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Developers of COVID Vaccine Are Children of Turkish Immigrants to Germany

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2020 //
63

The Pfizer vaccine was developed not by Pfizer but by a German company called BioNTech. There is an amazing story behind BioNTech, which was founded by a married couple, both of whom are children of Turkish immigrants to Germany. Thanks to the success of their vaccine, they are now billionaires but they don’t own a car. They are the kind of people that Trump’s strict bans on immigration would keep out of our country. The Washington Post profiled the couple.

BERLIN — At 8 p.m. Sunday ­evening, the phone rang with the call Ugur Sahin, chief executive of the German medical start-up ­BioNTech, had been anxiously awaiting.
“Are you sitting down?” Pfizer chief Albert Bourla asked him.


The news that followed was better than Sahin had hoped: Preliminary analysis from Phase 3 trials of his company’s coronavirus vaccine showed 90 percent protection.


“I was more than excited,” said Sahin, speaking to The Washington Post on a video call from his home in the western German city of Mainz.


The interim results put the 55-year-old and his co-founder wife, Ozlem Tureci, in the front of the pack racing for a safe and effective vaccine. Global markets rallied, and stock soared for ­BioNTech — a small-by-pharma-industry-standards company that has yet to see a vaccine using its technology brought to market. For the corona-weary masses, it was a much-needed glimpse of a potential end in sight...

The husband-and-wife team behind one of the world’s top coronavirus vaccine candidates are the sort of people who don’t own a car and who took the morning off for their wedding day in 2002 before returning to the lab. Half a day was “sufficient,” Tureci explained.

Sahin and Tureci, both children of Turkish immigrants to Germany, met while working on an oncology ward in the southwestern city of Homburg. They found they shared an interest in getting the body’s immune system to fight cancer.
Sahin was born in the Mediterranean city of Iskenderun and moved to Germany when he was 4. His father was a “Gastarbeiter,” or guest worker, at a Ford factory in Cologne.


Tureci’s family moved to Germany from Turkey before she was born, after her father finished medical school. “He schlepped me everywhere when I was young,” she said, “to the hospital and to see patients and such.”
In her studies, Tureci was surprised by the gap between advances in medical technology and what was available to doctors and patients. She and Sahin decided the best way to close that gap was to launch their own company.

Founded in 2008, BioNTech’s work focused primarily on cancer vaccines using what is known as messenger RNA technology. While traditional vaccines require labor-intensive production of ­viral proteins, mRNA vaccines deploy a piece of genetic code that instructs a person’s immune system to produce the proteins itself.



Sahin said he hadn’t closely followed the science of the novel coronavirus spreading in China, but on Jan. 24 he received a scientific paper that rang alarm bells. It described both serious cases and an asymptomatic carrier. He Googled “Wuhan” and saw it was a well-connected megacity with an international airport.


“That’s the full pattern you need for a pandemic virus,” he said.
It took a few days to talk others at the company into putting their resources behind a coronavirus vaccine, he said, as some experts were still dismissing the potential for a pandemic as hype. “In a company, it’s a matter of convincing people that they need to install a lot of energy,” he said. Energy is something Sahin exudes as he talks excitedly about the vaccine’s prospects.


It was a “snowball effect,” Tureci said. “He was very convincing that this kind of pandemic could develop.”


Within four weeks, the first wave of the epidemic in Europe was in full swing, and BioNTech had 20 vaccine candidates as part of what it dubbed project “Lightspeed” (no connection to the U.S. government’s “Operation Warp Speed”). With a team of more than 1,000 people in Mainz working “24-7,” Sahin said, the company narrowed its most promising candidates down to four. But it didn’t have the resources to conduct large-scale clinical trials or the production and distribution that would be necessary.


BioNTech approached Pfizer, with whom they had an existing relationship, working on influenza vaccines.
“The answer came immediately and was a yes,” said Tureci. In April, Pfizer invested an initial $185 million toward the vaccine development and said it would release up to $563 million more based on milestones in the development.
When the interim Phase 3 results came in, Tureci said, they took her by surprise. “As a scientist, I’m very cautious and tend to be a bit pessimistic,” she said.


Sahin said the news was “extremely relieving.”
The United States had already ordered 100 million doses, with an option for 500 million more. The European Union on Wednesday agreed on an order for an initial 200 million.
Amid the whirlwind of publicity, tweets from President Trump have brought some bemusement. “Complete nonsense” is how Sahin describes the accusation that the companies sat on the results until after the election.
And as for Trump’s claims of credit: “I’m not sure where the U.S. government would have had input in this,” Tureci said...

