A school should be a palace, and a top flight teacher should be pulling down 6 figures.
Nov 1, 2021
COVID-19 Update
🥳 We've hit the ⅔ mark for vaccinations 🎉
But, of course, there's never a shortage of assholes who just won't be able to resist fucking with us when there's a few easy bucks to be made on the misfortune of others.
(Ed Note: I think I could see my way clear to support the death penalty for guys like this guy)
WaPo:
Maryland man pleads guilty to operating fake Moderna website, charging people to buy advance vaccines
The website was almost identical.
When a user loaded the homepage, Moderna’s name and logo were displayed at the top of the site, along with a tab explaining how mRNA technology works.
Some visiting the page would have been convinced that it was Moderna’s official website. But two details gave the fake site away, federal prosecutors said: a rectangle that read “You may be able to buy a covid-19 vaccine ahead of time. Contact us,” and its domain, “Modernatx.shop.”
Moderna’s actual website has no such message promoting the advance sale of coronavirus vaccines, and its official URL is “Modernatx.com.”
On Friday, Odunayo “Baba” Oluwalade — one of three men accused of using the fake website to sell coronavirus vaccines at $30 per dose — pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud conspiracy in connection with the scheme.
Oluwalade, a Maryland resident, pleaded to conspiring with others to obtain access to a bank account used in the fraud scheme. Oluwalade, 25, also admitted that he knew the bank account would be used for a fraud scheme, though he denied being aware of the specifics, the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Maryland said in a statement.
Neither Oluwalade nor his attorney immediately responded to messages from The Washington Post late Sunday.
Authorities have charged multiple people with participating in vaccine and vaccination card schemes. In December, as many Americans raced to get their shots, a Wisconsin pharmacist was charged with deliberately spoiling more than 500 doses of the coronavirus vaccine. In January, a Texas pharmacist was charged with theft by a public servant for distributing 10 leftover Moderna doses before the vial expired. That charge was later dismissed.
Moderna’s actual website has no such message promoting the advance sale of coronavirus vaccines, and its official URL is “Modernatx.com.”
On Friday, Odunayo “Baba” Oluwalade — one of three men accused of using the fake website to sell coronavirus vaccines at $30 per dose — pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud conspiracy in connection with the scheme.
Oluwalade, a Maryland resident, pleaded to conspiring with others to obtain access to a bank account used in the fraud scheme. Oluwalade, 25, also admitted that he knew the bank account would be used for a fraud scheme, though he denied being aware of the specifics, the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Maryland said in a statement.
Neither Oluwalade nor his attorney immediately responded to messages from The Washington Post late Sunday.
Authorities have charged multiple people with participating in vaccine and vaccination card schemes. In December, as many Americans raced to get their shots, a Wisconsin pharmacist was charged with deliberately spoiling more than 500 doses of the coronavirus vaccine. In January, a Texas pharmacist was charged with theft by a public servant for distributing 10 leftover Moderna doses before the vial expired. That charge was later dismissed.
(Ed note 2: Mr Oluwalade is going to prison for up to 20 years for stealing a few thousand dollars from adults who have a misplaced sense of trust and good will. Eric Trump is walking around free having stolen millions from kids who have cancer)
- more -
Jan6 Stuff
The shit they tried to pull on January 6 didn't start that day, and it sure as fuck didn't end that day either.
WaPo: (pay wall)
BLOODSHED
For 187 harrowing minutes, the president watched his supporters attack the Capitol — and resisted pleas to stop them.
President Donald Trump had just returned to the White House from his rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 when he retired to his private dining room just off the Oval Office, flipped on the massive flat-screen television and took in the show. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, thousands of his supporters were wearing his red caps, waving his blue flags and chanting his name.
Live television news coverage showed the horror accelerating minute by minute after 1:10 p.m., when Trump had called on his followers to march on the U.S. Capitol. The pro-Trump rioters toppled security barricades. They bludgeoned police. They scaled granite walls. And then they smashed windows and doors to breach the hallowed building that has stood for more than two centuries as the seat of American democracy.
The Capitol was under siege — and the president, glued to the television, did nothing. For 187 minutes, Trump resisted entreaties to intervene from advisers, allies and his elder daughter, as well as lawmakers under attack. Even as the violence at the Capitol intensified, even after Vice President Mike Pence, his family and hundreds of Congress members and their staffers hid to protect themselves, even after the first two people died and scores of others were assaulted, Trump declined for more than three hours to tell the renegades rioting in his name to stand down and go home.
During the 187 minutes that Trump stood by, harrowing scenes of violence played out in and around the Capitol. Twenty-five minutes into Trump’s silence, a news photographer was dragged down a flight of stairs and thrown over a wall. Fifty-two minutes in, a police officer was kicked in the chest and surrounded by a mob. Within the first hour, two rioters died as a result of cardiac events. Sixty-four minutes in, a rioter paraded a Confederate battle flag through the Capitol. Seventy-three minutes in, another police officer was sprayed in the face with chemicals. Seventy-eight minutes in, yet another police officer was assaulted with a flagpole. Eighty-three minutes in, rioters broke into and began looting the House speaker’s office. Ninety-three minutes in, another news photographer was surrounded, pushed down and robbed of a camera. Ninety-four minutes in, a rioter was shot and killed. One hundred two minutes in, rioters stormed the Senate chamber, stealing papers and posing for photographs around the dais. One hundred sixteen minutes in, a fourth police officer was crushed in a doorway and beaten with his own baton.
