On Employer Vax Mandates

The nexus between the Libertarian nutballs and the Anti-Vax nutballs may be bringing up some interesting twists - for me anyway.

My general philosophy is that most everything is a matter of where you draw the line.

eg:

• Where's the line between Murder and Homicide?
• Where's the line between Sexual Harassment and pleasant friendly - even playful - interaction among colleagues?
• Where's the line between campaign contributions and bribery?

So I have to ask - if my employer can mandate shirts and pants, why not a mask?

If I can require my employees to observe safety regulations in the workplace, why would I not be allowed to mandate vaccinations?

You show up at work with measles because you refuse to get yourself or your kids vaccinated. You infect the young woman in the next cubicle and her pregnancy ends in miscarriage causing hemorrhage and complications that aren't fatal, but debilitating...etc etc.

Where does my liability as an employer end, and yours as an infection vector begin?

Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Can employers make COVID-19 vaccination mandatory?

Yes, with some exceptions.

Experts say U.S. employers can require employees to take safety measures, including vaccination. That doesn't necessarily mean you would get fired if you refuse, but you might need to sign a waiver or agree to work under specific conditions to limit any risk you might pose to yourself or others.

"Employers generally have wide scope" to make rules for the workplace, said Dorit Reiss, a law professor who specializes in vaccine policies at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. "It's their business."

Rules will vary by country. But the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has allowed companies to mandate the flu and other vaccines, and has indicated they can require COVID-19 vaccines.

There are exceptions. For example, people can request exemptions for medical or religious reasons. Some states have proposed laws that restrict mandating the vaccines because of their "emergency use" status, but that may become less of an issue since Pfizer has applied for full approval and others are likely to follow.

How employers approach the issue will vary. Many might not want to require vaccination because of the administrative burden of tracking compliance and managing exemption requests, noted Michelle S. Strowhiro, an employment adviser and lawyer at McDermott Will & Emery. Legal claims could also arise.

As a result, many employers will likely strongly encourage vaccination without making it mandatory, Strowhiro said.

Walmart, for example, is offering a $75 bonus for employees who provide proof they were vaccinated.

So, it seems like we're charging headlong into a new round of labor vs management scrapes, and suddenly we're seeing something of a break in the stone wall contention that has always maintained that the noble entrepreneur has - and deserves to exercise - all but absolute power when it comes to deciding what does and what doesn't happen in and around his little patch of empire.

But as the Anti-Vax bullshit gets more astroturf boosts from fat cat culture war hobbyists, are the clear-eyed pragmatic authoritarians now saying the workers deserve to have more of a say in company policy?

Or maybe it's more like - "We'll throw them this populist bone and that'll help them get their minds right"

I doubt anyone notices for very long that we've got another hypocrisy problem here. Some clever schmuck will come up with a cool-sounding slogan to smooth it all over. But hey - for a brief and glorious moment, y'know?

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   559,756 (⬆︎ .33%)
New Deaths:     12,349 (⬆︎ .35%)

USA

New Cases:   23,500 (⬆︎ .07%)
New Deaths:       607 (⬆︎ .10%)

Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations:          165.1 million (⬆︎ .43%)
Total Eligible Population:   58.9%
Total Population:                49.7%

Yesterday, May 26, 2021

0 Vaccinated people

and

12,349 Un-Vaccinated people

were killed by COVID-19

And what would USAmerica Inc be these days without some gaggle of assholes looking to turn a buck pandering to the rubes?

WaPo:

Resistance to vaccine mandates is building. A powerful network is helping.
A New York firm has filed suit or sent letters to employers in several states as part of an effort spearheaded by one of the largest anti-vaccination groups in the country.

The Americans lodging complaints against coronavirus vaccine mandates are a diverse lot — a sheriff’s deputy in North Carolina, nursing home employees in Wisconsin and students at the largest university in New Jersey.

But their resistance is woven together by a common thread: the involvement of a law firm closely tied to the anti-vaccine movement.

Attorneys from Siri & Glimstad — a New York firm that has done millions of dollars of legal work for one of the nation’s foremost anti-vaccination groups — are co-counsel in a case against the Durham County Sheriff’s Office. They’ve sent warning letters to officials in Rock County, Wis., as well as to the president of Rutgers University and other schools.

