership from the local , state to national level .
We still don ’ t have that .
We can ’ t agree on so many things that are important .
The second part is , get down community transmission .
And this is the role of government , to make sure we ’ re testing and tracing .
Nobody is talking about that anymore — isolating cases quickly , finding those contacts — nor does anybody talk about the metrics around that .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that ’ s our role , right ?
Wear a mask .
Please , wear a mask .
Wash your hands .
Social distance .
And the fourth thing is , do what you can to make sure that people who are hospitalized are more likely to survive .
And the one drug we know that does that right now is dexamethasone .
So , those are four simple principles , a national strategy , four principles .
We can get our disease contained like so many other countries all over the world @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ’ re the former head of the CDC ’ s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response , which included overseeing the Strategic National Stockpile on emergency medical supplies .
Can you account for , many months into this pandemic , the United States continuing to have a shortage of tests and masks ?
DR. ALI KHAN : I have no explanation for that .
I have said I could have grown polypropylene trees by this time for nasal swabs , given the ingenuity of Americans and our biomedical complex to create @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to contain tests — make tests .
So I really have no explanation for that .
I can say , though , that we have enough testing in the United States currently , if we used it correctly and we got a timely result back and didn ’ t have to wait a week for the result .
So , really , this goes back to strategy .
We do not have the right strategy in the United States to get this disease contained .
And if we did , we wouldn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , right ?
South Korea today had 40 cases .
Right ?
They ’ re not worried about personal protective equipment .
So we ’ re worried about these things because we can ’ t contain the disease and not willing to do the hard things , not willing to take — strip politics out of this , base it on the science and get this disease under control .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ : Dr. Khan , I wanted to ask you about the role of Anthony Fauci in terms of the handling of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one hand , we see the reality that the Trump administration is trying to undermine his credibility these days as he increasingly comes into conflict with what the president wants to do , but , on the other hand , there are some legitimate questions .
And in the early parts of the pandemic , Dr. Fauci did urge people not to wear masks .
Now , he didn ’ t couch it by saying there ’ s a shortage .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ : But at that time , most people in Asian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ among the population .
Your assessment of how Dr. Fauci has handled the crisis ?
DR. ALI KHAN : So , really , this isn ’ t about Dr. Fauci , right ?
This is about CDC , which is our nation ’ s public health agency .
And we need to see our nation ’ s public health agency get their role back , to educate the American people , to provide the necessary data and get us back into containment .
And there ’ s no doubt that there were missteps @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public health professionals .
Masks is a good example — the lack of a strategy that couldn ’ t tell the difference between flu and a SARS virus , you know , the lack of testing .
So , there was invariably — there were a lot of missteps .
However , what we need now is , we need that talent we ’ ve always had at CDC back at the forefront talking about public health issues .
That ’ s where our public health expertise resides .
It resides at CDC @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at ASPR , not at whatever .
It resides at CDC .
We need to hear CDC ’ s voice , bring those wonderful , amazing people , the greatest public health agency in the world , back to the forefront and help us contain this disease .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ : And how optimistic are you about the development of a vaccine ?
DR. ALI KHAN : I am optimistic ; however , the road to an uncertain vaccine is paved in death .
Right ?
So , we talk about 60,000 cases @ @ @ @ @ @ @ basically we ’ re minting 600 to a thousand new death certificates every day .
Right ?
We can ’ t wait for a vaccine .
Right ?
And other countries have gotten their diseases contained and eliminated without a vaccine .
So , yes , I would love a vaccine .
There ’ s lots of data that makes it problematic .
Immunity may be short-lived .
We ’ ve never had vaccines based on these technologies .
So , as anybody else , I ’ m optimistic .
I hope there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t need a vaccine today so that we don ’ t kill another 600 to a thousand people tomorrow .
We have the tools .
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk , Dr. Ali Khan , about what it would mean if the president of the United States simply put on a mask on a regular basis ?
Trump seeing a mask as weakness — only this past weekend , you saw him for a minute wearing a mask , and he said , well , he was in a hospital ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the federal level ?
Then you see it go down to the state level , his biggest allies , DeSantis , the governor Florida , for the first time donning a mask .
In Arizona — we ’ re going to go to and speak with the mayor of Tucson today — Governor Ducey , a recent death in Arizona of a Mexican American man .
His daughter said , “ I say that the governor and the president have blood on their hands.
” Do you feel the same way , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I believe all of government has blood on their hands — 136,000 deaths , preventable deaths , a tragedy .
There ’ s a lot of blood to go around here , Amy , let ’ s be very honest , you know , if you look at the rest of the world , that ’ s contained their disease , and some even eliminated .
So there ’ s a lot of blood to go around .
But what you saw in countries that were successful was that each and every politician @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the science .
So , everybody said , “ Wear masks.
” No controversy .
Everybody wore a mask .
They got their disease under control .
And we need to see that again right now at every political level — local , state , national .
Wear a mask .
That ’ s one of the four strategies that will get us out of this mess .
So we need everybody to be wearing a mask at this point .
AMY GOODMAN : Let me ask you about some of the recent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Britain , suggesting that people who have had COVID-19 begin losing their antibodies in just a few months .
So , even if there was a vaccine , the significance of this , Dr. Khan , and also of the younger people that we are seeing get sick and die all over the country ?
DR. ALI KHAN : So , Amy , two great questions .
So , yes , if your immunity is short-lived , that makes this — makes finding a vaccine , we ’ re chasing rainbows , right @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : We don ’ t need a vaccine to get out of this mess .
Even today , I ’ m very hopeful .
Public health still works today the way it worked at the end of January .
We can get this outbreak under control .
As far as young people are involved , without a doubt , we see less severe disease .
However , young people also can get sick .
Right ?
They can also get hospitalized .
They also die .
We are now learning that about 50 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with this disease have some sort of heart abnormality .
So , even if you don ’ t die , there may be long-term — there are long-term complications of this disease .
So we don ’ t want our young people to get infected , either .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ : And , Dr. Khan , speaking of young people , your sense of how various states and school districts around the nation are handling the issue of the reopening of public schools ?
What ’ s your assessment of it ?
Because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are in the country , there ’ s very different solutions of whether it ’ s all remote or partial days of the week in the schools .
DR. ALI KHAN : So , I will be very honest with you .
As a pediatrician , as a father , as a public health professional , we need kids back in school .
Right ?
Without a doubt .
We need to get kids back in school for numerous reasons .
But we have to get them back safely .
And we know @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I just did a review of over 15 countries that were able to safely get kids back in school .
But that ’ s based on not just the safety measures we take and wearing masks and everything else that the kids need to do .
It ’ s based on dropping community transmission .
So , I say that unless you have approximately 25 cases per million population per day , you can ’ t resume schools .
Right ?
So , if people want to go back to schools , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
Drop your community transmission .
Work with the local health department .
Make sure they have the support they need to test and trace everybody .
You know , this is what we all need to do to get our kids back in school .
Let ’ s not put them at risk .
AMY GOODMAN : Dr. Ali Khan , we want to thank you for being with us , epidemiologist , dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center , former director of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Preparedness and Response , where he oversaw the Strategic National Stockpile .
When we come back , we speak with Ohio State professor Amna Akbar .
Her new piece , “ The Left Is Remaking the World.
” Then we ’ ll speak with the mayor of Tucson .
Stay with us .
AMY GOODMAN : “ Wintertime ” by Norah Jones , ongoing concert series called “ Live from the Living Room .
”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re moving in on records being set every day. Coronavirus cases worldwide have soared by more than 1 million in just five days. The World Health Organization is warning the pandemic is raging out of control in North and South America and that the outbreak will continue to worsen if governments don’t take basic public health precautions.
TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS: If the basics aren’t followed, there is only one way this pandemic is going to go: It’s going to get worse and worse and worse.
