Stephan: If you have been thinking that getting a viable vaccine will quickly solve this pandemic, I am sorry to tell you it ain't that simple. This story will give you some idea of what it is going to take.
Pharmacists used the vials shown March 16 to prepare syringes on the first day of a clinical trial of the potential vaccine for coronavirus at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. Credit: Ted S. Warren/AP Photo
Meeting the overwhelming demand for a successful coronavirus vaccine will require a historic amount of coordination by scientists, drugmakers and the government.
The nation’s supply chain isn’t anywhere close to ready for such an effort.
The nation is already grappling with a shortage of the specialized glass used to make the vials that will store any vaccine. Producing and distributing hundreds of millions of vaccine doses will also require huge quantities of stoppers — which are made by just a handful of companies — as well as needles and refrigeration units. Low stocks of any one of these components could slow future vaccination efforts, much as shortfalls of key chemicals delayed widespread coronavirus testing.
A massive manufacturing effort is already gearing up to produce hundreds of millions of doses of promising vaccines now in late-stage trials, as scientists and the government […]
Stephan: I am really concerned that families already desperately stressed financially, are going to find the price of food escalating to a point beyond their means. Like everything else about this pandemic the Trump administration's abject failure to prepare for or manage this crisis is going to render the lives of ordinary people impossibly difficult. I encourage you to think about gardening, even if only on a balcony because I can see ordinary staples like lettuce going to $6-7 a head, and a half gallon of milk -- remember the millions of gallons thrown away because there was no plan to collect and distribute it -- going to $6. The virus is just one of the crises the country faces, or will face.
Meat, poultry and eggs led the price bump in April. Credit: Unsplash
In April, the prices Americans were paying for their groceries spiked by the highest percentage seen in nearly 50 years.
Today, the Labor Department reported that prices for groceries—also referred to as the “food at home” index—across the United States jumped by 2.6% in April, the highest single-month bump since February 1974, according to CNBC.
The spike in grocery prices is likely directly correlated to the spike in demand for the product. Grocery stores have been some of the only retailers around the country to keep their doors open during the coronavirus pandemic. And with restaurants closed to dine-in patrons, people have been eating at home more than ever, too.
In addition, there have been mounting concerns over the food supply chain, particularly in regard to the meat industry. The prices of meat products saw a particular spike: The cost of meats, poultry, fish and eggs jumped by 4.3%. However, the price increase was seen across food categories, though it was lower than the overall total. The cost […]
Stephan: While the Trump administration is making a complete cockup of the Covid-19 pandemic, under the radar it is doing the same thing about preparation for climate change.
Nature, like the virus, is not influenced by Trump's lies and rhetoric, and proceeds on the trend lines the data describes. And of course, the outcomes for both are worse than anyone originally thought possible. Here is the latest on sea rise.
Credit: Shmenny50/iStock
Oceans are likely to rise as much as 1.3 metres by 2100 if Earth’s surface warms another 3.5 degrees Celsius, scientists warned Friday.
By 2300, when ice sheets covering West Antarctica and Greenland will have shed trillions of tonnes in mass, sea levels could go up by more than five metres under that temperature scenario, redrawing the planet’s coastlines, they reported in a peer-reviewed survey of more than 100 leading experts.
About ten percent of the world’s population, or 770 million people, today live on land less than five metres above the high tide line.
Even if the Paris climate treaty goal of capping global warming below 2 °C is met – a very big “if” – the ocean watermark could go up two metres by 2300, according to a study in the journal Climate Atmospheric Science.
Earth’s average surface temperature has risen just over 1 °C since the pre-industrial era, a widely used benchmark for measuring global warming.
“It is clear now that previous sea-level rise estimates have been too low,” co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth system analysis at […]
Stephan: If we were not submerged in a pandemic this would be the lead story on every network and the A block on every news program. As things are, however, it is making hardly any impact. Imagine 2,000 men and women fully familiar with the inside workings of an institution have stepped forward to publicly deride the integrity and competence of the head of that institution.
Trump and Barr Credit: McNamee/Getty
Almost 2,000 former FBI agents and Department of Justice officials wrote an open letter Monday calling for Attorney General William Barr to resign over his handling of the Michael Flynn case, after the Justice Department abruptly dropped criminal charges against President Trump’s former national security advisor last week, despite Flynn’s earlier guilty pleas.
KEY FACTS
The DOJ on Thursday announced it was dropping its case against Flynn, who pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about conversations he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
The letter asks the federal judge overseeing Flynn’s case to dismiss the Department’s request to drop the charges: “Attorney General Barr’s repeated actions to use the Department as a tool to further President Trump’s personal and political interests have undermined any claim to the deference that courts usually apply to the Department’s decisions about whether or not to prosecute a case.”
The case has become a political rallying point for Trump, who alleges that the FBI mishandled Flynn’s case and who spent the weekend tweeting about the case, calling […]
Mary B. McCord, Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security (2016 to 2017) - The New York Times
Stephan: More than any other recent Attorney General William Barr reminds me of Nixon's AG John Mitchell, which is to say Barr like Mitchell is more a presidential Igor (Dr. Frankenstein's grotesque assistant) than competent ethical legal official. Barr is so far outside of honesty that former officials, like Mary McCord feel compelled to come forward, to tell the truth.
William Barr Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times
At the direction of Attorney General Bill Barr, the Justice Department last week moved to dismiss a false-statements charge against Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser. The reason stated was that the continued prosecution “would not serve the interests of justice.”
The motion was signed by Timothy Shea, a longtime trusted adviser of Mr. Barr and, since January, the acting U.S. attorney in Washington. In attempting to support its argument, the motion cites more than 25 times the F.B.I.’s report of an interview with me in July 2017, two months after I left a decades-long career at the department (under administrations of both parties) that culminated in my role as the acting assistant attorney general for national security.
That report, commonly referred to as a “302,” is an interesting read. It vividly describes disagreements between leadership of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. about how to handle the information we had learned about Mr. Flynn’s calls with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and, more specifically, Mr. […]