The legal salvos show that a groundswell against compulsory immunization is being coordinated, at least in part, from a law office on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan. And they offer a window into a wide-ranging and well-resourced effort to contest vaccine requirements in workplaces and other settings critical to the country’s reopening — a dispute with sweeping implications for public health, state authority and individual rights.

“The message is, ‘Maybe you should reconsider because you don’t want to end up in court,’ ” said Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. “I think that works.”

The Informed Consent Action Network, a Texas-based nonprofit group founded by former daytime television producer Del Bigtree that campaigns against requiring vaccines, in part by citing unsubstantiated or debunked claims about their dangers, has advertised Siri & Glimstad’s services and sought plaintiffs for challenges to mandates.

“If you or anyone you know is being required by an employer or school to receive a covid-19 vaccine, ICAN is offering to support legal action on your behalf to challenge the requirement,” reads an advertisement on a blog run by Children’s Health Defense, a group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that spreads what Kennedy’s family members say is anti-vaccine misinformation.

Even before the pandemic, legal services were core to these advocacy efforts. The nearly $1.3 million paid by ICAN to Siri & Glimstad in 2019 — the most recent year for which a tax filing is publicly available — was the nonprofit’s single largest reported expenditure.

At stake in this latest contest is whether hospitals, law enforcement agencies and others can require employees to take a vaccine that was made available in an expedited process permitted during a public health emergency — and, likewise, whether schools may require the shots for students, faculty and staff members in the same way many require familiar vaccines for measles and chickenpox. There is little case law on the matter, with only one vaccine, for anthrax exposure, previously cleared in a similar way.

Employers are expected to cite the expansive evidence supporting the safety and efficacy of the coronavirus vaccines, as well as the extraordinary health risks created by the current emergency, said Kerry A. Scanlon, a former Department of Justice official who oversees labor and employment litigation at Chicago-based law firm McDermott Will & Emery.

Scanlon believes employers are in a strong position to defend compulsory vaccination, but he said many might shy away from it simply to avoid costly litigation.

ICAN is already claiming victory, thanks to the work of a legal team led by Siri & Glimstad’s managing partner, Aaron Siri. “Employers and schools that previously required the covid-19 vaccine have dropped those requirements,” the group declares in its ad on the Children’s Health Defense blog. “This includes an employer that did so on the heels of ICAN’s legal team challenging its mandate in court.”

Neither Siri nor his co-counsel in the North Carolina case, Elizabeth A. Brehm, responded to emailed questions. Bigtree did not respond to telephone messages. Kennedy said his organization is “working with firms all over the country” to challenge vaccine mandates and estimated that he receives “many hundreds” of inquiries each week about potential litigation.

You won't believe these assholes:
Meet the New York couple donating millions to the anti-vax movement

In legal filings and letters to employers and universities, attorneys from Siri & Glimstad focus on the expedited process known as an emergency use authorization used to clear the shots during a public health emergency. Mandating a vaccine cleared that way, they argue in a complaint filed against the Durham County Sheriff’s Department, is “illegal and unenforceable.”Their arguments go further. Pointing to the principle of informed consent, a tenet of medical ethics addressing human experimentation enshrined in the Nuremberg Code after World War II, their letter to the president of Rutgers University contends a mandate under these circumstances violates not just federal law, but also “international laws, civil and individual rights, and public policy.” Failure to rescind a requirement in Rock County, Wis., the firm informed officials there, “will result in legal action being filed against you.”

“Govern yourself accordingly,” the Feb. 2 letter advised.

Unsettled law

No reference to these communications with Rock County appears in a Feb. 23 opinion column written by Siri for Stat, the health-focused news website.

The headline asserted, “Federal law prohibits employers and others from requiring vaccination with a Covid-19 vaccine distributed under an EUA.” The piece picked up significant traffic, according to the social media analysis tool CrowdTangle, gaining more than 100,000 interactions on Facebook, meaning likes, comments and shares. It drew attention across a wide range of anti-vaccine groups, as well as in forums devoted to conspiracy theories, including ones about 5G and the death toll from covid-19, CrowdTangle showed.

Framed as a legal overview offered for the benefit of employers, schools and other organizations “grappling with whether to require Covid-19 vaccination,” the piece warned of “costly and time-consuming litigation.”

Left unsaid was the fact that Siri and a law partner were representing a Wisconsin nursing home employee objecting to one such requirement. The piece also did not note significant disagreement over what the law allows.

