Stephan: An SR reader who is an epidemiologist and part of a coronavirus research team sent me this and asked me to publish it, which I am happy to do. If obesity is an issue for you or someone in your family I would take this very seriously.
For a world crippled by the coronavirus, salvation hinges on a vaccine.
But in the United States, where at least 4.6 million people have been infected and nearly 155,000 have died, the promise of that vaccine is hampered by a vexing epidemic that long preceded COVID-19: obesity.
Scientists know that vaccines engineered to protect the public from influenza, hepatitis B, tetanus and rabies can be less effective in obese adults than in the general population, leaving them more vulnerable to infection and illness. There is little reason to believe, obesity researchers say, that COVID-19 vaccines will be any different.
“Will we have a COVID vaccine next year tailored to the obese? No way,” said Raz Shaikh, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
“Will it still work in the obese? Our prediction is no.”
More than 107 million American adults are obese, and their ability to return safely to work, care for their families and resume daily life […]
Stephan: This is Wednesday's Republican Scum Report. It describes how Republican senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley are both operating as Russian agents seeking to sabotage American democracy. It is unspeakably shameful.
Republican senator and Trumpian orc, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin
Senator Ron Johnson’s investigations involving Ukraine have become a conduit of Russian disinformation.
Earlier this month, Johnson defended himself on a local Wisconsin news station saying, “What have I published, what have I reported on, that is not true, that is any form of Russian disinformation? There has been nothing.” Similarly, in his 11-page letter, Johnson asserted, “It is neither me, Chairman Grassley, nor our committees that are being used to disseminate Russian disinformation.”
The senator surely knows better, and his 11-page defense of his actions reveals it. Published on Monday, Aug. 10, the letter itself contains apparent products of Russian disinformation. And while Johnson denies taking information directly from two specific Ukrainians linked to Russia and its disinformation efforts, he makes no mention of his staff taking information directly from one of those individuals’ principal collaborators, which reportedly occurred over the course of several months.
Fellow Republican Senators — including the previous and current Chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee Sens. Richard Burr and Marco Rubio — […]
Stephan: You have probably already heard this, but I want to bring it back into focus because while everyone hears it, we have all become so accustomed to Trump's lies that we don't really hear how radical what he is saying is. Nothing he says can be taken as truthful, but he is consistent in his intentions, and I take this seriously. If this man is re-elected America, as we know it, will end.
Credit: Michael Tercha/Getty
President Donald Trump on Saturday afternoon openly vowed to permanently “terminate” the funding mechanism for both Social Security and Medicare if reelected in November—an admission that was seized upon by defenders of the popular safety net programs who have been warning for months that the administration’s threat to suspend the payroll tax in the name of economic relief during the Covid-19 pandemic was really a backdoor sabotage effort.
Announcing and then signing a series of legally dubious executive orders, including an effort to slash the emergency federal unemployment boost by $200 from the $600 previously implemented by Democrats, Trump touted his order for a payroll tax “holiday”—which experts noted would later have to be paid back—but said if he won in November that such a cut would become permanent.Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.
The Trump campaign was apparently so satisfied with the public acknowledgement of the president’s promise to make the payroll tax permanent—a move that would inherently bankrupt the Social Security […]
Stephan: My daughter is a middle-aged single mother herself, with an eight-year-old son, as well as the president of a large social services agency, so she has her own experiences, as well as listening to her therapists, and the agency's clients. In talking with my daughter, and reading and watching the news each day, what comes across to me is how a competent government, faced with something like Covid-19, would in anticipation of the coming months of pandemic have immediately begun to create and fund an educational system geared to the new social circumstances. Of course, we don't have a competent government, and as I read the news about how Trump and the Republican governors are pressing to reopen schools, the image that comes to me is that they think of America's schoolchildren as lab rats. They are perfectly willing to put them and their teachers, and their families at risk, just as they put the doctors, nurses, technicians, and orderlies at risk without making sure they had proper funding and equipment as they have labored to save the lives of the rest of us.
It is so callous, so unconscious, so ugly, and so obviously wrong-headed. And it is not as if clear signs of this were not obvious. In the last two weeks 97,000 American children and tested positive for coronavirus, and Israel, which opened its schools too early is facing a sudden spike of child cases and closing them back down.
A boy has his temperature checked as he receives a free COVID-19 test in South Los Angeles in July. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty
At least 97,000 children tested positive for COVID-19 in the final two weeks of July and there’s been an estimated 338,000 cases involving kids in the U.S. since the pandemic began, a new report finds.
Why it matters: The report from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association comes as schools and day cares look to reopen in the U.S.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced Friday that school districts in the state could resume in-person classes in the fall amid lower coronavirus transmission rates.
Some schools have already reopened for in-person learning in the South — including in Georgia, where authorities confirmed nine people had tested positive for the novel coronavirus at one school.
There have been many reports about the virus spreading through schools and summer camps, and evidence has begun to support the notion that children can play a key role in community transmission, Axios’ Caitlin Owens notes.
Stephan: This is one of those stories I wish were not true but, if you live in a fact-based world you have to acknowledge facts whether you like them or not. And the sad truth is that there is a large part of the American population who are White supremacist christofascists. The truth, as this report lays out, is that they are the reason a blatant, intellectually shoddy disinformation operation is the most-watched network in America, and a man like Donald Trump is the president of the United States. I think there is about a 40% chance Trump will be re-elected. The voter registration data is not encouraging, and it's not like the Republicans don't have a lot of money to advance their cause. And that doesn't even address voter suppression and the rest. November is going to tell us what America is made of.
In June and July, Fox News was the highest-rated television channel in the prime-time hours of 8 to 11 p.m. Not just on cable. Not just among news networks. All of television. The average live Fox News viewership in those hours outstripped cable rivals like CNN, MSNBC and ESPN, as well as the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC, according to Nielsen.
That three-hour slotis a narrow but significant slice of TV real estate, and it is exceedingly rare for a basic-cable channel to outrank the Big Three broadcasters, which are available in more households and offer a wider variety of programming.
