ReportWire

Tag: viruses

  • The greatest risk to China’s Xi Jinping? Himself | CNN

    The greatest risk to China’s Xi Jinping? Himself | CNN

    [ad_1]


    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    China’s economy is faltering. Unemployment is skyrocketing. Endless Covid lockdowns are wreaking havoc on businesses and people’s lives. The property sector is in crisis. Ties between Beijing and major global powers are under strain.

    The list of problems faced by the world’s second-largest economy goes on – and many of those long-term challenges have only worsened under a decade of Xi Jinping’s rule. Yet the Chinese leader’s grip on power is unwavering.

    In the past decade, Xi has consolidated control to an extent unseen since the era of Communist China’s strongman founder, Mao Zedong. He’s the head of the Chinese Communist Party, the state, the armed forces, and so many committees that he’s been dubbed “chairman of everything.” And now, he is poised to step into a norm-breaking third term in power, with the potential to rule for life.

    But absolute power can often mean absolute responsibility, and as problems mount, analysts warn Xi will have less room to avoid blame.

    “I think the worst enemy of Xi Jinping’s longevity in ruling China is Xi Jinping himself,” said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London. “It is when he makes a huge policy mistake that causes havoc in China that could potentially start the process of unraveling Xi Jinping’s hold to power.”

    Mao’s rule from 1949 until 1976 was marked by rash policy decisions that led to tens of millions of deaths and destroyed the economy. After those decades of turmoil, the Communist Party developed a system of collective leadership designed to prevent the rise of another dictator who could make arbitrary and dangerous decisions.

    China’s next leader, Deng Xiaoping, set an unwritten rule and precedent that the Communist Party’s General Secretary – the role from which China’s leader derives true power – would step down after two terms.

    From Mao to Xi: A history of China’s leadership

    When Xi assumed power in 2012, China’s economy was booming as it integrated more closely with the rest of the world. Just four years before, China had stunned the world with the extravagant Beijing Summer Olympics. But to Xi, the party was in a state of crisis: overrun by corruption, infighting, and inefficiencies.

    Xi’s solution was to return to dictatorial and personalistic rule. He purged political enemies in a sweeping anti-corruption campaign, silenced internal dissent, abolished presidential term limits and enshrined “Xi Jinping Thought” into the party’s constitution.

    According to analysts, many dictatorships fall into a pattern of abuse of power and poor decision-making when a lack of critical advice reaches the leader. They point to Vladimir Putin’s increasingly costly war against Ukraine as a concern that Xi’s similarly unquestionable power to the Russian President could one day lead to equally disastrous consequences.

    Putin and Xi “suffer from the same strongman-syndrome problem, which is that they turned their policy advice circles into echo chambers, so people are no longer able to speak their mind freely,” Tsang said. “We are seeing big mistakes being made because that internal policy debate has been reduced or indeed eliminated in terms of its scope.”

    In recent history, no country has modernized as rapidly as China. The Communist Party claims its leadership helped lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, turning backwater villages into stunning megacities. But that growth miracle has slowed. And many longstanding challenges in China’s economy have only been exacerbated by Xi’s policies.

    Xi has made it his mission to strengthen the party and its control over business and society. He unleashed a crackdown on the once-vibrant private sector that’s led to mass layoffs. Beijing claims the tougher regulations restrict overly powerful corporations and protect consumers, but the measures have suffocated private businesses, sending chills through the economy and sparking fears about future innovation.

    screengrab bankrupt victims

    China’s once vibrant private sector suffocating under Xi’s crackdown

    Beijing started clamping down on easy credit for property firms in 2020, which led to cash crunches and defaults for many developers, including giant conglomerate Evergrande. Housing projects have stalled and desperate homebuyers across the country are refusing to pay mortgages on unfinished homes. Disruptions in the property sector have an outsized impact on China’s broader economy, as it accounts for as much as 30% of the country’s GDP.

    But during Xi’s leadership, nothing has rocked China’s economy and society as much as zero-Covid. In year three of the pandemic, China has clung to the harsh policy, which relies on mass testing, extensive quarantines and snap lockdowns to stamp out infections at all costs, even as the rest of the world has learned to live with the virus.

    The country continues to lock down entire cities over a handful of infections, while sending all positive cases and close contacts to government quarantine facilities. Lining up for Covid tests and scanning a tracking health code to enter any public space have become normalized. Beijing argues the policy has prevented China from spiraling into a health care disaster like the rest of the world, but zero-Covid is wielded at enormous and growing costs.

    china corona nyc

    Artist wears 27 hazmat suits to protest China’s policies

    Constant lockdowns have dramatically shrunk the pace of growth in China’s economy. Record youth unemployment has reached nearly 20%. Pocketbooks are shrinking. Heavily indebted local governments are forced to spend on mass Covid testing. Experts say resources would be better spent on increasing vaccination rates rather than building costly testing sites and quarantine facilities. China has still not approved any foreign mRNA vaccines proven to be more effective against the highly contagious Omicron variant than the inactivated vaccines used in China.

    At the start of the pandemic, Beijing censored – and in some cases punished – doctors, experts, and citizen journalists who tried to warn of a deadly in virus in Wuhan.

    Nearly three years on, as most international experts advise China to find a way to live with the virus, Beijing has doubled down. Earlier this year, Shanghai – a metropolis with a population more than three times that of New York City – was locked down for two months. People struggled to get enough food and basic necessities. Desperate residents broke out of home confinement and clashed with enforcement workers in rare street protests. Many patients were denied life-saving health care.

    When the World Health Organization criticized the zero-Covid policy as “not sustainable,” China censored the statement on social media.

    Susan Shirk, director of the 21st Century China Center and author of “Overreach,” a book on Xi’s leadership, says China’s leaders “compete with one another to prove how loyal they are to him because Xi promotes loyalists, not the most competent people.” That leads to subordinates going over the top in executing policies to try to please Xi, she said.

    Shirk said this has played out with zero-Covid, as Xi has directly tied his leadership to the strategy, so local officials have zealously followed it to show loyalty to the leader and protect their careers.

    “A lot of the pain in China’s economy has been self-inflicted by China’s leader,” Shirk said.

    “So what this suggests, and this is a pretty disturbing idea, is that the Chinese Communist Party no longer brands itself as a developmental party, putting economic development as its primary objective. But instead, it’s Xi Jinping’s hold on power.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Covid-19 vaccines will be on the 2023 vaccine schedule, but that doesn’t mean they’re required in schools | CNN

    Covid-19 vaccines will be on the 2023 vaccine schedule, but that doesn’t mean they’re required in schools | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Covid-19 vaccines will be part of recommended immunization schedules in 2023 for both children and adults, after a unanimous vote by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

    That doesn’t make the vaccines mandatory for anyone, a point that was emphasized in a discussion before Thursday’s vote. The board members addressed concerns from the public that adding Covid-19 vaccinations to the schedule would force schools to require the shots.

    “We recognize that there is concern around this, but moving Covid-19 to the recommended immunization schedule does not impact what vaccines are required for school entrance, if any,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, a committee member and director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

    “Indeed, there are vaccines that are on the schedule right now that are not required for school attendance in many jurisdictions, such as seasonal influenza. Local control matters, and we honor that. The decision around school entrance for vaccines rests where it did before, which is with the state level, the county level and at the municipal level, if it exists at all. They are the arbiters of what vaccines are required, if any, for school entry. This discussion does not change that.”

    In fact, Covid-19 vaccines are explicitly banned from being included in school mandates in at least 20 states. Only California and the District of Columbia have announced that Covid-19 shots will be among mandated vaccinations for students, but those mandates were not implemented for this school year.

    It’s been nearly a year since eligibility for the Covid-19 vaccine was expanded to include everyone in the US 5 and older, but coverage among children still lags behind that of adults. Even as these vaccines and the related mandates have become highly politicized over the course of the pandemic, experts say vaccine hesitancy among parents isn’t new.

    Although the Covid-19 shot will not become mandatory for school, all 50 states do have laws requiring specific vaccines for students – most of which include shots for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP) and varicella.

    Uptake for these vaccines, mandated by schools long before Covid-19, fell during the pandemic.

    In the 2020-21 school year, vaccination coverage for kindergarteners fell to less than 94% – dropping below the overall target of 95% that was set as an objective by the US Department of Health and Human Services in the Healthy People project for the first time in six years.

    A CNN analysis of the latest CDC data suggests that students in states with stricter school vaccine requirements are more likely to have their shots.

    All school immunization laws grant exemptions to children for specific medical reasons. But 44 states and Washington, DC, also grant religious exemptions, and 15 states allow philosophical or moral exemptions for children, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

    According to the CNN analysis, states that were stricter with exemptions were much more likely to still meet the 95% coverage target. In the 2020-21 school year, an average of about 96% of kindergarten students had their MMR vaccine in states that allowed only medical exemptions, compared with 92% of students in states that also allowed philosophical or moral exemptions.

    The full effect of the pandemic on children’s routine vaccination rates isn’t clear: It will be another few months before the CDC shares national data for compliance rates for mandatory vaccinations in the 2021-22 school year, and schools are in the midst of outreach and programming to ensure that as many students as possible will continue through the 2022-23 school year up to date on their vaccines.

    Correcting the drop in vaccination coverage in students will probably depend more on better access to care, information and outreach – and school vaccine mandates can help.

    With many people who are hesitant, it’s “because of something they’ve heard or something they’ve read,” said Dr. Jesse Hackell, a pediatrician who co-authored a clinical report about countering vaccine hesitancy in 2016. “Most people [who are hesitant] have a very free-floating worry about vaccines. It’s not specific in most cases.”

    A small share of parents – about 2% or 3% – are adamantly opposed to vaccines, and that rate has stayed mostly consistent over the years, said Hackell, who is also chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Practice and Ambulatory Medicine.

    Overall vaccination coverage fell among kindergarteners in the 2020-21 school year, but the share of students who had an exemption also declined from 2.5% to 2.1%, according to CDC data. The rate has changed by less than 1 percentage point over the past 10 years.

    About 3% of kindergarteners in the US – about 120,000 students – were considered to be out of compliance with mandatory vaccines in the 2020-21 school year.

    “Mandates may not do anything to those people who would pull their kids out of public school,” Hackell said. “But the vast majority of parents are not opposed. They’re hesitant, or they’re uncertain. And when there’s pressure to do it for another reason, such as getting your kid into school, they come around.”