The fact sheet issued by the Food and Drug Administration for coronavirus vaccine recipients and caregivers says it is “your choice to receive or not receive” the shots. The language echoes a provision of federal law governing the emergency authorization of medicines that stipulates people must be informed “of the option to accept or refuse” the product, but also “of the consequences, if any, of refusing.”
Michelle M. Mello, a professor of law and medicine at Stanford University, said it’s not clear whether the statute was meant to address making the shots compulsory for work or school.

An employer can’t hold you down to get the shots against your will, said experts in health and employment law, but some believe a permissible consequence of refusal to vaccinate could, in some circumstances, be losing your job. In December, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said employers requiring the vaccine would comply with federal disability law and anti-discrimination statutes so long as they make exceptions for an individual’s disability or religious beliefs.

Still, most employers have avoided mandates. There are notable exceptions, including many universities, several hospitals and Delta Air Lines, which said this month that new employees must be vaccinated.

Employers will have more confidence about requiring vaccination, some experts said, once the products gain the FDA’s full approval, which U.S. pharmaceutical firm Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, are seeking for their coronavirus vaccine. A decision from regulators could come as soon as the fall, and other coronavirus vaccine makers are expected to apply for full approval soon.

The 128-bed Rock Haven nursing home had 15 cases of the coronavirus and two deaths, said Rock County Administrator Josh Smith, prompting leaders to require staff vaccinations. A memorandum issued shortly before Christmas noted that failure to comply would “result in the employee being laid off,” not eligible to return until vaccinated.

Of nearly 200 workers, 16 are on layoff status, Smith said.

Representing a Rock Haven employee, Brehm, one of the firm’s New York attorneys, wrote to county officials that they were “deliberately taking away each employee’s statutorily guaranteed right to decide for him or herself whether to accept or refuse administration of the covid-19 vaccines.”

The Feb. 2 letter arrived on the same day as another from a Wisconsin law firm. “It is our firm belief that … Rock County’s perhaps well-intentioned but heavy-handed policy concerning mandatory vaccination of county employees violates … constitutional rights,” wrote Michael J. Anderson of MJA Law, located near Madison.

The following week, Brehm wrote again on behalf of the same client, while noting 15 additional employees represented separately by Anderson. “We hereby demand that Rock Haven withdraw its covid-19 vaccine mandate forthwith since requiring an unlicensed and unapproved product violates federal law and, likely, numerous state laws,” she wrote, this time with Siri also signing the letter.

Anderson, the local attorney, said he spoke four to six weeks ago with representatives from Siri & Glimstad about the possibility of working together. A collaboration, he said, would allow the New York attorneys to practice law in Wisconsin on a temporary basis without being formally admitted to the state bar.

“This New York firm — I believe they were interested in cases like this around the country,” he said in an interview. “Going forward, if there is litigation, they may or may not be involved. I don’t know.”

In the meantime, however, Anderson went ahead with a claim against the county earlier this month, demanding $50,000 in lost wages and other benefits for 11 employees of the nursing home.

About a week later, the county showed signs of backing down. Its health services committee voted 4-to-1 on May 12 to recommend that officials revoke the requirement at the nursing home and reinstate employees who refused the shots. The full county board will consider the recommendation on Thursday. A formal collaboration is underway in North Carolina, where Siri & Glimstad attorneys are co-counsel in a case brought last month in federal court against the Durham County Sheriff’s Department. The local attorney participating in the case, Jeff Dobson, declined to comment. The plaintiff in the case, Christopher Neve, directed questions to Siri & Glimstad.

After Neve refused to disclose his vaccination status in March, the sheriff confiscated his badge, gun and bulletproof vest and placed him on administrative leave, according to the complaint. He was fired later that month, the complaint alleges.

Durham County Sheriff Clarence F. Birkhead declined to be interviewed but said in a statement, “Requiring the vaccine not only protects employees from covid-19, but also provides for the protection of anyone who lives in, works in, or visits Durham County.”

The arguments set forth in the North Carolina complaint mirror those outlined in letters from Siri, both sent on April 22, to the presidents of Rutgers and Princeton University.

“ICAN has received numerous inquiries from its members regarding this mandate, including students attending your university, and has asked that we send you the following notice,” reads the letter to Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway. It urged him to reconsider the requirement that students be vaccinated before arriving on campus this fall.

