DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus COVID-19: Trump Knew

Someone should punch junior in the neckbeard.

I swear that guy is on drugs no joke. Not by what he says but by how he acts and looks.

Someone? Go for it!

jc

$5,000 find or up to 18 months in jail for going to a friends house. Tell me, whats the point of beating coivd if we end up like north korea?

You can go to a restaurant, hangout with a group of 6-10 people without masks and thats ok. If you go to a friends house and have 6-10 people hanging out in the backyard, social distant with masks, you can go to jail.

Another county put a curfew into place from 10pm - 5am. I wasn't aware that covid only spread during those hours...

Both of these are county level policies. All levels of the government are doing stupid things in regards to covid.

That's why often times voting in local elections may be the most important vote you can make.

Let's face it, we have extremes on both sides. We also have places doing basically nothing as Covid ravages their area and death rates are rising.

We have no moderation in today's society. Common sense dictates that risking spreading a disease and the possibility of someone becoming infected and dying because people refuse to wear a damned mask isn't about their "personal freedom".

That is a consequence of the lack of Federal leadership.
Instead of a single unified message, every State, County, and City is left to create their own from scratch. Some will be good and some will be stupid.

One size fits all is not a good solution. There might be covid where you live, but it is not raging here. So why should my town be subjected to your economic shutdown or curfews.

Not saying it should be one size fits all.

How about if the Federal government used all their resources to come up with a game plan for high, medium, and low affected areas instead of each having to come up with it on their own.

I would rather have local government tailor fit the appropriate policy for my town than the Fedeal Government. The local government is in the best position to know the needs.

One size fits all would never work.

Sadly a viral infection spreads to the entire country, over and over again actually. You sound just like the people is states like the Dakota's, Nebraska and other less populated states who at one time were saying the same thing.

This "Wait until it's my turn" thinking is what's helped get us to where we are now. Yeah, let's wait until corpses are piling up in an area to do anything. How's that working out right now?

Your feelings dont count. I'm glad my local government is making the decisions. They have consistently made the right call.

We all see how well that has worked, or more correctly hasn't worked.

And what's with the harping on one size fits all? No one is saying that.

And again, you and your little bubble.
Even if your little area has been correct so many others have not.

Its worked fine for my state. In fact, my state has gone against all the liberal crybaby agenda. We had our second wave and now we are doing well.
Its not my fault your local government is incompetant.

We'll see. Since neither you nor your local officials are experienced virologists I find none of you are qualified to make such a call.

You were saying this same thing all along. At that point, Georgia was stable. Now their cases are going up again. If it traveled from other states back into your state, how much longer do you think it will be before it travels from other parts of your own stated into your county?

What will happen? Your county will wait until it's too late and has overrun your county before they take actions. that's what happens when people are reactionary rather then preventative.

Sadly your area will be badly effected again by this virus. and an ounce of prevention will be worth a pound of cure. And those aren't "feelings".

__________________________________________________________________

Fall surge feared as Georgia COVID-19 cases rise again

Coronavirus cases are again on the rise in Georgia, sparking fears among some health experts that the expected autumn surge gripping states across the nation has arrived in the Peach State.

The seven-day rolling average of new cases in Georgia has climbed about 42% since bottoming out Oct. 2, and current hospitalizations have started to climb after weeks of improvement, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of state data shows.

In a worrying sign, the latest White House Coronavirus Task Force report, dated Sunday and obtained by the AJC Wednesday, said more than 80% of Georgia hospitals reported having fewer than three days' worth of N95 masks, surgical gowns and gloves.

For now, cases in Georgia remain well below the summer surge that strained the state’s health care infrastructure and led to thousands of deaths. Georgia’s current rate of spread also is not as severe as the outbreaks seen in the Upper Midwest and Northwest.

Georgia started this latest surge in cases at nearly double the level that preceded the summer wave. And health experts said the cooler months ahead could be bleak in Georgia if residents do not heed warnings to wear masks, practice social distancing, wash hands, get a flu shot and avoid gatherings, particularly in poorly ventilated spaces.

“We’re starting off in a bad position,” said Dr. Lynn Paxton, director of the Fulton County Board of Health.

‘Signs of deterioration’

Georgia remained in the orange zone, or the second most severe level, for new cases in the latest White House coronavirus report. The state also remained in the yellow zone for test positivity last week.

Georgia ranked 34th nationally in new cases at 93 per 100,000 people, just under the red zone. The state ranked 29th for test positivity, for the seven days that ended Friday.

But the state’s outbreak is likely worse than the official data because the results of rapid antigen tests are not included in the White House assessment. And an AJC analysis of new confirmed cases over the past seven days shows Georgia would now be in the White House’s red zone for the first time since last month.

The task force warned of “signs of deterioration in the Sunbelt, now including Georgia, as mitigation efforts were decreased over the last month.”

