People are falling ill with COVID again. What to know about boosters, testing and masks
Michelle Marchante – August 26, 2023
D.A. Varela/dvarela@miamiherald.com
Are you feeling sick?
COVID-19 is going around again, and hospitalizations are on the rise, including in Florida, though its much lower then this time last year.
And while no one seems to wear masks or worries about social distancing anymore, a new COVID-19 vaccine booster is slated to roll out this fall to better protect people against new circulating strains.
Here’s what to know as we move into fall:
What’s the COVID situation in Florida? What about in Miami-Dade, Broward, the Keys and Palm Beach County?
COVID-19 hospitalizations in the country have ticked up again, with 12,613 new admissions the week ending Aug. 12, an increase of 21.6% from the prior week, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency says Florida saw 1,871 new admissions in the week ending Aug. 12, an increase of 11.6% from the prior week.
Current hospitalization numbers in the U.S. are “about three times lower than the same time last year and about six times lower than in 2021, according to the CDC,” ABC News reports.
The CDC is using COVID hospitalization admissions to determine whether a county is considered to have a low, medium or high COVID risk level. As of Friday, much of Florida is considered to be low risk, including Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe counties. Some parts of the state, including Sarasota and Palm Beach counties, are considered to have a medium COVID risk level.
People considered to be at high risk for COVID should wear a high-quality mask or respirator, such as an N95 mask, in indoor public settings if they live in or are visiting a medium risk county, according to the CDC. The federal agency says anyone who lives with or is in contact with high-risk people should also self-test for COVID before seeing them, and also consider masking up when indoors with them.
The CDC is also recommending everyone, regardless of their county’s risk level, stay up to date on vaccinations and avoid contact with people who are suspected or confirmed to have COVID-19. And if you test positive for COVID, quarantine. The agency is also recommending that people considered to be high risk for the disease speak with their doctor about precautions.
For Aarti Raja, a professor and virology expert in the department of biological sciences at Nova Southeastern University’s Halmost College of Arts and Sciences, the increase of COVID hospitalizations in the country is likely due to the time of the year, with lots of summer travel, along with the arrival of several new strains.
And while Raja said there’s some concern with how the country will handle the possibility of another “trifecta” of flu, COVID and RSV circulating in the fall, she said the U.S. is better prepared with COVID vaccines and boosters, influenza vaccines and new RSV vaccines and monoclonal antibodies.
What’s the dominant COVID strain in Florida? Common symptoms?
EG.5, also known as Eris, is the dominant COVID-19 strain in the U.S., including in Florida, and is a descendant of the omicron variant, according to the CDC. The CDC estimates that Eris makes up about 20.6% of cases in the country.
Common symptoms are similar to other omicron strains and include a runny nose, sore throat and other cold-like symptoms. Raja said that Paxlovid, the oral antiviral medication used to treat COVID in certain patients, should still work.
When will the new COVID booster come out?
A new COVID-19 booster, formulated to provide protection against the XBB lineage of the omicron variant, such as XBB.1.5, is expected to be available this fall, possibly in September or October.
Newer subvariants have emerged since manufacturers began working on the boosters, including EG.5. However, these strains are so closely related, the updated vaccine should provide some protection against them, according to Raja.
Both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the CDC will need to give the OK to the updated booster before it becomes available.
“The best way to think of it is a lot like the flu vaccine, where, yes, you may have gotten the flu vaccine last year and the year before, but you kind of have to get the updated one to cover for the most prevalent strain that is floating around in the population,” Raja said.
COVID-19 testing options?
Raja said most COVID tests should still be able to detect if someone is ill with COVID, regardless of the new circulating variants. However, it won’t be as easy to get tested. Popular South Florida COVID-19 test sites, like the one at Tropical Park, no longer exist. If you want to get tested, check with pharmacies such as CVS and Walgreens and other healthcare providers for options.
Keep in mind that since the federal COVID emergency ended in May, insurers are no longer required to cover COVID-19 testing, including at-home test kits and PCR testing. Check with your insurance to see if it will cover part or all of your COVID testing costs, and if there are any restrictions, such as requiring the test to be done with an in-network provider.
If you have expired at-home tests, check the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s website to see if the tests expiration date has been extended.
Should you wear a mask again with COVID on the rise?
While some schools and businesses in the country recently reinstated mask mandates, the face coverings have mostly become a pandemic relic.
However, Raja said those who are considered to be high risk for severe disease, such as seniors and those who are immunocompromised, might want to consider wearing a mask if they live or are traveling to an area that has begun to see more COVID circulating. It depends on your risk factor and current situation.
“People 65-plus and people who are immunocompromised should strongly consider masking during flu, RSV, COVID season while in indoor public spaces,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, a CBS News medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News, told CBS News. “And for everyone else — it all depends on what their risk tolerance is.”
And while the COVID alphabet soup will likely continue as newer variants appear, Raja said “we just have to be smart about it, realize and acknowledge this is out there and take the precautions necessary.”