Sahin and Tureci are now a billionaire couple, numbering among the 100 richest Germans, according to the German paper Welt am Sonntag. Sahin said he can’t avoid watching the stock price go up — “but it doesn’t really matter that much.” He’s more concerned about getting his first product to the market.
“I don’t have a car. I’m not going to buy a plane,” said Sahin, who cycles to work every day. “What’s life-changing is to be able to impact something in the medical field.”

Categories Health, Science

FAIR: Why Is the New York Times Cheerleading to Reopen Schools?

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2020 //
31

The organization Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting writes that the New York Times has become a “cheerleader” for reopening the schools as the COVID surges to new heights.

it is strange indeed because there is evidence to support reopening and equally impressive evidence against reopening schools. Yet the New York Times consistently lands on one side: reopen the schools.

Ari Paul of FAIR writes:

We’re still dealing with a pandemic of biblical proportions, and the scientific community is still conflicted about how schools reopening fits into the crisis. Anthony Fauci, one of the nation’s top infectious disease experts, favors school reopening (Business Insider, 11/29/20)—as does the American Academy of Pediatrics, though it notes that “the current widespread circulation of the virus will not permit in-person learning to be safely accomplished in many jurisdictions.”

But the idea that children are not vectors, or are merely low-risk vectors, for spread of the coronavirus is in dispute (Healthline, 9/24/20; AP, 9/22/20). The Journal of the American Medical Association (7/29/20) reported “a temporal association between statewide school closure and lower Covid-19 incidence and mortality,” saying that school closures between March 9 and May 7 were associated with a 62% relative decline in Covid incidence per week and a 58% decline in deaths per week.

Nature (11/16/20) cited JAMA’s finding to bolster its comprehensive statistical review of governmental “non-pharmaceutical interventions” against Covid, which found that school closures were one of “the most effective NPIs” in curbing the spread of the disease. A report in US News and World Report (12/2/20) based on data compiled by the Covid Monitorproject on the coronavirus in K–12 schools  concluded that “the data suggests schools are NOT safe and DO contribute to the spread of the virus—both within schools and within their surrounding communities.”

And that’s partially why parents and teachers are so worried about de Blasio’s plan. Individual schools in the city have to deal with budget shortfalls, deteriorating buildings and lack of supplies in the best of times, and now they suddenly must rapidly and safely implement in-person teaching. And as many New York schools advocates, like one-time gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, have argued, reopening schools tends to benefit whiter communities, as whiter, more affluent schools tend to have more resources to adapt to the current environment.

Paul identifies Times’ reporter Eliza Shapiro as purveyor of a consistent anti-union, anti-teacher perspective, who consistently supports reopening and ignores the voices of teachers who complain about the lack of funding for protective measures for both students and teachers.

Paul concludes that the New York Times, the newspaper of record, “should be playing a much more balanced and compassionate role.”

Categories Accountability, Health, Media, New York City, Science

Tim Schwab: Is Bill Gates Undermining Public Health Data?

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2020 //
42

Tim Schwab has written several articles about the Gates Foundation and its negative effect on freedom of the press, education, and every other arena where it exercises an outsize influence because of its disproportionate power. When Melinda and Bill Gates make mistakes, they seldom apologize or make amends. They usually blame someone else or simply double down. In education, we have certainly seen this as Gates doubled down on using test scores to judge teacher quality, invested in charter schools, and funded the single biggest effort to standardize education: the Common Core.

In Schwab’s latest report on Gates’ follies, he reports that Gates has distorted knowledge about the pandemic by pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into one data-gathering project.

Schwab begins:

A perennial feature of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the guessing game of whether things are getting better or worse—and how policy approaches (masks, shutdowns) and changes in the weather will affect the coronavirus. Dozens of research institutes have published educated guesses about what’s coming next, but none have had the impact or reach of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

In the early days of the pandemic, the IHME projected a far less severe outbreak than other models, which drew the attention of Donald Trump, who was eager to downplay the danger. At a March 31 press briefing, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, Debbie Birx, with the president at her side, used IHME charts to show that the pandemic was rapidly winding down.

““Throughout April, millions of Americans were falsely led to believe that the epidemic would be over by June because of IHME’s projections,” the data scientist Youyang Gu noted in his review of the institute’s work. “I think that a lot of states reopened based on their modeling.”