A university spokeswoman, Dory Devlin, said the policy stands. “Like the hundreds of public and private universities who have followed our lead, we are entirely confident in our legal and ethical position with respect to mandating vaccines in the fight against the global pandemic,” she said in an email to The Washington Post.

Princeton, too, was unmoved by the letter. “We conducted a careful review and are confident in our legal position,” said Ayana Gibbs, a university spokeswoman.
Putting ‘your imprint on an early area of law’

This month, ICAN updated its notice seeking plaintiffs for possible litigation, saying it is “no longer accepting cases for legal action.”

Some legal experts suggested the group may be pulling back because it has accomplished what it set out to do. Its attorneys have made their mark on the early legal contest over vaccine mandates, through commentary as well as legal communications and filings, said Reiss, the University of California professor. She noted that other lawsuits filed against coronavirus vaccine mandates “follow very closely Siri’s piece in Stat.”

Attorney-client privilege makes the extent of the role played by ICAN’s legal team difficult to determine, said James G. Hodge Jr., director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.

“They’re peddling specific legal arguments designed to attract anti-vaxxers and others who might be willing to listen,” Hodge said.

ICAN’s legal team remains active on other vaccine-related fronts. Earlier this month, Siri & Glimstad filed a complaint on ICAN’s behalf asking a federal court to order Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to remove the finding that “vaccines do not cause autism” from all communication with the public.

A suit last year against Facebook and YouTube said these platforms had terminated or greatly restricted ICAN’s activities — and offered a window into the group’s communications strategy. At stake was the group’s “ability to reach billions of potential viewers,” said the complaint, filed by Siri and Brehm, along with a California attorney, in federal court in California.

Asking the court to dismiss the complaint, Facebook and YouTube said they had acted against ICAN because it was “spreading harmful misinformation about covid-19 that could exacerbate the ongoing public health crisis.”

Stripped of other platforms to press its case against vaccines, experts said, the group is turning increasingly to the courts.

“It’s a chance to put your imprint on an early area of law that hasn’t been litigated before,” Reiss said. “And to do it in a context that fits your beliefs.”

Today's Tweet

An armed, violence-prone, well-trained-but-ignorant minority faction of terrorist zealots being necessary to the overthrow of American democracy, the right to keep and bear weapons of war for the purpose of political intimidation shall not be infringed.

OUR LIVES ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOUR RIGHT TO OWN WEAPONS OF WAR. #EndTheFilibusterNow pic.twitter.com/QEMt6blvy6 08

— Tomthunkit™ (@TomthunkitsMind) May 26, 2021

Today's Thought

• Voters can't be trusted.
• Poll workers can't be trusted.
• Voting machines can't be trusted because the nerds who created the software can't be trusted.
• The media can't be trusted.
• The Justice Department can't be trusted.
• The intelligence community can't be trusted.
• The post office can't be trusted.
• The guys in charge of election security can't be trusted.
• The lower courts can't be trusted.
• The appellate courts can't be trusted.
• The Supreme Court can't be trusted.
• Democrats can't be trusted.
• Republicans can't be trusted.

But Donald Trump - now there's a guy we can trust - we should just take him at his word no matter what.

Roll that around in your head for a short minute til you understand how thoroughly stoopid it sounds.

Today's BTC

Brian Tyler Cohen presents: Marjorie Taylor Greene shits on own head.

She used a public comments forum to make a campaign pitch.

Then - of course - she makes the holocaust "gaffe", which isn't a gaffe at all, because - of course again - Republicans have no honor, so they're free to use the same bullshit thing that they slag others for saying, because - of course one more time - they know their supporters have the memory and the attention span of squirrels on Adderall.

BTW, AOC shouldn't have used the holocaust thing either, but a concentration camp is a concentration camp is a concentration camp.

Then again, a crap-meister like MTG is going to go for the false equivalence thing anyway, so what the fuck, it doesn't matter.

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   525,999 (⬆︎ .31%)
New Deaths:    12,091 (⬆︎ .35%)

USA

New Cases:   22,738 (⬆︎ .07%)
New Deaths:       669 (⬆︎ .11%)

Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations:           164.4 million (⬆︎ .31%)
Total Eligible Population:    58.7%
Total Population:                 49.5%

Yesterday,

0 Vaccinated people

and

12,091 Un-Vaccinated people

were killed by COVID-19

The default position is still "we just don't know" because making an assumption that the lab leak conclusion is the correct one is the Argument From Ignorance fallacy.