“If we have the means and mechanisms in place to protect ourselves, we should protect ourselves and start maybe getting used to the idea that this likely will resemble flu, not resemble the flu virus and what it does, but more in how we take precautions against it,” Raja said. “Just like how we think of the flu as a seasonal issue, we’re going to have to start thinking about COVID more along those lines.”
Forget Covid, Las Vegas Strip faces a new health issue
Since the covid pandemic, Las Vegas has struggled with RSV, bed bugs, and multiple other health issues.
Daniel Kline – August 26, 2023
Las Vegas collects the health problems of the world: If there’s an infectious disease, someone brings it to Sin City.
That’s partly why in the early days of the covid pandemic some of the first super-spreader events took place at Las Vegas-based conventions.
You can’t blame that on anything that the city has done, or not done. If you put a lot of people in close proximity and even one of them has a highly contagious disease, then it will spread quickly.
What happened in Las Vegas also happened at theme parks, on cruise ships, and anyplace else where people gathered in mass. Since covid, however, the Las Vegas Strip has been plagued with a number of other significant health issues.
RSV threatened to overwhelm area hospitals, a deadly fungus proved difficult for doctors to cure, and numerous Las Vegas Strip properties were plagued by bedbugs. People may say “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” but in recent months a visit to the Strip increasingly might mean bringing home an unhealthy souvenir.
That bad luck is apparently continuing as Southern Nevada Health District is investigating multiple instances of a highly communicable disease on the Las Vegas Strip.
Caesars Palace is Caesars Entertainment’s premiere property. Image Source: Shutterstock.
Caesars Palace has a Legionnaires’ disease problem
“Legionnaires’ disease is a serious type of pneumonia (lung infection) caused by Legionella (LEE-juh-nell-a) bacteria,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “People can get sick when they breathe in small droplets of water or accidentally swallow water containing Legionella into the lungs.”
The Southern Nevada Health District is investigating two travel-associated cases of Legionnaires’ disease in guests who stayed at Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino.
“Two individuals who have been diagnosed with Legionnaires’ disease stayed at Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino within the last 12 months. Environmental samples taken from the property tested positive for Legionella,” according to a health-district news release.
Caesars Entertainment (CZR) – Get Free Report has been cooperating with the investigation. Subsequent tests of the Caesars Palace water system did not detect Legionellabacteria.
For those who might have contracted Legionnaires’ disease: The symptoms generally begin to appear between two and 10 days after you were infected.
“People should watch for symptoms such as cough, shortness of breath, fever, muscle aches, and headaches for up to two weeks after exposure,” according to the Southern Nevada Health District.
The Las Vegas Strip heads into a huge stretch
While Las Vegas has fully recovered from the covid pandemic, it remains vulnerable to health concerns that cause people to stay away. We saw that during the Consumer Electronics Show 2022, when the omicron variant of covid caused most major companies to pull out of the convention.
In that period vaccines already were common and Las Vegas’s hospitals had plenty of capacity. The issue was not the dangers covid presented but rather the optics of companies sending employees into a city where — despite testing, vaccine requirements, and mask protocols — the risks of infection persisted.
In the coming months, Las Vegas will host two of the biggest events in its history. November will bring Formula 1 to the Strip for an event that looks to be a boon for Caesars, MGM Resorts International, Wynn Resorts, and every hotel on the Strip.
That will be followed in February by an even bigger event: the Super Bowl. Both the F1 race, which will literally take place on the Strip, and the Super Bowl will bring record crowds and revenue to the Strip.
An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease — or any other highly communicable health problem — may not cancel those events, but it could cause crowds to stay away.
That may seem unthinkable, but CES normally packs the city, and the 2022 event left hotels operating at roughly 30% occupancy.
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Arena Group Editor at Large Daniel Kline focuses on the travel industry while also writing about retail, pop culture, and technology.
Maggie Haberman Reveals Why Trump Pulled That Face During His Mug Shot
Ed Mazza – August 25, 2023
CNN’s Jake Tapper said the look on Donald Trump’s face in his Georgia mug shot is one he’s used before to appear menacing ― but New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said there’s more to it than that.
“It isn’t just that he wants to look menacing, which is certainly true, and he has made that kind of face in photos for years and years and years,” she said. “He doesn’t want to look weak, and that’s what that’s about.”
Donald Trump’s booking photo, taken at the Fulton County Jail on August 24, 2023.
Donald Trump’s booking photo, taken at the Fulton County Jail on August 24, 2023.
Haberman said the desire not to appear weak comes across not just in Trump’s face in the mug shot, but in what he’s doing with the image.
“Circulating the mug shot, fundraising off of it, owning it, using it for press ― that’s all part of a playbook that we have seen him use over and over again,” she said. “But that does not mean he’s enjoying any of this. This is a serious thing. He is facing serious jail time.”