“Georgia must expand mitigation in the counties with rising cases and new hospital admissions,” the task force said. “Mitigation efforts should continue to include mask wearing, physical distancing, hand hygiene, avoiding crowds in public and social gatherings in private, and ensuring flu immunizations.”

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump held a large campaign rally in Macon in violation of Gov. Brian Kemp’s 50-person gathering limit. Trump’s campaign rallies frequently run counter to the advice of his own task force.

Residents have complained of bustling bars, nightclubs and house parties.

A recent AJC survey of law enforcement agencies across the state found few issued any citations for gatherings of more than 50, though many said they issue warnings and attempt to educate homeowners and businesses about COVID-19 restrictions.

The task force also warned of potential viral spread from Halloween parties and said signs remain of “community spread initiated by social friends and family gatherings.”

“People must remember that seemingly uninfected family members and friends may be infected but asymptomatic,” the report said. “Exposure to asymptomatic cases can easily lead to spread as people unmask in private gatherings."

Allison Chamberlain, an epidemiologist and professor who leads the Emory COVID-19 Response Collaborative at Emory University, said as the weather gets cooler, people will do more indoors, posing high risks of transmission. She said indoor Halloween parties, and holiday gatherings such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah and New Year’s, are concerning.

The more that can be done outdoors, she said, the better.

“As people move into the holiday season and we have this innate desire to be around our loved ones we have to keep in mind we are the ones that transmit this virus,” Chamberlain said.

Amber Schmidtke, a public health researcher and former Mercer University professor who tracks Georgia’s epidemic on her widely read blog, said hospitals need to be prepared for a surge.

“We are in a vulnerable position,” she said.

‘Virus fatigue’

On Wednesday, Georgia reported 1,734 net new cases and 34 net new deaths attributed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. To date, the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) has reported 355,025 confirmed cases and 7,876 deaths attributed to the disease.

The state said 1,419 people are currently hospitalized with the coronavirus and the rolling average of current hospitalizations is up nearly 10% in the past two weeks.

Paxton, the Fulton health director, attributed the rise in cases in part to people not following health guidance or consistently wearing masks.

“We’ve got virus fatigue. But the virus does not care,” she said.

Paxton said her agency will distribute 500,000 reusable masks, beginning with giveaways at polling places. The agency is also offering flu shots at most testing centers.

Same day appointments for testing are available and results are typically returned within 48 hours, a vast improvement over the summer when the state’s testing infrastructure was pushed to its breaking point.

On Tuesday, DPH published its latest weekly statewide COVID-19 update. The state reported 123 outbreaks last week, 30 more than a week earlier.

Twenty-five were at schools, 24 were at long-term care homes, 19 were listed as outbreaks in workplaces and five were at detention facilities.

Nancy Nydam, a spokeswoman for DPH, urged Georgians to follow health guidelines and to cooperate with disease detectives known as contact tracers who help isolate exposed individuals to curtail spread.

“We are beginning to see an uptick in COVID testing — testing and contact tracing can help prevent further spread of COVID-19, but we need people to participate in the contact tracing process,” Nydam said.

https://www.ajc.com/news/fall-surge-fear...JMTGGMDWVKOKCQ/

The article I posted states plainly you are not "doing well". But I understand actual evidence means nothing.

For the record, where I live has been doing great. Where I work (about a 25 minute drive) has not. But just because one small local municipality is doing a good job there should be not leadership from the federal government because of course since your area is doing fine well the rest of the country must be just as competent. Got it.

I can look at our chart and see Georgia is doing good. Its been going up a little bit. Maybe you missed the part of your article that says Georgia is 34th in new cases. So, as good as we are doing, there are other states doing even better.

But by all means keep making trash posts about how the sky is falling.

Your one size fits all solution will never work, and the absolute last thing I want is the Feds trying to make decisions for my town. This is why we elect local 0fficials. If your local officials suck then elect someone new.

Providing leadership and guidance is not the same thing as one size fits all.
Just because you keep saying it over and over does not make it so.

I gave you facts. You don't like facts so you throw back trash. In Georgia the cases are rising twice as fast as they were during your first wave. So keep ignoring that and throwing trash. At this point that's all you got.

Stanford Study Links Trump Rallies to 700 COVID-19 Deaths

Eighteen Trump rallies may have led to more than 700 COVID-19 deaths, including among people who did not attend the rallies, according to a new working paper from Stanford University researchers.

While Joe Biden has tailored his presidential campaign toward smaller, more socially distanced events during the pandemic, President Donald Trump has made a selling point of his packed rallies, where mask use is often scarce. The Stanford paper studied 18 Trump rallies this year, and linked them to a significant spike in COVID-19 cases—approximately 30,000—in surrounding counties.

The paper, from the school’s economics department, has not been peer reviewed, leading epidemiologists to raise some caveats about its findings. However, one such infectious disease expert told The Daily Beast that the study’s broader findings do suggest a post-Trump COVID bump, and further illustrate the effect of wearing a mask.