AMY GOODMAN: Here in the United States, more than 67,000 new cases of the coronavirus were reported Tuesday alone, marking the highest one-day spike so far, and at least 11 states reported record hospitalizations. More than 136,000 people in the country have now died from the disease.
During a webinar with The Journal of the American Medical Association, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, made a dire prediction.
DR. ROBERT REDFIELD: I do think the fall and the winter of 2020 and 2021 are going to be probably one of the most difficult times that we’ve experienced in American public health.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes as the Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers of Disease Control when they send COVID-19 patient data. Starting today, instead of the usual process of sending the data to the CDC, which then releases it to the public, states have been told to send it directly to a Department of Health and Human Services system that The New York Times reports is, quote, “not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers, and health officials who rely on CDC data to make projections and crucial decisions.”
For more, we’re joined by Dr. Ali Khan, epidemiologist and the dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He’s the former director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the CDC. He’s also author, with William Patrick, of The Next Pandemic: On the Front Lines Against Humankind’s Gravest Dangers, a book that looks at how the world’s public health community responded to outbreaks of the most dangerous infectious diseases over the past quarter of a century.
Dr. Khan, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Let’s start with that new directive that no longer are hospitals to send their information on COVID-19 patient data to the CDC, but instead to bypass the CDC. Can you talk about the significance of this?
DR. ALI KHAN: Good morning, Amy, and thank you for the opportunity.
I think that story is a little bit more nuanced. So, the type of data that’s going to the assistant secretary for preparedness and response is capacity and utilization data in terms of how many hospital beds are being used, how many ICU beds are being used. And that data has always traditionally gone to ASPR and not gone to CDC. What we’re not seeing is that public health data is being rerouted to CDC — rerouted from CDC. So, that story about where that specific bit of data is going may be a little bit nuanced, because it’s always gone to the assistant secretary for preparedness and response in the past.
AMY GOODMAN: But the stuff that’s being bypassed from the CDC, the significance of the public not then being able to see it?
DR. ALI KHAN: Now, that would be an issue if the data is no longer available to the public. If you read the original memo, which I did, this was all about streamlining data to a single — capacity data and utilization data, so how many hospital beds are being used, how many tests are being performed in hospitals, to one site, so that multiple federal agencies are not asking hospitals for the exact same thing. This is what hospitals have asked for. They do not want to send data to multiple federal agencies. They want to send it to one place, that is then shared everywhere else. So, as long as the — the real test is, “Is this data still available to the American public?” — is the real test.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dr. Khan, there have been some issues or some criticisms about the CDC data in terms of the fact that there’s always at least a week lag time between the time that the agency gets the information and the time it’s released. Do you have concerns, given the fast-moving nature of this pandemic, that there is a need for the CDC to be able to make data available more quickly?
DR. ALI KHAN: Oh, absolutely. This has been an issue from day one of this outbreak, which is a timely data and transparency of data. Countries that have managed this outbreak well — South Korea, for example, Singapore — all of their data is completely available to the public, and they’re very timely in getting that data, and they use good metrics for how their response is going. And the U.S. has never adopted that strategy to the current day.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And speaking about other countries, what’s your concern about the U.S. response to the pandemic compared to some other countries, like South Korea or New Zealand?
DR. ALI KHAN: That’s an excellent question. So, this, without a doubt, is the greatest public health failure in our nation’s history, and it just continues to be in freefall. So, we peaked at about 30,000 cases in mid-April, and then we squandered two months of lockdown and economic collapse by failing to get our disease contained, and now we’re up to 60,000 cases a day. I mean, that’s completely out of step with the rest of Europe, with Oceania and East Asia.
So, many — all those countries have not only just contained their outbreaks, resumed their economies, started back schools, but some countries have just gone all out and said, “We’re going to zero.” So, New Zealand has eliminated disease. Right? A number of other countries have eliminated disease. China, with 1.4 billion people, has gone nine days without a domestic case. So China is going for elimination, too. So, we are clearly the outlier with this uncontrolled response here in the United States — failed response here in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Ali Khan, what is the U.S. doing wrong?
DR. ALI KHAN: So, it starts — goes right back. So, you know, in the early days, I said it was lack of imagination. So, you know, the U.S. had sort of been sucker-punched by this outbreak. But at this point, it’s very clear: We don’t have a national strategy based on the four principles that everybody else has used to get rid of this outbreak. Simple four principles, right?
So, the first principle to contain this outbreak is leadership. So that’s integrated, whole-of-government leadership from the local, state to national level. We still don’t have that. We can’t agree on so many things that are important.
The second part is, get down community transmission. And this is the role of government, to make sure we’re testing and tracing. Nobody is talking about that anymore — isolating cases quickly, finding those contacts — nor does anybody talk about the metrics around that.
The third thing is community engagement. And that’s our role, right? Wear a mask. Please, wear a mask. Wash your hands. Social distance.
And the fourth thing is, do what you can to make sure that people who are hospitalized are more likely to survive. And the one drug we know that does that right now is dexamethasone.
So, those are four simple principles, a national strategy, four principles. We can get our disease contained like so many other countries all over the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Khan, you’re the former head of the CDC’s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, which included overseeing the Strategic National Stockpile on emergency medical supplies. Can you account for, many months into this pandemic, the United States continuing to have a shortage of tests and masks?
DR. ALI KHAN: I have no explanation for that. I have said I could have grown polypropylene trees by this time for nasal swabs, given the ingenuity of Americans and our biomedical complex to create these material, personal protective equipment, to contain tests — make tests. So I really have no explanation for that.
I can say, though, that we have enough testing in the United States currently, if we used it correctly and we got a timely result back and didn’t have to wait a week for the result. So, really, this goes back to strategy. We do not have the right strategy in the United States to get this disease contained. And if we did, we wouldn’t be worried about personal protective equipment, right? South Korea today had 40 cases. Right? They’re not worried about personal protective equipment. So we’re worried about these things because we can’t contain the disease and not willing to do the hard things, not willing to take — strip politics out of this, base it on the science and get this disease under control.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dr. Khan, I wanted to ask you about the role of Anthony Fauci in terms of the handling of this disease, because, on the one hand, we see the reality that the Trump administration is trying to undermine his credibility these days as he increasingly comes into conflict with what the president wants to do, but, on the other hand, there are some legitimate questions. And in the early parts of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci did urge people not to wear masks. Now, he didn’t couch it by saying there’s a shortage.
DR. ALI KHAN: There wasn’t a shortage.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But at that time, most people in Asian countries were wearing masks, widespread use among the population. Your assessment of how Dr. Fauci has handled the crisis?
DR. ALI KHAN: So, really, this isn’t about Dr. Fauci, right? This is about CDC, which is our nation’s public health agency. And we need to see our nation’s public health agency get their role back, to educate the American people, to provide the necessary data and get us back into containment.
And there’s no doubt that there were missteps made by our public health agencies and public health professionals. Masks is a good example — the lack of a strategy that couldn’t tell the difference between flu and a SARS virus, you know, the lack of testing. So, there was invariably — there were a lot of missteps.
However, what we need now is, we need that talent we’ve always had at CDC back at the forefront talking about public health issues. That’s where our public health expertise resides. It resides at CDC, not at the NIH, not at ASPR, not at whatever. It resides at CDC. We need to hear CDC’s voice, bring those wonderful, amazing people, the greatest public health agency in the world, back to the forefront and help us contain this disease.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And how optimistic are you about the development of a vaccine?