All in the first two hours.
Trump watched the attack play out on television and resisted acting, neither to coordinate a federal response nor to instruct his supporters to disperse. He all but abdicated his responsibilities as commander in chief — a president reduced to mere bystander. The tweets Trump sent during the first two hours of rioting were muddled at best. He disavowed violence but encouraged his supporters to press on with their fight at the Capitol. And throughout, he repeated the lie that the election was stolen.
His “Make America Great Again” army was on the march, just as he had commanded at the rally. The president had directed his followers to head to the Capitol in a forceful show of “pride and boldness” to pressure lawmakers to try to overturn the results of an election he falsely claimed had been rigged. And there they were, literally fighting to keep Trump in power.
“He was enamored with [how] ‘all these people are coming to fight for me,’ ” said a senior Republican close to him. “I don’t think he appreciated what was going on.”
An investigation by The Washington Post provides the richest understanding to date of Trump’s mindset and the cost of his inaction as democracy came under attack. It also reveals new aspects of an extensive pressure campaign by the president and those around him to get Pence to block certification of the election results — including a last-ditch appeal on the night of Jan. 6, after the riot was over, by attorney John C. Eastman, who urged Pence to reject electors as Congress reconvened.
In a statement, Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich disputed The Post’s findings as “fake news” and falsely cast people who entered the Capitol that day as “agitators not associated with President Trump.”
The Post’s investigation also found that signs of escalating danger were in full view hours before the Capitol attack, including clashes that morning among hundreds of pro-Trump demonstrators and police at the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. The mounting red flags did not trigger stepped-up security responses that morning, underscoring how unprepared law enforcement authorities were for the violence that transpired. Yet some officials knew what to expect; Liz Cheney (R-WY) had hired a personal security detail out of fear for her own safety.
As Trump watched on television as rioters broke into the Capitol, he raged to those around him about the vice president. At 2:24 p.m., the very moment that Pence and his family were endangered by violent marauders calling him a traitor — “Hang Mike Pence!” some of them chanted — Trump made clear in a tweet whose side he was on:
Two minutes later, Trump called Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a newly elected Republican from Alabama who had been one of the president’s more outspoken allies propagating election fraud claims. “Coach, how’s it going?” Trump asked the former Auburn University football coach.
“Not very good, Mr. President,” Tuberville responded. “As a matter of fact, they’re about to evacuate us.”
“I know we’ve got problems,” Trump responded.
Amid the mayhem, Tuberville abruptly ended the call. “Mr. President, they just took our vice president out,” the senator said. “They’re getting ready to drag me out of here. I got to go.”
Keith Kellogg, Pence’s national security adviser, who spent the day at the White House and was in and out of the Oval Office talking to Trump, had related to the president that the vice president was safe in the Capitol basement with his wife and daughter. But Trump had no reaction. Trump instead stayed focused on the television.
Many others tried to influence the president. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), a Trump booster, called him and said, “You have to denounce this.” Trump falsely claimed to McCarthy that the rioters were members of AntiFa, but McCarthy corrected him and said they were in fact Trump supporters.
“You know what I see, Kevin? I see people who are more upset about the election than you are. They like Trump more than you do,” the president replied.
“You’ve got to hold them,” McCarthy said. “You need to get on TV right now, you need to get on Twitter, you need to call these people off.”
Trump responded, “Kevin, they’re not my people.”
McCarthy told the president, “Yes they are, they just came through my windows and my staff is running for cover. Yeah, they’re your people. Call them off.”
The piece goes on to detail the timeline starting in the early morning.
It's horrifying.
About The Gun Thing
This piece at BBC understates the prevalence of guns here in USAmerica Inc.
There are almost 121 guns for every 100 Americans, and more than 99% of those guns are unregistered - we have no fucking idea where those guns are, or who's doing what with them.
Imagine living in a country where people haven't been manipulated into being so fearful of one another that they feel the need to go around armed to teeth.
How Japan has almost eradicated gun crime
Japan has one of the lowest rates of gun crime in the world. In 2014 there were just six gun deaths, compared to 33,599 in the US. What is the secret?
If you want to buy a gun in Japan you need patience and determination. You have to attend an all-day class, take a written exam and pass a shooting-range test with a mark of at least 95%.
There are also mental health and drugs tests. Your criminal record is checked and police look for links to extremist groups. Then they check your relatives too - and even your work colleagues. And as well as having the power to deny gun licences, police also have sweeping powers to search and seize weapons.
That's not all. Handguns are banned outright. Only shotguns and air rifles are allowed.
The law restricts the number of gun shops. In most of Japan's 40 or so prefectures there can be no more than three, and you can only buy fresh cartridges by returning the spent cartridges you bought on your last visit.
Police must be notified where the gun and the ammunition are stored - and they must be stored separately under lock and key. Police will also inspect guns once a year. And after three years your licence runs out, at which point you have to attend the course and pass the tests again.