The study’s authors wrote that their findings affirmed previous warnings about large gatherings.

“Our analysis strongly supports the warnings and recommendations of public health officials concerning the risk of COVID-19 transmission at large group gatherings, particularly when the degree of compliance with guidelines concerning the use of masks and social distancing is low,” they wrote. “The communities in which Trump rallies took place paid a high price in terms of disease and death.”

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, an infectious diseases expert at UCLA who was not involved with the study, said it “does indeed raise the possibility that these outdoor rallies increased the incidence of COVID in counties where they occurred.”

Klausner raised several caveats, noting that the study’s authors had not individually counted deaths, but looked at post-rally COVID surges, applied COVID death rates in the affected counties and predicted the number of deaths that had resulted from the rallies. The method meant researchers could not control for certain demographic factors, like the age of the affected people, he said. (Old age appears to be a significant factor in COVID death rates.)

Other epidemiologists, like Michael Mina of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, also urged caution in extrapolating too much from the study.

“There are better ways to look at this data through actual infectious disease epidemic lenses,” Mina told Politico. “It offers a data point, but nothing I would want to draw any strong conclusions from. It is also so overtly political that it makes it hard to distinguish if there were decisions made out of perhaps unrecognized bias.”

Klausner and another epidemiologist who spoke to Politico said the study’s methods seemed generally sound, if a little speculative.

Fifteen of the 18 Trump rallies (held from June to September across multiple states) were held outside. COVID-19 research has suggested outdoor events with good ventilation are safer than indoor events with poor air circulation. Despite that, the researchers recorded a notable uptick in COVID-19 cases in surrounding areas after the rallies. Meanwhile, similar studies on outdoor Black Lives Matter rallies this summer did not find a notable outbreak among protest participants.

The difference might have been mask use, Klausner noted.

Although Black Lives Matter rallies “had crowding, a lot of people yelling, and other attributes we associate with COVID, you had a much higher percentage of mask-wearing,” compared to Trump rallies where fewer people were photographed in protective gear, he noted.

“Lack of masks may have been the key difference between Black Lives Matter rallies and Trump rallies,” Klausner said.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/stanford-study-links-trump-rallies-to-700-covid-19-deaths?ref=scroll

‘A whole lot of hurt’: Fauci warns of covid-19 surge, offers blunt assessment of Trump’s response

By
Josh Dawsey and
Yasmeen Abutaleb
Oct. 31, 2020 at 7:00 p.m. EDT


President Trump’s repeated assertions the United States is “rounding the turn” on the novel coronavirus have increasingly alarmed the government's top health experts, who say the country is heading into a long and potentially deadly winter with an unprepared government unwilling to make tough choices.


“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation,” Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious-disease expert, said in a wide-ranging interview late Friday. “All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”

Fauci, a leading member of the government’s coronavirus response, said the United States needed to make an “abrupt change” in public health practices and behaviors. He said the country could surpass 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day and predicted rising deaths in the coming weeks. He spoke as the nation set a new daily record Friday with more than 98,000 cases. As hospitalizations increase, deaths are also ticking up, with more than 1,000 reported Wednesday and Thursday, bringing the total to more than 230,000 since the start of the pandemic, according to health data analyzed by The Washington Post.


Some voters said the coronavirus pandemic was their top concern as President Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden made final 2010 campaign stops. (Reuters)
Fauci’s blunt warnings come as Trump has rallied in states and cities experiencing record surges in infections and hospitalizations in a last-ditch effort to convince voters he has successfully managed the pandemic. He has held maskless rallies with thousands of supporters, often in violation of local health mandates.

Even as new infections climb in 42 states, Trump has downplayed the virus or mocked those who take it seriously. “Covid-19, covid, covid, covid,” he said during one event, lamenting that the news media gives it too much attention. In another rally, he baselessly said that U.S. doctors record more deaths from covid-19, the disease the coronavirus causes, than other nations because they get more money.

“I mean our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say, ‘I’m sorry but everybody dies of covid,’ ” Trump said Friday at a rally in Waterford Township, Mich., without offering any evidence.


Since the start of the coronavirus outbreak, President Trump has repeatedly said that the virus will disappear. (Video: JM Rieger/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By contrast, former vice president Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris have consistently worn masks in public, and have held socially distanced events. When two people around Harris tested positive for the coronavirus in October, she canceled all travel for several days. Asked about the difference between their approaches, Fauci said Biden’s campaign “is taking it seriously from a public health perspective.” Trump, Fauci said, is “looking at it from a different perspective.” He said that perspective was “the economy and reopening the country.”



Fauci, who once took a starring role in the response and briefed the president almost every day as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described a disjointed response as cases surge. Several current and former senior administration officials said the White House is almost entirely focused on a vaccine, even though experts warn it is unlikely to be a silver bullet that ends the pandemic immediately since it will take months under the best of circumstances to inoculate tens of millions of people to achieve herd immunity.