The IHME brushed aside the widespread criticism that emerged—“Many people do not understand how modeling works,” its director, Chris Murray, explained in a Los Angeles Times op-ed—and continued to push headline-grabbing projections that drew alarm from its peers. For example, while many researchers limit their projections to a few weeks into the future, Murray used his regular appearances on CNN to chart the course of the pandemic many months in advance, putting the IHME’s highly contested estimates in a position to guide policy-making ahead of other models.

“It seems to be a version of the playbook Trump follows,” says Sam Clark, a demographer at Ohio State University. “Absolutely nothing negative sticks, and the more exposure you get, the better, no matter what. It’s really stunning, and I don’t know any other scientific personality or organization that is able to pull it off quite like IHME.”

The institute’s uncanny resilience, unconventional methods, and media savvy have long made it controversial in the global health community, where scholars have watched its meteoric rise over the past decade with a mix of awe and concern. Years before Covid, the IHME gained outsize influence by tracking hundreds of diseases across the planet and producing some of the most cited studies in all of science.

But it has also spawned a legion of detractors who call the IHME a monopoly and a juggernaut and charge the group has surrounded itself with a constellation of high-profile allies that have made it too big to peer review, the traditional method of self-regulation in science. Fueled by more than $600 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—a virtually unheard-of sum for an academic research institute—the IHME has outgrown and overwhelmed its peers, most notably the World Health Organization (WHO), which previously acted as the global authority for health estimates.

With Gates’ funding, IHME has become the go-to source for public health data. Schwab explains the unfortunate consequences of this global hegemony.


Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Health, Science

Growing Consensus that Young Children Can Safely Return to School

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2020 //
83

The New York Times reports that scientists are converging on a consensus that it is safe for young children to return to school.

After a summer of uncertainty and fear about how schools across the globe would operate in a pandemic, a consensus has emerged in recent months that is becoming policy in more and more districts: In-person teaching with young children is safer than with older ones, and particularly crucial for their development.

On Sunday, New York City, home to the country’s largest school system, became the most high-profile example of that trend, when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that only elementary schools and some schools for children with complex disabilities would reopen after all city classrooms were briefly shuttered in November. There is no plan yet to bring middle and high school students back into city school buildings.

It was an abrupt about-face for the mayor, who had for months promised to welcome all of the city’s 1.1 million children — from 3-year-olds to high school seniors — back into classrooms this fall.

But the decision put New York in line with other cities around America and across the world, which have reopened classrooms first, and often exclusively, for young children, and in some cases kept them open even as they have confronted second waves of the virus.

In-person learning is particularly crucial for young children, who often need intensive parental supervision to even log on for the day, education experts say. And mounting evidence has shown that elementary school students in particular can be safe as long as districts adopt strict safety measures, though it’s an unsettled question for older students.

“With younger kids, we see this pleasant confluence of two facts: science tells us that younger children are less likely to contract, and seemingly less likely to transmit, the virus,” said Elliot Haspel, the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It. “And younger children are the ones that most need in-person schooling, and in-person interactions.”

Districts including Chicago, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia have either begun to bring back only young children or have plans to do so whenever they eventually reopen classrooms.

In Rhode Island, Gov. Gina Raimondo, a strong proponent of keeping schools open, recently asked colleges to shift to all-remote learning after Thanksgiving, and gave districts the option of reducing the number of high school students attending in person. But she asserted that middle and elementary schools were not sources of community spread.

That model of giving priority to younger students has been pioneered in Europe, where many countries have kept primary schools open even as most other parts of public life have shuttered during the continent’s second wave.

Italy has kept its primary schools open but kept teaching remote for middle and high schools. All schools in Germany are open, and discussions about possible closures have focused mainly on high schools.

And in America, more and more districts have begun to prioritize elementary school students for in-person learning.

In urban districts that have been slow to reopen, that has meant making plans to bring back the youngest students. In parts of the Midwest where school districts were more aggressive about reopening, and where there has been a huge rise in cases in recent weeks, public health officials have prioritized keeping elementary schools open even as they have closed high schools and in some cases middle schools.

“The data is becoming more compelling that there is very limited transmission in day care and grade schools,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s coronavirus task force, in a recent interview.

“I keep telling people, ‘Stop talking about kids — talk about those younger than 10,’” he added. “We’re seeing a very different epidemiology in that group than we’re seeing, for example, in high school students.”

Categories Health, Science

Why I Object to the Term “Science of Reading”

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2020 //
101

As anyone who read my book Left Back (2000) knows, I have long been persuaded of the value of phonetic instruction for early readers. I was a friend of the late Jeanne Chall, who began her career as a kindergarten teacher and eventually became a Harvard professor and the nation’s most eminent reading researcher. Her 1967 book, Learning to Read: The Great Debate, should have ended the reading wars, but they continued for the next half century. She understood that both sides were right, and that teachers should have a tool-kit of strategies, including phonetic instruction, that they could deploy when appropriate.