So we don't know enough yet, but there are reasons to lean that way, especially considering all the CYA going on.

WaPo:

The source of the coronavirus that has left more than 3 million people dead around the world remains a mystery. But in recent months the idea that it emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — once dismissed as a ridiculous conspiracy theory — has gained new credence.

How and why did this happen? For one, efforts to discover a natural source of the virus have failed. Second, early efforts to spotlight a lab leak often got mixed up with speculation that the virus was deliberately created as a bioweapon. That made it easier for many scientists to dismiss the lab scenario as tin-hat nonsense. But a lack of transparency by China and renewed attention to the activities of the Wuhan lab have led some scientists to say they were too quick to discount a possible link at first.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) from the start pointed to the lab’s location in Wuhan, pressing China for answers, so the history books will reward him if he turns out to be right. The Trump administration also sought to highlight the lab scenario but generally could only point to vague intelligence. The Trump administration’s messaging was often accompanied by anti-Chinese rhetoric that made it easier for skeptics to ignore its claims.

The source of the coronavirus that has left more than 3 million people dead around the world remains a mystery. But in recent months the idea that it emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — once dismissed as a ridiculous conspiracy theory — has gained new credence.

How and why did this happen? For one, efforts to discover a natural source of the virus have failed. Second, early efforts to spotlight a lab leak often got mixed up with speculation that the virus was deliberately created as a bioweapon. That made it easier for many scientists to dismiss the lab scenario as tin-hat nonsense. But a lack of transparency by China and renewed attention to the activities of the Wuhan lab have led some scientists to say they were too quick to discount a possible link at first.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) from the start pointed to the lab’s location in Wuhan, pressing China for answers, so the history books will reward him if he turns out to be right. The Trump administration also sought to highlight the lab scenario but generally could only point to vague intelligence. The Trump administration’s messaging was often accompanied by anti-Chinese rhetoric that made it easier for skeptics to ignore its claims.

Early speculation

Dec. 30, 2019: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issues an “urgent notice” to medical institutions in Wuhan, saying that cases of pneumonia of unknown cause have emerged from the city’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

Jan. 5, 2020: Earliest known tweet suggesting China created the virus. @GarboHK tweeted: “18 years ago, #China killed nearly 300 #HongKongers by unreporting #SARS cases, letting Chinese tourists travel around the world, to Asia specifically to spread the virus with bad intention. Today the evil regime strikes again with a new virus.”

Jan. 23: A Daily Mail article appears, headlined: “China built a lab to study SARS and Ebola in Wuhan — and U.S. biosafety experts warned in 2017 that a virus could ‘escape’ the facility that’s become key in fighting the outbreak.”

Jan. 26: The Washington Times publishes an article with the headline: “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” An editor’s note is added March 25: “Since this story ran, scientists outside of China have had a chance to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They concluded it does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab.”

Jan. 26: A study by Chinese researchers published in the Lancet of the first 41 hospitalized patients in Wuhan who had confirmed infections found that 13 of the 41 cases, including the first documented case, had no link to the seafood marketplace that originally was considered the origin of the outbreak.

Jan 30: Sen. Tom Cotton, speaking at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, says: “This coronavirus is a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl for China. But actually, it’s probably worse than Chernobyl, which was localized in its effect. The coronavirus could result in a global pandemic.” He adds: “I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”

Feb. 3: WIV researchers report in the journal Nature that the novel coronavirus spreading around the world was a bat-derived coronavirus. The report said SARS-CoV-2 is 96.2 percent identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus named RaTG13.

Feb. 6: Botao Xiao, a molecular biomechanics researcher at South China University of Technology, posts a paper stating that “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” He pointed to the previous safety mishaps and the kind of research undertaken at the lab. He withdrew the paper a few weeks later after Chinese authorities insisted no accident had taken place.

Feb. 9: In response to criticism from China’s ambassador that Cotton’s remarks are “absolutely crazy,” the senator tweets: “Here’s what’s not a conspiracy, not a theory: Fact: China lied about virus starting in Wuhan food market. Fact: super-lab is just a few miles from that market. Where did it start? We don’t know. But burden of proof is on you & fellow communists. Open up now to competent international scientists.”