Officials told governors on a call Friday that they hoped to begin distributing a vaccine by the end of the year, giving some specific guidance on how states would receive their first doses. Fauci focused on the rise in cases, according to people familiar with the call.



Fauci said the White House coronavirus task force meets less frequently and has far less influence as the president and his top advisers have focused on reopening the country. “Right now, the public health aspect of the task force has diminished greatly,” he said.

Fauci said he and Deborah Birx, coronavirus task force coordinator, no longer have regular access to the president and he has not spoken to Trump since early October. “The last time I spoke to the president was not about any policy; it was when he was recovering in Walter Reed, he called me up,” he said. Fauci said he phones into meetings of other staffers but largely avoids the West Wing because “of all the infections there.”

He also lamented that Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist and Trump’s favored pandemic adviser, who advocates letting the virus spread among young healthy people and reopening the country without restrictions, is the only medical adviser the president regularly meets with.


“I have real problems with that guy,” Fauci said of Atlas. “He’s a smart guy who’s talking about things that I believe he doesn’t have any real insight or knowledge or experience in. He keeps talking about things that when you dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn’t make any sense.”

Fauci said he actually appreciated chief of staff Mark Meadows saying last weekend on CNN that the administration was not going to control the pandemic. “I tip my hat to him for admitting the strategy,” he said. “He is straightforward in telling you what’s on his mind. I commend him for that.”

At one point during the interview, Fauci said he needed to be careful with his words because he would be blocked from doing appearances in the future.

Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, offered blistering criticism of Fauci for his comments in a statement to The Washington Post on Saturday. Deere said Fauci “knows the risks [from the coronavirus] today are dramatically lower than they were only a few months ago.”



“It’s unacceptable and breaking with all norms for Dr. Fauci, a senior member of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force and someone who has praised President Trump’s actions throughout this pandemic, to choose three days before an election to play politics,” Deere said. “As a member of the Task Force, Dr. Fauci has a duty to express concerns or push for a change in strategy, but he’s not done that, instead choosing to criticize the President in the media and make his political leanings known by praising the President’s opponent — exactly what the American people have come to expect from The Swamp.”

Deere added that the president “always put the well-being of the American people first,” citing his decision to cut off travel from China, his early shutdown of the country and his mobilization of the private sector to deliver critical supplies and develop treatments and vaccines.

Fauci’s candid warnings about the threat of the virus have angered the president, who has mocked the scientist for his prognostications early in the outbreak — for instance, saying that masks were not necessary — and even for his baseball pitch. “People are tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots, all these idiots who got it wrong,” Trump said during one rally in October.



Some White House advisers have been leery of a public fight with Fauci — knowing his popularity is higher than that of the president. But they’ve also grown frustrated by his media appearances and complain he is too focused on his personal reputation and is “not on the team,” said one senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. The doctor has become loathed among many Trump supporters, and Fauci has told others that he has experienced a surge in harassment and threats.

White House spokespeople did not offer comments from either Atlas or Birx despite being asked several times.


Several senior administration officials and outside advisers described a White House overwhelmed by the pandemic, with a feeling of helplessness over the inability to curb its spread without also throttling the economy or damaging the president’s reelection chances.



“People need to take a step back and be humble about this,” said Joe Grogan, the former head of the domestic policy council under Trump. “Nobody, regardless of political party or ideology, should be getting arrogant about how they have this figured out.”

However, the campaign trail message that life is returning to normal underscores how little the president and White House have focused on the pandemic beyond pushing for development and approvals of vaccines and treatments. With the clearance of a vaccine unlikely until year’s end, that raises questions about what happens after Election Day, during what is projected to be the worst stretch yet of the pandemic. The Trump administration will be in charge of managing the pandemic until at least Jan. 20, no matter who wins.

“We need to plan now for how we turn the corner in 2021, and one thing we should be doing is laying the foundation to get public schools reopened in the late winter or early spring,” said Trump’s former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Scott Gottlieb. “If we don’t plan now, we’ll lose the opportunity to prioritize opening what should be most important to us, just as we lost that chance in the fall because we didn’t plan appropriately this summer.”



Without the ear of the president or other top White House officials, Fauci and other health experts believe the most effective thing they can do is get the public health message out through local and national television media interviews. Birx, the coronavirus coordinator, has traveled across the country in recent weeks delivering blunt advice to state and local leaders grappling with surges of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

“The thing we can do is to try to get the message out,” Fauci said.

Earlier in the pandemic, Fauci said he and Birx would agree on a message that Birx, who works out of the White House and once met with the president almost every day, would deliver to Trump.

“All of a sudden, they didn’t like what the message was because it wasn’t what they wanted to do anymore,” he said. “They needed to have a medical message that was essentially consistent with what they were saying.