In recent years, proponents of phonics have termed themselves champions of “the science of reading.” Even though I support phonics instruction, I find it misleading to use this term. Learning to read is one of the most important experiences that children have in their lifetimes. Of course, teachers should know how to teach students how to decode words. Of course, teachers should use reading and writing instruction together. Of course, teachers should introduce children to wonderful literature. Of course, of course, of course.

But teaching reading is not science. Good reading teachers use their knowledge, judgment, skill, and experience. They are not scientists. They are reading teachers.

The “science of reading” sounds to me like “the science of play,” “the science of cooking,” “the science of pedagogy,” “the science of love,” “the science of finding the right mate,” “the science of tennis.” You can take it from there.

Reading is not chemistry, biology, physics, or mathematics. Some children will learn to read before they ever start school, because they sat on the lap of a parent who read the same books over and over, with love, delight, and enthusiasm. Many children do need systematic decoding instruction and phonemic awareness. Reading teachers know which children need which approach.

Just as there is no “science of history,” “science of literature,” or “science of government,” there is no “science of reading.” I would go farther and ay there is no “science of teaching science.” Science is based on hypothesis and evidence, but teachers will find a variety of ways to teach science. Good teachers, whatever their field, rely on the knowledge and judgment gleaned from practice, study, and experience. With time and good teachers, all children will learn to read.

Categories Education Reform, Literacy, Science

John Thompson: COVID and Schools in Oklahoma

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2020 //
8

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, is concerned about the lackadaisical responses of elected officials in his state and reliance on Big Data, not science.

The headlines could not be clearer; we’re headed for a disastrous surge in COVID-19. But many of the same public health experts who previously called for shutdowns and, recently, some top journalists are pushing the position that we should continue to reopen schools, even as they warn that community transmission of the virus continues. I am becoming more worried that some of those data-driven public health experts, who I respect, are stepping out of their lanes and giving advice to institutions, urban schools, that they may not understand, and the result could be disastrous.

The motivation is the sincere concern for children, especially the most vulnerable, who suffer from school closures.  A common meme in this debate, however, involves noneducators describing their children’s experiences while rarely indicating how affluent schools are very different than high-poverty urban schools. And I see little evidence that these researchers fully consider the harm that can be done by becoming less cautious.

I hope we are not seeing a repeat of the mess that was made so much worse by Big Data scholars who contributed to the data-driven, competition-driven school reform fiasco. While their skills with numbers were outstanding, they and the corporate school reformers who hired them, refused to listen to educators, and they added more evidence in support of the truism, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Due to their lack of curiosity about the complicated politics that drove education policy, then and (perhaps) now, the truism about metrics, “garbage in, garbage out” has been ignored.

A prime example of a researcher “going viral” when arguing that educators’ fears are “overblown” is Emily Oster. In May, Oster argued that “infection among kids is simply very unlikely.” Oster argued in October that:

Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19…. Our data on almost 200,000 kids in 47 states from the last two weeks of September revealed an infection rate of 0.13 percent among students and 0.24 percent among staff. That’s about 1.3 infections over two weeks in a school of 1,000 kids, or 2.2 infections over two weeks in a group of 1,000 staff.”

Oster even cited Florida and Texas as evidence that schools aren’t super spreaders, raising the question of why she would trust numbers published in those states. Moreover, a key to the first surge in those states was young people infecting members of their multigenerational homes. And as Rachel Cohen explained, Oster’s data “reflected an extremely small and unrepresentative sample of schools.” There was not a single urban traditional public school reporting data across 27 states in her dataset, including from Florida [and] Texas…”  Then, in November as more public health advocates pushed for more rapid reopenings, Texas became the first state to have a million infections.

I hope I’m wrong, but the data experts hired by the Billionaires Boys Club set out to prove that the reformers’ hypotheses about school improvement – which focused on classrooms, while ignoring the broader community – “can” work and transform schools. Now, data-driven analysis says that schools “can” be reopened more quickly. But in both cases, the question should have been about what “would” be the most likely results. Today, the evidence seems to say that a number of schools can be reopened safely, but the issue should be what would most likely happen in communities where public health recommendations are ignored.   