    Responsibility for enforcing vaccine mandates falls to the education system, and practices vary by state. Some students are ultimately turned away because they aren’t up to date, but most states offer provisional enrollment periods that allow kids to stay in school if they are in progress with at least one shot in a series or evidence of an upcoming appointment.

    According to the CDC, “school officials may prefer to keep students in school where they have access to education, safe supervision, nutrition, and social services while working with parents or guardians to get children vaccinated.”

    And many states do their best to help students stay up to date on their immunizations, with vaccination drives and direct followup with parents.

    “I think that the drop in the past year or two is partly pandemic-related,” Hackell said. “What we’re seeing, I think, is a little bit of a disparity between kids who have a medical home and have a private [doctor] versus kids who get their immunizations from a public source” like a school clinic.

    Mississippi is an impressive example of finding ways to keep child vaccination rates high, Hackell says. Public schools are the only option for many in the state, where poverty rates are higher than anywhere else in the US.

    Despite the large public need and additional resource struggles that the pandemic brought, 99% of kindergarteners in Mississippi met required vaccination coverage in the 2020-21 school year – better than any other state, according to the CDC.

    “They’ve done a tremendous job at that,” Hackell said, and it demonstrates the power of mandates. Mississippi is strict with exemptions – one of just six states allowing medical reasons only – and just 0.1% of kindergarteners were exempt in the 2020-21 school year.

    Hackell says he would be most concerned if he sees a sustained drop in vaccination rates for highly transmissible diseases, especially measles and polio. And he’s worried about pockets of low vaccination rates in certain communities.

    Schools are public spaces with a level of control, and 95% vaccination coverage is a goal with intent.

    “We know it’s never going to be 100% because there are some people who cannot medically be vaccinated. But if you have 95%, that means in any given school classroom of 30 kids, there might be one unvaccinated kid. And so if that child brings a case of something into the class, there’s nobody else to give it to,” he said. “It stops there with one case.”

    And when it comes to adding Covid-19 vaccines to the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule, the focus is still on public health – not on adding another requirement.

    “I’ve had parents who come in my office, and I say, ‘What are you here for?’ And they say, ‘Well, we’re here for vaccines so that our kids can go to school.’ And I’ve said, ‘OK, I understand that, but really I’m not vaccinating so you can go to school, I’m vaccinating because I want to prevent serious disease and death in your kids,’ ” Dr. Matthew Daley, an ACIP member and senior investigator with the Institute for Health Research at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, said at Thursday’s advisory meeting.

    “And the fact that there’s a school immunization requirement helps because it brought you into the office, but that’s not my goal. My goal is to prevent serious disease.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Under Xi Jinping, zero-Covid is accelerating China’s surveillance state | CNN

    Under Xi Jinping, zero-Covid is accelerating China’s surveillance state | CNN

    [ad_1]


    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    As a new, deadly virus overtook the central city of Wuhan and spread throughout China in early 2020, the country’s ruling Communist Party and its leader Xi Jinping were faced with a crisis on a scale not seen in decades.

    In Wuhan, there was chaos. The city shut itself off from the outside world, while hospitals were overrun with the sick and dying – but it was too late to stop the virus’ advance. Huge swaths of China, too, locked down, grinding the country to a halt. Online, public outrage over apparent delays in the official release of information – and the silencing of whistleblowers – lit up social media faster than the censors could repress it.

    Outside China, observers watching the start of what would become the Covid-19 pandemic began to ask: could this be a catastrophe so big it calls into question the legitimacy of the Communist Party and its leader?

    Nearly three years later, however, Xi is poised to cement his place as China’s most powerful leader in decades, when he is anointed with a likely norm-breaking third term as the party chief on Sunday.

    In the months following that initial outbreak, Xi oversaw the assembly of a toolbox of brute-force lockdowns, enforced quarantines, and digital tracking. All that was used to bring the virus to heel and largely keep it outside China’s shuttered borders – an approach that initially appeared to earn broad public support as China lived largely virus-free and the pandemic raged overseas.

    But, now, as Xi steps into an expected new era of his rule, that system – known today as the “dynamic zero-Covid” policy – is facing both social and economic pushback.

    Public frustration – the true scale of which is difficult to gauge – appears to be rising over lockdowns that can shutter people in their homes for weeks on end with fleeting advance notice, digital health codes that dictate where people can move, and the constant threat of being sent to centralized quarantine. Meanwhile, the country’s economy is faltering, with both the IMF and World Bank recently downgrading China’s GDP growth forecasts, citing zero-Covid as one of the major drags.

    As China’s Communist Party National Congress meets this week to approve the party’s priorities for the next five years, many are watching for signs restrictions could be loosened. But with Xi having personally tied himself to the policy, any change would need to come straight from the top – and from a leader, who throughout his rule, has sought to extend, not curtail, the party’s control on daily life.

    China’s advanced online ecosystem – run on mobile phone superapps and ubiquitous QR codes – has offered arguably unrivaled convenience for consumers to shop, dine and travel. Now, those technologies play a role in constraining daily life.

    Mobile phone health codes are the backbone of a system designed to track citizens and designate whether they are cleared to enter various venues, upping state control on people’s movement to an extent never before seen in China.

    Across the country, basic activities like going to the grocery store, riding public transport, or entering an office building depend on holding an up-to-date, negative Covid test and not being flagged as a close contact of a patient – data points reflected by a color code.

    Going out in public can be a risk in itself, as being placed under quarantine or barricaded by authorities into a mall or office building as part of a snap lockdown could simply depend on whether someone in the general vicinity ends up testing positive.

    “(You see) all the flaws of big data when it has control over your daily life,” said one Shanghai resident surnamed Li, who spent a recent afternoon scrambling to prove he didn’t need to quarantine after a tracking system pinned his wife to a location near to where a positive case had been detected.

    Li, who’d been with his wife at the time but received no such message, said they were eventually able to reach a hotline and explain their situation, ultimately returning her health code to green.

    “If you don’t complain, the next step is your neighborhood committee seals up your door,” he said.

    The clear message from Beijing is that these steps are necessary to prevent large-scale loss of life and overwhelmed medical systems.

    “The essence of persisting with dynamic zero-Covid is putting people first and prioritizing life,” read a recent editorial in the People’s Daily – one of three along similar lines released by the party mouthpiece last week in an apparent bid to lower public expectation about any policy changes ahead of the Party Congress.

    But as local officials pursue Beijing’s edict of stopping the spread of the virus above all other considerations – the system too, over and over again, has led to human tragedy.

    The past year is marked by grim examples well-known across China: the expectant mother in Xi’an who miscarried after being denied treatment due to expired test results, the off-duty nurse who died from an asthma attack in Shanghai as a hospital branch was closed for Covid-19 disinfection, and, last month, the 27 passengers who died in a crash in the middle of the night as they were bussed into a different jurisdiction for compulsory quarantine.

    “What makes you think that you won’t be on that late-night bus one day?” read a viral comment, which garnered more than 250,000 likes before it was censored – one of a number of glimpses into rising frustration with the cost of the policy.

    Last week, a rare political protest in Beijing saw banners hung from a bridge along the capital’s busy Third Ring Road that zoned in on social controls under the policy.

    “Say no to Covid test, yes to food. No to lockdown, yes to freedom. No to lies, yes to dignity. No to cultural revolution, yes to reform. No to great leader, yes to vote. Don’t be a slave, be a citizen,” one banner read, while the other called for the removal of “dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping.”

    Speaking before some 2,300 mostly surgical-mask clad Communist Party members at the opening of the party’s five-yearly leadership reshuffle on Sunday, Xi gave a sweeping endorsement of China’s Covid controls, saying the party had “protected the people’s health and safety to the greatest extent possible” and “made tremendous, encouraging achievements in both epidemic and social development.”

    The impact of those controls is becoming sharper, as lockdowns – which have repeatedly left people struggling for access to food and medicine and grappling with lost income and a mental toll – have become more frequent.

    Last month, CNN counted more than 70 Chinese cities placed under full or partial Covid lockdowns in a period of a couple weeks, impacting more than 300 million people.

    In the run up to the Party Congress, controls amplified – as local authorities around the country sought to tamp down on outbreaks coinciding with the major political event.

    Chinese leader Xi Jinping meets with medical workers at Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan in March 2020.

    “Maintaining the zero-Covid strategy is now substantially more costly than it was a year ago, because the latest (viral) strains are so much more transmissible and outbreaks are occurring more frequently,” said epidemiologist Ben Cowling of the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health.

    “At the same time, the threat posed by Covid is reduced because of the higher vaccine coverage and the availability of antivirals. Taken together, I think the point has already been crossed where continuing zero-Covid could be considered a cost-effective strategy,” he said, adding that maintaining high vaccine coverage was key for a planned transition away from zero-Covid.

    Xi’s proclaimed success over the virus and China’s accompanying propaganda campaign is one reason why it may be difficult for China to change course.

    “The issue is Xi Jinping already associated himself with the ‘successful’ model of fighting Covid, so the zero-Covid policy now is a de facto Xi Jinping policy,” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, adding that China’s handling of the virus in comparison to other countries remains a point of national pride for many Chinese.

    And backing away from the policy will come with significant consequences. Allowing the virus to spread within the country of 1.4 billion would likely increase Covid-19 deaths to unseen levels in the country, experts say – and China so far has staked its policy around preventing those outcomes at all costs.

    Outside experts say that, since the virus will stay in circulation beyond China, keeping tight controls and closed borders is just delaying the inevitable, and the focus should be on preparing, for example through raising elderly vaccination rates and increasing ICU capacity, as well as getting or expanding access to the most effective vaccines and treatments.

    While China backed a massive vaccination campaign since early 2021, it has relied on homegrown shots, which produce lower levels of protective antibodies than mRNA vaccines developed in the West.

    So far, however, China has appeared most focused on bolstering the pillars of zero-Covid: mass testing capacity and mass quarantine facilities.

    “The vaccines take time, the ICU expansion takes time – and if you don’t see effort to prepare for the change, that implies that they are not planning to change the policy any time soon,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

    And while experts say it’s possible economic and other considerations could see China loosen certain controls in the coming year, an eventual end to zero-Covid may not see an end to all of its vestiges – especially as Xi, including in his Sunday address, has made clear his focus on increasing “security” in China.