DR. ALI KHAN: I am optimistic; however, the road to an uncertain vaccine is paved in death. Right? So, we talk about 60,000 cases a day. So that’s basically we’re minting 600 to a thousand new death certificates every day. Right? We can’t wait for a vaccine. Right? And other countries have gotten their diseases contained and eliminated without a vaccine. So, yes, I would love a vaccine. There’s lots of data that makes it problematic. Immunity may be short-lived. We’ve never had vaccines based on these technologies. So, as anybody else, I’m optimistic. I hope there’s a vaccine. We don’t need a vaccine today so that we don’t kill another 600 to a thousand people tomorrow. We have the tools.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Dr. Ali Khan, about what it would mean if the president of the United States simply put on a mask on a regular basis? Trump seeing a mask as weakness — only this past weekend, you saw him for a minute wearing a mask, and he said, well, he was in a hospital? The significance of what this would mean at the federal level? Then you see it go down to the state level, his biggest allies, DeSantis, the governor Florida, for the first time donning a mask. In Arizona — we’re going to go to and speak with the mayor of Tucson today — Governor Ducey, a recent death in Arizona of a Mexican American man. His daughter said, “I say that the governor and the president have blood on their hands.” Do you feel the same way, Dr. Khan?
DR. ALI KHAN: I believe all of government has blood on their hands — 136,000 deaths, preventable deaths, a tragedy. There’s a lot of blood to go around here, Amy, let’s be very honest, you know, if you look at the rest of the world, that’s contained their disease, and some even eliminated. So there’s a lot of blood to go around.
But what you saw in countries that were successful was that each and every politician, regardless of their party, followed the science. So, everybody said, “Wear masks.” No controversy. Everybody wore a mask. They got their disease under control. And we need to see that again right now at every political level — local, state, national. Wear a mask. That’s one of the four strategies that will get us out of this mess. So we need everybody to be wearing a mask at this point.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about some of the recent studies out of China, Germany and Britain, suggesting that people who have had COVID-19 begin losing their antibodies in just a few months. So, even if there was a vaccine, the significance of this, Dr. Khan, and also of the younger people that we are seeing get sick and die all over the country?
DR. ALI KHAN: So, Amy, two great questions. So, yes, if your immunity is short-lived, that makes this — makes finding a vaccine, we’re chasing rainbows, right? So, again, a reminder: We don’t need a vaccine to get out of this mess. Even today, I’m very hopeful. Public health still works today the way it worked at the end of January. We can get this outbreak under control.
As far as young people are involved, without a doubt, we see less severe disease. However, young people also can get sick. Right? They can also get hospitalized. They also die. We are now learning that about 50% of all people who get infected with this disease have some sort of heart abnormality. So, even if you don’t die, there may be long-term — there are long-term complications of this disease. So we don’t want our young people to get infected, either.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Khan, speaking of young people, your sense of how various states and school districts around the nation are handling the issue of the reopening of public schools? What’s your assessment of it? Because, obviously, depending on where you are in the country, there’s very different solutions of whether it’s all remote or partial days of the week in the schools.
DR. ALI KHAN: So, I will be very honest with you. As a pediatrician, as a father, as a public health professional, we need kids back in school. Right? Without a doubt. We need to get kids back in school for numerous reasons.
But we have to get them back safely. And we know we can do this. You know, I just did a review of over 15 countries that were able to safely get kids back in school. But that’s based on not just the safety measures we take and wearing masks and everything else that the kids need to do. It’s based on dropping community transmission. So, I say that unless you have approximately 25 cases per million population per day, you can’t resume schools. Right?
So, if people want to go back to schools, please put on your mask. Right? Drop your community transmission. Work with the local health department. Make sure they have the support they need to test and trace everybody. You know, this is what we all need to do to get our kids back in school. Let’s not put them at risk.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Ali Khan, we want to thank you for being with us, epidemiologist, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, former director of the CDC’s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, where he oversaw the Strategic National Stockpile.
When we come back, we speak with Ohio State professor Amna Akbar. Her new piece, “The Left Is Remaking the World.” Then we’ll speak with the mayor of Tucson. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Wintertime” by Norah Jones, ongoing concert series called “Live from the Living Room.”


democracynow--2020-07-15--Headlines for July 15, 2020

Headlines for July 15, 2020

The United States has set another grim record for coronavirus infections , with more than 67,000 new cases confirmed on @ @ @ @ @ states are reporting record hospitalizations , with nearly 1,000 new deaths in just 24 hours @ @ @ @ @ Arizona have put out calls for refrigerated trucks , as morgues overflow with the bodies @ @ @ @ @ least 136,000 people in the U.S. have now died from the disease .
On Tuesday @ @ @ @ @ U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , Dr. Robert Redfield , made a dire @ @ @ @ @ — which is already the worst in the world .
Dr. Robert Redfield : “ @ @ @ @ @ and the winter of 2020 and 2021 are going to be probably one of the @ @ @ @ @ ’ ve experienced in American public health .
”

The United States has set another grim record for coronavirus infections, with more than 67,000 new cases confirmed on Tuesday. At least 11 states are reporting record hospitalizations, with nearly 1,000 new deaths in just 24 hours. Officials in Texas and Arizona have put out calls for refrigerated trucks, as morgues overflow with the bodies of COVID-19 patients. At least 136,000 people in the U.S. have now died from the disease.
On Tuesday, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, made a dire prediction about the U.S. epidemic — which is already the worst in the world.


democracynow--2020-07-17--Philadelphia Delays Unhoused Encampment Eviction as CDC Says "Let Them Remain" & Stop COVID Spread

This is a rush transcript .
Copy may not be in its final form .
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now !
The Quarantine Report .
I ’ m Amy Goodman .
As public health officials plead with people to follow guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop the spread of the coronavirus , many cities are going against these recommendations when it comes to working with people who are unhoused .
CDC guidelines state , quote , “ If individual housing options are not available , allow people who are living unsheltered or in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” unquote .
Despite this , sweeps have been conducted in New York , St. Louis , Minneapolis , Denver and elsewhere .
For more , we go to Philadelphia , where the mayor has postponed the eviction of an encampment of unhoused people that was scheduled for this morning — about right now , in fact .
Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement Thursday the camp , quote , “ casts an important light on the racial inequities in our society that impact homelessness , ” and said he ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ affordable housing .
For more , we ’ re going to go to one of those encampments of unhoused people near the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and join Sterling Johnson , an organizer with Black and Brown Workers Cooperative in Philadelphia , spokesperson for Philadelphia Housing Action .
Sterling Johnson , welcome to Democracy Now !
Please describe for us where you are and what ’ s happening at this encampment .
STERLING JOHNSON : So , thank you , Amy , for having us .
Right now we are at — right in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s called the Von Colln Memorial Field .
This is the James Talib-Dean encampment .
We have taken this space .
We ’ ve occupied this space .
It is right in front of the Park Towne Plaza , where people pay about $ 5,000 a month to stay in there .
It ’ s a very , very open and clear occupation of land that is not meant for us .
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about how it is that the encampment of unhoused people managed to get the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this encampment today .
What kind of negotiations have been taking place ?
STERLING JOHNSON : So , just upon setting up tents , they did contact me specifically about negotiation .
We had been in negotiations for a long period of time .
We had eight demands .
The first demand was to transfer the vacant homes that the city of Philadelphia and the Housing Authority , the Philadelphia Housing Authority , owned into a community land trust .
They refused to talk to us about those issues .
They raised many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they refused to talk about this .
They then — we decided that we would walk out , that we needed to have one conversation that was about permanent housing .
Upon doing that , then they started to escalate and to threaten us and to cut our sanitation contracts .
We then engaged them again , and that is where we ’ re at now .
They have decided to come to the table , with the actual mayor and the actual Housing Authority CEO , to have a real conversation about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Last month , one of your fellow housing activists , Jennifer Bennetch , announced they were helping unhoused families occupy multiple homes .
In this clip from an interview with Unicorn Riot , she describes who owns the homes .
AMY GOODMAN : That ’ s Jennifer Bennetch .