For instance, The New York Times published an analysis in early July with the theme, “We Have to Focus on Opening Schools, Not Bars.”  Since then, however, the focus was distorted by Trumpian ideology. For example, Oklahoma’s major metropolitan areas had taken a science-based, team approach to the coronavirus which kept infections down. But, the Trump-supporting Gov. Kevin Stitt pushed for a premature opening for businesses. On June 1, when the full reopening of public and private institutions began, the state only had 67 new infections.  On July 1, there was 355 new infections.  By August 1, daily infections jumped  to 1,000, and stayed around that level for three months. That number quickly doubled in November.

The Oklahoma City Public Schools had been professional when wrestling with the issue of reopening in-person classes. It started with pre-k and early elementary students, with the plan calling for the complete reopening of schools on Nov. 10. For reasons beyond the district’s control, it couldn’t have found itself in a worse situation, reopening at a time when all trends, national and local, seemed to foreshadow a tragedy. But the OKCPS was not only under pressure from ideology-driven Republicans, but it also faced a series of calls for reopening by many parents, and some journalists and medical professionals.

Given the national super spread, it’s likely that each city faced its own challenges, but here’s what drove community transmission in Oklahoma City: public gatherings ranging from the Tulsa Trump rally to the Weedstock festival to back-to-college parties; the complete reopening of most public school systems; the reopening of universities; high school and college football; the failure to enforce masks and social distancing policies or limit bars and indoor dining; holiday get-togethers; and then an unexpected blast of ice and rain which shut down electricity for hundreds of thousands of households for up to two weeks.  This sent thousands of households to stay in hotels, with family members, and hurriedly-made public spaces to escape the freezing weather.

On the weekend before the promised reopening of the OKCPS, a daily high of 4,507 new cases was reported. Granted, some of those numbers were due to delays in reporting due to ice. But the state’s three-day average was over 3,000 and since then the numbers have consistently been over 2,000.  (For comparisons sake, Oklahoma’s population is about 1.2% of the nation’s.) The worst increase was in Oklahoma County where according to the latest New York Times database, the seven day increase reached 58.8 per 100,000. And since the biggest public school dangers were in secondary schools, it was noteworthy that more than 5% of the state’s active cases were in the seven zip codes where all but three of the OKCPS middle and high schools were located.

At the Nov. 9 School Board meeting, when the state’s seven day average daily increase was 2,197, the American Federation of Teachers and other educators voiced their concerns about the reopening. After all, the White House Coronavirus Task Force put the metro area and Oklahoma County in the Red Zone. But, believe it or not, a state rating of Orange was used as the rationale for reopening all schools and extracurricular activities.

Moreover, some argue that schools don’t contribute as much as bars or indoor dining to the spread, but that misses the point. The question is whether school policies make conditions better or worse.   

Understanding the pressures that administrators and board members were under, when we got our electricity back, I sought to quietly urge caution, as opposed to writing about the need to close schools so they do not add to the spread which will get worse over Thanksgiving and that will make Christmas more dangerous.

I’d planned to send an email to OKCPS decision-makers with the link to the New York Times’ Are School Reopenings Over? School leaders may have felt trapped by political pressure from multiple sides, and this might encourage them to resist the pressure. But then I got my weekly email, The Grade,  from Alexander Russo, who has repeatedly attacked educators for failing to go back to in-person instruction. As in previous weeks, it included a series of journalists’ criticisms of supposedly over-cautious educators. At that, I knew I had to write a post to help counter that sort of public pressure.

But, guess what? As I went through the painful process of writing a piece explaining why we shouldn’t dare reopen the OKCPS at this time, it was announced that the district would pause the return to in-person instruction after four days! The Oklahoman reported that on Monday, the OKCPS will return to remote learning for the rest of the semester. It explained, “Rates of COVID-19 infections reached record highs this week while hospital space is at an all-time low for the pandemic. Other school districts in the metro area, which have taught in person for months, report hundreds of positive tests and quarantines every week among students and staff.”

 So, Superintendent Sean McDaniel reported that Oklahoma State Department of Health (OSDH) indicates that “cases per 100,000 for Oklahoma County are 67.3 for this week, as compared to 30.4 last week.” He explained:

“As the number of COVID-19 cases has steadily risen over the last several weeks, we reached a significant turning point for Oklahoma County…The increase in positive cases for Oklahoma County has moved us into the OSDE’s (Oklahoma State Department of Education’s) Red Alert Level.