    Already the health code system has been used to diffuse social protest – with petitioners who lost their savings in rural banks barred from protesting after their health codes inexplicably turned red.

    “One scenario is that (China) might drop the zero-Covid policy, but some of the key components of the policy might be retained and repurposed,” said Huang, pointing to Xi’s focus on maximizing security in China, including via high tech means.

    “Zero-Covid has provided a proof of concept – this actually works,” he said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • How Covid prompted Asian startups to use tech in revolutionizing mental health support | CNN Business

    How Covid prompted Asian startups to use tech in revolutionizing mental health support | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    Singapore
    CNN Business
     — 

    Many Asian countries introduced tougher Covid-19 restrictions than in other continents, a reality that has caused concerns about elevated levels of stress, anxiety and isolation. Now, a number of young entrepreneurs are leveraging technology to provide greater access to mental healthcare there.

    In July, Singapore-based Intellect raised $20 million in its Series A funding, the largest amount raised by a mental health start-up in Asia.

    Founded in 2019, Intellect runs a mobile app that regularly checks in on users’ mood, provides rescue sessions and exercises that tailor to their needs, and allows them to connect with therapists in real time if needed.

    “The traditional form of therapy is in-person and on-on-one, and it is hard to scale,” said Theodoric Chew, the 26-year-old co-founder of Intellect. “When technology comes in, we can scale access to mental care to everyone.”

    The start-up now serves more than 3 million users across the Asia-Pacific region in 15 languages since services began in early 2020.

    Chew said he was inspired to try to popularize mental healthcare after battling a panic attack when he was 16 years old.

    “I saw first-hand how therapy and working with professionals helped me become better,” he said. “On the flip side, I saw a lot of people struggling across the region – not clinically, but not having the right tools or know-how to access care.”

    While Intellect was founded before the pandemic, it quickly grew in popularity as companies became aware of their employees’ mental health as Covid-19 related lockdown and quarantine measures were imposed.

    “A lot of people were thrown into an array of things – anxiety of the pandemic, being locked up, and getting stay-home notices,” he said. “What has changed fundamentally was that mental health is no longer just a nice-to-have element that companies should consider, it’s something that’s needed across the board today.”

    “It does benefit companies in very real ways … because if you’re not feeling well mentally, you tend to not perform as well,” he said.

    Justin Kim, CEO and co-founder of Ami, another digital mental healthcare start-up based in Singapore and Jakarta, agreed that there’s a need to scale mental health offerings.

    “Many companies are spending millions of dollars a year and paying for gym memberships. But why don’t people invest into their mental health the same way? It’s because there are no resources that are being offered to them, that’s just as accessible and affordable,” he added.

    Justin Kim is the CEO and co-founder of Ami. His start-up has received funding from Meta, the owner of Facebook.

    Since the start-up was founded in January this year, it has raised at least $3 million from a number of investors, including Meta, the owner of Facebook.

    Kim’s team has been working on developing an app that would allow users to text or call mental health coaches confidentially at any time – without having to make prior appointments. He said this allows users to seek professional help whenever they need it in the most efficient way.

    Both Chew and Kim are targeting employers in their business models – companies can pay for a subscription and workers will have unlimited access to their services, which are kept private from their bosses.

    Alistair Carmichael, an associate partner at McKinsey & Company, said employers will benefit from better mental health in their workforce. “The impacts of poor mental health outcomes are significant. … If we focus on the employment and organizational level, those impacts can be things like presenteeism, absenteeism, lost productivity, lost engagement and attrition,” he said.

    Depression and anxiety disorders have cost the global economy $1 trillion each year in lost productivity, the World Health Organization has estimated. And a report by the WHO in March showed the global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by 25% during the first year of the pandemic.

    Chew said Intellect is attempting to close the gap by proactively safeguarding mental wellbeing before symptoms get worse. When employees open the app, the system asks them how they feel at the moment. Mini “rescue sessions” are also provided to users who are experiencing a rough time, while live therapy sessions are also available for those who require them.

    The app that Intellect developed proactively asks users how they feel at the moment. Mini

    The app features numerous learning programs for users to overcome mental roadblocks, such as self-esteem issues, depression or procrastination. A journal function guides users through writing what’s on their mind, while a “mood timeline” keeps track of their stress levels.

    Since launching the app, Intellect has served a number of high-profile corporate clients such as Dell, Foodpanda, and Singaporean communications conglomerate Singtel, Chew said, which allowed Intellect to expand from a team of two to 80.

    Kim, whose start-up has been building a prototype, said employers could also benefit by identifying trends and general concerns among their workforces.

    “With employees’ consent, we do share aggregated levels of data. And that offers employers a birds’ eye perspective of what their employees are actually struggling with, that they need to deep dive on,” he said.

    “But we never identify who said that, because we don’t want employees to feel like this isn’t a safe space where they can freely address concerns they have.”

    Karen Lau, a Hong Kong-based clinical psychologist with mental health initiative Mind HK, said addressing mental health in Asia comes with unique challenges.

    “In Asian contexts, many cultures tend to uphold values such as honor, pride, and a concept of face,” she said. “Mental illness is usually viewed and judged as a sign of weakness and a source of shame for the family.”

    “I think when it comes to mental health, just like your physical health, every issue is easier to prevent than fixed,” Kim said. “If people get out there and admit and celebrate the fact that they’re receiving coaching or services to invest in their mental health, it’s going to normalize the practice.”

    Chew said one of his goals is to break social stigma and build a new mental healthcare system for the Asia-Pacific region.

    “Mental health has long had a stigma across Asia, whereby traditionally we’ve seen it as a clinical issue, a crisis,” he said. “We see mental health just as important as physical health. You and I face things like stress, burnout, sleep issues, and relationship struggle as well. That’s where actually a lot of us should start working on our mental wellbeing.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Xi Jinping’s speech: yes to zero-Covid, no to market reforms? | CNN Business

    Xi Jinping’s speech: yes to zero-Covid, no to market reforms? | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    Hong Kong
    CNN Business
     — 

    Even though China’s economy is beset by problems ranging from a real estate crisis to youth unemployment, Xi Jinping did not offer any grand ideas to set the country back on track during his two-hour opening speech at the Communist Party Congress on Sunday.

    The Chinese leader is expected to secure an unprecedented third term in power at the week-long congress. Priorities presented at the political gathering of more than 2,000 party members will also set China’s trajectory for the next five years or even longer.

    In his speech Sunday, Xi struck a confident tone, highlighting China’s growing strength and rising influence under his first decade in power. He also repeatedly underscored the risks and challenges the country faces, including the Covid pandemic, Hong Kong and Taiwan — all of which he claimed China had come away from victorious.

    But experts are concerned that Xi offered no signs of moving away from the country’s rigid zero-Covid policy or its tight regulatory stance on various businesses, both of which have hampered growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

    “Yesterday’s speech confirms what many China watchers have long suspected — Xi has no intention of embracing market liberalization or relaxing China’s zero-Covid policies, at least not anytime soon,” said Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a DC-based think tank.

    “Instead, he intends to double down on policies geared towards security and self-reliance at the expense of China’s long-term economic growth.”

    China is the world’s last major economy still enforcing strict zero-Covid measures, which aim to stamp out chains of transmission through border restrictions, mass testing, extensive quarantines, and uncompromising snap lockdowns.

    And China’s economy is in bad shape. Growth has stalled, youth unemployment is at a record high, and the housing market is in shambles. Constant Covid lockdowns have not only wreaked havoc on the economy, but also sparked rising social discontent.

    Last week, two large banners were hung on an overpass of a major thoroughfare in Beijing, protesting against Xi’s Covid policy and authoritarian rule. It was a rare protest against the top leadership in the country, signaling the frustration and anger among the public.

    Many international organizations, including the IMF and World Bank, have recently downgraded China’s GDP growth forecasts for this year, citing zero-Covid as one of the major drags.

    Xi, however, praised the government’s adherence to zero-Covid, saying it has “achieved significant positive results.”

    Xi’s speech — a summary of the Communist Party’s work report, or action plan — was similarly short on concrete solutions to other challenges facing the economy in the near term.

    “We believe the ongoing Party Congress may not be an inflection point for major policy changes,” Goldman Sachs analysts said on Sunday, adding that they believe China may not loosen its Covid restrictions until at least the second quarter of 2023.

    On the property sector, Xi emphasized the need to provide affordable housing and dampen speculative demand — but there was no specific mention of the slump in real estate, which has mushroomed into a major crisis over the past few years, threatening both economic and social stability.

    “We maintain our view that a comprehensive solution to the beleaguered property sector might not be introduced until after March 2023, when the political reshuffle is fully completed,” said Nomura analysts on Monday.

    Nor did Xi mention record youth unemployment, which is mainly a result of his year-long crackdown on the tech industry set against the backdrop of punishing zero-Covid policies.

    In the full version of the official 20th Party Congress work report, which was published shortly after his speech, Xi emphasized the need to continue the party’s “anti-monopoly” crackdown and regulate “excessive incomes,” a sign that he will continue to get tough on big businesses and wealthy individuals.

    Beijing’s sweeping crackdown on the country’s private sector, under the banner of Xi’s “common prosperity” campaign, has pummeled several companies in sectors ranging from tech and finance to gaming and private education.

    The government has defended the campaign as necessary for “social fairness” and narrowing income gaps.

    In his speech, Xi also made clear that development was the “top priority” and stressed continued focus on “high-quality growth.”

    That may dispel some market concerns that the government no longer cared much about economic growth, UBS analysts said.

    However, to achieve Xi’s target of making China a “medium developed country” by 2035, the country’s annual real GDP growth needs to average around 4.7% a year from 2021 to 2035, the UBS analysts said. That could be “quite challenging,” they noted, adding they expect China’s potential growth to average between 4% to 4.5% a year this decade, and fall lower after 2030.

    Meantime, a comparison between this year’s speech and the last one delivered by Xi in 2017 at the 19th party congress revealed a potentially worrying trend.

    The frequency of words such as “security,” “people,” and “socialism” used in 2022 had increased compared to 2017, while that of “economy,” “market” and “reform” declined, Goldman analysts said.