She ’ s standing in front of all these closed homes , boarded-up homes .
Sterling , can you tell us what is the Philadelphia Housing Authority ?
How many homes does it own ?
How many are empty ?
STERLING JOHNSON : So @ @ @ @ @ @ @ largest housing provider in the city of Philadelphia .
They have a waitlist where nobody has moved — well , that has been closed since 2013 .
They are a group that has a history of malfeasance , has a history of corruption , of using money for other — to make market-rate housing .
They have a history of blighting properties .
They have a history of taking Black and Brown homeowners ’ properties and giving them dimes on their — for their properties .
They have a history of also putting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 45 million , and not really focusing on the people that are around them .
The Philadelphia Housing Authority has about 5,000 vacant properties right now .
We want to use them to create a community land trust .
What they want to do is to auction them off to private developers every single year , so they can act as a private rental company , a real estate company .
We have decided to occupy those homes .
We don ’ t believe that it ’ s a crime to place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home so they can sleep safely and soundly .
Those aren ’ t crimes .
That ’ s an act of love .
You know , it ’ s really important to see what the Housing Authority in Philadelphia — and not only Philadelphia , but other housing authorities across the country — have been doing to basically privatize public property .
This is public property .
AMY GOODMAN : So , Sterling , I want to ask you about the resignation this week of the Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney ’ s second-in-command @ @ @ @ @ @ @ faced criticism for his handling of homeless services and policing .
It ’ s been reported investigators from a police counterterrorism unit visited the home of a Philadelphia man , Jose de Marco , who sent flower arrangements to Abernathy ’ s house as part of a demonstration to call attention to the COVID death of a man living in a shelter , and the city ’ s affordable housing crisis .
Talk about the resignation and what this was all about .
STERLING JOHNSON : Yeah .
It ’ s very important @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Jose de Marco is an organizer for ACT UP Philadelphia .
We are , you know , a coalition of groups that talk to the Office of Homeless Services , and talk to him specifically , about all the trouble that people are going to have staying at home due to COVID-19 .
They continued to increase the budget for the police .
They continued to say that they were doing what they could for homeless services .
We know that ’ s not true , when they cut the budget by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ call to defund the police and invest in housing , invest in the people that are here , invest — don ’ t take federal money that ’ s supposed to go to people experiencing homelessness , and give it to the police .
That ’ s a very simple — a very simple ask .
AMY GOODMAN : Sterling Johnson , talk about what ’ s next .
The Philadelphia mayor says he plans to meet with the encampment ’ s organizers directly next week .
Will you be there ?
What @ @ @ @ @ @ @ You ’ re standing in front of this tent encampment .
It ’ s not the only encampment , to say the least , in Philadelphia .
And will you also be able to meet with Kelvin Jeremiah , CEO of the Housing Authority ?
And we just have 30 seconds .
STERLING JOHNSON : Yes .
They have both said that they will meet .
Kenney and Jeremiah have said that they will meet with us .
We will tell them that this is not for us .
We are not the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deep , deep love for everybody that is low- and no-income .
We ’ re not asking for affordable housing .
We need housing for no-income people , for disabled people .
I am a disabled person .
We deserve every right to stay in this city and to live peacefully .
AMY GOODMAN : And , Sterling , how are you keeping safe ?
I see you ’ ve got a mask that you ’ ve pulled down just for this interview .
How are folks staying safe , in this last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
We have regular testing .
We have PPE .
We have hand washing .
We have hand sanitizer .
We have a medic tent .
We care about — everybody in this community cares about each other .
AMY GOODMAN : It might shock people to know the CDC recommendation is that unhoused people not be moved from encampments like yours .
Five seconds , Sterling .
STERLING JOHNSON : Of course , yes .
And Philadelphia has rejected that , has told us that is one man ’ s opinion .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ GOODMAN : Sterling Johnson , I want to thank you for being with us , organizer with Black and Brown Workers Cooperative in Philadelphia , spokesperson for Philadelphia Housing Action .
That does it for our show .
Wear a mask .
Stay safe and save lives .
I ’ m Amy Goodman .
Thanks for joining us .

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman. As public health officials plead with people to follow guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop the spread of the coronavirus, many cities are going against these recommendations when it comes to working with people who are unhoused. CDC guidelines state, quote, “If individual housing options are not available, allow people who are living unsheltered or in encampments to remain where they are,” unquote. Despite this, sweeps have been conducted in New York, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Denver and elsewhere.
For more, we go to Philadelphia, where the mayor has postponed the eviction of an encampment of unhoused people that was scheduled for this morning — about right now, in fact. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement Thursday the camp, quote, “casts an important light on the racial inequities in our society that impact homelessness,” and said he’s committed to taking steps to provide affordable housing.
For more, we’re going to go to one of those encampments of unhoused people near the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and join Sterling Johnson, an organizer with Black and Brown Workers Cooperative in Philadelphia, spokesperson for Philadelphia Housing Action.
Sterling Johnson, welcome to Democracy Now! Please describe for us where you are and what’s happening at this encampment.
STERLING JOHNSON: So, thank you, Amy, for having us. Right now we are at — right in between the City Hall and Art Museum. It’s called the Von Colln Memorial Field. This is the James Talib-Dean encampment. We have taken this space. We’ve occupied this space. It is right in front of the Park Towne Plaza, where people pay about $5,000 a month to stay in there. It’s a very, very open and clear occupation of land that is not meant for us.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how it is that the encampment of unhoused people managed to get the mayor not to raid and take down this encampment today. What kind of negotiations have been taking place?
STERLING JOHNSON: So, just upon setting up tents, they did contact me specifically about negotiation. We had been in negotiations for a long period of time. We had eight demands. The first demand was to transfer the vacant homes that the city of Philadelphia and the Housing Authority, the Philadelphia Housing Authority, owned into a community land trust. They refused to talk to us about those issues. They raised many other issues that were important, but they refused to talk about this. They then — we decided that we would walk out, that we needed to have one conversation that was about permanent housing. Upon doing that, then they started to escalate and to threaten us and to cut our sanitation contracts. We then engaged them again, and that is where we’re at now. They have decided to come to the table, with the actual mayor and the actual Housing Authority CEO, to have a real conversation about permanent low-income housing.
AMY GOODMAN: Last month, one of your fellow housing activists, Jennifer Bennetch, announced they were helping unhoused families occupy multiple homes. In this clip from an interview with Unicorn Riot, she describes who owns the homes.
JENNIFER BENNETCH: So, we’re over here, right across the street from the $45 million Housing Authority headquarters, where we just broke that news. And if you could look over here, these are all vacant public Housing Authority-owned properties. And our Housing Authority, as I said earlier, is processing applications from 2010 and has stopped taking applications in 2013. But there are just vacant properties. This is three right here. There’s two more down there at the end. All of these lots are also owned by the Housing Authority.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Jennifer Bennetch. She’s standing in front of all these closed homes, boarded-up homes. Sterling, can you tell us what is the Philadelphia Housing Authority? How many homes does it own? How many are empty?
STERLING JOHNSON: So, the Philadelphia Housing Authority is the largest housing provider in the city of Philadelphia. They have a waitlist where nobody has moved — well, that has been closed since 2013. They are a group that has a history of malfeasance, has a history of corruption, of using money for other — to make market-rate housing. They have a history of blighting properties. They have a history of taking Black and Brown homeowners’ properties and giving them dimes on their — for their properties. They have a history of also putting money into their headquarters, which is $45 million, and not really focusing on the people that are around them.
