Inside the Fall of the CDC How the world’s greatest public health organization was brought to its knees by a virus, the president and the capitulation of its own leaders, causing damage that could last much longer than the coronavirus. ........... a superspreader event in which 52 of the 61 singers at a 2½-hour choir practice developed COVID-19. Two died. .......... When the next history of the CDC is written, 2020 will emerge as perhaps the darkest chapter in its 74 years, rivaled only by its involvement in the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which federal doctors withheld medicine from poor Black men with syphilis, then tracked their descent into blindness, insanity and death. ............ A vaunted agency that was once the global gold standard of public health has, with breathtaking speed, become a target of anger, scorn and even pity. .......... How could an agency that eradicated smallpox globally and wiped out polio in the United States have fallen so far? ....... the escalating tensions, paranoia and pained discussions that unfolded behind the walls of CDC’s Atlanta headquarters ......... battles that are as much about protecting science from the White House as protecting the public from COVID-19. It is a war that they have, more often than not, lost. ........... A shifting and mysterious cast of political aides and private contractors — what one scientist described as young protégés of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, “wearing blue suits with red ties and beards” — crowded into important meetings about key policy decisions. ......... Veteran CDC specialists with global reputations were marginalized, silenced or reassigned — often for simply doing what had always been their job. Some of the agency’s most revered scientists vanished from public view after speaking candidly about the virus. ............. Theirs was the model other nations copied. Their leaders were the public faces Americans turned to for the unvarnished truth. They’d served happily under Democrats and Republicans. ......... Now, 10 months into the crisis, many fear the CDC has lost the most important currency of public health: trust, the confidence in experts that persuades people to wear masks for the public good, to refrain from close-packed gatherings, to take a vaccine. ....... what can happen when people lose confidence in the government and denial and falsehoods spread faster than disease. He called it the “bankruptcy of trust.” ....... Emails and calls bounced among the agency’s leaders ......... In the fierce chaos of Trump’s Washington, the CDC needed a streetfighter. Instead, it got “the nicest grandfather you can imagine” .......... the American public health system, which has been quietly gutted since the Great Recession. ......... years of federal and state cuts had left about 26,000 fewer employees at state, county and municipal health agencies since 2009 ........ In the secure, high-tech room where the CDC brain trust met, the mood turned dark as the scientists began to fear they were confronting a pandemic. .......... The lab official tried to contact a chief virologist at the China CDC who was usually helpful, but got no response. Neither did colleagues who reached out to Chinese scientists with whom they had collaborated for years. The Americans concluded that the regime in Beijing was telling them to keep quiet. .......... China was a hard target. Even U.S. spy agencies struggled to gather intelligence on the evolution of the disease. .......... “What the fuck are we paying for people to be in China if they can’t go where there’s an outbreak when there’s an outbreak” ............ His coverage of the SARS pandemic had helped shape his view of China as what he called “an expansionist totalitarian empire.” .......... The CDC, which had been the public face of the government during every health crisis in memory, soon became nearly invisible. After a few more briefings, a Pence aide told the agency’s media staff that this was the president’s stage, not theirs. ......... A friend of one CDC scientist ribbed him: “We keep waiting for the CDC to show up on a milk carton as a missing child.” ............... Trump countermanded science in a flurry of inaccuracies and dangerous advice, saying the virus would soon go away, theorizing about injecting disinfectant as a treatment, and dismissing recommendations about wearing a mask. .......... In contrast, South Korean officials gave near instantaneous approval to commercial labs, and they quickly began testing 10,000 people a day. ........... “There’s a four-foot gap at the top of the shower curtain that you bought from Home Depot — and you’re calling this a quarantine area?” ........ Trump flew to Atlanta for an impromptu tour of the CDC laboratories. Wearing a red “KEEP AMERICA GREAT” cap, Trump briefly praised the CDC’s tests as “perfect” and talked about the record high ratings for his recent appearance on Fox News. Asked by a reporter about cruise ships, the president said he preferred that the Grand Princess passengers remain on board because their arrival — even at a federal quarantine site — would cause a spike in U.S. case numbers. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship,” Trump told reporters. .............. At the same time as they were watering down Cetron’s criticism of the cruise industry, the White House and DHS were pushing him to invoke quarantine powers to stop a problem that barely existed: the spread of coronavirus by migrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. ............... border officials tested unaccompanied children seeking asylum — and expelled them even if their results were negative. ........ By April, the numbers were brutal. There were 608,000 cases of COVID nationwide. More than 26,000 people had died, about 10,000 of them in New York City, where the per capita death rate had surpassed Italy’s. ................ the agency had a “culture where petty rivalries between egos tend to subordinate the public good.” ........... the tough new policy would “convert a problem of incomplete data to a problem of invalid data.” ......... the 1918 flu pandemic that had infected a third of the world’s population, killing more than 50 million people ................ Obama was clear: All decisions had to be made quickly and grounded in the best available science. .......... “You know, Rahm,” Besser recalled him saying. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be writing scientific guidance.” Cursing, Emanuel crumpled the paper in his fist, threw it aside and began eating his lunch. At a crucial moment, science prevailed. ......... One CDC official recalls seeing the July 8 tweet and sighing in defeat. “Come on, man, this is your team! You don’t have to tweet it like that! You can just pick up the phone and call Redfield!” ........... Everyone nitpicked the CDC’s subsequent proposals, records show — even Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who suggested granting paid sick leave to teachers and administrators at high risk for COVID-19 complications. ............. In a section that described the higher proportion of cases among Hispanic children, the White House counsel’s office wanted the CDC to add a reference to one of the president’s favorite bugaboos, the Mexican border. .......... The HHS unit was even critical of the suggestion that schools might need to close in areas where the virus was raging uncontrolled. ......... One of their prime tormentors was Michael Caputo, a political fixer handpicked by Trump himself to oversee communications at HHS. A proud protégé of convicted dirty trickster Roger Stone, Caputo had served as an adviser for Russian politicians, worked for Trump’s campaign and promoted conspiracy theories. Soon after arriving at HHS in April, Caputo began riding herd over CDC communications seen as conflicting with Trump’s political message. ................. She attracted the administration’s ire with her blunt assessments in media interviews.