    The change was also noticed by Nomura analysts, who said it could point to “a shift in the party’s mandate.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • ‘Walled-in’ China under Xi Jinping poses long-term global challenges | CNN

    ‘Walled-in’ China under Xi Jinping poses long-term global challenges | CNN

    [ad_1]

    Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.


    Beijing
    CNN
     — 

    During China’s National Day holiday in early October, several expatriate friends and I took our young children – who are of mixed races and tend to stand out in a Chinese crowd – to the Great Wall on the outskirts of Beijing.

    As we climbed a restored but almost deserted section of the ancient landmark, a few local families on their way down walked past us. Noticing our kids, one of their children exclaimed: “Wow foreigners! With Covid? Let’s get away from them…” The adults remained quiet as the group quickened their paces.

    That moment has lingered on my mind. It feels like a snapshot that illustrates how China has changed since its strongman leader Xi Jinping took power a decade ago – it’s become an increasingly walled-in nation physically and psychologically – and such transformation will have long-term global implications.

    Understanding the big picture is timely as Xi is poised to break convention to assume a third term as the head of the Chinese Communist Party – the real source of his power instead of the ceremonial presidency – at the ruling party’s twice-a-decade national congress, which opened in Beijing on Sunday.

    The Great Wall, a top tourist attraction that normally draws throngs of visitors during holidays, stood nearly empty when we went thanks to Xi’s insistence – three years into the global pandemic – on a policy of zero tolerance for Covid infections while the rest of the world has mostly moved on and re-opened.

    China’s borders have remained shut for most international travelers since March 2020, while many foreigners who once called the country home have chosen to leave.

    With the highly contagious Omicron variant raging through parts of the country, authorities had discouraged domestic travel ahead of National Day holiday. They are also sticking to a playbook of strict quarantine, incessant mass testing and invasive contact tracing – often locking down entire cities of millions over a handful of cases.

    Unsurprisingly, holiday travel plummeted during the so-called “Golden Week” along with tourism spending, which fell to less than half of that in 2019, the last “normal” year.

    And it’s not just one industry: Pessimism blankets other sectors, from automobile to real estate, as the world’s second-largest economy falters.

    Children visit the Great Wall of China on October 6, 2022.

    The Chinese economic slowdown poses a massive political challenge for Xi, whose party’s legitimacy in the past few decades has relied on rapid growth and rising incomes for 1.4 billion people. It’s also a harsh reality check for the international community: the world’s longtime growth engine is sputtering, just as the prospect of a global recession emerges.

    But Xi’s costly “zero-Covid” intransigence is a natural outcome of the unprecedented amount of power he has amassed. For many Chinese officials, this policy is less about science and more about political loyalty to the country’s most powerful leader in decades.

    Online videos abound of local health workers swabbing fruits, animals and even shoes for Covid testing despite the absence of sound scientific basis. China’s only Covid-related deaths in September were 27 people who were killed when their bus crashed on its way to a quarantine facility. Still, officials nationwide have doubled down on enforcing draconian rules, especially ahead of the party congress, helped by the world’s most sophisticated surveillance technologies.

    China had boasted more security cameras than any other country even before Covid. Now, in the age of smartphones, mandatory apps allow the government to check people’s Covid status and track their movement in real time. Authorities can easily confine someone to their home by remotely switching the health app to code red – and they did just that on several occasions to stop potential protesters from taking to the streets.

    Whether physical lockdowns or digital manipulation, these measures born out of “zero-Covid” have proven such effective means of control in a system obsessed with social stability that many worry Xi and his underlings will never ditch the policy.

    A series of recent articles published by the party’s mouthpieces had reinforced such concern by stressing the policy’s “correctness” and “sustainability,” even before Xi hailed “zero-Covid” as a resounding success story in his two-hour speech Sunday. And state media fills its coverage with depictions of the “grim reality” in foreign countries where leaders supposedly turn a blind eye to mass fatalities and suffering caused by Covid – in contrast to China’s apparent triumph in saving lives with “minimal overall cost.”

    For years, Xi’s cyber police have been fortifying the country’s so-called “Great Firewall” – perhaps the world’s most extensive internet filtering and censorship system that blocks and deletes anything deemed “harmful” by the party. Now supported by artificial intelligence, censors quickly scrub clean any posts seen as contradicting the party line – including on Covid.

    This potent mix of propaganda and control under Xi appears to have had its desired effect on a large segment of Chinese society, creating a buffer for the leadership by convincing enough people of the superiority of China’s system even as millions of their fellow countrymen grow resentful of “zero-Covid.” But this approach, combined with prolonged border closure and escalating geopolitical tensions, also provides fertile ground for xenophobia.

    The local child’s remarks on the Great Wall reflected that. But the true danger of the “blame the foreigners” sentiment comes when adults in powerful positions take advantage of it in the face of mounting pressure on the domestic front.

    screengrab xi speech 2021

    Here’s Xi Jinping’s vision to make China great again

    Since his ascent to the top in 2012, Xi’s ruling philosophy has become increasingly clear: Only he can make China great again by restoring the party’s – thus his – omnipresence and dominance, as well as the country’s rightful place on the global stage.

    With China’s increasing economic and military might, coexistence with the West has given way to confrontation with the United States and its allies. Gone are the days of “hiding your strength and biding your time” – Chinese diplomats under Xi are proud warriors training fire on anyone who dares to question their government.

    Underpinned by rising nationalism, China has started flexing military muscle beyond its shores. Tensions over Taiwan poses a real threat of war in Asia, as few doubt that “reunification” with the self-governed democratic island – long claimed by the Communist leadership despite having never ruled it – would be seen as the crown jewel of Xi’s legacy.

    That outward power projection goes hand in hand with China’s sense of besiegement in a US-led world order, which Xi has made no secret of trying to reshape along with other autocrats like Russian President Vladmir Putin. Until that happens, though, the Chinese strongman’s instinct and demand for total control at home seem to have meant the erection of ever-higher barriers – in the real world and cyberspace – to keep out pesky outsiders, the perceived source of dangerous viruses and ideas.

    A history paper released recently by a government-run research institute has gone viral as it, like Xi, upended a long-held consensus. Instead of denouncing the isolationist policy adopted by China’s last two imperial dynasties as a cause of their backward turn and eventual collapse, the authors defended its necessity to protect national sovereignty and security when faced with Western invaders.

    The emperors of those dynasties, who also rebuilt parts of the Great Wall, failed to reverse their country’s decline back then. But the tools at their disposal were no match to the high-tech ones in the hands of China’s current ruler. Xi seems confident that his “walls” – among other things – will help him realize his oft-cited ultimate goal: the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

    Whether or not he succeeds, the world will feel the impact for years to come.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Regina Spektor postpones tour due to ‘bad case’ of Covid-19 | CNN

    Regina Spektor postpones tour due to ‘bad case’ of Covid-19 | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Regina Spektor has put her national tour on hold after coming down with a “bad case” of Covid-19, the singer announced on Instagram.

    The Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, 42, wrote that she caught the virus “after being so careful and miraculously avoiding it for over 2.5 years,” and went on to apologize to ticket holders.

    “I have gone from feeling bad, to worse, to terrible. I’ve lost my voice. I am a bit delirious from fever, so in advance I apologize if this note isn’t too coherent,” she wrote in a note posted to her official Instagram. “We will reschedule the shows for when the theaters are able to have me back.”

    Her now-postponed tour was going to hit cities in New York, New Jersey, DC, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and California.

    She performed the opening night of the tour, set to run through the end of this month, in Chicago earlier this week.

    “I just want to add that my heart is with all the people who have suffered from the different iterations of this virus over this long while,” Spektor added. “…To some it is asymptomatic, or some sniffles, and to others it is a long road to recovery or worse, it alters the course of their entire life.”

    Spektor most recently released “Home, Before and After,” her eighth studio album and the first one in six years.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Teach Your Kids to Stop the Spread of Viruses

    Teach Your Kids to Stop the Spread of Viruses

    [ad_1]




    Teach Your Kids to Avoid Colds

































    091e9c5e820faac4091e9c5e820faac4FED-Footermodule_FED-Footer_091e9c5e820faac4.xmlwbmd_pb_templatemodule0144002/02/2021 01:57:340HTML















    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Teach Your Kids to Stop the Spread of Viruses

    Teach Your Kids to Stop the Spread of Viruses

    [ad_1]




    Teach Your Kids to Avoid Colds

































    091e9c5e820faac4091e9c5e820faac4FED-Footermodule_FED-Footer_091e9c5e820faac4.xmlwbmd_pb_templatemodule0144002/02/2021 01:57:340HTML















    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • A single mom’s 4 kids had to fend for themselves when tragedy struck. How a chance encounter years ago saved their future | CNN

    A single mom’s 4 kids had to fend for themselves when tragedy struck. How a chance encounter years ago saved their future | CNN

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    On a dark autumn evening almost four years ago, Janie Yoshida was driving her daughter home from high school play rehearsal when she noticed a teenager walking by himself next to a busy road.

    Tre Burrows, it turned out, was also in the play at Somerset Academy Canyons High School in Boynton Beach, Florida.

    “I pulled over to the side of the sidewalk and rolled the window down and said, ‘Hey, where do you live? I’ll take you home,’” Janie recalled.

    The 17-year-old kept insisting he was fine, until Janie put on “my mom’s voice” and demanded: ‘“Get in the car.”

    The polite young man with the gregarious smile complied. But, Janie soon learned, he led a life more challenging than she imagined – one in which she’d soon play a far bigger role.

    “He wanted me to drop him off at a main intersection. And I said, ‘Of course not. Just show me where you live.’ And he goes, ‘No, I can walk the rest of the way,’” Janie recalled.

    Reluctantly, Tre directed Janie to where he and his family were living.

    A motel.

    “I tried to play it off, like no big deal,” Janie recalled. But in reality, “I’m thinking to myself, ‘Oh my God … just terrible.’”

    From that point on, Janie gave Tre a ride every day after play rehearsal. Sometimes, she would make up an excuse to get fast food along the way, just to make sure Tre had a hot meal.

    “‘I don’t want to cook tonight,’” she’d tell him. “’Let’s just go through the drive thru.’”

    Then one day, Tre let slip another detail about his family life.

    “‘I’m gonna save this (meal),’” he told Janie, “’and split it with my sisters’” – one older and two younger, all together at the motel.