… Although our health officials have continuously supported our Return to Campus plan, they now recommend that we transition to Red Alert Level protocols.I would add that during the four days of in-person instruction, the state’s seven day average daily infections increased by 15%.
But, focusing on the positive, several suburban schools are following the OKCPS and returning to virtual learning.“

The public health evidence regarding this fall’s debate about school closures is just as persuasive as it was this March when Oklahoma City schools quickly shut down. But, as Oklahoma and the nation face an even greater surge of Covid-19 infections, today’s complicated politics make it so much harder to engage in evidence-based decisions.

I know many or most Oklahomans will recoil from our governor ducking responsibility, refusing to even order masks, while saying the key is personal responsibility. But, I also understand that many parents will be upset by the return to online instruction only. And plenty of educators are frustrated by researchers like Oster who seem to have a simplistic view of the challenges faced by high-poverty schools, as opposed to the affluent classrooms that their children attend.

But we should remember that the OKCPS, like systems across the nation, was under great pressure to keep schools open. So, we need to stand up for our districts when they make these painful but necessary choices.

Categories Education Reform, Health, Oklahoma, Science

Biden Announces Coronavirus Task Force: Science Rules!

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2020 //
112

Farewell, Scott Atlas and Mike Pence! Amateur hour is over.

President-Elect Joe Biden announced his coronavirus task force.

James Hohmann of the Washington Post reports:

WILMINGTON, Del. – In his first act as president-elect, Joe Biden announced Monday the 13 members of his transition team’s covid-19 advisory board.

Biden advisers say this speedy rollout is intended to signal that the incoming administration will elevate the voices of public health experts and scientists, who have found themselves marginalized and debased by President Trump as the coronavirus continues to course through the country. 

The United States will surpass 10 million confirmed infections today. The seven-day average for new cases is more than 100,000 per day for the first time. In five of the past seven days, covid-19 has killed more than 1,000 Americans.

People wait in their vehicles on Sunday at a drive-through coronavirus testing site in Milwaukee. (Bing Guan/Reuters)People wait in their vehicles on Sunday at a drive-through coronavirus testing site in Milwaukee. (Bing Guan/Reuters)

The new advisory group will brief Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris here later today, and Biden will deliver remarks on his plan to control the contagion. Vice President Pence will host a meeting at 3 p.m.of the White House coronavirus task force in the Situation Room. This is the first meeting Pence has convened since Oct. 20, despite the rapidly deteriorating situation.

 

Two members of the new panel worked inside the Trump administration: Luciana Borio was director for medical and biodefense preparedness on Trump’s National Security Council until she left last year before the pandemic. She is now vice president of the technical staff at In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency’s investment arm, and a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. She previously served as assistant commissioner for counterterrorism policy and the acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration.

There’s also Rick Bright, an immunologist and vaccine researcher, who was ousted by Trump political appointees in April as the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. Bright, a civil servant who had led the agency since 2016, alleged in a whistleblower complaint and testified under oath before Congress that he was pushed aside after he strongly objected to Trump’s insistence that his agency support widespread access to chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, two potentially dangerous drugs that the president spent weeks peddling in the spring as a potential cure for covid-19.

Bright was demoted to a lesser role at the National Institutes of Health, from which he resigned on Oct. 6 because he said that he was being given no work to do. “Public health and safety have been jeopardized by the administration’s hostility to the truth and by its politicization of the pandemic response, undoubtedly leading to tens of thousands of preventable deaths,” Bright wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post the day after his resignation.

He has been warning that the Trump administration still has no coordinated national testing strategy and criticized the White House for expressing resistance to testing people who might have asymptomatic infections. “Federal agencies, staffed with some of the best scientists in the world, continue to be politicized, manipulated and ignored,” Bright wrote in the op-ed. “The country is flying blind into what could be the darkest winter in modern history.”

Bright also previously served as an adviser to the World Health Organization. In July, the Trump administration began the process of formally withdrawing the United States from the U.N. agency. One of the first actions Biden plans to take after being inaugurated on Jan. 20 is to reverse that.

 

Trump’s political people at the top of Health and Human Services have claimed they got rid of Bright because he was confrontational and ineffective, but his whistleblower complaint included emails and other documentation that supported his allegations.

 

The spotlight is also back on the Trump White House’s handling of the coronavirus within its own walls. News leaked out late Friday that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and five other Trump aides in the West Wing – plus a senior campaign official – tested positive for the virus around Election Day. Meadows, who tested positive Wednesday but told others not to disclose his condition, said on Oct. 25 that Trump was pushing to reopen schools and send people back to work because “we’re not going to control the pandemic.”