“And one of the ways to say the outbreak is over is [to say] it’s really irrelevant because it doesn’t make any difference. All you need to do is prevent people from dying and protect people in places like the nursing homes,” Fauci said. “And because of that, Debbie almost never ever sees the president anymore. The only medical person who sees the president on a regular basis is Scott Atlas. It’s certainly not Debbie Birx.”

Although Trump, Atlas and other top officials say their strategy is to “protect the vulnerable,” health experts say the administration has not done enough to protect those in nursing homes. The administration has sent tests to nursing homes and other hard-hit communities, but not nearly the number that experts say are needed. Many nursing homes are also experiencing shortages of personal protective equipment, personnel and other critical supplies that the administration has not sufficiently addressed.

While Atlas has publicly rebutted assertions that he promotes a herd immunity strategy, he recently endorsed the Great Barrington Declaration — a document named after the town in Massachusetts where it was unveiled on Oct. 4 at a libertarian think tank — that calls for allowing the coronavirus to spread freely at “natural” rates among healthy young people, while keeping most aspects of the economy up and running.

“He insists he’s not somebody who’s pushing for herd immunity,” Fauci said of Atlas. “He says, ‘That’s not what I mean.’ [But] everything he says — when you put them together and stitch them together — everything is geared toward the concept of ‘it doesn’t make any difference if people get infected. It’s a waste of time. Masks don’t work. Who cares,’ and the only thing you need to do is protect the vulnerable, like people in the nursing homes,” Fauci said.

Fauci said that many people who catch the virus recover “virologically” but will have chronic health problems.

“The idea of this false narrative that if you don’t die, everything is hunky dory is just not the case,” he said. “But to say, ‘Let people get infected, it doesn’t matter, just make sure people don’t die’ — to me as a person who’s been practicing medicine for 50 years, it doesn’t make any sense at all.”

A similar assessment was offered by Tom Bossert, the former homeland security adviser in the Trump administration. “It sounds alluring,” Bossert said. “It sounds so seductive. It’s not possible. Math makes it irresponsible to even try and say it.”

Fauci and other top health experts applauded the substantial growth in expertise about how to treat covid-19 since last spring that has led to a dramatic reduction in death rates.

“Even though we’re getting challenged with more cases,” he said, “the medical system is much better prepared to take care of seriously ill people, so that’s the reason why I think the surge of cases is going to be counterbalanced by better experience.”

Nonetheless, he and others said they are worried about regions of the country that may be ill-prepared to deal with a winter surge of infections, including Midwestern and Western states because they have limited intensive care beds, as well as nurses who can treat growing numbers of covid-19 patients.

“It’s much more about some of the states like Utah, Nevada, South Dakota, North Dakota, where … they never had a pretty good reserve of intensive care beds and things like that. I hope they’ll be okay, but it’s still a risk that, as you get more surging, they’re going to run out of capacity,” Fauci said.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/01/politics/donald-trump-anthony-fauci-2020-campaign/index.html

He reminds me of the crazy eyed preacher man that will justify anything to get you to send in your cash (or vote as the case may be).

Who, Biden?

And there you have it, we are expected to rely on the common sense of trump and his GOP leadership as long as they hold control.

Yeah, he's the one who acts like a cult leader. Telling the FBI that his supporters trying to run someone off the road did nothing wrong and are patriots. Who says the DOJ should arrest his opponents. You don't actually pay attention do you?

Are you talking about the black truck or the white SUV?

I'm talking about the black truck intentionally hitting the white SUV. Twice.

So the black truck hit the white SUV while maintaining its lane? The camera panned away, but when it snapped back, the white SUV was well into the black truck's lane.

So you can't see that the black truck turned into the white SUV not once, but twice? You can argue that the white SUV encroached on the black trucks lane. That much seems obvious.

What you would then have to do is explain how ramming that vehicle twice was the proper response. It's not and you know that.

Trump admin funds plasma company based in owner's condo

An Associated Press investigation has found that the Trump administration awarded emergency coronavirus funds to a well-connected Republican donor's company to test a possible COVID-19-fighting blood plasma technology

WASHINGTON -- When the Trump administration gave a well-connected Republican donor seed money to test a possible COVID-19-fighting blood plasma technology, it noted the company’s “manufacturing facilities” in Charleston, South Carolina.

Plasma Technologies LLC is indeed based in the stately waterfront city. But there are no manufacturing facilities. Instead, the company exists within the luxury condo of its majority owner, Eugene Zurlo.

Zurlo's company may be in line for as much as $65 million in taxpayer dollars; enough to start building an actual production plant, according to internal government records and other documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The story of how a tiny business that exists only on paper has managed to snare attention from the highest reaches of the U.S. military and government is emblematic of the Trump administration’s frenetic response to the coronavirus pandemic.

It's also another in a series of contracts awarded to people with close political ties to key officials despite concerns voiced by government scientists. Among the others: an ill-conceived $21 million study of Pepcid as a COVID therapy and more than a half billion dollars to ApiJect Systems America, a startup with an unapproved medicine injection technology and no factory to manufacture the devices.