    Tre’s mother, it turned out, had been working two jobs and hanging by a thread to support her four children against immeasurable odds.

    Despite the financial challenges, Cindy Dawkins worked tirelessly to give her kids everything they needed. She had every meal ready, even without a kitchen. She helped with homework. Instead of asking her older ones to work part-time to support the family, she encouraged extracurricular activities such as track or school theater.

    Eventually, Tre told Janie why he’d been so nervous about telling anyone where he lived.

    “He didn’t want anybody to know because he was worried that the Department of Children and Families would come and take them away from his mom,” Janie said. “That’s just heartbreaking.”

    Janie asked to meet this matriarch – and was floored by her work ethic and strength.

    And as much as he loved his mom, Tre had no idea how much she sacrificed for her children.

    Soon, immense tragedy would force him to learn.

    A native of the Bahamas, Cindy moved to the US for what seemed like a promising career in the hospitality industry. But an avalanche of “bad luck on top of bad luck” fell on her, Janie said, including a layoff and a divorce.

    She ended up waitressing at two restaurants – one during the day, the other at night.

    “For the longest (time), she was working two jobs just to keep us afloat, paycheck to paycheck,” said Tre, now 21.

    “And she did all of that with a smile on her face because she didn’t want us to know exactly how hard it was to do all that.”

    But despite working two jobs, Cindy couldn’t get an apartment on her own because of a prior eviction. So she and her children moved into the motel, which cost far more per month than an apartment.

    The late Cindy Dawkins, with her daughter Zoe Clarke, moved to the US from the Bahamas.

    For three years, Cindy raised her four children in a motel room while working multiple jobs.

    Behind the omnipresent smile she put on for her kids, though, Cindy was struggling.

    She lamented that “‘in three years, I haven’t been able to make a home-cooked meal,’” Janie recalled.

    “She was like, ‘I don’t have a moment to myself or any privacy except when I’m in the shower. So if I’m going to break down, I’m going to cry, it’s going to be in the shower,’” Janie recalled.

    “‘And I’ve got to put my face back on, walk out of the bathroom in front of the kids and make sure that they don’t see it from me because I have to make them think everything’s OK.’”

    The family’s bad luck culminated the day Tre missed play rehearsal.

    The next day, Janie asked if he had been sick.

    “‘They kicked us out of the hotel because my mom couldn’t pay,’” Janie recalled him telling her.

    Janie went home and told her husband: “We need to get this family an apartment. I’m going tomorrow.”

    And as readily as she’d opened her car door to Tre that first time, “we just rented an apartment for them,” she said.

    With Janie’s name on the lease, the family of five moved into a two-bedroom apartment – mom in one bedroom, her four children sharing the other.

    Cindy meticulously paid the rent and utilities “earlier or on time – always,” Janie said.

    She got a raise at one of her restaurant jobs, Tre said, allowing her to quit her second job and spend more time with her kids.

    But that cherished time with her children would be short-lived.

    With a new home and better pay, Cindy and her kids eagerly anticipated celebrating her 50th birthday last summer.

    “We were planning on going up to Orlando a few days before and then spend her birthday up there,” Tre said.

    “We noticed that she started getting sick literally the day that we got there. As soon as we arrived, she went to bed and went to sleep and was just sleeping the entire time.”

    Cindy spent her birthday, August 1, in bed with severe Covid-19. The disease ravaged her body so quickly, “I didn’t even get to see her after she went into the hospital,” Tre said.

    On August 7, 2021 – six days after her birthday – Cindy died.

    Disbelief exacerbated her children’s agony.

    “She didn’t have any prior illnesses. … We just didn’t think anything like that would happen because we were healthy,” Tre said.

    “We were seeing the news (about) all the people passing away from Covid, but you never really understand exactly how bad it is until you experience it firsthand. We weren’t thinking this would completely uproot our lives.”

    Tre said his mother did not get vaccinated, in part due to rumors about side effects.

    “We didn’t want to do this and then (have it) potentially cause us to get sick,” Tre said. “We know better than that now. But I guess that was the reasoning behind her not getting” vaccinated.

    Tre and his siblings joined a growing group of children no one wants to be part of: the orphans of Covid. More than 212,000 US children have lost one or both parents to Covid-19, according to estimates from Imperial College London. And the number of children robbed of their parents keeps rising.

    “It never crossed my mind,” Tre said, “that me and my older sister would be the ones taking care of our little sisters.”

    Tre was the first to hear from the doctor his mother had passed. He rushed to the hospital and told his older sister, Jenny Burrows, now 25, to get there immediately.

    When Jenny arrived, “We cried for hours,” Tre recalled. “Our little sisters were at home (sleeping). Then we gathered ourselves and we tried to figure out, ‘OK, how are we going to tell our sisters?’”

    They woke up heir siblings Zoe Clarke, then 15, and Sierra Clarke, then 12. The most horrific nightmare had just turned into reality.

    The late Cindy Dawkins, with daughter Sierra Clarke, worked multiple jobs to support her children.

    But Tre and Jenny didn’t have time to mourn. Their minds were racing:

    “‘OK, are we about to get kicked out of the apartment we’re staying in because we can’t afford the bills?

    “‘How are we going to move on from this home?

    “‘How are we going to get the girls … everything they need for school?’”

    And the biggest question of all: Will the younger children get taken away?

    Despondent, overwhelmed and tasked with planning a funeral, Tre told Janie his mother passed.

    “I just lost it. I couldn’t believe it,” Janie said. “It was devastating.”

    She realized the siblings quickly needed help – and not just financially.

    They needed to learn how to parent on the fly.

    So once again, like she did all those years back from the driver’s seat, Janie went into mom mode.

    Without a living legal guardian, the children’s greatest fear was getting separated. Maybe the younger siblings would get taken away into state custody and foster care. Or maybe they would be sent to the Bahamas to live with relatives.

    Janie helped Jenny get to work on Priority No. 1: Becoming the younger girls’ legal guardian. It was one of the myriad legal complications that followed their mother’s death.

    “Another thing that’s helping us tremendously is we were able to get the girls set up with Social Security benefits from my mom,” Tre said, which will help support Sierra and Zoe until they turn 18.

    Janie and her husband also paid the remaining six months on the apartment’s lease. And she started a GoFundMe account, with an initial goal of paying for Cindy’s funeral expenses.

    Then just as Janie had stepped in as a stranger to help Tre’s hard-working but struggling family, hundreds more strangers did the same.

    The crowdsourcing fund grew so popular, it yielded enough for a down payment on a house so the children wouldn’t have to worry about getting evicted. Any extra funds likely will go toward Sierra’s and Zoe’s college education in the coming years.

    Janie also taught the older siblings about car insurance, credit and other life skills they would need to know immediately, now that they had dependents.

    Tre Burrows, left, and Jenny Burrows, right, became unexpected parents after their mom Cindy Dawkins died from Covid-19.

    The hardest part of being both a brother and a parent to younger siblings is “definitely the mental aspect of all of that,” Tre said.

    “The attitude stuff is a big thing for teenagers. They’re teenagers. Like getting chores done, getting your homework done, the attitude that comes with all that … basically, everything that goes with raising a 16- and 12-year-old,” he said.

    He and Jenny try to balance it all “while also making sure they don’t look at it like, ‘Oh, since Mom isn’t here, now you think you’re the boss and you can do all this stuff?’”

    And Tre tries to balance tough love with “not being too harsh with them, obviously, because we all just went through a horrible situation.”

    Tre and Jenny also now juggle a daily marathon of jobs, their own schooling and taking care of their sisters’ basic needs, their education and their mental health.

    Tre works at a computer repair company and has started training to become an emergency medical technician and firefighter. And Jenny, a dental assistant, wants to finish training to become a dental hygienist.

    The older siblings devised a plan for how to finish their education while paying the bills and taking care of the girls.

    “When I was going through EMT school … my sister would drop them off at school. I would pick them up, and (then) I would head to school. That was our plan,” Tre said.

    “And my sister would be the one at home with them, making sure they’re getting their homework done, making sure they’re OK mentally. And obviously I would help with that whenever I’m not in school. And basically I would get through that, get through the fire academy, doing the same thing,” he said.

    “And then once I’m done with schooling, the roles will kind of be reversed. So I’ll be the one that’s dropping them off, and I’ll be home with them (while) my sister’s at school, getting her career situated.”

    It’s a daunting task. But it’s nothing compared to what his own mother did, Tre said.

    “My biggest (concern) was just making sure I can fill her shoes,” he said. “I never really understood exactly how much she was doing until now, when my sister and I are the ones who have to do it.”

    Tre is also immensely grateful to the countless strangers who helped him and his siblings find a home and stay together.

    And it all traces to Janie giving him a ride home from school that dark autumn evening.

    “Without her,” he said, “we wouldn’t know what we would have done.”

    And Janie has learned from Cindy’s children, she said. Perhaps they inherited their mother’s fortitude.

    “I know they have the same instinct inside of them, just like their mom did – that hey, even if it sucks, let’s get up and make the best of it,” she said.

    “They’re my inspiration now.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • How Buffalo is ensuring the Black community isn’t left behind after mass supermarket shooting | CNN

    How Buffalo is ensuring the Black community isn’t left behind after mass supermarket shooting | CNN

    [ad_1]


    Buffalo, NY
    CNN
     — 

    The day after Buffalo experienced the largest mass shooting in its history, teams of emergency volunteers and mental health counselors arrived on the scene, offering emotional support and distributing food.

    The response was robust and swift, but there was one big problem.

    “The community didn’t feel comfortable coming up the stairs to the center because what they saw was a large group of White people,” said Kelly Wofford, Erie County’s director of health equity.

    A White gunman had deliberately opened fire at a predominantly Black neighborhood’s only grocery store, a Tops supermarket, on a busy Saturday in May. Eleven of the 13 people shot were Black, including the 10 killed. Authorities called the shooting racially motivated.

    “In any other kind of tragedy, like a hurricane or flood, anyone offering resources would be gladly welcomed, but this was different. This tragedy had a face and a hatred for a certain group of people,” said Thomas Beauford Jr., president and CEO of the Buffalo Urban League, which was one of the community organizations on site the day of the shooting.

    “They completely rejected it,” said Beauford, adding, “The immediate reaction to the counselors was, ‘We need to see counselors that look like us.’”