The Philadelphia Housing Authority has about 5,000 vacant properties right now. We want to use them to create a community land trust. What they want to do is to auction them off to private developers every single year, so they can act as a private rental company, a real estate company. We have decided to occupy those homes. We don’t believe that it’s a crime to place a family with small children into a home so they can sleep safely and soundly. Those aren’t crimes. That’s an act of love. You know, it’s really important to see what the Housing Authority in Philadelphia — and not only Philadelphia, but other housing authorities across the country — have been doing to basically privatize public property. This is public property.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Sterling, I want to ask you about the resignation this week of the Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney’s second-in-command, Managing Director Brian Abernathy, who faced criticism for his handling of homeless services and policing. It’s been reported investigators from a police counterterrorism unit visited the home of a Philadelphia man, Jose de Marco, who sent flower arrangements to Abernathy’s house as part of a demonstration to call attention to the COVID death of a man living in a shelter, and the city’s affordable housing crisis. Talk about the resignation and what this was all about.
STERLING JOHNSON: Yeah. It’s very important to see the response to legitimate protests. Jose de Marco is an organizer for ACT UP Philadelphia. We are, you know, a coalition of groups that talk to the Office of Homeless Services, and talk to him specifically, about all the trouble that people are going to have staying at home due to COVID-19. They continued to increase the budget for the police. They continued to say that they were doing what they could for homeless services. We know that’s not true, when they cut the budget by $12 million. We have a call to defund the police and invest in housing, invest in the people that are here, invest — don’t take federal money that’s supposed to go to people experiencing homelessness, and give it to the police. That’s a very simple — a very simple ask.
AMY GOODMAN: Sterling Johnson, talk about what’s next. The Philadelphia mayor says he plans to meet with the encampment’s organizers directly next week. Will you be there? What do you plan to tell him? You’re standing in front of this tent encampment. It’s not the only encampment, to say the least, in Philadelphia. And will you also be able to meet with Kelvin Jeremiah, CEO of the Housing Authority? And we just have 30 seconds.
STERLING JOHNSON: Yes. They have both said that they will meet. Kenney and Jeremiah have said that they will meet with us. We will tell them that this is not for us. We are not the beneficiaries of this. We have a deep, deep love for everybody that is low- and no-income. We’re not asking for affordable housing. We need housing for no-income people, for disabled people. I am a disabled person. We deserve every right to stay in this city and to live peacefully.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Sterling, how are you keeping safe? I see you’ve got a mask that you’ve pulled down just for this interview. How are folks staying safe, in this last 10 seconds?
STERLING JOHNSON: Yes. We have regular testing. We have PPE. We have hand washing. We have hand sanitizer. We have a medic tent. We care about — everybody in this community cares about each other.
AMY GOODMAN: It might shock people to know the CDC recommendation is that unhoused people not be moved from encampments like yours. Five seconds, Sterling.
STERLING JOHNSON: Of course, yes. And Philadelphia has rejected that, has told us that is one man’s opinion. We have that on video.
AMY GOODMAN: Sterling Johnson, I want to thank you for being with us, organizer with Black and Brown Workers Cooperative in Philadelphia, spokesperson for Philadelphia Housing Action.
That does it for our show. Wear a mask. Stay safe and save lives. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.


democracynow--2020-07-17--Sonia Shah: "It's Time to Tell a New Story About Coronavirus — Our Lives Depend on It"

This is a rush transcript .
Copy may not be in its final form .
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now !
I ’ m Amy Goodman .
The Quarantine Report .
The United States hit an all-time high of 75,600 new COVID cases Thursday , the largest number recorded in a single day since the pandemic began .
And that number is expected to be much higher , as it ’ s increasingly difficult now to get tests across the country .
In some places , in Texas and Arizona and other states , the lines are hours @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hit record COVID-19 daily death tolls Thursday , joining Alabama , Arizona , Hawaii , Idaho , Montana , Oregon , South Carolina and Utah , which all saw their highest number of dead in a single day this week .
As the U.S. spirals into a disaster that public health experts warn could get much worse in the fall , half of the states in the country have now issued mask mandates .
But some Republican leaders are continuing to fight the basic public health measure .
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp suspended @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sued the city of Atlanta and its mayor , Mayor Bottoms , for its mask mandate .
President Trump has repeatedly refused to wear a mask , as he did when he landed in Atlanta this week .
A University of Washington model predicts near-universal mask wearing could save up to 28,000 lives in the U.S. before October 1st .
Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday the spike in coronavirus cases resulted from states rushing to reopen their economies , and that the economy will continue to suffer unless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ simple measures like mask-wearing , avoiding crowds , and practicing social distancing .
Despite this , President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos are continuing to push schools to reopen in person in the fall .
This is the White House press secretary speaking at the White House .
AMY GOODMAN : We ’ re joined right now by Sonia Shah , investigative journalist and the author of Pandemic : Tracking Contagions , from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond and The Next Great Migration : The Beauty and Terror of Life on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nation is headlined “ It ’ s Time to Tell a New Story About Coronavirus — Our Lives Depend on It.
” Welcome back to Democracy Now !
, Sonia Shah .
What is that new story that must be told ?
SONIA SHAH : Well , I think the way we think about infectious diseases , like COVID-19 , is as if they are a foreign incursion that we have to repel sort of with military might and weaponry .
But , in fact , we ’ re not passive victims of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lot of human agency involved in the infectious disease process .
And I think we need to start talking about COVID-19 and other infectious diseases as the social and political phenomenon that they also are .
AMY GOODMAN : So , talk about that .
Further elaborate on what you think is the real crisis here , and that even finding a vaccine is not going to cure that catastrophe we ’ re facing .
SONIA SHAH : Right .
So , the way we talk about the disease , you know , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
So , if we think of it as a foreign incursion , then we want to do things like close the borders or control people ’ s movements who are unwanted people ’ s movements , and we want to create these weapons — vaccines and drugs .
And , you know , that might work for older diseases that we already had under control , but when you have a brand-new disease like this one — and we ’ re already seeing this — you can not make a drug or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the first wave .
And the first wave is the most deadly wave , because that ’ s when we have no immunity at all .
And so , we ’ re seeing the effect of that now .
Instead of spending — you know , we should have been spending way more time and resources prioritizing collective actions , which we ’ re having so much difficulty doing now , sort of after the fact .
After we ’ ve had these huge outbreaks and we have so much virus around , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about , “ Well , maybe we should wear masks .
Maybe we should stay home .
Maybe we should close restaurants.
” We should have been doing that early on .
And I think if we had told a different story about this pathogen , that it is a social phenomenon , that it is within our ability to arrest its spread by changing our behavior through cooperative actions together , I think we might have been in a different place .
AMY GOODMAN : Some might say that the best vaccine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , is healthcare for all .
Can you fit the disparities , the racial disparities in who lives and who dies , who gets sick and who doesn ’ t , into that ?
SONIA SHAH : Yeah , I think that ’ s absolutely right .
I mean , I think when we spend — you know , if we look at where we ’ re spending our resources as a nation , where we ’ re spending our attention , it ’ s very much into this market-driven , proprietary vaccine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ serves certain interests , of course .
Those companies are going to , you know , make a lot of money , get a lot of glory for creating a vaccine .
And of course the vaccine will help us , if we actually ever get one , but the people who can wait for the vaccine have privileges , right ?
There ’ s a lot of people who can ’ t wait for a vaccine .
We need to do collective actions and behavior changes now .
And we need everyone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ build that trust up again and to think of this disease as something that is within our power .
We are not the passive victims that we blame other people for — right ?
— that they ’ re bringing it to us , and we need to keep them out , or we need to have weapons to destroy the microbes in their bodies .
We need to think of it as something — you know , all these microbes , they have no independent locomotion .
They rely entirely on us @ @ @ @ @ @ @ next .
So , even if you have the introduction of a deadly pathogen in a community — and we ’ ve seen this over time historically — you may not have an epidemic if behaviors don ’ t sustain it .
So , these are things that we have to — we have to rethink what our role is in the disease process .