Robert Lighthizer Blew Up 60 Years of Trade Policy. Nobody Knows What Happens Next. Trump’s trade representative joined the administration with one mission: Bring factory jobs back from overseas. The results so far? Endless trade wars, alienated allies, and a manufacturing recession. ............ He’s ruptured international relationships, maintained tariffs on $350 billion worth of imports, and constructed a series of piecemeal and delicate agreements with trading partners that are as good as the next president’s dedication to enforcing them. .................... The gap between American imports and exports of goods is as big as it’s ever been, while manufacturing output and job growth flatlined in 2019. To the extent that manufacturers have pulled out of China, they’ve shifted to countries like Vietnam and Mexico, rather than set up factories in the U.S. And Lighthizer has failed to achieve his most ambitious goals, as a tempestuous president’s abrupt twists and turns sabotaged the patient, insistent approach on which his trade representative had built his reputation. .............. Trump’s tactics have undermined his goal of reviving America’s industrial might. ............ we still see a trade deficit today that’s bigger than when Trump took office, and ongoing outsourcing of jobs, despite good efforts to try and turn around a mess.” ............ Ultimately, import quotas on Japanese steel and cars didn’t save the Rust Belt — Japanese automakers simply set up shop in the union-free American South, while robots thinned the ranks of workers needed on factory floors. ........... Moving plants to cheaper locales all over the world was rapidly becoming the default setting for American companies, and plenty of attorneys were making good money helping them do it. ............ “The fact that the Appellate Body had ruled against the U.S. repeatedly was the primary reason Lighthizer was determined to bring down the WTO” .............. Decades later, Donald Trump blamed NAFTA for a host of ills — from the rise of automation to the decline of unions — and it helped him win traditionally Democratic states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. ........... To be fair, conventional wisdom had begun to shift under President Barack Obama, as it became increasingly clear even to free-trade advocates that U.S. efforts to prevent China from flouting international rules and norms weren’t working. ................. Obama spent much of his second term negotiating a trade pact with 12 other Pacific Rim countries, with the idea of creating a U.S.-centered economic bloc to counter China’s influence, and tried to sell it to Congress. The Trans Pacific Partnership marked a rare point of agreement with Republican leadership, but an alliance of labor-oriented progressives and tea party conservatives opposed it. ................ Many staffers harbored hopes that Trump would put his own stamp on the TPP agreement and move ahead with it. Instead, Trump pulled out of the deal on the first business day of his administration, stunning USTR officials who had devoted years to hammering out its intricately balanced details. “It was like someone died,” said one former staff member, describing the mood at headquarters on that rainy January Monday. ............... To Trump, relationships with other countries usually come down to who’s “winning.” In trade, that usually refers to the trade deficit — that is, America’s exports to a country minus its imports. Like his boss, Lighthizer focused on the goods deficit, since the U.S. imports far more stuff than it exports, which he sees as a problem. That leaves out services, including everything from the many billions in financial expertise the U.S. provides, to tourists and foreign students who attend college here. On that front, the U.S. actually sells more to the rest of the world than it buys. ............... Trump often gave no notice of his tariff pronouncements, blindsiding careful USTR employees. “When you’re getting calls from the private sector asking what’s going on, and you have to somewhat jokingly say, ‘I haven’t checked Twitter,’ That can be a challenge,” said one former staffer. ........... Over time, staff gained respect for Lighthizer’s management of his single most important constituent: the president. While USTR’s profile heightened, Lighthizer largely avoided the limelight, knowing that upstaging his boss could hasten his exit. He also coped with Trump’s more extreme trade impulses, like hiking tariffs without warning and threatening to end various alliances and agreements. .............. The world’s second-biggest economy had become a market system that was fundamentally different from the capitalist model upon which most international trade laws and norms are predicated. ......... the Chinese executed an about-face around the time of the great financial crisis, when capitalist systems neared collapse. Returning to a managed economy, they subsidized exports, required outside companies to enter joint ventures with Chinese ones, and encouraged widespread piracy of intellectual property. ............... In the TPP, the Obama administration negotiated a trade agreement with Pacific Rim nations that would theoretically be so attractive to China, it would meet the pact’s requirements for fair competition so that it could join. .......... The Trump administration’s thinking: Assembling a coalition of nations to pressure China would never have worked. ........... Farmers, an important Trump political constituency, were compensated for the lost Chinese market with tens of billions of dollars in subsidies — more than the auto companies received during the last recession — and no obligation to repay them. But manufacturers, faced with higher prices for imported parts, got nothing. That helped drive the sector into a recession ............... “The strategy of talking to these people had been tried across two administrations and basically led to nothing.” ............. by Lighthizer’s own metrics, the U.S. isn’t winning the trade war. The trade deficit with China has barely budged, and it’s widened with other countries like Vietnam as American companies responded to tariffs by moving operations elsewhere in the region. ................. Although they’re not usually cast as such, tariffs aren’t so much a weapon against other countries as they are a signal to domestic business: Lighthizer was telling American companies that investing overseas wouldn’t be the obvious choice it had been in the past. ............ “The business community’s concern is that an effort to reset tariffs risks ending up with higher tariffs everywhere”
U.S. tops 60,000 daily coronavirus infections for first time since early August New study shows Republican-leaning counties hardest hit in recent weeks.
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