See more of her analysis below:https://www.youtube.com/embed/tP4eSoRnx28?rel=0 View comments (3.9k)
With Prigozhin’s Death, Putin Projects a Message of Power
Anton Troianovski and Valerie Hopkins – August 25, 2023
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with acting governor of the Kherson region Vladimir Saldo at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Aug. 24, 2023. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Just as the news broke Wednesday of the presumed death of mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, President Vladimir Putin of Russia was presiding over a televised World War II anniversary ceremony on a dark stage lit dramatically in red.
He held a moment of silence, flanked by service members in dress uniforms, while a metronome’s beats sounded, like the slow ticking of a clock: Tock. Tock. Tock.
The eerie split screen — the reported fiery demise of the man who launched an armed rebellion in June and the Russian president telegraphing the state’s military might — may have been coincidental. But it underscored the imagery of dominance and power that Putin, 18 months into his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, appears more determined than ever to project.
Prigozhin may have been brutally effective, throwing tens of thousands of his fighters into the maw of the battle for Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, tying up Ukrainian forces in the process and hobbling Kyiv’s ability to stage a counteroffensive. His internet “troll farm” helped the Kremlin interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, while his mercenary empire helped Russia exert influence across Africa and the Middle East.
But with his June rebellion, Prigozhin threatened something even more sensitive: Putin’s own hold on power. After the crash of Prigozhin’s plane Wednesday, the Kremlin appears to be sending the message that no degree of effectiveness and achievement can protect someone from punishment for violating Putin’s loyalty.
“Everyone’s afraid,” Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor with ties to the Kremlin, said of the reaction among the Russian elite to the plane crash Wednesday that Western officials theorize was caused by an explosion on board. “It’s just that everyone sees that anything is possible.”
Never before has someone so central to Russia’s ruling establishment been killed in a suspected state-sponsored assassination, said Mikhail Vinogradov, a Moscow political analyst.
“This is a rather harsh precedent,” Vinogradov said, adding that the Kremlin appeared to be doing little to dissuade Russians of the view that it had sanctioned Prigozhin’s killing. After all, if members of the ruling elite concluded that one of the Putin system’s most powerful players had been killed against the Kremlin’s wishes, it would send a devastating signal of Putin’s loss of control.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said Friday that the suggestion by foreign officials that the Kremlin was behind Prigozhin’s death was an “absolute lie.”
To some, the fact that Prigozhin was able to survive for two months after staging his rebellion was more surprising than the crash of his private jet. In an address to the nation on June 24, as Prigozhin’s forces were marching on Moscow and already in control of a city of a million people in Russia’s southwest, Putin accused the warlord of “betrayal.”
And betrayal, Putin has said previously, is the one act that cannot be forgiven. So when Putin appeared to strike a deal with Prigozhin allowing him to retreat safely to neighboring Belarus, the act struck some Russians as a sign of the president losing control. The view was magnified when photographs surfaced of Prigozhin meeting with African officials on the sidelines of Putin’s marquee summit with African leaders in St. Petersburg in July.
“After he ‘forgave’ Prigozhin, it was understood by those around him as weakness,” said Alexei Venediktov, who headed the liberal Echo of Moscow radio station before the Kremlin shut it down last year.
Venediktov, in an interview in Moscow on Thursday, argued that Prigozhin’s apparent death had strengthened Putin’s dominance in the Russian political system after the chaos of the rebellion. Now, “Putin has shown his elite,” Venediktov went on, that “any betrayal will be found out.”
U.S. officials are increasingly certain that Prigozhin was killed in Wednesday’s crash, and that Putin ordered the assassination. But when it comes to the power dynamics inside Russia’s ruling elite, whether Putin personally ordered the attack may be beside the point: What matters is that Prigozhin suffered a violent death after Putin publicly condemned him.
“He called him a traitor,” Remchukov said. “And that was enough for everyone to see that this person is no longer invulnerable.”
When Putin broke his silence about the plane crash Thursday, some 24 hours after it happened, he described Prigozhin as a “talented man” with a “complicated fate.” Putin revealed that his personal ties with Prigozhin dated back to the early 1990s, and he acknowledged for the first time that he had personally asked Prigozhin to carry out tasks on his behalf.
“He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved necessary results, for himself and, when I asked him about it, for our common cause,” Putin said.
Prigozhin had long been suspected of acting in the shadows in Putin’s interest while giving the Kremlin plausible deniability. His forces deployed to eastern Ukraine in 2014, back when Putin was stoking a separatist war there while insisting he had nothing to do with it. In 2016, Prigozhin’s internet “troll farm” intervened in U.S. politics as part of the Kremlin’s attempt to swing the presidential election to Donald Trump.
But what Putin left unsaid in his brief eulogy of Prigozhin was that by turning against the Russian president after decades of devoted service, Prigozhin may have signed his own death sentence.