AMY GOODMAN : Sonia Shah , give us a history lesson .
Take us back through the contagions , from 1832 , the cholera outbreak in 1832 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ SHAH : So , when cholera first emerged in the 1800s , it was like COVID-19 today — brand-new disease , no one had ever seen anything like it .
It tore across the world .
It started in South Asia , moved up into Europe and then across into North America .
And it was carried through contaminated water .
People in New York , physicians , collected data showing very clearly that cholera was coming down the Hudson River , it was coming down the Erie Canal and was heading straight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ interests at the time said , “ Well , we can not quarantine the waterways , because that would be too disruptive to trade.
” And so public health interventions never included any quarantines of the waterways .
So , that was part of the resistance to controlling the disease , was just it was too costly to the economy .
But the other part of it was that it wasn ’ t the way they understood the disease .
The way they understood diseases at that time was that contagious diseases were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were carried by miasmas , these smelly clouds of gas , that if you inhaled them , that that ’ s what would make you sick .
So , rather than quarantining the waterways , people did things like string up sides of beef to soak up the cholera vapors , or they burned barrels of tar to repel the miasmas .
In the city of London , people would install flush toilets , you know , what they called water closets , not because they wanted to get rid of human waste @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in fact contaminated with cholera , but because they wanted to get rid of the smells .
And so , since they didn ’ t care about the contents of their privies and outhouses , they dumped all of that human waste into their drinking water , into the River Thames .
And after every cholera outbreak , they actually installed more flush toilets to dump more human waste into the rivers and their drinking water , rather than less , and so they probably made cholera a lot worse .
And so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for nearly a century , over the 19th century , and thousands and thousands of people died , of course .
AMY GOODMAN : And then talk about how society has dealt with , for example , Zika and Ebola , and how COVID-19 is different from those pandemics .
SONIA SHAH : Well , Zika and Ebola never really became full-on — SONIA SHAH : — pandemics , of course , but as outbreaks , you know , those are much more — have been much more containable .
But I think @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the same approach , where we look for drugs and vaccines rather than looking at the deep root causes , which are human-driven .
All of these things are coming out of wildlife and animals .
All of these microbes live in animals and wildlife and are harmless in those environments .
So we think of them as invading us , but what ’ s really happening is we ’ re invading their territory .
So , when we invade wildlife habitat , we destroy where the bats roost .
And so , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They come and live in our farms and backyards instead .
And that facilitates all kinds of novel , intimate contact between wildlife and human bodies , whether it ’ s wildlife trade or bushmeat hunting or wet markets or , you know , casual contact , any number of those things .
We are not getting at those root causes .
And so , since 1940 , we ’ ve had hundreds of these new pathogens emerge , whether it ’ s Ebola in West Africa , where it had never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Americas , where it had never been seen before , or this new coronavirus .
And so , this is a drip , drip , drip of new pathogens that are emerging .
And , you know , the underlying reasons are because of the way we ’ re interacting with the environment and with nature .
These are things that are under our control , so we need to start talking about it that way rather than casting ourselves as sort of the passive victims of these foreign , invading germs .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ cases , are learning the word “ zoonotic ” disease for the first time , the spillover , the jumping from animals to humans .
If you could explain that further , just what you were talking about ?
SONIA SHAH : So , about 60 % of the new pathogens that we ’ ve been seeing since 1940 originate in the bodies of animals .
About 70 % of them originate in the bodies of wild animals .
Those are not microbes that cause disease in those creatures .
So , just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ live in our bodies ; they don ’ t make us sick .
You know , we have things in our guts , and they don ’ t make us sick .
They actually are beneficial to us .
So , those microbes are living in animals ’ bodies .
When we come into novel , intimate contact with those animals — say , for example , if there ’ s bat excreta around and your kid is playing near a tree and gets a little bit of bat poo on their hands @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the microbes that live inside the bat ’ s body then enter the human body .
If that happens again and again often enough , that microbe will start to adapt to the human body .
And like every other living thing , when it finds a new territory to exploit , it starts to thrive .
It starts to adapt and evolve to colonize that new environment .
And so that ’ s how these new pathogens are being born .
We are creating these bridges between wild — between the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bodies , because we ’ re destroying so much of the habitat where they live in .
So , instead of these animals living in far-off places where they don ’ t encounter us very much , we are cutting down the forests and paving over the wetlands where they would normally live , and instead they ’ re coming and living in our farms and gardens and backyards instead — those that don ’ t go extinct , of course .
AMY GOODMAN : With the climate crisis contributing — the climate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : Yes .
Well , because of the climate crisis , we also have wild animals moving in all new — in all different places , right ?
We have 80 % of wild species are on the move right now , moving into the heights and towards the poles And so , they are encountering new human populations as they move into new places .
And those movements , of course , are life-saving for them , but it just adds to these collisions between humans , microbes and animals .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new diseases .
AMY GOODMAN : Sonia Shah , before we end , I wanted to get into what you think are some solutions .
For example , explain the concept of One Health .
SONIA SHAH : So , One Health is a concept in public health circles , and as a theoretical construct , it ’ s gotten a lot of purchase .
The idea is that human health is not just the absence of pathogens or the absence of certain kinds of sicknesses .
Human health is connected to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of our wildlife and the health of our ecosystems .
And so , if we think of human health that way , then it ’ s not just an issue for biomedical experts .
It ’ s not just an issue for drug companies to come up with new medicines and new vaccines for us .
What we have to do to create good health is to make sure that our livestock are healthy , to make sure that our wildlife is healthy and to make sure our ecosystems are healthy .
So @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Health .
And [ inaudible ] operationalized on a kind of a low level .
There ’ s a lot more we can do to make the One Health approach more common , but it ’ s starting , so it ’ s there .
And I think this is something that is [ inaudible ] promise , as we move into this new era , seeing a lot more of these emerging [ inaudible ] .
AMY GOODMAN : You know , in our headlines today , we covered the story of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ States saying that Russia is trying to hack the vaccine research that ’ s being done in different countries .
I was wondering — and , of course , Russia is denying this .
If you can talk about vaccine nationalism ?
Instead of sharing knowledge to cure the world , countries are racing to be the first to make the vaccine and then get a monopoly on it .
We just spoke to Dr. Ali Khan , who is a former CDC official and now dean of the school at University of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if all of this were open-source , then you wouldn ’ t have the time spent on these accusations .
SONIA SHAH : Absolutely .
I think he ’ s absolutely right .
It needs to be open-source .
And this goes back to the whole way we think about diseases as a problem of foreign invasion .
You know , it really lends itself to these nationalistic kind of enterprises , saying , “ Well , we need to come up with our own thing to protect our people with our weapon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we would have already seen is the only thing that is helping in this last six months is international solidarity .
It ’ s the fact that we understand so much about the disease because scientists in China and Europe and elsewhere have been sharing data with other scientists around the world .
That ’ s what is actually helping us understand : How does this thing spread from one person to another ?
How much pathogen do you need to have an infectious dose ?
Do masks really work ?
Does hand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ things we ’ re learning because of international solidarity across borders , these international scientific collaborations , which are really unheard of .
You know , it ’ s unprecedented , the amount of collaboration that ’ s happening across borders right now .
And that ’ s what we need to support , moving forward .
This whole idea of a vaccine search that ’ s funded through taxpayer dollars , to a large extent , and yet being capitalized and creating — you know , that we ’ re creating proprietary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ absolute wrong direction .
AMY GOODMAN : There ’ s a front-page piece in The New York Times today , “ Unproven Firm Got $ 1.6 Billion to Find a Cure , ” for vaccine research .
But this issue of where the money goes and where the money could be better spent makes me think about Jonas Salk , who refused to make the polio vaccine — let it be trademarked .
He said it must be free to all .
SONIA SHAH : Yeah , absolutely .