In addition, a government whistleblower claimed that a $1.6 billion vaccine contract to Novavax Inc. was made over objections of scientific staff.

At the center of these deals is Dr. Robert Kadlec, a senior Trump appointee at the Department of the Health and Human Services who backed the Pepcid, Novavax and ApiJect projects. Records obtained by the AP also describe Kadlec as a key supporter of Zurlo’s company.

In one government email obtained by the AP, an official said Kadlec, whose job as assistant secretary for preparedness and response is to help guide the nation through public health emergencies, was “all in” on Plasma Technologies.

This was the case despite misgivings from the scientists he oversees. One of them said the company would be just another “mouth to feed” that would distract from other important work on the pandemic. An HHS spokesperson said Kadlec “does not have a role in technical review of proposals nor in negotiating contracts.”

Kadlec has come under pressure from the White House to act with more urgency and not be bound by lower-level officials whom Trump has castigated as the “deep state” and accused of politically motivated delays in fielding COVID-19 vaccines and remedies. This pressure has led to investments in numerous untested companies.

The AP reached out to more than a dozen blood plasma industry leaders and medical experts. Few had heard of Zurlo’s company or its technology, and would not comment.

Zurlo, the company’s founder and a former pharmaceutical industry executive, told the AP in an email that the renewed interest in his company is being driven by COVID and other diseases.

“It is increasingly clear that the collection of adequate supplies of plasma is not possible; the answer being the adoption of new process technology that fully utilizes the scarce plasma currently available,” he said.

But whether Zurlo’s technology, which claims to increase the amount of disease-fighting plasma harvested from human blood, will be an improvement over other methods is still anyone’s guess.

A FORMER SENATOR ON BOARD

Top government officials began to take notice of Plasma Technologies after Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania and two-time presidential candidate, became part-owner, according to the records and AP interviews.

After Congress supplied hundreds of billions of dollars to combat the pandemic, Santorum stepped up his sales pitch for the company’s method of turning human plasma into a therapeutic product — a process the company has described as a game changer. In mid-August, the federal government awarded Plasma Technologies a $750,000 grant to demonstrate that it could deliver on its promises.

Santorum, who’s held no elective office since 2007, remains influential among social conservatives, a key part of President Donald Trump’s political base. Santorum has extolled the president’s handling of the pandemic on national television in his job as a CNN commentator, arguing that the nation’s response would have been worse under a Democratic administration.

Trump "didn’t botch it,” Santorum said recently in response to charges that the president had done a poor job leading the country through COVID-19. “I mean you guys keep blaming Trump. This is a local decision.”

HHS would not comment when asked whether Santorum’s public backing of the president led to a company he has a financial stake in getting a government contract.

Zurlo has deep ties to the Republican Party. He has contributed thousands of dollars to Santorum’s campaigns and to other GOP campaigns and political action committees. He entertained Santorum and his family at the mansion Zurlo used to own on Kiawah Island, an exclusive golf resort in South Carolina. They would play golf during the day and enjoy evenings overlooking the Atlantic, according to Michel “Mitch” LaPlante, a former business associate of Zurlo’s who attended several dinners with Santorum and Zurlo.

The business relationship between Zurlo and LaPlante turned ugly after those days of hobnobbing on Kiawah. A real estate deal they had invested in together fell into foreclosure, leading to a suit seeking more than $700 million by their mortgage lender. Each man sued the other for fraud and severed their business ties acrimoniously.

Zurlo founded Plasma Technologies in 2003, according to articles of organization and other records filed with South Carolina’s secretary of state. The company’s most recently listed address is Zurlo’s condominium in Charleston’s French Quarter.

The company has no other presence in South Carolina — or any other state — even though a U.S. government spokeswoman told the AP that Plasma Technologies has “manufacturing facilities” in Charleston.

“Fairy tale,” LaPlante said when asked if Plasma Technologies operates any commercial space in South Carolina’s most populous city.

OUTSIDE, LOOKING IN

Granting tens of millions of dollars to Plasma Technologies would track with Trump’s support for treating COVID-19 patients with convalescent plasma. Plasma, the yellowish liquid part of blood, harbors various antibodies, the soldiers of the body’s immune response that can target specific intruders such as viruses. Studies are underway to see if plasma taken from people who have recently recovered from COVID-19 can help those newly diagnosed fight the infection.

Zurlo has spent years trying to break into a sector of the pharmaceutical industry that manufactures therapies using antibodies called immunoglobulins, which are taken from healthy people to treat immune disorders. But routine immunoglobulin treatments are only one part of the field.

During the pandemic, many plasma companies are focusing on “hyperimmune globulin,” a therapy that pools and purifies plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients. The result is a powerful “potential global treatment for people at risk for serious complications from COVID-19,” according to the CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance, an industry group that includes the world’s largest plasma companies. Hyperimmune globulin produced by several companies is being tested in new COVID-19 patients.