    By Monday, the problem was addressed. Wofford, who grew up down the street from the Tops, tapped her network to ensure there were more Black counselors on site, that Black people were the ones handing out flyers on the street about available services, and that Black people greeted folks at the help center.

    “We made sure the community affected felt comfortable seeking the services they need,” Wofford said.

    Her response efforts – and the spotlight the May 14 shooting put on the community’s existing disparities – exemplifies the role Erie County’s newly formed Office of Health Equity is meant to play in the community: ensuring that health services are equitably distributed across disadvantaged and marginalized populations.

    Within Erie County, there is a significant disparity between the health outcomes of White residents and residents of color, which became even clearer as Covid-19 disproportionately affected Black and brown communities there, as well as across the country.

    Even before the pandemic, the life expectancy of Black Buffalo residents was 12 years shorter than White residents, according to a report published by the Buffalo Center for Health Equity in 2015, the most recent data available.

    Erie County’s Office of Health Equity was launched to help address those disparities. It was established in January by county law, and the funding was made possible by a major federal pandemic relief package known as the American Rescue Plan that distributed money to states, counties and cities across the country.

    Kelly Wofford is the first director of the Erie County Office of Health Equity, which launched earlier this year.

    Erie County allocated roughly $1 million of the nearly $179 million it received from the American Rescue Plan for the creation of the Health Equity Office. It is using the remaining funds on a variety of needs, including economic assistance for small businesses, water treatment infrastructure and restoring jobs and spending that were initially cut due to the pandemic.

    While issues of health equity were addressed prior to the formation of the office, the law formalized the efforts and put funding behind them, ensuring it can work to address long-term solutions. With Wofford at the helm, the office has nine staff members, including two epidemiologists.

    “The Office of Health Equity – which did not exist and would not have existed without the funding we received from the American Rescue Plan – immediately became an integral partner in the response to the Tops shooting on May 14, by being in some ways the boots on the ground and the coordinator between third-party agencies and the county’s delivery of these services to the community,” said Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz.

    “It was unlike any experience we’ve ever had,” Poloncarz added, “and I’m very grateful that we had the Office of Health Equity in place because it would have made our job a lot tougher without it.”

    Addressing health disparities is something communities across the country are grappling with, and while the pandemic caused illness and death for millions, it also has helped spur some momentum.

    State and local health equity offices are far from being as prevalent as water departments, for example, but they are having a moment – due in part to the influx of money from the federal government meant to help communities recover.

    “The pandemic really highlighted the gross differences in our ability to keep people healthy, related to race and ethnicity,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

    The group hasn’t tracked how many formal equity offices have opened, but the number is growing, Freeman said. Philadelphia hired its first chief racial equity officer earlier this year.

    In the past, some communities have not had the political will or the resources to formalize their health equity efforts, she added.

    A memorial waterfall was built inside the renovated Tops supermarket in Buffalo, which reopened in July, two months after the mass shooting.

    High-profile killings of Black people by police, notably the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, gave rise to a number of communities declaring racism as a public health crisis, laying the groundwork for some of the offices opening now. In April 2021, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also declared racism a serious public health threat.

    Resolving health inequities will take time and requires tackling the social determinants of health. These are the factors that contribute to someone’s health that they don’t have control over themselves, like access to clean water and healthy food and other conditions where they live, work and play that can affect their health.

    “You’re really trying to create the same opportunity for health for every single person in the community, no matter what their economic status is, where they live or whether they have a job,” Freeman said.

    In mid-July, the Tops grocery store reopened to mixed reactions from the community.

    Without the supermarket, those without a car may have lacked convenient access to nutritious food. For others, it was emotionally difficult to reenter the store.

    Migdalia Lozada, a crisis counselor with the Buffalo Urban League, spent one August morning offering support to shoppers. Lozada took one woman by the hand as she walked into the store for the first time since the tragedy, feeling the woman’s tears fall onto her arm.

    The Buffalo Urban League’s community resource center, located just two blocks from the Tops, continues to serve the traumatized neighborhood. People can walk right into the space and speak with a crisis counselor. Some people are regulars who come in nearly every day. Others may have been triggered by an event like a shooting elsewhere or movement in a court case against the shooting suspect.

    “We just try to give the person some space to open up in a safe, confidential place,” said Lozada.

    While the Buffalo Urban League’s crisis counselors had already been serving the community for months, its leaders wanted a physical space nearby the Tops store after the shooting. The group found an open space down the street that had once been a neighborhood bar known as Pixie’s and opened a resource center there within days after the tragedy. The building intentionally looks and feels much more like a local watering hole than a health institution.

    Buffalo Urban League's Yukea Wright (left), a crisis counselor team leader, and Migdalia Lozada, a crisis counselor, work at the resource center near the Tops.

    The center also serves as a place that connects people with other resources to address a wide range of social determinants of health, like employment, housing and education.

    The Buffalo Urban League plans to work closely with the county, especially with the new Office of Health Equity, to help drive long-term change going forward.

    The county office is first working on training people in the Mental Health First Aid national program, so that the county can deploy counselors throughout the community – like at Bible studies and community centers – to meet people where they already may be. A recent nationwide study found that while the share of US adults who received treatment for mental health grew throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, people of color are less able to access mental health services.

    The office is also working on a survey that, in part, will show what problems members of the community would like addressed – it could be the high prevalence of diabetes or high blood pressure, for example.

    “When you look at the social determinants of health, there are inequities across all of them, so you can pick whichever one you want,” Wofford said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Opinion: My 5-year-old daughter just confirmed our decision to leave China | CNN

    Opinion: My 5-year-old daughter just confirmed our decision to leave China | CNN

    [ad_1]

    Editor’s Note: Matthew Bossons (@MattBossons) is managing editor of the Shanghai-based online publication Radii. He has lived in China since 2014. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.


    Shanghai
    CNN
     — 

    When word began circulating on social media and in group chats in mid-September that one of China’s top health officials was warning citizens to avoid physical contact with foreigners as a precaution against monkeypox, the news hit me with an unshakable anxiousness.

    The recommendation was the first of five issued by Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in response to mainland China’s first monkeypox case in the southwestern municipality of Chongqing.

    Wu blasted the advice out to his nearly half a million followers on Weibo, China’s heavily censored version of Twitter, and it was quickly picked up and further publicized by state-backed media outlets.

    Wu’s choice of words was a far cry from the World Health Organization’s advice, which recommends “limiting close contact with people who have suspected or confirmed monkeypox” and avoids singling out any nationality as at risk of spreading the disease.

    Having lived through the wave of xenophobia that accompanied the closure of China’s borders in the spring of 2020 – when Covid-19 was largely under control in China and running rampant abroad – Wu’s proclamation associating foreigners with disease immediately triggered alarm bells.

    I moved from my hometown of Vancouver, Canada, in 2014 to live and work as a journalist in the southern Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou. In April 2020, I watched as the city’s expatriate population began to find themselves shunned by locals concerned about imported Covid-19 cases, despite the vast majority of imported cases being brought in by returning Chinese nationals, the foreign ministry said at the time.

    Infamously, many of the city’s African residents were expelled from their residences and denied access to hotels despite having not left the country since the pandemic began. Out of fear of contracting the virus, taxi drivers refused to pick up foreigners, gyms turned away non-Chinese patrons and expats on the subway found themselves with more personal space than usual as local commuters fled for the neighboring carriage.

    These memories came flooding back in the wake of Wu’s social media post. And while I pondered how local commuters may receive me on the bus to work the following Monday, a bigger concern loomed: How would my five-year-old daughter be treated by her peers at the local kindergarten she attends in our new home base of Shanghai. (We had moved from Guangzhou to Beijing in July 2020, and from Beijing to Shanghai in July 2021).

    Despite having Chinese ancestry, my daughter, Evelyn, does not look particularly Chinese, a fact that is often pointed out to my wife, who hails from Jiangsu province in eastern China. As such, she stands out among her classmates, who are all ethnically Chinese.

    My worst fears were seemingly confirmed the following Monday evening when Evelyn returned from school and told her mom that she wanted more than anything to “look Chinese.” Visibly upset, she said that some of her classmates had taunted her with calls of “waigouren,” meaning ‘foreigner’ in Mandarin Chinese.

    Did Wu’s advice about foreigners make it into dinner table conversation at her classmates’ homes over the weekend? It was the first time she’d said anything like this, and as a parent, I was crushed to learn my daughter felt uncomfortable in her own skin.

    Evelyn was only three years old and not yet attending school in the spring of 2020, helping to insulate her from Guangzhou’s wave of Covid-induced discrimination. This time around, however, she is much more vulnerable to health-related hysteria.

    Throughout the rest of the week, I was given a much wider berth than usual on my commute to and from the office. Online, I watched as a seemingly large and unquestionably vocal group of Chinese internet users spewed xenophobic comments on social media. Some encouraged their compatriots to “wash your hands after touching a foreigner,” while more extreme voices claimed “racism against foreigners is justified” and called for China to close its borders to outsiders.

    Words from power carry weight, and careless comments or malicious statements risk othering segments of society and fueling xenophobic attitudes. We saw this clearly with former US President Donald Trump’s repeated use of terms like “Chinese virus” and “kung flu,” which provided cover for the racists on Twitter and likely contributed to the rise in anti-Asian incidents in the US and other Western nations.

    As an authoritative health professional, Wu’s statement was beyond careless, and the state-backed media’s willingness to run his advice unchallenged was irresponsible at best and malicious at worst. It has inflamed anti-foreigner sentiments online and has put China’s diverse expat community at risk of further public discrimination.

    Chinese tourist information clerks wear protective masks and visors at their desk in the departures area of Beijing International Airport, March 2020.

    The Chinese CDC’s chief epidemiologist has since revised his original social media post to clarify that only “skin-to-skin contact with foreigners who have been in monkeypox epidemic areas in the past three weeks” should be avoided.

    This adjustment, though, seems redundant considering Wu’s second piece of advice is to avoid close contact with anyone coming from or transiting through monkeypox epidemic areas. It also still needlessly targets foreigners in the country, a demographic that has either been in China since the pandemic began or undergone the nation’s required Covid-19 quarantine upon entry.