Biden has attacked the Trump team for waving the white flag of surrender, and he promised during his victory speech on Saturday nightthat trying to get the pandemic under control will be his top priority as president.

“We cannot repair the economy, restore our vitality or relish life’s most precious moments — hugging a grandchild, birthdays, weddings, graduations, all the moments that matter most to us — until we get this virus under control,” Biden said. “That plan will be built on a bedrock of science. It will be constructed out of compassion, empathy and concern. I will spare no effort — or commitment — to turn this pandemic around.”

Who else is on the Biden task force:

The effort will be co-chaired by David Kessler, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who served as commissioner of the FDA from 1990 to 1997, under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Vivek Murthy, who as surgeon general during the final three years of Barack Obama’s administration commanded 6,600 public health officers during the Ebola and Zika outbreaks; and Marcella Nunez-Smith, the associate dean for Health Equity Research at Yale medical school. Murthy and Kessler have been regularly advising Biden for months.

Zeke Emanuel, an oncologist, chairs the medical ethics department and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he’s also vice provost. During the first two years of the Obama administration, he was served a special adviser for health policy at the Office of Management and Budget. (His brother Rahm was White House chief of staff.) Emanuel has also chaired the bioethics department at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health since 1997.

Atul Gawande, a surgeonatBrigham and Women’s Hospital, teaches at Harvard’s medical school. The prolific author founded Ariadne Labs, a health systems innovation center between the hospital where he practices and Harvard’s School of Public Health. He was a senior advisor in HHS during the Clinton administration. 

Celine Gounder cares for patients at Bellevue Hospital Center and teaches at New York University’s medical school. While on the faculty at Johns Hopkins, she directed delivery efforts for the Gates Foundation-funded Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS/TB Epidemic. 

Julie Morita, who served as the city of Chicago’s health commissioner for two decades, is executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, sat on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Community Based Solutions to Promote Health Equity in the United States. 

Michael Osterholm directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, where he chairs the Department of Public Health. He was previously a science envoy for health security on behalf of the State Department and worked for 24 years in the Minnesota Department of Health, including 15 years as the state’s epidemiologist.

Loyce Pace is executive director and president of the Global Health Council. She has worked with Physicians for Human Rights and Catholic Relief Services, and she previously held leadership positions at the Livestrong Foundation and the American Cancer Society.

Robert Rodriguez is a professor of emergency medicine at UCSF medical school, where he practices in the emergency department and intensive care unit of two major trauma centers in the Bay Area. The Harvard medical school graduate has authored papers on the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the mental health of frontline providers. In July, he volunteered to help with a critical surge of coronavirus patients in the ICU in his hometown of Brownsville, Tex. 

Eric Goosby, also a professor at UCSF medical school, was the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator during the Obama administration. Later, he was appointed by the United Nations Secretary General as a special envoy for TB.During the Clinton administration, he was founding director of the Ryan White CARE Act, the largest federally funded HIV-AIDS program, and the interim Director of the White House’s Office of National AIDS Policy. 

Rebecca Katz, the director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University Medical Center, and Beth Cameron, director for global health security and biodefense on the White House National Security Council during the Obama administration, are serving as advisers to the transition task force.

Joe Biden receives a virtual coronavirus briefing on Oct. 28 at the Queen in Wilmington, Del. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)Joe Biden receives a virtual coronavirus briefing on Oct. 28 at the Queen in Wilmington, Del. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

This new advisory group offers a stark contrast with Trump, who suggested last week during one of his final rallies before Election Day that he plans to fire Anthony Fauci, the top expert on infectious diseases in the government since 1984, after the election. Fauci and others have clashed with Scott Atlas, a radiologist at a conservative think tank who does not have a background in public health but who has had Trump’s ear since advocating for a more relaxed approach to the virus during appearances on Fox News.

Categories Biden, Science

Rachel Cohen: Emily Oster Was Too Optimistic about Children and COVID

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2020 //
71

Economist Emily Oster of Brown University has become the go-to expert on the risks that children might get COVID. She has written widely in the popular press and been quoted extensively by others about the low risk of reopening schools. Oster is an economist, not a public health expert.

Writing in The American Prospect, journalist Rachel Cohen quotes many public health experts who disagree with Oster. She writes that Oster’s datasets are incomplete and flawed. There is more uncertainty about the risks to children than Oster reports, she writes.

https://prospect.org/coronavirus/why-reopening-schools-has-become-the-most-fraught-debate-of-the-pandemic/?pico_new_user=false&pico_ui=login_link


But she concludes by giving Oster credit:

Oster, unlike others and to her credit, does acknowledge that some people will get sick and even die if schools reopen. In addition to emphasizing the social, emotional, and academic harms students face by missing in-person school, Oster says we accept mortality risks in normal times, like allowing people to drive cars, have swimming pools, and avoid the flu shot. “There will be some in-school transmission, no matter how careful we are,” she wrote in July. “This is the unfortunate reality. Some of these people may get very sick. If we are not willing to accept this, we cannot open schools.”