The process for making these plasma-based therapies is called fractionation, and Plasma Technologies markets its approach as a “disruptive and transformative” technology that makes for a more potent product, according to the records. A document prepared by Plasma Technologies in late May that outlines the company’s business strategy is focused on how much better its method is than a World War II-era process named for its developer, Edwin Cohn.

Dr. Jeff Henderson, an infectious disease specialist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said it is very likely that many companies have already developed improvements over the decades-old “Cohn” method. They just don’t discuss them publicly because they are trade secrets.

“There may be 50 technologies in use that are an improvement over Cohn fractionation,” Henderson said.

But Santorum described the plasma fractionation industry as more interested in keeping shareholders happy than adopting new technologies that would require expensive modifications to their manufacturing lines.

“You’ve got companies that are doing really well and don’t want to change anything,” Santorum said in an interview with the AP.

“We’re the little guy trying to fight City Hall.”

Plasma Technologies seemed to be on its way in 2014. The company had licensed its system to Dallas-based Access Pharmaceuticals, according to financial records filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

One filing described Zurlo as a trailblazer whose technology would “fundamentally change the economics of plasma fractionation.” Under the terms of the licensing agreement, Plasma Technologies was to be paid $1 million in cash with an additional $4 million in cash or stock to come.

But three years later, the agreement ended abruptly, according to the SEC records.

Now named Abeona Therapeutics, the company was grappling with crushing deficits — $346 million in June 2017. It’s unclear whether any of that red ink was due to the deal with Plasma Technologies. But by the end of 2017, “the agreement was terminated and the technology was returned” to Zurlo’s company, according to an Abeona SEC filing.

A spokesman for Abeona Therapeutics declined to comment on the licensing agreement with Plasma Technologies.

Santorum blamed the deal’s demise on onerous regulatory hurdles imposed by the Food and Drug Administration to ensure patient safety.

“They basically killed the product,” he said.

Santorum rejected any suggestion that Zurlo’s innovation is unproven, even though his company has never made an FDA-approved product. Plasma Technologies, he declared, is on the verge of transforming the industry, and for a fraction of the cost to develop a coronavirus vaccine.

“I’m just telling you, it’s gonna happen,” Santorum said.

A LINE IN

Zurlo brought Santorum aboard after the agreement with Abeona fell through. “We’ve got an FDA problem. Can you help me?” Santorum recalled Zurlo telling him.

Zurlo’s close relationship to Santorum offered a direct line into the FDA. The former senator had built a connection with Dr. Peter Marks, a senior FDA official, according to the documents obtained by AP.

In September 2019, Marks introduced Santorum at an FDA workshop held to explore the development of therapies for a rare disease. Santorum told the group about his youngest child, who was born with a life-threatening condition known as Trisomy 18, according to a transcript. Immunoglobulin treatments had saved her life, he told the audience.

Santorum’s personal story about his child’s illness was intertwined with a promotion of Plasma Technologies. Santorum said Zurlo, whom he called “a good friend,” had invented a groundbreaking technology for better plasma-based therapies to help his child and others.

Santorum credited Marks, director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, for pledging to remove barriers that have kept Plasma Technologies on the outside, looking in. “All I’m saying is, we have an opportunity because of Dr. Marks and what he has laid forward,” Santorum said at the workshop.

The former senator told the AP it would have been a “crime” if he hadn’t used his influence to get Plasma Technologies recognized.

“Shame on me if I hadn’t,” he said.

A SMALL SHAREHOLDER

In mid-April, a few weeks after Trump declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, Santorum described Marks as an enthusiastic backer of Plasma Technologies, according to an email routed to multiple officials in the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, an HHS office Kadlec oversees.

Calling himself a “small shareholder” in Plasma Technologies, Santorum wrote, “Dr. Marks said I should communicate to you that he is ‘excited about this process and looks forward to working with us to get our process adopted by the industry.’”

The FDA declined a request to interview Marks and also declined to answer questions about whether he’s been helping Plasma Technologies secure a commercial foothold.

“Dr. Marks’ enthusiastic nature should not be mistaken for support for any specific product or technology," FDA spokeswoman Stephanie Caccomo said.

Federal ethics rules ban government employees from giving preferential treatment to any private organization or individual, according to Scott Amey, general counsel at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight.

“Public trust in government decisions and a level playing field is essential to good government, so this situation deserves a look,” Amey said.

Santorum confirmed that he communicated directly with Kadlec, whom he described as “very supportive” of Plasma Technologies.

But Santorum’s initial pitch at HHS failed to gain traction among the agency’s scientists, who didn’t see Zurlo’s technology as worthy of millions in emergency pandemic funding, according to the emails and Rick Bright, the former BARDA director. They were focused on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments that could be delivered quickly, and saw the Plasma Technologies project as a longer-term effort.