Feb. 16: Cotton, in response to a Washington Post article critical of him, offers four scenarios on Twitter: “1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market) 2. Good science, bad safety (e.g., they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred). 3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach). 4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in). Again, none of these are ‘theories’ and certainly not ‘conspiracy theories.’ They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence.”

Scientists respond

Feb. 19: A statement is published in Lancet by a group of 27 scientists: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” the statement says. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The statement was drafted and organized by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, which funded research at WIV with U.S. government grants. (Three of the signers have since said a laboratory accident is plausible enough to merit consideration.)

March 11: Scientific American publishes a profile of virologist Shi Zhengli, who heads a group that studies bat coronaviruses at WIV. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” she said. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?” The article said that after the virus emerged, Shi frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, but she “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.” She told the magazine: “That really took a load off my mind. I had not slept a wink for days.”

March 17: An analysis published in Nature Medicine by an influential group of scientists states: “Although the evidence shows that SARSCoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD [receptor- binding domain] and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

The intelligence community weighs in

March 27: A Defense Intelligence Agency assessment on the origin of the coronavirus is updated to include the possibility that the new coronavirus emerged “accidentally” due to “unsafe laboratory practices.”

April 2: David Ignatius, writing in The Washington Post, notes: “The prime suspect is ‘natural’ transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.”

April 14: Josh Rogin, writing in The Post, reveals that in 2018, State Department officials visited the WIV and “sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.”

April 22: Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepreneur, in a long and detailed post on Medium, reviews “gain-of-function” research undertaken at the lab and concludes that “from a technical standpoint, it would not be difficult for a modern virologist to create such a strain” as the new coronavirus. He adds: “The opposite point is worth repeating too: the inverse hypothesis about the exclusively natural origin of the virus does not yet have strong evidence either.”

April 24: Under pressure from the White House, the National Institutes of Health terminates the grant to EcoHealth Alliance that funded study of bat coronaviruses at WIV.

April 30: President Donald Trump tells reporters: “You had the theory from the lab. … There’s a lot of theories. But, yeah, we have people looking at it very, very strongly.”

April 30: In a rare statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says: "The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified....The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

May 3: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says in an interview with ABC News: “There’s enormous evidence that that’s where this began. … Remember, China has a history of infecting the world, and they have a history of running substandard laboratories. These are not the first times that we have had the world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab.”

May 18: The Seeker, an anonymous Twitter user, posts a medical thesis describing a mine in Mojiang, Yunnan, where miners fell ill with a viral-induced pneumonia in 2012.

June 4: Milton Leitenberg, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reviews the history of lab safety and the type of research conducted at WIV and argues that the lab-leak theory cannot be easily dismissed. “The pros and cons regarding the two alternative possibilities—first, that it arose in the field as a natural evolution, as many virologists maintain, or second, that it may have been the consequence of bat coronavirus research in one of the two virology research institutes located in Wuhan that led to the infection of a laboratory researcher and subsequent escape—are equally based on inference and conjecture,” he says.

New evidence emerges

July 4: The Times of London reports that a virus 96 percent identical to the coronavirus that causes covid-19 was found in an abandoned copper mine in China in 2012. The bat-infested copper mine in southwestern China was home to a coronavirus that left six men sick with pneumonia, with three eventually dying, after they had been tasked with shoveling bat guano out of the mine. This virus was collected in 2013 and then stored and studied at WIV.

July 28: Jamie Metzl, a former Clinton administration national security official, writes in The Wall Street Journal that “suggesting that an outbreak of a deadly bat coronavirus coincidentally occurred near the only level 4 virology institute in all of China—which happened to be studying the closest known relative of that exact virus—strains credulity.” He calls for a “comprehensive forensic investigation must include full access to all of the scientists, biological samples, laboratory records and other materials from the Wuhan virology institutes and other relevant Chinese organizations. Denying that access should be considered an admission of guilt by Beijing.”

July 31: Science magazine publishes an interview with Shi Zhengli of WIV. She said it was impossible for anyone at the institute to have been infected, saying “to date, there is ‘zero infection’ of all staff and students in our institute.” She added: “President Trump’s claim that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from our institute totally contradicts the facts. It jeopardizes and affects our academic work and personal life. He owes us an apology.” In the interview, she admitted that some coronavirus research was conducted at biosafety level 2, not the more restrictive BSL-4.