    To be clear: I’m cognizant that Evelyn’s experience of being singled out by her classmates for her physical appearance pales in comparison to the verbal harassment and outright violence experienced by Asian and Pacific Islander communities in the US and other Western nations during the pandemic. Still, this incident, coming on the back of health advice from one of China’s top medical experts that otherizes foreigners, doesn’t help me to feel welcome in the country I’ve called home for the past eight years.

    Several months ago, my wife and I decided it was time to prepare to join the throngs of expats and locals fleeing a China that’s increasingly difficult to recognize, mired by rigid Covid lockdowns and rising nationalism. The decision to relocate to my home country, Canada, was made after considering several factors, chief among them: the discrimination dished out against foreign residents in many Chinese cities during the pandemic.

    This latest episode tells me that the lessons about xenophobia that the Covid-19 pandemic offered have not been learned here and that leaving Shanghai is the right decision for my family and me.

    After all, if my daughter, a Chinese citizen, is being made to feel unwelcome in the country of her birth, then perhaps it’s time to find a new home.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Americans hold mixed views on getting back to ‘normal’ after Covid-19, new polling shows | CNN Politics

    Americans hold mixed views on getting back to ‘normal’ after Covid-19, new polling shows | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Three years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Americans’ views of the disease’s impact have stagnated into a complex set of mixed feelings, recent polling suggests, with few believing that the pandemic has ended but most also saying that their lives had returned mostly – if not entirely – to normal.

    The US Senate passed a bill last week that would end the national Covid-19 emergency declared in March 2020. The US House approved the measure earlier this year, and the White House has said President Joe Biden will sign it despite “strongly” opposing the bill. The administration had already planned to wind down the emergency by May 11.

    In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey about the Biden administration’s original plan to end the public health emergency by May, 59% of Americans said they expected the decision to have no impact on them or their family, with the remainder about evenly split between the 20% who thought it would have a positive effect and the 21% who thought the impact would be negative.

    Only 24% of Americans personally feel that the pandemic is over, a recent Monmouth University poll found, with 20% saying it will end eventually and 53% saying that it’ll never be over. Those numbers were very similar to Monmouth’s polling last fall, suggesting that a sense of some lingering abnormalcy may well be the new normal.

    Relatively few Americans say either that their lives have completely returned to a pre-pandemic normal or that their lives are still completely upended by it. The Monmouth poll found a 69% majority saying that their daily routine was at least mostly back to what it was pre-pandemic – but only about a third, 34%, say that things were completely the same as they were three years ago. Another 20% said things were partially back to normal, and 11% that they were still not normal at all.

    Declaring to pollsters that the pandemic is over may be something of a political statement for ordinary Americans as well. Republicans were 17 points likelier than Democrats to say that their own routines were mostly back to normal, the Monmouth poll found, and 28 points likelier to say that the pandemic had completely ended.

    The results of the Monmouth survey echo a February Gallup poll that found 33% of Americans saying that their life was completely back to pre-pandemic normal, 20% saying that they expected it would eventually return to normal and nearly half that their life would never fully return to the way it was pre-pandemic. Gallup also found that views about the pandemic’s trajectory were nearly unchanged from their polling in October, when 31% thought normalcy had completely returned.

    “The 47% who don’t foresee a return to normalcy may be getting used to a ‘new normal’ that, for some, means occasional mask use, regular COVID-19 vaccines and avoidance of some situations that may put them at greater risk of infection, particularly at times when COVID-19 infections are spiking,” Gallup’s Megan Brenan wrote.

    About half of Americans, 48%, are continuing to mask up in public on at least some occasions, the Monmouth poll found, though only about 21% said they do so most or all of the time. In KFF polling from earlier this year, 46% of Americans said they’d taken some form of precautions – including mask-wearing or avoiding large gatherings, travel or indoor dining – over the winter due to news about the triple threat of Covid-19, the flu and RSV.

    In KFF’s latest poll, just over half the American public said they’d been boosted against Covid-19, but only 23% reported receiving the latest bivalent version of the booster vaccine.

    At the broader societal level, in a CNN poll last fall, more than 6 in 10 Americans said they believed the pandemic had permanently reshaped multiple aspects of the American landscape, from healthcare (66%) and education (63%) to the economy (61%) and the way most people do their jobs (69%).

    But while the public sees the pandemic’s effects as far-reaching and ongoing, they’re also not top of mind. In a Quinnipiac University survey released last week, fewer than 1% of Americans picked Covid-19 as “the most urgent issue facing the country.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Biden signs bill ending Covid-19 national emergency | CNN Politics

    Biden signs bill ending Covid-19 national emergency | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden signed legislation Monday to end the national emergency for Covid-19, the White House said, in a move that will not affect the end of the separate public health emergency scheduled for May 11.

    A White House official downplayed the impact of the bill, saying the termination of the emergency “does not impact our ability to wind down authorities in an orderly way.”

    The bill to end the national emergency cleared the Senate last month in a bipartisan 68-23 vote and passed the House earlier this year with 11 Democrats crossing party lines to vote for the joint resolution.

    “Since Congress voted to terminate the National Emergency earlier than anticipated, the Administration has worked to expedite its wind down and provide as much notice as possible to potentially impacted individuals,” the official said, adding that the country is in a “different place” than it was in January.

    The administration has been winding down authorities over the past few months, the official noted.

    The official said that “to be clear, ending the National Emergency will not impact the planned wind-down of the Public Health Emergency on May 11” – which enabled the government to provide many Americans with Covid-19 tests, treatments and vaccines at no charge, as well as offer enhanced social safety net benefits, to help the nation cope with the pandemic and minimize its impact, as CNN previously reported.

    “But since Congress moved to undo the National Emergency earlier than intended, we’ve been working with agencies to address the impacts of ending the declaration early,” the official said.

    The White House had signaled strong opposition to the bill but said that ultimately, the president would sign it if it came across his desk. The White House had planned end to both emergencies by May 11.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Meta phased out Covid-19 content labels after finding they did little to combat misinformation, Oversight Board says | CNN Business

    Meta phased out Covid-19 content labels after finding they did little to combat misinformation, Oversight Board says | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Late last year, Facebook-parent Meta quietly phased out certain content labels on its platforms that for much of the pandemic had directed viewers to its central Covid-19 information page, after internal research concluded the labels may be ineffective at changing attitudes or stopping the spread of misinformation, according to a report Thursday by the company’s external oversight board.

    Facebook rolled out the labels in early 2021, after coming under criticism for the spread of Covid-19 misinformation on its platforms during the first year of the pandemic. The company applied the labels to a wide range of claims both true and untrue about vaccines, treatments and other topics related to the virus.

    But Meta’s use of the labels began slowing on Dec. 19, and ended completely soon after, the report said, following the internal research. Study results provided to the Meta Oversight Board, a quasi-judicial body, showed that the company’s labels appeared to have “no detectable effect on users’ likelihood to read, create or re-share” claims that had previously been rated as false by third-party fact-checkers or that discouraged the use of vaccines, the report said.

    The research focused on Meta’s direct labeling interventions as opposed to labels the company applies to content as part of its third-party fact-checking program. The research found that the more frequently a user was exposed to the labels, the less likely they were to visit the Covid-19 information center, which offers authoritative resources and information linked to the pandemic.

    “The company reported that initial research showed that these labels may have no effect on user knowledge and vaccine attitudes,” the report said.

    Meta’s internal research on the labels has not been previously released, and the Oversight Board on Thursday called for Meta to publish its findings as part of a broader review of the company’s handling of Covid-19 misinformation.

    The new details highlight the struggles platforms have faced in fighting misinformation and could raise broader questions about the efficacy of labeling and directing users to more accurate information. It also comes at a time when some of the biggest social media companies, including Twitter and Meta, are either rolling back their Covid-19 misinformation policies or considering doing so.

    Meta should not relax its approach to Covid-19 misinformation as the company has proposed, the Oversight Board added. Until the World Health Organization determines that the pandemic has eased, Meta should instead continue to remove misinformation that violates the company’s policies, rather than shifting toward more lenient treatments such as labeling or downranking misleading information, the board said.

    Meta said Thursday it will publicly respond to the Oversight Board’s recommendations within 60 days.

    “We thank the Oversight Board for its review and recommendations in this case,” a company spokesperson said. “As Covid-19 evolves, we will continue consulting extensively with experts on the most effective ways to help people stay safe on our platforms.”

    In the past, Meta has touted its ability to direct users to the Covid-19 information center. Last July, the company said it had connected more than 2 billion people across 189 countries to trustworthy information through the portal.

    Some of those visits occurred through labels that Meta referred to internally as “neutral inform treatments,” or NITs, and “facts about ‘X’ informed treatments,” also known as FAXITs.

    The labels were automatically applied to content that Meta’s automated tools determined were about Covid-19, the Oversight Board said. The labels never directly addressed the claims within any given post, but they provided a link to the Covid-19 information center as well as more contextual information, including messages saying that vaccines have been proven safe and effective or that unapproved Covid-19 treatments could cause bodily harm. (Meta provided examples of a NIT and a FAXIT in its July 2022 request for Oversight Board guidance on whether it should relax its Covid-19 misinformation policy.)

    The decision to begin phasing out the labels came after Meta’s product and integrity teams ran an experiment studying Meta’s global userbase, the report said. The study found that users who were shown the labels approximately once a month were more likely on average to click through to the Covid-19 information center than users who were shown the labels both more and less frequently.

    In light of the results, Meta later told the Oversight Board it would stop using the labels altogether, to ensure they could remain effective in other public health emergencies, according to the report.

    While the Oversight Board’s report Thursday did not pass judgment on Meta’s decision to stop using the labels, it urged the company to reevaluate the 80 distinct types of claims that the company considers to be Covid-19 misinformation and therefore subject to removal from its platforms.

    Meta should perform the reassessments regularly, the Oversight Board said, consulting with public health officials to determine which claims on Meta’s banned list continue to be false or misleading and worthy of removal. Meta should also publish a record of when and how it updates that list, the board added.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Ron DeSantis praised Anthony Fauci for Covid response in spring 2020 for ‘really doing a good job’ | CNN Politics

    Ron DeSantis praised Anthony Fauci for Covid response in spring 2020 for ‘really doing a good job’ | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis is attacking former President Donald Trump for “turning the country over to [Dr. Anthony] Fauci in March 2020” but DeSantis was praising the chief public health official at the same time in previously unreported quotes, saying Fauci was “really, really good and really, really helpful” and “really doing a good job.”