This helps explain why mass shootings in Japan are extremely rare. When mass killings occur, the killer most often wields a knife.
The current gun control law was introduced in 1958, but the idea behind the policy dates back centuries.
"Ever since guns entered the country, Japan has always had strict gun laws," says Iain Overton, executive director of Action on Armed Violence and the author of Gun Baby Gun.
"They are the first nation to impose gun laws in the whole world and I think it laid down a bedrock saying that guns really don't play a part in civilian society."
People were being rewarded for giving up firearms as far back as 1685, a policy Overton describes as "perhaps the first ever gun buyback initiative".
The result is a very low level of gun ownership - 0.6 guns per 100 people in 2007, according to the Small Arms Survey, compared to 6.2 in England and Wales and 88.8 in the US.
"The moment you have guns in society, you will have gun violence but I think it's about the quantity," says Overton. "If you have very few guns in society, you will almost inevitably have low levels of violence."
Japanese police officers rarely use guns and put much greater emphasis on martial arts - all are expected to become a black belt in judo. They spend more time practising kendo (fighting with bamboo swords) than learning how to use firearms.
"The response to violence is never violence, it's always to de-escalate it. Only six shots were fired by Japanese police nationwide [in 2015]," says journalist Anthony Berteaux. "What most Japanese police will do is get huge futons and essentially roll up a person who is being violent or drunk into a little burrito and carry them back to the station to calm them down."
Overton contrasts this with the American model, which he says has been "to militarise the police".
"If you have too many police pulling out guns at the first instance of crime, you lead to a miniature arms race between police and criminals," he says.
To underline the taboo attached to inappropriate use of weapons, an officer who used his gun to kill himself was charged posthumously with a criminal offence. He carried out the act while on duty - policemen never carry weapons off-duty, leaving them at the station when they finish their shift.
The care police take with firearms is mirrored in the self-defence forces.
Journalist Jake Adelstein once attended a shooting practice, which ended with the gathering up of the bullet casings - and there was great concern when one turned out to be missing.
"One bullet shell was unaccounted for - one shell had fallen behind one of the targets - and nobody was allowed to leave the facilities until they found the shell," he says.
There is no clamour in Japan for gun regulations to be relaxed, says Berteaux. "A lot of it stems from this post-war sentiment of pacifism that the war was horrible and we can never have that again," he explains.
"People assume that peace is always going to exist and when you have a culture like that you don't really feel the need to arm yourself or have an object that disrupts that peace."
In fact, moves to expand the role of Japan's self-defence forces in foreign peacekeeping operations have caused concern in some quarters.
"It is unknown territory," says political science professor Koichi Nakano. "Maybe the government will try to normalise occasional death in the self-defence force and perhaps even try to glorify the exercise of weapons?"
According to Iain Overton, the "almost taboo level of rejection" of guns in Japan means that the country is "edging towards a perfect place" - though he points out that Iceland also achieves a very low rate of gun crime, despite a much higher level of gun ownership.
Henrietta Moore of the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London applauds the Japanese for not viewing gun ownership as "a civil liberty", and rejecting the idea of firearms as "something you use to defend your property against others".
But for Japanese gangsters the tight gun control laws are a problem. Yakuza gun crime has sharply declined in the last 15 years, but those who continue to carry firearms have to find ingenious ways of smuggling them into the country.
"The criminals pack the guns inside of a tuna so it looks like a frozen tuna," says retired police officer Tahei Ogawa. "But we have discovered cases where they have actually hidden a gun inside."
2021 YTD - USA
Gun Deaths = 34,422
Oct 31, 2021
COVID-19 Update
It's probable we'll never know the details on how the monster came to be.
U.S. intelligence agencies on Friday offered their most detailed explanations to date about the possible origins of the coronavirus that spawned the covid-19 pandemic, including why some analysts think an accident in a lab may be the most plausible source.
The intelligence community’s unclassified assessment didn’t change the summary of its conclusions that were reported last August, which reached few definitive answers about the origins of the virus, a question that has vexed scientists and become a political flash point.
Ultimately, the newly released intelligence assessment shows government analysts puzzling over the same questions and pursuing the same inconclusive leads as scientists who’ve been working for nearly two years without the benefit of secret intelligence.
But the document provides a fuller explanation for why some intelligence analysts ultimately came down in favor of a “lab-leak” hypothesis as the most likely explanation and others determined that the virus probably emerged in nature, when an infected animal passed the pathogen to a human.
The document doesn’t identify where the analysts work and refers to intelligence “elements” rather than agencies by name.
Analysts who had moderate confidence in the lab-leak scenario emphasized that employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the Chinese city where the first covid cases were found in late 2019, had conducted research on other coronaviruses.
These analysts, after examining academic articles, said lab employees worked under what the literature indicated were “inadequate biosafety conditions that could have led to opportunities for a laboratory-associated incident,” the assessment revealed.
Two years before the coronavirus outbreak, U.S. officials had warned in classified diplomatic cables about inadequate safety at the lab. The newly released assessment doesn’t mention the cables, but they would almost certainly have been available to all analysts studying the origins question.
The analysts who favored the lab-leak hypothesis also took into account the fact that the initial clusters of covid-19 cases “occurred only in Wuhan” and that the researchers at the lab had taken samples of coronaviruses from animals throughout China and thus “provided a node for the virus to enter the city,” according to the assessment.