Nov. 2: David A. Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist, writes in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “The ‘origin story’ is missing many key details, including a plausible and suitably detailed recent evolutionary history of the virus, the identity and provenance of its most recent ancestors, and surprisingly, the place, time, and mechanism of transmission of the first human infection.”

Nov. 17: An influential paper written by Rossana Segreto and Yuri Deigin is published: “The genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 does not rule out a laboratory origin.” The paper noted that “a natural host, either direct or intermediate, has not yet been identified.” It argues that certain features of the coronavirus “might be the result of lab manipulation techniques such as site-directed mutagenesis. The acquisition of both unique features by SARS-CoV-2 more or less simultaneously is less likely to be natural or caused only by cell/animal serial passage.” The paper concluded: “On the basis of our analysis, an artificial origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not a baseless conspiracy theory that is to be condemned,” referencing the Lancet statement in February.

Nov. 17: WIV researchers, including Shi, post an addendum to their Feb. 3 report in Nature, acknowledging that RaTG13, the bat coronavirus closely associated with the coronavirus, was found in a mine cave after several patients had fallen ill with “severe respiratory disease” in 2012 while cleaning the cave.

Jan. 4, 2021: New York magazine publishes a lengthy article by Nicholson Baker, who reviews the evidence and concludes the lab-leak scenario is more compelling than previously believed.

Jan. 15: Days before Trump leaves office, the State Department issues a “fact sheet” on WIV that states: “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses. … The WIV has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses. But the WIV has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the covid-19 virus, including ‘RaTG13,’ which it sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS-like illness.”

Jan. 20: Joe Biden becomes president.

Feb. 9: A joint report by the World Health Organization and China declares: “The findings suggest that the laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain introduction of the virus into the human population.”

Feb. 11: WHO Secretary General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus refuses to rule out the lab-leak scenario. “Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded,” he said. “I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study.”

Feb. 19: National security adviser Jake Sullivan issues a statement about the WHO report: “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them. It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government. To better understand this pandemic and prepare for the next one, China must make available its data from the earliest days of the outbreak.”

March 4: Prominent scientists from around the world, in an open letter to WHO, call for a new investigation into the origins of the virus, saying the previous investigation was flawed. The letter detailed the elements of a “full and unrestricted” investigation. (Additional letters are released April 7 and April 30.)

March 22: The Australian newspaper reports: “Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers working on corona­viruses were hospitalized with symptoms consistent with covid-19 in early November 2019 in what U.S. officials suspect could have been the first cluster.”

March 28: “60 Minutes” airs report on lingering questions about the origins of the coronavirus, featuring Metzl and former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger. “There was a direct order from Beijing to destroy all viral samples -- and they didn’t volunteer to share the genetic sequences,” Pottinger says, quoting from declassified intelligence information.

May 5: Former New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reviews the evidence and makes a strong case for the lab-leak theory. He focuses in particular on the furin cleavage site, which increases viral infectivity for human cells. His analysis yields this quote from David Baltimore, a virologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology: “When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.”

May 14: Eighteen prominent scientists publish a letter in the journal Science, saying a new investigation is needed because “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.” One signer is Ralph Baric, a virologist who worked closely with Shi.

May 17: Another former New York Times science reporter, Donald G. McNeil Jr., posts on Medium: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory.” He quotes W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University — who had signed the March 2020 letter in Nature Medicine — as saying his mind had changed in light of new information.

Money Meets Mouth

QAmom - from YouTube guy DurtySean:

Take the fact that we all had to stay put during the pandemic - with not enough to occupy ourselves - plus the election cycle, plus the decades-long push towards plutocracy - you put it all together and you get some pretty weird shit goin' on here in USAmerica Inc.

Seems like a pretty good idea to make those bets though.

COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   443,417 (⬆︎ .26%)
New Deaths:      8,895 (⬆︎ .26%)

USA

New Cases:   19,866 (⬆︎ .06%)
New Deaths:       325 (⬆︎ .05%)

Vaccination Scorecard

Total Vaccinations:           163.9 million (⬆︎ .37%)
Total Eligible Population:    58.5%
Total Population:                 49.4%

Yesterday,

0 Vaccinated people

and

8,895 Un-Vaccinated people

were killed by COVID-19

Salman Rushdie tries to be pragmatic, but I think even this scenario is a bit rosy.