“They were not excited,” recalled Bright, a vaccine expert who’s been sharply critical of Kadlec’s tenure at HHS. “They did not jump all over this and say, ‘We’ve got to get this going right away.’”

Bright filed a whistleblower complaint in May that alleges the Trump administration failed to prepare for the onslaught of the coronavirus.

With HHS scientists unconvinced, Plasma Technologies submitted a proposal dated May 28 to the Defense Department, which also is heavily engaged in the government’s COVID-19 response.

The detailed proposal, obtained by the AP, sought $51.6 million to build a plasma fractionation facility in Atlanta or Raleigh, North Carolina.

With a military audience in mind, the proposal emphasizes the national security implications of the coronavirus pandemic, stressing the need to churn out sufficient doses of antibody-rich hyperimmune globulin “to bolster force health protection for members of our military who are at especially high risk of infection, or whose performance is critical to national security and safety.” The proposal adds these plasma-derived proteins can be used as a treatment for viral infections until a vaccine is available.

The pitch fell flat. At first.

ANOTHER MOUTH TO FEED

In a June 12 email to HHS scientists, Army Lt. Col. Kara Schmid wrote that the price tag for Plasma Technologies was too high, even for the Pentagon, and that key parts of the company’s proposal were too vague.

“I’m just unclear if it has $50M worth of value,” Schmid wrote, adding she was “lukewarm at this point.”

Brian Tse, a BARDA health scientist, told Schmid that his office had passed on Plasma Technologies. With no production facility, Zurlo’s company intended to get COVID-19 patient plasma from blood donation centers that were already under heavy stress because of the pandemic.

“I believe that adding one additional ‘mouth to feed’ to the same source is more likely to induce delays to the projects already underway than it is to solve problems,” Tse wrote.

Despite the doubts, Kadlec didn’t lose interest in Plasma Technologies, according to the emails. “Dr. Kadlec has specifically asked us to take a closer look,” an early July message read.

Over the rest of July, the messages among his staff expressed misgivings about Zurlo’s technology, yet the company remained in play.

Several days later, an HHS contracting officer rejected the idea that Plasma Technologies might partner with one of the plasma companies that the government was already working with.

“The connection is not viable from a contractual standpoint,” the officer wrote in a July 16 email.

Still, a week later, Plasma Technologies had a champion at the Pentagon.

Santorum said he was contacted by Steven Morani, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for materiel readiness. Defense Department officials were drawn to the idea of a U.S.-owned and operated fractionation facility, according to Santorum.

It’s not clear what changed, but messages from late July show Morani and other defense officials had conferred and would support the Plasma Technologies project. An initial $750,000 in emergency coronavirus spending would be used to prove the concept, a move backed by HHS, with as much as $65 million in government money to come later to build a commercial facility and to purchase plasma and other materials, according to the emails. That’s more even than Plasma Technologies requested.

The messages don’t say where that money would come from or why the additional $13.4 million is required.

Morani referred AP’s emailed questions about the company and the contract to a Defense Department spokeswoman, Jessica Maxwell, who declined to discuss future funding for Plasma Technologies.

“The $750,000 is currently the total amount of government funding planned for the effort,” Maxwell said.

Santorum, who criticized a reporter for writing what he termed a “political hit piece,” said Zurlo intends to donate any profits Plasma Technologies generates to charities that support the mission of the Catholic Church.

But Santorum had different plans for any returns on his investment.

“I have made no such claims as a father of seven who has three weddings this year,” he said. “If any money were to come, I would welcome that money to help pay my bills.”

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/trump-admin-funds-plasma-company-based-owners-condo-73954807

I saw that he turned into the white SUV at the very end. Didn't see the first time, but arch gave a synopsis on all of the poor driving going on in that clip.

What I'm taking issue with is the characterization that there were certain cars intentionally ramming. I see a whole lot of distracted and reactionary driving, without much intent.

Man I’m starting to think we got some racist truck people in here.

Well you've had people stanning for Andy Ngo all summer, a bunch of white people telling you all summer on the right way to protest, countless articles from the dailystormer and Breitbart, and others going on about an impending civil war.

You may be on to something here.

I wonder if Q will grace us with his presence here shortly?

Who's Q?

The leader(s) of QAnon. They're a group who believe that Hillary, Biden, and other prominent Dems are running a global pedophile cabal. They also believe the cabal are Satan worshippers who are consuming bodily fluids of their victims to reach immortality. The Q group has been behind the "this was a planned pandemic with a manufactured virus" rhetoric, too. They're the most ardent anti-maskers, too.

This group believes JFK Jr. faked his death in the plane to fight this group. They believe Donald Trump is now the main agent to take down this cabal. The group has unfortunately tried to co-opt child trafficking narratives to support their conspiracy.

I'm glad you're not part of them, arch. Be aware of those in your circle who start saying some of that nonsense. Stay away from it.

Thanks.

Where do you get this stuff?

And why would Q post on here?

I'm a fairly savvy guy, much to the chagrin of 2 posters.