These analysts judged that the researchers’ work with infected animals was “inherently risky” and “provided numerous opportunities for them to unwittingly become infected with SARS-CoV-2,” the virus that causes covid-19.
However, the intelligence community “has no indications that [the lab’s] research involved SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor virus,” the assessment stated. Despite that lack of physical evidence, the pro-lab-leak analysts noted that “it is plausible that researchers may have unwittingly exposed themselves to the virus without sequencing it during experiments or sampling activities, possibly resulting in asymptomatic or mild infection.”
In that respect, the assessment is notable because it suggests those analysts who believe the virus emanated from a lab have based their conclusions largely on speculation and circumstantial evidence.
One former U.S. official who has recently taken part in discussions with analysts examining classified information — which is not detailed in the public assessment — said nothing they’ve seen points conclusively to a lab-leak or a natural origin.
The assessment also undercut one of the key pieces of information that lab-leak proponents have used to bolster their case.
In November 2020, a State Department team searching for the origins obtained classified intelligence it thought was a breakthrough: One year earlier, three researchers at the Wuhan lab had gone to a hospital with symptoms similar to those associated with covid-19 and other seasonal illnesses, such as the flu.
But the assessment found that reports about sick workers were “not diagnostic of the pandemic’s origins,” adding: “Even if confirmed, hospital admission alone would not be diagnostic of covid-19 infection.”
Those analysts who think the virus is more likely to have emerged in nature also lack any definitive evidence.
Among the factors they considered was “China’s officials’ lack of foreknowledge” that the virus existed before researchers at the Wuhan lab isolated it after it was seen in the general population, the assessment said.
The entire intelligence community agreed that Chinese officials probably didn’t have any advance knowledge of the virus, and that accordingly if it did emanate from an incident associated with the lab, officials probably were unaware in the initial months of spread that such a lab-leak had occurred.
U.S. intelligence reporting in early 2020 — before the virus began to tear through U.S. cities — did find that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak after it had begun, The Washington Post previously reported.
The analysts who favored the natural-transmission hypothesis pointed to precedent: Earlier infectious-disease outbreaks also have zoonotic origins. A wide diversity of animals also are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection, and animal trafficking, farming, sale and rescue, which all occur in China, could enable animal-to-human transmission, the analysts found.
Although no confirmed animal source for the virus has been found, the analysts noted that “in many previous zoonotic outbreaks, the identification of animal sources has taken years, and in some cases, animal sources have not been identified.”
The most likely scenario is that somebody fucked up and the virus escaped - just like it does in every movie ever made about this kinda shit.
Of course, learning the details doesn't much matter to the public manipulators. They'd rather we amuse ourselves chasing bullshit rumors and conspiracy "theories" cuz that's what keeps those clicks coming and the donations flowing and the attention focused on anything other than the fact that the people pimping the rumors are doing it either as a distraction because they need us not to notice how they're fuckin' us with our pants on, or because they're just along for the ride - knowing there're 20 or 30 million rubes out there, each with a few bucks to spend, so hey - why not carve out a niche for myself, and let those rubes provide me a nice comfortable living?
Anyway - WaPo: (pay wall)
U.S. intelligence agencies on Friday offered their most detailed explanations to date about the possible origins of the coronavirus that spawned the covid-19 pandemic, including why some analysts think an accident in a lab may be the most plausible source.
The intelligence community’s unclassified assessment didn’t change the summary of its conclusions that were reported last August, which reached few definitive answers about the origins of the virus, a question that has vexed scientists and become a political flash point.
Ultimately, the newly released intelligence assessment shows government analysts puzzling over the same questions and pursuing the same inconclusive leads as scientists who’ve been working for nearly two years without the benefit of secret intelligence.
But the document provides a fuller explanation for why some intelligence analysts ultimately came down in favor of a “lab-leak” hypothesis as the most likely explanation and others determined that the virus probably emerged in nature, when an infected animal passed the pathogen to a human.
The document doesn’t identify where the analysts work and refers to intelligence “elements” rather than agencies by name.
Analysts who had moderate confidence in the lab-leak scenario emphasized that employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the Chinese city where the first covid cases were found in late 2019, had conducted research on other coronaviruses.
These analysts, after examining academic articles, said lab employees worked under what the literature indicated were “inadequate biosafety conditions that could have led to opportunities for a laboratory-associated incident,” the assessment revealed.
Two years before the coronavirus outbreak, U.S. officials had warned in classified diplomatic cables about inadequate safety at the lab. The newly released assessment doesn’t mention the cables, but they would almost certainly have been available to all analysts studying the origins question.
The analysts who favored the lab-leak hypothesis also took into account the fact that the initial clusters of covid-19 cases “occurred only in Wuhan” and that the researchers at the lab had taken samples of coronaviruses from animals throughout China and thus “provided a node for the virus to enter the city,” according to the assessment.
These analysts judged that the researchers’ work with infected animals was “inherently risky” and “provided numerous opportunities for them to unwittingly become infected with SARS-CoV-2,” the virus that causes covid-19.