On Friday, another longtime confidant of Putin, Alexei Dyumin, issued a statement that made the message a little clearer. Dyumin, a former bodyguard of Putin who is now the governor of a region south of Moscow, said he had known Prigozhin “as a true patriot, a decisive and fearless man.” He said he mourned the crash’s victims and all Wagner fighters who had died in Ukraine, and added: “You can forgive mistakes and even cowardice, but never betrayal. They were not traitors.”
The apparent subtext was that Prigozhin’s soldiers and commanders were loyal men worthy of respect. But it also hinted at the notion that if Prigozhin himself was a traitor — as Putin had said — then he may have deserved his death.
But Prigozhin’s death also carries risks for the Kremlin. In Ukraine, Wagner was seen as one of Russia’s most effective and brutal fighting forces, exacting and taking enormous casualties in the monthslong battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
In Africa, where Prigozhin built a mercenary empire propping up autocrats loyal to Moscow in countries such as Mali and the Central African Republic, it is far from clear whether Wagner will be able to retain its footprint. Wagner’s top military commander, Dmitri Utkin, was listed as a passenger alongside Prigozhin on the plane that crashed, according to Russian authorities.
Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Putin who is now a political consultant based in Israel, said the Kremlin was most likely behind the plane crash, and he argued that the risky decision to kill Prigozhin to send a signal of deterrence revealed the president’s fears of losing power.
“To send this signal, Putin decided to risk a bunch of projects,” Gallyamov wrote on social media. “This is important for understanding what his priorities are right now: maintaining power, not external expansion.”
Putin has also long made it clear that he sees his personal interests as inextricable from those of the Russian state. “He believes that if something is important for keeping him in power, then all other concerns are secondary,” said Grigorii Golosov, a professor of political science at the European University at St. Petersburg.
It’s a philosophy that Vyacheslav Volodin, the chair of Russia’s lower house of parliament, summed up simply earlier this year: “As long as there is Putin, there is Russia.”
Andrew Putnam, superintendent of urban forestry and landscapes for the city of Cambridge, Mass., in Danehy Park, near Harvard University, July 26, 2023. (Cassandra Klos/The New York Times)
The tiny forest lives atop an old landfill in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although it is still a baby, it’s already acting quite a bit older than its actual age, which is just shy of 2.
Its aspens are growing at twice the speed normally expected, with fragrant sumac and tulip trees racing to catch up. It has absorbed stormwater without washing out, suppressed many weeds and stayed lush throughout last year’s drought. The little forest managed all this because of its enriched soil and density, and despite its diminutive size: 1,400 native shrubs and saplings, thriving in an area roughly the size of a basketball court.
It is part of a sweeping movement that is transforming dusty highway shoulders, parking lots, schoolyards and junkyards worldwide. Tiny forests have been planted across Europe, in Africa, throughout Asia and in South America, Russia and the Middle East. India has hundreds, and Japan, where it all began, has thousands.
Now tiny forests are slowly but steadily appearing in the United States. In recent years, they’ve been planted alongside a corrections facility on the Yakama reservation in Washington state, in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park and in Cambridge, where the forest is one of the first of its kind in the Northeast.
“It’s just phenomenal,” Andrew Putnam, superintendent of urban forestry and landscapes for the city of Cambridge, said on a recent visit to the forest, which was planted in fall 2021 in Danehy Park, a green space built atop the former city landfill. As dragonflies and white butterflies floated about, Putnam noted that within a few years, many of the now 14-foot saplings would be as tall as telephone poles and the forest would be self-sufficient.
Healthy woodlands absorb carbon dioxide, clean the air and provide for wildlife. But these tiny forests promise even more.
They can grow as quickly as 10 times the speed of conventional tree plantations, enabling them to support more birds, animals and insects and to sequester more carbon, while requiring no weeding or watering after the first three years, their creators said.
Perhaps more important for urban areas, tiny forests can help lower temperatures in places where pavement, buildings and concrete surfaces absorb and retain heat from the sun.
“This isn’t just a simple tree-planting method,” said Katherine Pakradouni, a native plant horticulturist who oversaw the forest planting in Griffith Park. “This is about a whole system of ecology that supports all manner of life, both above and below ground.”
The Griffith Park forest occupies 1,000 square feet and has drawn all manner of insects, lizards, birds and ground squirrels, along with western toads that journeyed from the Los Angeles River, Pakradouni said. To get to the forest, the toads had to clamber up a concrete embankment, traverse a bike trail, venture down another dirt embankment and cross a horse trail.
“It has all the food they need to survive and reproduce, and the shelter they need as a refuge,” Pakradouni said. “We need habitat refuges, and even a tiny one can, in a year, be life or death for an entire species.”
Known variously as tiny forests, miniforests, pocket forests and, in the United Kingdom, “wee” forests, they trace their lineage to Japanese botanist and plant ecologist Akira Miyawaki, who in 2006 won the Blue Planet Prize, considered the environmental equivalent of a Nobel award, for his method of creating fast-growing native forests.