Categories Accountability, Health, Science

Trump Accuses Nation’s Doctors of Inflating COVID Death Count to Hurt Him

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2020 //
52

Not only does Trump feel no sympathy for the 225,000 Americans who died of coronavirus (so far), he thinks that doctors across America have inflated the death rate to make him look bad.

The Boston Globe reports:

Dr. Abraar Karan, an internal medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, had just finished a 15-hour shift Saturday night when he opened Twitter and saw a video of President Trump on the campaign trail, parroting a roundly debunked conspiracy theory that hospitals have been inflating COVID-19 deaths for financial gain.

At a rally in Waukesha, Wisc., on Saturday, Trump said “doctors get more money and hospitals get more money” if they report that their patients died of COVID-19, as opposed to other preexisting conditions or comorbidities. “Think of this incentive,” the president said, insinuating as he has before that the death toll from the virus is not to be trusted. He then falsely claimed the pandemic, which has killed more than 226,000 Americans, is “going away,” even as the country approaches a third wave of infections.

“When I got out and I saw that, I found it extremely insulting and frustrating,” Karan said of the president’s comments. “This is somebody who just got taken care of by doctors, who just benefited from our medical system — presumably on taxpayer money — and he’s coming out criticizing the health care profession in what seems like a politically motivated attempt to further downplay the seriousness of the virus.”

Trump’s baseless accusations that doctors are overcounting COVID-19 deaths have sparked a surge of criticism from the American medical community. In a statement issued Sunday, the American College of Emergency Physicians called the president’s assertions “reckless and false.” The American College of Physicians, which represents internal medicine doctors, denounced the president’s allegations as “a reprehensible attack on physicians’ ethics and professionalism.” The Council of Medical Specialty Societies said Trump’s claims “promulgate misinformation that hinders our nation’s efforts to get the Covid-19 pandemic under control...”

Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, said Trump’s suggestion that doctors are falsifying COVID-19 deaths is not only demeaning — to health care workers, to those who have died from COVID-19, and to their families — but nonsensical.

“You have to believe a few things for this conspiracy theory to make sense,” Jha said. “One is you have to believe that all the doctors, all the nurses, and all the health care executives are morally corrupt. Second, that you can do widespread fraud across the entire system and no one is really going to pick it up and that there would be no repercussions to this. You would just have to believe things that are so clearly not true.”

Categories Science, Trump

Historian: How Do Pandemics End? Most Don’t.

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2020 //
18

Nükhet Varlik, a historian at the University of South Carolina, studies the history of diseases and public health. In this article, she reveals that epidemics and pandemics seldom completely disappear. Only one epidemic–smallpox–has been eradicated. Many others survive.

She writes:

A combination of public health efforts to contain and mitigate the pandemic – from rigorous testing and contact tracing to social distancing and wearing masks – have been proven to help. Given that the virus has spread almost everywhere in the world, though, such measures alone can’t bring the pandemic to an end. All eyes are now turned to vaccine development, which is being pursued at unprecedented speed.

Yet experts tell us that even with a successful vaccine and effective treatment, COVID-19 may never go away. Even if the pandemic is curbed in one part of the world, it will likely continue in other places, causing infections elsewhere. And even if it is no longer an immediate pandemic-level threat, the coronavirus will likely become endemic – meaning slow, sustained transmission will persist. The coronavirus will continue to cause smaller outbreaks, much like seasonal flu.

The history of pandemics is full of such frustrating examples.

Whether bacterial, viral or parasitic, virtually every disease pathogen that has affected people over the last several thousand years is still with us, because it is nearly impossible to fully eradicate them.

The only disease that has been eradicated through vaccination is smallpox. Mass vaccination campaigns led by the World Health Organization in the 1960s and 1970s were successful, and in 1980, smallpox was declared the first – and still, the only – human disease to be fully eradicated.

We can all do our part to reduce the danger of COVID-19 by wearing masks and social distancing. When there is a vaccine available, we should take it. It may never be completely eradicated, but we can protect ourselves and our communities by following the practices that scientists have agreed are effective.

Categories Education Reform, Health, History, Science
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