And I think the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is that we have put a lot of faith and stock into vaccine development .
And I think , you know , if you look at the history of our viral threats , our microbial threats , there ’ s been very few that we ’ ve been able to control or even eradicate through vaccines .
There ’ s only been one that we ’ ve actually ever eradicated through a vaccine , and that was smallpox .
And that was actually — the smallpox vaccine was not based on a proprietary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on a folk remedy that had been developed for hundreds of years in Asia and Africa .
So , you know , this idea that we can very rapidly produce this product and it ’ s going to save us all , I think , is a little bit exaggerated , when you really consider the whole history of how vaccines have been able to control contagious diseases .
In almost all the big diseases we ’ ve encountered in our history , whether it ’ s cholera , malaria , tuberculosis , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ change that has saved us from them .
It ’ s been housing reform and social reform , sanitary reform , clean water , all of those things — hard-won social changes that actually build us out of the contagious way of life .
AMY GOODMAN : Sonia Shah , I want to thank you for being with us , and end with the exact quote of Jonas Salk .
He was asked by Ed Murrow , “ Who owns this patent ?
” Salk replied , “ Well , the people , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ patent .
Could you patent the sun ?
” he asked .
Sonia Shah , science investigative journalist , author of Pandemic : Tracking Contagions , from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond , as well as The Next Great Migration : The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move .
We ’ ll link to your latest article published in The Nation .
It ’ s headlined “ It ’ s Time to Tell a New Story About Coronavirus — Our Lives Depend on It.
” When we come back , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ living in encampments should be allowed to remain there , which will help stop the spread of COVID-19 .
We ’ ll go to Philadelphia .
Stay with us .

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. The Quarantine Report. The United States hit an all-time high of 75,600 new COVID cases Thursday, the largest number recorded in a single day since the pandemic began. And that number is expected to be much higher, as it’s increasingly difficult now to get tests across the country. In some places, in Texas and Arizona and other states, the lines are hours and hours long. Texas and Florida hit record COVID-19 daily death tolls Thursday, joining Alabama, Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, South Carolina and Utah, which all saw their highest number of dead in a single day this week.
As the U.S. spirals into a disaster that public health experts warn could get much worse in the fall, half of the states in the country have now issued mask mandates. But some Republican leaders are continuing to fight the basic public health measure. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp suspended local mask requirements this week and has sued the city of Atlanta and its mayor, Mayor Bottoms, for its mask mandate. President Trump has repeatedly refused to wear a mask, as he did when he landed in Atlanta this week.
A University of Washington model predicts near-universal mask wearing could save up to 28,000 lives in the U.S. before October 1st. Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday the spike in coronavirus cases resulted from states rushing to reopen their economies, and that the economy will continue to suffer unless the virus is brought under control through simple measures like mask-wearing, avoiding crowds, and practicing social distancing.
Despite this, President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos are continuing to push schools to reopen in person in the fall. This is the White House press secretary speaking at the White House.
PRESS SECRETARY KAYLEIGH McENANY: You know, the president has said unmistakably that he wants schools to open. And I was just in the Oval talking to him about that. And when he says open, he means open in full, kids being able to attend each and every day at their school. The science should not stand in the way of this.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by Sonia Shah, investigative journalist and the author of Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond and The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. Her new piece for The Nation is headlined “It’s Time to Tell a New Story About Coronavirus — Our Lives Depend on It.”
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Sonia Shah. What is that new story that must be told?
SONIA SHAH: Well, I think the way we think about infectious diseases, like COVID-19, is as if they are a foreign incursion that we have to repel sort of with military might and weaponry. But, in fact, we’re not passive victims of these things. There’s a lot of human agency involved in the infectious disease process. And I think we need to start talking about COVID-19 and other infectious diseases as the social and political phenomenon that they also are.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about that. Further elaborate on what you think is the real crisis here, and that even finding a vaccine is not going to cure that catastrophe we’re facing.
SONIA SHAH: Right. So, the way we talk about the disease, you know, that is what propels our policy responses. So, if we think of it as a foreign incursion, then we want to do things like close the borders or control people’s movements who are unwanted people’s movements, and we want to create these weapons — vaccines and drugs.
And, you know, that might work for older diseases that we already had under control, but when you have a brand-new disease like this one — and we’re already seeing this — you cannot make a drug or vaccine fast enough to protect people from the first wave. And the first wave is the most deadly wave, because that’s when we have no immunity at all. And so, we’re seeing the effect of that now.
Instead of spending — you know, we should have been spending way more time and resources prioritizing collective actions, which we’re having so much difficulty doing now, sort of after the fact. After we’ve had these huge outbreaks and we have so much virus around, now we’re trying to talk about, “Well, maybe we should wear masks. Maybe we should stay home. Maybe we should close restaurants.” We should have been doing that early on.
And I think if we had told a different story about this pathogen, that it is a social phenomenon, that it is within our ability to arrest its spread by changing our behavior through cooperative actions together, I think we might have been in a different place.
AMY GOODMAN: Some might say that the best vaccine for the coronavirus is Medicare for All, is healthcare for all. Can you fit the disparities, the racial disparities in who lives and who dies, who gets sick and who doesn’t, into that?
SONIA SHAH: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. I mean, I think when we spend — you know, if we look at where we’re spending our resources as a nation, where we’re spending our attention, it’s very much into this market-driven, proprietary vaccine development and drug development. And that serves certain interests, of course. Those companies are going to, you know, make a lot of money, get a lot of glory for creating a vaccine.
And of course the vaccine will help us, if we actually ever get one, but the people who can wait for the vaccine have privileges, right? There’s a lot of people who can’t wait for a vaccine. We need to do collective actions and behavior changes now. And we need everyone on board. So we need to build that trust up again and to think of this disease as something that is within our power. We are not the passive victims that we blame other people for — right? — that they’re bringing it to us, and we need to keep them out, or we need to have weapons to destroy the microbes in their bodies.
We need to think of it as something — you know, all these microbes, they have no independent locomotion. They rely entirely on us to spread from one person to the next. So, even if you have the introduction of a deadly pathogen in a community — and we’ve seen this over time historically — you may not have an epidemic if behaviors don’t sustain it. So, these are things that we have to — we have to rethink what our role is in the disease process.
AMY GOODMAN: Sonia Shah, give us a history lesson. Take us back through the contagions, from 1832, the cholera outbreak in 1832, and come to the present.
SONIA SHAH: So, when cholera first emerged in the 1800s, it was like COVID-19 today — brand-new disease, no one had ever seen anything like it. It tore across the world. It started in South Asia, moved up into Europe and then across into North America. And it was carried through contaminated water. People in New York, physicians, collected data showing very clearly that cholera was coming down the Hudson River, it was coming down the Erie Canal and was heading straight for New York City. But commercial interests at the time said, “Well, we cannot quarantine the waterways, because that would be too disruptive to trade.” And so public health interventions never included any quarantines of the waterways. So, that was part of the resistance to controlling the disease, was just it was too costly to the economy.
But the other part of it was that it wasn’t the way they understood the disease. The way they understood diseases at that time was that contagious diseases were carried in the air, that these were carried by miasmas, these smelly clouds of gas, that if you inhaled them, that that’s what would make you sick. So, rather than quarantining the waterways, people did things like string up sides of beef to soak up the cholera vapors, or they burned barrels of tar to repel the miasmas. In the city of London, people would install flush toilets, you know, what they called water closets, not because they wanted to get rid of human waste and contain human waste, which was in fact contaminated with cholera, but because they wanted to get rid of the smells. And so, since they didn’t care about the contents of their privies and outhouses, they dumped all of that human waste into their drinking water, into the River Thames. And after every cholera outbreak, they actually installed more flush toilets to dump more human waste into the rivers and their drinking water, rather than less, and so they probably made cholera a lot worse. And so, we had these cholera outbreaks continuing for nearly a century, over the 19th century, and thousands and thousands of people died, of course.