However, the intelligence community “has no indications that [the lab’s] research involved SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor virus,” the assessment stated. Despite that lack of physical evidence, the pro-lab-leak analysts noted that “it is plausible that researchers may have unwittingly exposed themselves to the virus without sequencing it during experiments or sampling activities, possibly resulting in asymptomatic or mild infection.”
In that respect, the assessment is notable because it suggests those analysts who believe the virus emanated from a lab have based their conclusions largely on speculation and circumstantial evidence.
One former U.S. official who has recently taken part in discussions with analysts examining classified information — which is not detailed in the public assessment — said nothing they’ve seen points conclusively to a lab-leak or a natural origin.
The assessment also undercut one of the key pieces of information that lab-leak proponents have used to bolster their case.
In November 2020, a State Department team searching for the origins obtained classified intelligence it thought was a breakthrough: One year earlier, three researchers at the Wuhan lab had gone to a hospital with symptoms similar to those associated with covid-19 and other seasonal illnesses, such as the flu.
But the assessment found that reports about sick workers were “not diagnostic of the pandemic’s origins,” adding: “Even if confirmed, hospital admission alone would not be diagnostic of covid-19 infection.”
Those analysts who think the virus is more likely to have emerged in nature also lack any definitive evidence.
Among the factors they considered was “China’s officials’ lack of foreknowledge” that the virus existed before researchers at the Wuhan lab isolated it after it was seen in the general population, the assessment said.
The entire intelligence community agreed that Chinese officials probably didn’t have any advance knowledge of the virus, and that accordingly if it did emanate from an incident associated with the lab, officials probably were unaware in the initial months of spread that such a lab-leak had occurred.
U.S. intelligence reporting in early 2020 — before the virus began to tear through U.S. cities — did find that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak after it had begun, The Washington Post previously reported.
The analysts who favored the natural-transmission hypothesis pointed to precedent: Earlier infectious-disease outbreaks also have zoonotic origins. A wide diversity of animals also are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection, and animal trafficking, farming, sale and rescue, which all occur in China, could enable animal-to-human transmission, the analysts found.
Although no confirmed animal source for the virus has been found, the analysts noted that “in many previous zoonotic outbreaks, the identification of animal sources has taken years, and in some cases, animal sources have not been identified.”
Oct 30, 2021
COVID-19 Update
I've been trying to work this shit most of the day and I'm sick of it.
So fuck it. I guess the numbers are just a Monday thru Friday work-a-day thing.
Sorry, guys - gettin' a little burned out on this shit.
But of course, the disease doesn't give a fuck about anything but it's own survival, which seems to have fallen out of fashion for a great many of the humanoid biologic units.
WaPo:
Inside Russia's ‘fourth wave’: Record deaths, deep frustration and plenty of blame
MOSCOW — A routine medical checkup in mid-September nearly cost Alexander Ivanov his life. The clinic was packed with people, almost no one wearing masks.
“Or distancing,” he said — a common sight in Russian public spaces and on transport. “I even told some of the people that they should be wearing masks, but people didn’t care.”
Three days later he fell ill with the coronavirus and wound up in intensive care in Yekaterinburg, in Russia’s Urals region. The 47-year-old resident — who was not vaccinated — watched other patients dying, thinking he was next.
Russia’s catastrophic “fourth wave” is a cautionary tale for a failing vaccination campaign, showing the difficulties in correcting course after the government’s confused, on-off messaging about covid-19.
Russia’s pandemic measures began with a strict lockdown in early 2020 and dropped before a crucial July 2020 vote on constitutional changes. This summer, Moscow brought in QR codes to prove vaccine status to enter bars, restaurants and cafes, but the unpopular measure was abandoned after a few weeks.
Some analysts say Russians’ distrust of authorities and skepticism of doctors — going back to Soviet times — helps explain the country’s vaccine reticence. Others blame anti-vaccine activists and rampant disinformation on social media.
But the result leaves Russia as a pandemic hot spot, while countries with higher vaccination rates are lifting restrictions.
Almost daily, a grim record of Russian deaths is marked: more than 1,100 a day, according to official figures. That is still understated, many independent analysts say. Hospitals are struggling and small business owners are angered by the reimposition of restrictions, including a partial lockdown from Thursday.
As authorities played down the crisis before September parliamentary elections, Russia’s vaccination rate hovered among the lowest globally. In recent weeks, officials have ramped up warnings about the coronavirus and the need for vaccines.
Russia’s Ministry of Health says it has fully vaccinated 8 million Russians since Oct. 14, bringing the current total to 50.9 million, or about 35 percent of the population. That compares to 74 percent in Canada, 72 percent in Japan, 68 percent in France, 67 percent in Britain, 66 percent in Germany and 57 percent in the United States, according to the Britain-based Global Change Data Lab.
Ivanov is not against the vaccine, but his attitude illustrates how the government failed to convince even those not opposed to vaccines. A retired policeman who spends a lot of time with his dogs and chickens at his small farm outside Yekaterinburg, he didn’t think the jab was necessary.
“I was planning to do it, but I just thought tomorrow. And tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. I just didn’t get around to it,” said Ivanov. “I didn’t take this virus seriously at all. I thought it was like the flu, not dangerous at all. I was not afraid.”