Miyawaki, who died in 2021 at the age of 93, developed his technique in the 1970s, after observing that thickets of indigenous trees around Japan’s temples and shrines were healthier and more resilient than those in single-crop plantations or forests grown in the aftermath of logging. He wanted to protect old-growth forests and encourage the planting of native species, arguing that they provided vital resilience amid climate change while also reconnecting people with nature.
“The forest is the root of all life; it is the womb that revives our biological instincts, that deepens our intelligence and increases our sensitivity as human beings,” he wrote.
Miyawaki’s prescription involves intense soil restoration and planting many native flora close together. Multiple layers are sown — from shrub to canopy — in a dense arrangement of about three to five plantings per square meter. The plants compete for resources as they race toward the sun, while underground bacteria and fungal communities thrive. Where a natural forest could take at least a century to mature, Miyawaki forests take just a few decades, proponents say.
Crucially, the method requires that local residents do the planting, in order to forge connections with young woodlands. In Cambridge, where a second tiny forest, less than half the size of the first one, was planted in late 2022, Putnam said residents had embraced the small forest with fervor. A third forest is in the works, he said, and all three were planned and organized in conjunction with the nonprofit Biodiversity for a Livable Climate.
“This has, by far and away, gotten the most positive feedback from the public and residents than we’ve had for any project, and we do a lot,” Putnam said.
Still, there are skeptics. Because a Miyawaki forest requires intense site and soil preparation, and exact sourcing of many native plants, it can be expensive. The Danehy Park forest cost $18,000 for the plants and soil amendments, Putnam said, while the pocket forest company, SUGi, covered the forest creators’ consulting fees of roughly $9,500. By way of comparison, a Cambridge street tree costs $1,800.
“A massive impact for a pretty small dollar amount in the grand scheme of the urban forestry program,” Putnam said.
Doug Tallamy, an American entomologist and author of “Nature’s Best Hope,” said that while he applauded efforts to restore degraded habitat, particularly in urban areas, many of the plants would eventually get crowded out and die. Better to plant fewer and save more, he said.
“I don’t want to throw a wet blanket on it; the concept is great, and we have to put the plants back in the ground,” Tallamy said. “But the ecological concept of a tiny forest packed with dozens of species doesn’t make any sense.”
Kazue Fujiwara, a longtime Miyawaki collaborator at Yokohama National University, said survival rates are between 85% and 90% in the first three years, and then, as the canopy grows, drop to 45% after 20 years, with dead trees falling and feeding the soil. The initial density is crucial to stimulating rapid growth, said Hannah Lewis, author of “Mini-Forest Revolution.” It quickly creates a canopy that shades out weeds and shelters the microclimate underneath from wind and direct sun, she said.
Throughout his life, Miyawaki planted forests at industrial sites globally, including at an automotive parts plant in southern Indiana. A turning point came when an engineer named Shubhendu Sharma took part in a Miyawaki planting in India. Enthralled, Sharma turned his own backyard into a miniforest, started a planting company called Afforestt and, in 2014, delivered a TED Talk that, along with a 2016 follow-up, ended up drawing millions of views.
Around the world, conservationists took notice.
In the Netherlands, Daan Bleichrodt, an environmental educator, plants tiny forests to bring nature closer to urban dwellers, especially city children. In 2015, he spearheaded the country’s first Miyawaki forest, in a community north of Amsterdam, and has overseen the planting of nearly 200 forests since.
Four years later, Elise van Middelem started SUGi, which has planted more than 160 pocket forests worldwide. The company’s first forest was planted on a dumping ground alongside the Beirut River in Lebanon; others were sown later near a power plant in the country’s most polluted city and in several playgrounds badly damaged by the 2020 blast at Beirut’s port.
And Earthwatch Europe, an environmental nonprofit, has planted more than 200 forests, most of them the size of a tennis court, throughout the United Kingdom and mainland Europe in the past three years.
Although many of the forests are still very young, their creators say there have already been outsize benefits.
The woodlands in Lebanon have drawn lizards, geckos, birds and tons of insects and fungi, according to Adib Dada, an architect and environmentalist and the main forest creator there. In the West African country of Cameroon, where eight Miyawaki forests have been planted since 2019, there are improved groundwater conditions and higher water tables around the forest sites, according to Limbi Blessing Tata, who has led the reforestation there. Crabs and frogs have also returned, she said, along with birds that were thought to be extinct.
According to Bleichrodt, a 2021 university study of 11 Dutch miniforests found more than 1,100 types of plants and animals at the sites — kingfishers, foxes, hedgehogs, spider beetles, ants, earthworms and wood lice.
“A Miyawaki forest may be like a drop of rain falling into the ocean,” Fujiwara wrote in an email, “but if Miyawaki forests regenerated urban deserts and degraded areas around the world, it will create a river.”
“Doing nothing,” she added “is the most pointless thing.”