I think the snap back - the drive to get back to "normal" - could be horrendous.

Air Quality is already taking a hit: https://www.iqair.com/earth 

WaPo Op/Ed:

In her celebrated book “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag — herself a cancer survivor, who years later succumbed to a different cancer — warned us against seeing ill health as a figure of some other social ill. “My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness,” she wrote, “is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”

As the global pandemic raged, many people failed to take her advice. Voices including an Islamic State spokesman, Hulk Hogan and a conservative pastor from Florida named Rick Wiles declared that the virus was a punishment from God. Other, greener voices suggested it was nature’s revenge on the human race — though, to be fair, there were louder voices warning against anthropomorphizing “Mother Nature.” The old science-fiction idea that the human race is the virus from which the Earth is trying to recover got some airtime too. Politicians characterized the pandemic as a war. Arundhati Roy called it “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” And sales of Albert Camus’s 1947 novel “The Plague” went through the roof.

I didn’t buy any of it, the stuff about divine or earthly retribution, or the dreams of a better future. Many people wanted to feel that some good would come out of the horror, that we would as a species somehow learn virtuous lessons and emerge from the cocoon of the lockdown as splendid New Age butterflies and create kinder, gentler, less greedy, more ecologically wise, less racist, less capitalist, more inclusive societies. This seemed to me, still seems to me, like Utopian thinking. The coronavirus did not strike me as the harbinger of socialism. The world’s power structures and their beneficiaries would not easily surrender to a new idealism. I couldn’t help finding strange our need to imagine the good emerging out of the bad. Europe in the time of the Black Death, and later London during the Great Plague, weren’t full of people trying to see the positive side. People were too busy trying not to die.

We are not the dominant species on the planet by accident. We have great survival skills. And we will survive. But I doubt that a social revolution will follow because of the lessons of the pandemic. But yes, sure, one can hope for betterment, and fight for it, and maybe our children will see — will make — that better world.

It is a part of our tragedy that in this time of crisis we have been cursed, in many countries, including all three of those I have most cared about in my life, with leaders of astonishing cynicism and bad faith. In India, Narendra Modi’s government used the pandemic to put the blame on Muslims. In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson (despite having had and recovered from the virus himself) handled the crisis with stunning incompetence, at first downplaying the dangers, reacting too little and too late and continuing to play the Brexiteers’ anti-immigrant card, in spite of the fact that both the primary caregivers who looked after him in the hospital were immigrants and the British National Health Service as a whole depends on their skills and courage.

And in Donald Trump’s America, where nothing was unthinkable, no matter how low he and his followers sank, there was always a lower level to sink to — in Trumpistan, the virus (like everything else) was politicized, minimized, called a Democrat trick; the science was derided, the administration’s lamentable response to the pandemic was obscured by a blizzard of lies, wearers of masks were abused by wearers of red hats, and the mountain of the dead went on growing, unmourned by the self-obsessed charlatan who claimed, in the face of all the evidence, that he was making America great again.

To repair the damage done by these people in these times will not be easy. I may not see the wounds mended in my lifetime. It may take a generation or more. The social damage of the pandemic itself, the fear of our old social lives, in bars and restaurants and dance halls and sports stadiums, will take time to heal (although a percentage of people seem to know no fear already). We will hug and kiss again. But will there still be movie theaters? Will there be bookstores? Will we feel okay in crowded subway cars?

The social, cultural, political damage of these years, the deepening of the already deep rifts in society in many parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India, will take longer. It would not be exaggerating to say that as we stare across those chasms, we have begun to hate the people on the other side. That hatred has been fostered by cynics and it bubbles over in different ways almost every day.

It isn’t easy to see how that chasm can be bridged — how love can find a way.

Today

May 25th, 1965.

A couple of weeks later, for the first time ever, I heard my dad speak about a black man in respectful tones.

"Quick as a cat."

"I guess that first fight was no fluke after all."

"Never seen a heavyweight move like that."

"He can run his mouth all he wants - he knows how to back it up."

Thought For Today

I'm glad knowing that come July or so, a friend of my daughter's will be getting an extra $300 a month for childcare because of Biden's plan to help Americans recover from the pandemic.

I won't get any of it.

My daughter won't get any of it.

Neither of my sons will get any of it.

But a young woman with a new baby will be getting a little extra help, and that makes me glad.