In intensive care for several weeks, his only contact with the outside world was a doctor who reported his condition to his family and read them notes he wrote.
“So I wrote, ‘Don’t worry, I’m okay.’ But of course I was thinking I could die, especially when I saw people around me dying,” Ivanov said.
In Russia, experts are challenging official pandemic figures as too low. They refuse to be silenced.
Vlad Nesterov — father-in-law of Ivanov’s daughter — had similar views about getting the virus. He also fell sick in late September, along with his family and almost everyone in the office where he worked.
Nesterov, a journalist, thinks he picked it up at an office birthday party. There was plenty of vodka and toasts and many guests later came down with covid-19.
“I’m not against the vaccine. It’s just that I thought that Jesus Christ would help me, and whatever should happen would happen,” said Nesterov. He spent four weeks battling the coronavirus at home, ill and constantly exhausted.
St. Petersburg doctor Lev Averbakh feels as is if he is wading against a tide of ignorance, apathy and disinformation. “I am so sick and tired of explaining to people what this virus is about and why they need to be vaccinated. This resistance from the population is huge,” he said in an interview.
Another doctor, Sergei, working in the “red zone” — or the coronavirus treatment unit — at a regional hospital, no longer feels much compassion for unvaccinated patients. He just thinks about the generous red zone bonus payments that means he earns double his normal pay.
“But we covid doctors are very cynical now, because of these covid payments. For us, covid is good, as awful as that might sound,” said the doctor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals. “For us, the worse the covid situation is the better,” he said referring to doctors’ bonuses.
A few months ago, he asked every one of 120 coronavirus patients under his direct care if they had been vaccinated. All said no, citing vague reasons such as “side effects or genetic problems,” he said.
His 200-bed hospital was ordered to add 70 extra beds when the disease peaked.
“And there was no space to put beds. We had to stick beds in the corridors, in the operating theaters, anywhere we could find a space,” said the doctor. Patients without coronavirus-related illnesses were sent home prematurely, he said, only to return soon after, sicker than ever.
With cases hitting record highs, hospitals across Russia are under similar intense pressures.
His 200-bed hospital was ordered to add 70 extra beds when the disease peaked.
“And there was no space to put beds. We had to stick beds in the corridors, in the operating theaters, anywhere we could find a space,” said the doctor. Patients without coronavirus-related illnesses were sent home prematurely, he said, only to return soon after, sicker than ever.
With cases hitting record highs, hospitals across Russia are under similar intense pressures.
Identifying himself only as Sergei, he videoed himself pulling on a white protective suit, surgical gloves, blue goggles and a mask, and walking up the hospital’s interior stairs.
“Grandma, hi. Quiet, quiet,” he said, approaching her bed, recording multiple black bruises on her arms and discovering that her diaper had not been changed and pressure sores had not been bandaged. The video was aired Wednesday on Tomsk independent television TV2.
He spent nearly nine and a half hours in the hospital the first day and returned a day later to find her unwashed, lying again in a dirty diaper, he said. On day three, a doctor confronted him and he fled.
Antonina Stoilova, head of therapeutics at the hospital, said all patients are properly cared for, TV2 reported.
Russian authorities have ordered a partial lockdown to regain control, including a nonworking week until Nov. 8. But instead of staying home, many people are jetting off on vacation to Egypt, Turkey or Russia’s Black Sea coast, according to travel agents cited in Russia media.
One Russian posted a TikTok video on Oct. 26 from Cide on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, panning across crowds frolicking in the sea. “The beaches are packed. The sea is warm. The temperature is 30 degrees (86 degrees Fahrenheit). People are delighted, resting. Only in Russia is there a lockdown,” she said.
Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of state-run RT, said on Telegram she had a change of heart about anti-vaccine claims because children were dying “en masse.”
“At first, the anti-vaxers evoked my understandable sympathy. People are afraid, people are not explained, people are confused,” she wrote Oct. 20. But now she calls them a threat to children’s lives.
“Choke on ventilators, crawl with an [oxygen] saturation of 70 in the corridors of jam-packed hospitals,” she wrote. “That’s your choice. But I cannot forgive you the deaths of my country’s children.”
But Tatiana Stanovaya, an analyst at Moscow-based think tank R. Politik, said President Vladimir Putin’s uneven messaging and resistance to mandatory vaccinations were more to blame.
“If any other country had the same information policy as Russia,” she said, “everything would be the same.”
Un-Fucking-Believable
I'm not to blame for your black eye and bloody nose.
- You failed to obey me
- You didn't do what I wanted you to do
I had to punch you in the face to get you to stop denying that I have a right to punch you in the face. You made me do it.
During Jan. 6 riot, Trump attorney told Pence team the vice president’s inaction caused attack on Capitol
As Vice President Mike Pence hid from a marauding mob during the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, an attorney for President Donald Trump emailed a top Pence aide to say that Pence had caused the violence by refusing to block certification of Trump’s election loss.
The attorney, John C. Eastman, also continued to press for Pence to act even after Trump’s supporters had trampled through the Capitol — an attack the Pence aide, Greg Jacob, had described as a “siege” in their email exchange.
“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” Eastman wrote to Jacob, referring to Trump’s claims of voter fraud.