Biden administration expected to unveil Tuesday first drugs subject to Medicare negotiations
Tami Luhby and Kayla Tausche – August 25, 2023
Kurt Wittman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
The Biden administration is preparing to reveal Tuesday the first 10 drugs that will be subject to negotiation in Medicare, according to two sources briefed on the matter.
The controversial program was authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act that Democrats pushed through Congress last year. The drug industry and their supporters, however, are determined to quash the effort, filing at least eight lawsuits in recent weeks declaring it unconstitutional.
Undaunted, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has pushed ahead with its historic new power, which Democrats have long argued is a way to lower drug prices. The White House is planning public events to coincide with the announcement, which comes a few days ahead of the agency’s September 1 deadline to make the list public.
Multiple industry experts and the drugmakers themselves have predicted which medications are likely to be in the first round of negotiations. They include Eliquis, manufactured by Bristol Myers Squibb, which said in a lawsuit filed in June that it expects its blood thinner to be on the initial list, and Januvia, a diabetes drug made by Merck, which was the first to take legal action in early June. Other names floated include the blood thinner Xarelto, the cancer treatment Imbruvica and Ozempic, a blockbuster medication used for diabetes and weight loss.
The initial set of drugs will be chosen from the top 50 Part D drugs that are eligible for negotiation that have the highest total expenditures in Medicare. CMS will consider multiple factors when developing its initial offer, including the drugs’ clinical benefits, the price of alternatives, research and development costs and patent protection, among others.
What happens next
Drugmakers have a month to decide whether to participate. CMS and the manufacturers will then negotiate, and the agency will publish the agreed-upon maximum fair prices by September 1, 2024. The prices won’t take effect until 2026.
If drugmakers don’t comply with the process, they will have to pay an excise tax of up to 95% of the medications’ US sales or pull all their products from the Medicare and Medicaid markets. The pharmaceutical industry contends that the true penalty can be as high as 1,900% of sales.
After the initial round, the Health and Human Services secretary can negotiate another 15 drugs for 2027 and again for 2028. The number rises to 20 drugs a year for 2029 and beyond. Only medications that have been on the market for several years without competition are eligible.
In the first two years of negotiations, CMS will select only Part D drugs that are purchased at pharmacies. It will add Part B drugs, which are administered by doctors, to the mix for 2028.
The program is expected to save Medicare $98.5 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Drugmakers’ court challenges
Manufacturers hope to halt the negotiation process, filing multiple lawsuits in federal courts across the US. They each argue the program is unconstitutional in various ways and also say that the negotiation provision will harm innovation and patients’ access to new drugs.
Among the arguments are that the program violates the Fifth Amendment’s “takings” clause because it allows Medicare to obtain manufacturers’ patented drugs, which are private property, without paying fair market value under the threat of serious penalties.
Plus, the negotiations process violates the First Amendment, the challengers say, because it coerces manufacturers into saying that they agree to the price that the government has dictated and that it’s fair.
Another argument is that the process violates the Eighth Amendment by levying an excessive fine if drugmakers refuse to negotiate and continue selling their products to the Medicare market.
The Biden administration, however, has said that nothing in the Constitution bars it from negotiating drug prices. Legal experts have generally agreed.
“The Biden-Harris Administration isn’t letting anything get in our way of delivering lower drug costs for Americans,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra said in a statement in June. “Pharmaceutical companies have made record profits for decades. Now they’re lining up to block this Administration’s work to negotiate for better drug prices for our families. We won’t be deterred.”
The CDC just published new flu vaccine guidelines: What you need to know
There’s a notable change for people with egg allergies.
Korin Miller – August 25, 2023
Flu season is coming. Here’s what to know. (Getty Images)
Flu season typically runs from October to May, making the unofficial start just weeks away. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued new guidelines for this flu season — and there’s a surprising change in the mix.
Here’s everything you need to know about the new flu guidance, plus how to prepare for this tricky time of year.
What’s new about the guidelines?
This year’s guidelines are “pretty standard, with one big exception,” Dr. Thomas Russo, chief of infectious diseases at the University at Buffalo in New York, tells Yahoo Life. That’s the CDC’s position on which flu vaccines people with egg allergies can use.- ADVERTISEMENT -https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/4-11-1/html/r-sf-flx.html
The CDC says people with egg allergies can now get any vaccine — egg-based or non-egg-based — that is “otherwise appropriate for their age and health status.” Previous recommendations had been that people with severe egg allergies should avoid egg-based vaccines.
“Data now shows that people who are egg-allergic really do not have a major contraindication to egg-based flu vaccines,” Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, tells Yahoo Life.
While this is new in the U.S., it isn’t in other parts of the world. “The U.S. has now caught up to the Canadians and Europeans, who for some time have looked at the data regarding rare but serious allergic reactions with the flu vaccine and have come to the conclusion that eggs have almost nothing to do with it,” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, says.
Schaffner says that “there will be a few people who are still twitchy” about getting an egg-based vaccine, noting that egg-free vaccines will continue to be available.
What’s in this year’s flu vaccine?