AMY GOODMAN: And then talk about how society has dealt with, for example, Zika and Ebola, and how COVID-19 is different from those pandemics.
SONIA SHAH: Well, Zika and Ebola never really became full-on —
AMY GOODMAN: Epidemics.
SONIA SHAH: — pandemics, of course, but as outbreaks, you know, those are much more — have been much more containable. But I think, you know, it’s the same approach, where we look for drugs and vaccines rather than looking at the deep root causes, which are human-driven.
All of these things are coming out of wildlife and animals. All of these microbes live in animals and wildlife and are harmless in those environments. So we think of them as invading us, but what’s really happening is we’re invading their territory. So, when we invade wildlife habitat, we destroy where the bats roost. And so, they don’t just go away. They come and live in our farms and backyards instead. And that facilitates all kinds of novel, intimate contact between wildlife and human bodies, whether it’s wildlife trade or bushmeat hunting or wet markets or, you know, casual contact, any number of those things.
We are not getting at those root causes. And so, since 1940, we’ve had hundreds of these new pathogens emerge, whether it’s Ebola in West Africa, where it had never been seen before, Zika in the Americas, where it had never been seen before, or this new coronavirus. And so, this is a drip, drip, drip of new pathogens that are emerging. And, you know, the underlying reasons are because of the way we’re interacting with the environment and with nature. These are things that are under our control, so we need to start talking about it that way rather than casting ourselves as sort of the passive victims of these foreign, invading germs.
AMY GOODMAN: People, in many cases, are learning the word “zoonotic” disease for the first time, the spillover, the jumping from animals to humans. If you could explain that further, just what you were talking about?
SONIA SHAH: So, about 60% of the new pathogens that we’ve been seeing since 1940 originate in the bodies of animals. About 70% of them originate in the bodies of wild animals. Those are not microbes that cause disease in those creatures. So, just like we have lots of microbes that live in our bodies; they don’t make us sick. You know, we have things in our guts, and they don’t make us sick. They actually are beneficial to us.
So, those microbes are living in animals’ bodies. When we come into novel, intimate contact with those animals — say, for example, if there’s bat excreta around and your kid is playing near a tree and gets a little bit of bat poo on their hands and puts their hand in their mouth, the microbes that live inside the bat’s body then enter the human body. If that happens again and again often enough, that microbe will start to adapt to the human body. And like every other living thing, when it finds a new territory to exploit, it starts to thrive. It starts to adapt and evolve to colonize that new environment.
And so that’s how these new pathogens are being born. We are creating these bridges between wild — between the bodies of wild animals and our own bodies, because we’re destroying so much of the habitat where they live in. So, instead of these animals living in far-off places where they don’t encounter us very much, we are cutting down the forests and paving over the wetlands where they would normally live, and instead they’re coming and living in our farms and gardens and backyards instead — those that don’t go extinct, of course.
AMY GOODMAN: With the climate crisis contributing — the climate crisis contributing to this.
SONIA SHAH: Yes. Well, because of the climate crisis, we also have wild animals moving in all new — in all different places, right? We have 80% of wild species are on the move right now, moving into the heights and towards the poles And so, they are encountering new human populations as they move into new places. And those movements, of course, are life-saving for them, but it just adds to these collisions between humans, microbes and animals. And that is the process that brings us new diseases.
AMY GOODMAN: Sonia Shah, before we end, I wanted to get into what you think are some solutions. For example, explain the concept of One Health.
SONIA SHAH: So, One Health is a concept in public health circles, and as a theoretical construct, it’s gotten a lot of purchase. The idea is that human health is not just the absence of pathogens or the absence of certain kinds of sicknesses. Human health is connected to the health of our livestock, the health of our wildlife and the health of our ecosystems.
And so, if we think of human health that way, then it’s not just an issue for biomedical experts. It’s not just an issue for drug companies to come up with new medicines and new vaccines for us. What we have to do to create good health is to make sure that our livestock are healthy, to make sure that our wildlife is healthy and to make sure our ecosystems are healthy. So that’s the idea of One Health.
And [inaudible] operationalized on a kind of a low level. There’s a lot more we can do to make the One Health approach more common, but it’s starting, so it’s there. And I think this is something that is [inaudible] promise, as we move into this new era, seeing a lot more of these emerging [inaudible].
AMY GOODMAN: You know, in our headlines today, we covered the story of the U.K., Canada and the United States saying that Russia is trying to hack the vaccine research that’s being done in different countries. I was wondering — and, of course, Russia is denying this. If you can talk about vaccine nationalism? Instead of sharing knowledge to cure the world, countries are racing to be the first to make the vaccine and then get a monopoly on it. We just spoke to Dr. Ali Khan, who is a former CDC official and now dean of the school at University of Nebraska. And he just tweeted that if all of this were open-source, then you wouldn’t have the time spent on these accusations.
SONIA SHAH: Absolutely. I think he’s absolutely right. It needs to be open-source. And this goes back to the whole way we think about diseases as a problem of foreign invasion. You know, it really lends itself to these nationalistic kind of enterprises, saying, “Well, we need to come up with our own thing to protect our people with our weapon,” instead of — but what we would have already seen is the only thing that is helping in this last six months is international solidarity.
It’s the fact that we understand so much about the disease because scientists in China and Europe and elsewhere have been sharing data with other scientists around the world. That’s what is actually helping us understand: How does this thing spread from one person to another? How much pathogen do you need to have an infectious dose? Do masks really work? Does hand washing really work? All of these things we’re learning because of international solidarity across borders, these international scientific collaborations, which are really unheard of. You know, it’s unprecedented, the amount of collaboration that’s happening across borders right now.
And that’s what we need to support, moving forward. This whole idea of a vaccine search that’s funded through taxpayer dollars, to a large extent, and yet being capitalized and creating — you know, that we’re creating proprietary products instead, is going in the absolute wrong direction.
AMY GOODMAN: There’s a front-page piece in The New York Times today, “Unproven Firm Got $1.6 Billion to Find a Cure,” for vaccine research. But this issue of where the money goes and where the money could be better spent makes me think about Jonas Salk, who refused to make the polio vaccine — let it be trademarked. He said it must be free to all.
SONIA SHAH: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other part of it, Amy, is that we have put a lot of faith and stock into vaccine development. And I think, you know, if you look at the history of our viral threats, our microbial threats, there’s been very few that we’ve been able to control or even eradicate through vaccines. There’s only been one that we’ve actually ever eradicated through a vaccine, and that was smallpox. And that was actually — the smallpox vaccine was not based on a proprietary, high-tech process. It was based on a folk remedy that had been developed for hundreds of years in Asia and Africa.
So, you know, this idea that we can very rapidly produce this product and it’s going to save us all, I think, is a little bit exaggerated, when you really consider the whole history of how vaccines have been able to control contagious diseases. In almost all the big diseases we’ve encountered in our history, whether it’s cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, etc., it’s been behavior change that has saved us from them. It’s been housing reform and social reform, sanitary reform, clean water, all of those things — hard-won social changes that actually build us out of the contagious way of life.
AMY GOODMAN: Sonia Shah, I want to thank you for being with us, and end with the exact quote of Jonas Salk. He was asked by Ed Murrow, “Who owns this patent?” Salk replied, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” he asked.
Sonia Shah, science investigative journalist, author of Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, as well as The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. We’ll link to your latest article published in The Nation. It’s headlined “It’s Time to Tell a New Story About Coronavirus — Our Lives Depend on It.”
When we come back, the Center for Disease Control says unhoused people living in encampments should be allowed to remain there, which will help stop the spread of COVID-19. We’ll go to Philadelphia. Stay with us.