Eastman sent the email as Pence, who had been presiding in the Senate, was under guard with Jacob and other advisers in a secure area. Rioters were tearing through the Capitol complex, some of them calling for Pence to be executed.
Jacob, Pence’s chief counsel, included Eastman’s emailed remarks in a draft opinion article about Trump’s outside legal team that he wrote later in January but ultimately chose not to publish. The Washington Post obtained a copy of the draft. Jacob wrote that by sending the email at that moment, Eastman “displayed a shocking lack of awareness of how those practical implications were playing out in real time.”
Jacob’s draft article, Eastman’s emails and accounts of other previously undisclosed actions by Eastman offer new insight into the mind-sets of figures at the center of an episode that pushed American democracy to the brink. They show that Eastman’s efforts to persuade Pence to block Trump’s defeat were more extensive than has been reported previously, and that the Pence team was subjected to what Jacob at the time called “a barrage of bankrupt legal theories.”
Eastman confirmed the emails in interviews with The Post but denied that he was blaming Pence for the violence. He defended his actions, saying that Trump’s team was right to exhaust “every legal means” to challenge a result that it argued was plagued by widespread fraud and irregularities.
“Are you supposed to not do anything about that?” Eastman said.
He stood by legal advice he gave Pence to halt Congress’s certification on Jan. 6 to allow Republican state lawmakers to investigate the unfounded fraud claims, which multiple legal scholars have said Pence was not authorized to do.
Eastman said the email saying Pence’s inaction led to the violence was a response to an email in which Jacob told him that his “bull----” legal advice was why Pence’s team was “under siege,” and that Jacob had later apologized.
A person familiar with the emails said Jacob apologized for using profanity but still maintained that Eastman’s advice was “snake oil.” That person, like several others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has said that it plans to subpoena Eastman as it investigates his role in Trump’s efforts, which included two legal memos in which Eastman outlined how Republicans could deny Joe Biden the White House.
In the days before the attack, Eastman was working to salvage Trump’s presidency out of a “command center” in rooms at the Willard hotel near the White House, alongside such top Trump allies as Rudolph W. Giuliani.
Jacob wrote in his draft article that Eastman and Giuliani were part of a “cadre of outside lawyers” who had “spun a web of lies and disinformation” in an attempt to pressure Pence to betray his oath of office and the Constitution.
Jacob wrote that legal authorities should consider taking action against the attorneys.
“Now that the moment of immediate crisis has passed, the legal profession should dispassionately examine whether the attorneys involved should be disciplined for using their credentials to sell a stream of snake oil to the most powerful office in the world, wrapped in the guise of a lawyer’s advice,” he wrote in the draft.
Robert Costello, a lawyer for Giuliani, said Jacob had a right to his opinion. “This is an opinion piece, and not surprisingly, he agrees with his own opinion,” Costello said.
A bipartisan group of former government officials and legal figures, including two former federal judges, has asked the California bar association to investigate Eastman’s conduct.
Eastman’s memos gave several options for Pence to use the vice president’s ceremonial role of counting electoral college votes to halt Trump’s defeat. Eastman has argued that the 1887 Electoral Count Act is unconstitutional, and that the vice president has power under the 12th Amendment to decide whether electoral votes are valid.
Under the most drastic of the options outlined in the memos, Pence would have rejected electoral votes for Biden from states where Republicans were claiming fraud, making Trump the winner — a proposal that Eastman has more recently tried to disown as a “crazy” suggestion he did not endorse.
Eastman made the case for Pence to act during a meeting in the Oval Office with Trump, Pence, Jacob and Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, on the afternoon of Jan. 4, according to two people familiar with the discussions. The meeting was reported in the media soon after. Pence advisers said they had never heard of Eastman before January.
The meeting was called, the people said, because Trump was frustrated that Pence was not acceding to his demands, and wanted the vice president to hear arguments from Eastman, whom he viewed as having more credibility in legal circles than some of Trump’s other legal advisers.
Eastman argued that Pence should at least try the maneuver of not certifying electors on Jan. 6, because it had never been done before, and so had not been ruled on by the courts, one of the people familiar with the discussions said. Eastman told The Post he did not recall making “any such statement.”
Eastman said that, in response to a question from Pence, he said in the meeting that it was an “open question” whether Pence had the ability to unilaterally decide which electoral votes to count.
During a little-noticed radio interview that evening, Eastman said that although it would be politically impossible for a vice president to certify his “favorite slate of electors” without any evidence of fraud, the “level of corruption” in the 2020 vote could not be allowed to stand.
“I think that makes the exercise of the vice president’s power here very compelling,” Eastman said.
In a meeting the following day with Short and Jacob at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Eastman began by arguing that Pence should reject Biden electors, according to the two people. He did not share his memos outlining how to stop Biden’s victory with Pence’s team at either the Jan. 4 or the Jan. 5 meetings, according to the people familiar with the discussions. Eastman’s memos were first reported in the book “Peril” by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
Jacob wrote in his draft article that a Trump lawyer conceded to him in a Jan. 5 meeting that “not a single member of the Supreme Court would support his position,” that“230 years of historical practice were firmly against it,” and that “no reasonable person would create a rule that invested a single individual with unilateral authority to determine the validity of disputed electoral votes for President of the United States.”