Flu vaccines for this season are designed to target these strains, per the CDC:
Worth noting: There is just one update to this year’s flu vaccine from last year’s.
As for how effective this year’s vaccine will be, Russo says we’ll have to wait and see. “Sometimes we hit, sometimes we miss,” he says. “It happens every single year.”
When will flu vaccines become available?
They’ll be available soon. Many major pharmacies, including CVS and Walgreens, are allowing people to schedule vaccine appointments for as early as Sept. 1. Some pharmacies may even offer them now, along with doctor’s offices — it really depends on when supplies arrive at any given location, Russo says.
When should I get my flu vaccine?
It’s best to hold off a little if you can. “Ideally, you want to get your flu vaccine at the end of September, in October or the very first week or so in November — that’s the ideal time,” Schaffner says. Timing your flu vaccine this way helps ensure you have adequate protection through the peak of flu season, he explains.
“If you get it too early, the protection begins to wane at the end of the flu season,” he adds.
There is an exception, though: Children under the age of 8 who have never received a flu vaccine will need two doses, separated by a month, Schaffner points out. If your child meets those criteria, he recommends contacting your pediatrician to get an appointment scheduled now.
When is flu season at its worst?
Flu season usually peaks between December and February, per the CDC, which is why the timing of your vaccine is important. “It doesn’t make sense to get vaccinated this early,” Adalja says.
How can I prepare for flu season?
Getting vaccinated is an important place to start, Russo says. “Vaccination is the pillar of protection,” he says.
But he also suggests that you keep high-quality masks handy in case flu activity rises in your area and that you remain aware of risk-benefit situations as flu cases increase. “If you’re high-risk, you may want to avoid scenarios that are indoors, with lots of people and poor ventilation,” Russo says.
Schaffner says this year’s flu activity is likely to increase in October, as opposed to last year, when it started early. “There will be flu. Will it be mild, moderate or severe this year? We just don’t know,” he says. “But there will be flu, and we should protect ourselves.”
“Trump is in the final stage of cult leadership”: Fulton County arrest elevates his MAGA “martyrdom”
Chauncey DeVega – August 24, 2023
Donald Trump with “TRUMP 2024” flag Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images
Donald Trump continues to be at the center of America’s political universe. His gravity and pull are that powerful.
Later today, Trump, the twice impeached four-time indicted ex-president traitor who attempted a coup on Jan. 6 and who is facing hundreds of years in prison for his political crime spree will surrender to law enforcement authorities in Fulton County, Georgia. Last night, Trump participated in an “interview” with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, where he was allowed an unrestricted platform to lie, spread other misinformation and distortions, and attack his “enemies” and other imagined foes.
In all, this week has been a spectacle of the worst sort. At CNN, Stephen Collinson accurately described it as, “No other GOP leader could confidently snub a prime-time television debate and turn his no-show into an argument for his inevitability. But Trump – as with his attempt to use criminal indictments to advance a political career that has always prospered amid perceptions that he’s being unfairly treated – is changing all the rules of campaigning once again.”
The American news media, political class, and general public will do their best (and will largely fail) to navigate these “historic” events with the goal of finding some sense of balance, normalcy, and clarity in unprecedented times. Unfortunately, it is those same bad habits and norms that helped to create the disaster that is the Age of Trump and ascendant American neofascism in the first place.
So, in an attempt to make sense of what comes next in this truly historic and unprecedented moment with Donald Trump and his criminal indictment(s) in Georgia, wishcasting and other forms of denial by the news media and political elites about the true depth of the country’s democracy crisis, and what potentially comes next, I recently asked a range of experts for their thoughts and insights.
The interviews have been lightly edited for clarity:
Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and author of “Criminology on Trump.”
As Trump is about to be booked in Atlanta, Georgia for orchestrating a criminal enterprise that spanned seven battleground states and involved at least 50 indictable people, and as the GOP is holding its first presidential debate in Milwaukee — whether Trump is present or not. I am feeling very optimistic about the looming legal and political demise of the former president who currently faces 91 criminal charges. I am also feeling optimistic about the likelihood of Boss Trump taking down the GOP with him in 2024 unless the party abandons him starting Wednesday night which seems unlikely even though his poll numbers after the fourth criminal indictment are now plummeting with the general electorate. Meanwhile, while his legal fees have become astronomical — $40 million and counting — his fundraising has been declining since its peak after his first criminal indictment in Manhattan on April 4.
The danger of Trump taking the other Republican candidates and the Republicans off the proverbial cliff with him has to do with how overly invested they are in Trump’s lawlessness and corruption. In short, the Republicans and the GOP have become trapped by their endorsing the Big Lie, by their habitual shielding of Trump from the indefensible, and by their kowtowing to the MAGA base.
This Trumpian dilemma coupled with the former Racketeer-in-Chief’s anti-democratic and authoritarian agenda will certainly be a losing formula up and down the ballots across America, the same as they were in the 2022 midterms only it will be much worse in 2024. Think of landslide elections like Barry Goldwater losing to President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 or President Jimmy Carter’s loss to the former governor of California Ronald Reagan in 1980.