    In other comments, the Florida governor said he deferred to Fauci’s guidance on COVID-19 restrictions and later cited his guidance when communicating the policies he was putting in place early in the pandemic in the state of Florida.

    “You have a lot of people there who are working very, very hard, and they’re not getting a lot of sleep,” DeSantis said on March 25, 2020, at a briefing on Florida’s response. “And they’re really focusing on a big country that we have. And from Dr. Birx to Dr. Fauci to the vice president who’s worked very hard, the surgeon general, they’re really doing a good job. It’s a tough, tough situation, but they’re working hard.”

    In one of his first appearances as a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, DeSantis attacked Trump for following Fauci’s guidance during the Covid pandemic. Fauci served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until retiring in 2022. He played a key early role in crafting the administration’s response to the pandemic, but often was criticized and sidelined by then-President Trump.

    “I think [Trump] did great for three years, but when he turned the country over to Fauci in March of 2020 that destroyed millions of people’s lives,” DeSantis said last Thursday. “And in Florida, we were one of the few that stood up, cut against the grain, took incoming fire from media, bureaucracy, the left, even a lot of Republicans, had schools open, preserved businesses.”

    “If you are faced with a destructive bureaucrat in your midst like a Fauci, you do not empower somebody like Fauci. You bring him into the office and you tell him to pack his bags: You are fired,” DeSantis said Tuesday at one of his first campaign events in Iowa.

    Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for DeSantis, told CNN he initially followed guidance from Fauci but changed course and didn’t look back.

    “Like most Americans, the governor initially assumed medical officials were going to serve the interests of the people and keep politics out of their decision making. When it became clear that this wasn’t the case, the governor charted his own course and never looked back,” Griffin told CNN in an email. “Governor DeSantis would’ve fired Anthony Fauci.”

    In a news conference on Tuesday, DeSantis also acknowledged mistakes early in the pandemic.

    “And what I’ve said about it is it was a difficult situation and we didn’t know a lot,” he said. “So I think people could do things that they regret. I mean I’ve said there are things we did in those first few weeks that I pivoted from.”

    Though Fauci did help craft the administration’s Covid response, Trump was often critical of Fauci as he attacked his own administration’s pandemic guidelines. Trump began criticizing Fauci early in spring 2020, retweeting calls to fire him in April of that year and in May blasting comments Fauci made against reopening schools. In July 2020, the White House’s deputy chief of staff for communications, Dan Scavino, posted a cartoon on Facebook that showed Fauci as a faucet flushing the American economy for his COVID guidance.

    In spring 2020, Fauci was provided with around-the-clock security after he began receiving escalating threats after his providing guidance to Trump for the country to remain as locked down as possible to help control the spread of the virus, which to date has claimed more than a million lives in the US.

    DeSantis, like Trump, later broke with Fauci over reopening Florida in July 2020, but he didn’t begin regularly harshly criticizing Fauci until spring 2021.

    Trump urged reopenings by May 2020 and DeSantis was one of the first to put in place plans to do so – for which Trump praised the Florida governor at an October 2020 rally.

    Last week, DeSantis’ campaign’s rapid response account and a spokesperson also shared a video from a Republican congressman that attacked Trump for praising Fauci, which used comments from March and February 2020, the same time DeSantis himself was praising Fauci.

    But DeSantis’ attacks rewrite history, according to a CNN KFile review of public appearances by DeSantis in 2020 as Trump began harshly criticizing Fauci much earlier than DeSantis. And in at least 10 different instances at press briefings in April and March, DeSantis cited Fauci or mentioned his guidance when discussing his own support for restrictive policies like closing beaches and putting in place curfews.

    Speaking at a news briefing on March 21, 2020, DeSantis made similar comments praising Fauci.

    “The president’s task force has been great,” DeSantis said. “I mean, you’ve called, you know, we’ve talked Dr. Fauci number of times, talked to, you know, the surgeon, US surgeon general number of times, VP, you know, they’ve been really, really good and really, really helpful.”

    At other press briefings in March 2020, DeSantis also cited Fauci’s guidance on mobile testing, individual testing, and how long the timeline on COVID might be.

    “I would defer to people like Dr. Fauci,” DeSantis said on March 14, 2020. “I think Dr. Fauci has said nationwide, you’re looking at six to eight weeks of where we’re really gonna be having to dig in here.”

    On March 25, 2020, DeSantis cited Fauci’s guidance on isolating.

    “So please, please if you’re one of those people who’ve come from the hot zone, Dr. Fauci said yesterday, you know, you have a much higher chance being infected coming out of that region than anywhere else in the country right now. So please, you need to self-isolate. That’s the requirement in Florida.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interview, Musk again uses Twitter to promote candidates aligned with his views | CNN Business

    With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interview, Musk again uses Twitter to promote candidates aligned with his views | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Twitter owner Elon Musk has proposed hosting Twitter Spaces interviews with political candidates of all stripes, reflecting the billionaire’s supposed commitment to ideological neutrality and to promoting Twitter as a true “public square.”

    So far, however, Musk appears to be more interested in platforming candidates that align with his own views rather than those who might challenge them. On Monday, Musk is set to share an audio chatroom with Robert Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist and Democratic candidate for president.

    The decision to host Kennedy again highlights, for the second time in as many weeks, Musk’s unique potential to shape public opinion through a combination of his own personal celebrity and his private control of a social media megaphone. But this time, it also deepens doubts about Musk’s claims to open-mindedness — and his willingness to use Twitter as anything other than a tool for his own activism.

    Musk, who built much of his early reputation as an entrepreneur on a concern for ensuring humanity’s survival, has opposed the Covid-19 vaccine and spent much of the pandemic railing against Anthony Fauci, the government’s former top infectious disease expert. Musk has claimed as recently as January that he is “pro vaccines in general” but that they risk doing more harm than good “if administered to the whole population.”

    Medical experts widely agree that the broad application of vaccines helps prevent the spread of disease not only by making it less likely for an individual to get sick, but also by creating herd immunity at the societal level. In other words, part of the purpose of vaccines is to administer them as universally as possible so that even if one person falls ill, the infection cannot find other suitable hosts nearby.

    For years, Kennedy has pushed back on that consensus, including by invoking Nazi Germany in an anti-vaccine speech in Washington last year. Instagram shut down his account in 2021 for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” though the company announced Sunday it has restored Kennedy’s account because he is now running for office. Instagram’s parent, Meta, has also banned accounts belonging to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine advocacy group.

    Kennedy has also attacked the closing of churches, social distancing and government track-and-trace surveillance. At the start of the pandemic, churches were closed and social distancing was enforced across the country to contain the spread of coronavirus, while the government used methods to track cases. (Musk, for his part, also objected to state lockdown orders earlier in the pandemic.)

    It’s unclear if Musk has reached out to other candidates. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    According to a CNN poll published last month, 60% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters say they back President Joe Biden for the top of next year’s Democratic ticket, 20% favor Kennedy and 8% back Williamson. Another 8% say they would support an unnamed “someone else.”

    With the national profile and visibility that comes with running for high office, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine ideology and vocal stances against prior Covid policies were already primed to become a topic of the 2024 presidential race. But by putting Kennedy center stage on Twitter, Musk appears poised to promote these views further to his millions of followers.

    Musk took a similar tack in sharing a stage with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who announced his White House bid with Musk during a Twitter Spaces event last month plagued by technical glitches. Musk declined to endorse a candidate but has previously tweeted that he would support DeSantis if he ran for president.

    As Twitter’s owner, Musk has shared conspiracy theories and welcomed extreme voices back to the platform who had been suspended for violating Twitter’s rules in the past. He has also laid off more than 80% of Twitter’s staff, including many who had previously been responsible for content moderation.

    All of that, combined now with his direct association with Kennedy, could have significant ramifications both for Twitter as a platform and for Musk’s credibility.

    DeSantis at least has the plausible distinction of being a top challenger to former President Donald Trump. But as a marginal candidate who espouses debunked medical claims, Kennedy and his appearance with Musk could further cement the perception that Twitter actively mainstreams extremism.

    That could be the very thing that drives away more moderate candidates from accepting Musk’s “invitation” to appear alongside him.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Senate votes to end Covid-19 emergency, 3 years after initial declaration | CNN Politics

    Senate votes to end Covid-19 emergency, 3 years after initial declaration | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The Senate on Wednesday passed a bill that would end the national Covid-19 emergency declared by then-President Donald Trump on March 13, 2020.

    The final vote was overwhelmingly bipartisan, 68-23. The joint resolution, which cleared the House earlier this year, now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk.

    The vote comes on the heels of two other successful efforts led by Republicans in approving legislation rescinding Biden administration policies.

    A White House official said in a statement to CNN that while the President “strongly opposes” this bill, the administration is already winding down the emergency by May 11, the date previously announced for the end of the authority.

    Still, the official noted, if the Senate passed the measure and it heads to Biden’s desk, “he will sign it, and the administration will continue working with agencies to wind down the national emergency with as much notice as possible to Americans who could potentially be impacted.”

    The White House said in January that Biden “strongly opposes” the GOP resolution to end the Covid-19 emergency, according to its statement of administration policy, but did not threaten a veto.

    While the lack of an explicit veto threat left the possibility of Biden signing the measure a clear, if not likely, option, Biden’s ultimate decision to sign the bill marked another moment where House Democrats have privately voiced frustration that the lack of clarity – or outright messaging mishap – from the White House left lawmakers in a lurch.

    House Democrats largely voted against the bill when it was brought to the floor in February except for 11 Democrats who joined Republicans in support. A separate White House official noted that the Senate vote comes after several weeks when the Biden administration has had time to accelerate its wind-down efforts – and just a little over a month before they’d announced the emergency would end.

    But it also comes after the administration drew blowback from House Democrats after sending what lawmakers viewed as mixed signals over how the president planned to respond to a Republican-led resolution that would block a controversial Washington, DC, crime bill, which opponents criticized as weak on crime. The president ultimately did not veto the measure.

    The measure was able to succeed in the Senate by a simple majority through the Congressional Review Act, which allows a vote to repeal regulations from the executive branch without breaking a filibuster at a 60-vote threshold that is required for most legislation in the chamber.

    [ad_2]

    Source link