The two people familiar with the matter said Eastman was the only lawyer in the Jan. 5 meeting.
By the end of the two-hour meeting, the people said, Eastman had conceded that having Pence reject Biden electors was not a good plan.
Eastman denied to The Post that he made concessions and said he never advocated for Pence to reject the electors outright. “That is false,” he said. “And distorting the conversation, which depends heavily on what scenario was being discussed.”
In telephone calls later on Jan. 5, Eastman proposed to Pence advisers that he take a less drastic option outlined in the memos of “sending it back to the states” for the unfounded fraud claims to be examined. Eastman also suggested on several occasions, according to the people with knowledge of the meetings, that Pence could intervene because the courts would invoke “the political question doctrine” and not intervene.
“But if the courts stayed out of a standoff between the Vice President and Congress over the fate of the presidency, then where would the issue be decided? In the streets?” Jacob wrote in his draft op-ed.
Eastman told The Post: “I did not push for electors to be thrown out, but for the disputes to be referred to state legislatures, as had been requested by key legislators in several states, for assessment of the impact of the acknowledged illegality in the conduct of the election.”
Around 1 p.m. on Jan. 6, as Trump addressed supporters at a rally near the White House, Pence’s office released a letter to Congress stating that he would not block the certification. Thousands of Trump supporters marched to the Capitol and rioted.
“What the lawyers did not tell the crowd — and to the best of my knowledge, never told the president — is that they were pushing an abstract legal theory that had overwhelming drawbacks and limitations,” Jacob wrote in the op ed.
Jacob wrote that Pence never considered a different course of action.
After the unrest began on Jan. 6, Jacob sent an email to memorialize his conversation with Eastman from the day before, according to the two people with knowledge.
After Pence was escorted out of the Senate, Jacob emailed Eastman to criticize the legal advice he had pushed to Pence on stopping certification.
“Thanks to your bull----, we are now under siege,” Jacob wrote, according to Eastman. Eastman, while willing to discuss the email, declined to provide a copy to The Post. One of the other people with knowledge of the matter confirmed the content of Jacob’s email.
That led to Eastman sending the email stating that Pence’s decision led to the “siege.”
The two exchanged further messages in which Jacob apologized for his expletive, but not his critiques, and Eastman said that he had wanted Pence to postpone the count to allow states to investigate, according to Eastman and the two people familiar with the exchange.
That evening, Eastman told Jacob in another email that Pence should still not certify the results, according to Eastman and one of the people familiar with the emails. That email from Eastman came after the rioters had been cleared from the Capitol and Pence had returned to the chair to preside over the proceedings and vowed to continue.
Pence allowed other lawmakers to speak before they returned to counting the votes, and said he wasn’t counting the time from his speech or the other lawmakers against the time allotted in the Electoral Count Act.
Eastman said that this prompted him to email Jacob to say that Pence should not certify the election because he had already violated the Electoral College Act, which Pence had cited as a reason that he could not send the electors back to the states.
“My point was they had already violated the electoral count act by allowing debate to extend past the allotted two hours, and by not reconvening ‘immediately’ in joint session after the vote in the objection,” Eastman told The Post. “It seemed that had already set the precedent that it was not an impediment.”
Eastman, 61, is a veteran conservative legal activist who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. A longtime member of the Federalist Society, he has spent much of his legal career fighting same-sex marriage.
He is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank based in Upland, Calif., whose leaders stridently defended Eastman from criticism over his role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and attacked the media’s coverage of it.
Eastman was sharply criticized by Democrats in August last year for writing an article for Newsweek that questioned then-Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s eligibility to be vice president on the grounds that her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born. He said his understanding was that Trump first noticed him arguing against birthright citizenship on Fox News.
Eastman has said that he first made contact with lawyers working on Trump’s election challenges during the weekend after the election in Philadelphia, where he happened to be attending an academic conference. The law firm Jones Day had just withdrawn from representing Trump and, Eastman said in a podcast interview in June, “somebody had heard I was in town and brought me over to the headquarters.”
Eastman’s visit to Trump’s team was brief, but “long enough to catch covid,” he said on the podcast hosted by David Clements, a former New Mexico State University professor who is well known in election-denial circles.
Eastman testified via video about purported fraud to Georgia state senators at a Dec. 3 hearing where Giuliani also spoke. Giuliani said state legislators were given copies of a paper by Eastman that argued they could reject election results and directly appoint electors.
Eastman’s seven-page paper featured theories about voter fraud published by the right-wing blog the Gateway Pundit and an anonymous Twitter user named “DuckDiver19,” according to a copy Eastman shared with The Post.
Eastman has said that Trump asked him to draft a brief calling for the Supreme Court to allow Trump to intervene in a case filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), which sought to block the electoral college votes from four states. Eastman submitted his brief on Dec. 9 and the high court rejected the case two days later.
Eastman was previously a professor of law at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. A week after the Jan. 6 attacks, Chapman President Daniele Struppa announced that Eastman had agreed to retire from the school after what Struppa called a “challenging chapter for Chapman.”
At the time of the Capitol attack, Eastman was on leave from Chapman and serving as a visiting professor at the University of Colorado, which subsequently stripped him of some of his duties there.
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