I am looking forward to each of these criminal trials especially because they are “slam dunks” for the prosecution regardless of what Trump or his attorneys and supporters have been saying up to now. Reality check: There are simply no legal defenses for Trump’s criminal behavior other than trying to procedurally dissolve these cases by denying that they were crimes in the first place or to simply make motion after motion in the hopes of delaying these trials from beginning for as long as possible.
With respect to the January 6 and Georgia election fraud and conspiracy cases, neither one has anything to do with free speech or with the weaponization of the Justice Department (DOJ) by either President Joe Biden or Attorney General Merrick Garland. While both of these political talking points may continue to thrive in the Trumpian alternative universe, I believe that their powers of persuasion are already starting to fade or decline as a byproduct of the powerful RICO indictments in Georgia. No matter though, these arguments may have had or have value in the court of public opinion, they will have no value whatsoever in the federal or state criminal courts of law where Trump should ultimately be tried will also be convicted.
I am especially looking forward to these trials as they converge with Trump’s campaigns during the GOP primaries like Super Tuesday in March and in the runup to the general election as well. Although Trump could probably stop campaigning altogether and still win the GOP nomination he won’t have to. Instead of taking to the expensive campaign trail week after week, he will simply transfer what passes for political campaigning, or more accurately, his staged and unhinged tirades of doom, gloom, and bada-bing bada-boom to the courthouse steps each and every day of those first two federal criminal trials that will probably not be televised.
I am looking most forward to the RICO trial and to Trump’s Court TV reality show because it will be televised, and its star defendant Donald Trump won’t say one word because he will never take the stand. More importantly, the trial of Trump’s criminal enterprise will be a most illuminating and entertaining criminal trial. If it materializes, this trial will captivate viewers and audiences like never before and that includes the 9-month-long criminal trial of OJ. Simpson. Watched literally by the whole world, this fairly complex yet easily understood criminal trial will witness the prosecution methodologically taking us through those 161 acts that furthered the conspiracy of their criminal enterprise. When Trump leaves the Fulton County criminal trial daily for perhaps as long as nine months he will uncharacteristically no longer be talking about his innocence or his persecution. Instead, with his tail tucked firmly between his legs Trump will be demonstrating that he is quite capable of keeping his gaslighting mouth shut when it better serves his interests or when his talking will only make a fool of himself even to his sycophantic MAGA base.
Regardless of the facts or the law, people often interpret events like January 6 as they want to see them as opposed to how they actually were. So, while I agree that there are a lot of Republicans, and many more Democrats, as well as people in the news media, the political class, and so on who want to turn the page on Trump, I think it is important to ascertain the different reasons or motives as to why they want to move on.
In the case of Republicans who want to move on from Trump, most of these folks like the other candidates running for the GOP presidential nomination who don’t have a chance of defeating Trump for the nomination want to do so only because they know Trump will be defeated once again and that he has become a terrible election liability for the party. In other words, their distancing themselves from Trump has nothing to do with Trump’s ideology of authoritarianism or his assault on democracy and the rule of law.
With respect to the right-wing political class and Fox News or Newsmax, they fully understand the big picture and what is at stake in the 2024 election but that so far has been okay with them. On the other hand, the true-believing MAGA folks for the most part are rather clueless about politics, crime, and the administration of justice. As for most of the other Republicans at large with the exception of the Never Trumpers, these folks are either deeply confused or they have simply drank the “Kool Aid” or succumbed to Trumpian disinformation, gaslighting, and/or propagandistic brainwashing.
Donald Sherman serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Counsel of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
Nobody goes into government ethics work unless they trend towards optimism, but this is an especially important and optimistic time. After more than seven years of egregious and unprecedented ethics abuses in the campaign, in government, and in his post-presidency, Donald Trump is finally facing real accountability that can’t be undermined by his sycophants in Congress and other parts of the government.
The only way that our nation can move forward and repair our democracy in the wake of the January 6 insurrection is for there to be accountability. More than 1,000 participants in the mob have been charged by DOJ for their role in the insurrection, and now Donald Trump is finally facing charges. The complex and damning indictment brought in Georgia by Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, makes clear that you can’t reach into states to try to overturn their election. With the Georgia grand jury’s indictment of Trump, we also have the potential for a conviction that can’t be pardoned by Trump, or some other Republican president. Not even Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, can pardon Trump under Georgia law. Several elements of the Georgia indictment are especially important for accountability including that being charged with his co-conspirators increases the likelihood of cooperation and that if this matter eventually goes to trial, there are likely to be cameras in the courtroom.
These cases also strengthen the public case made by CREW, and scholars across the ideological spectrum that Trump is legally disqualified from serving in office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Last year, CREW brought and won the first successful case in more than 150 years to remove an official from office for violating the Disqualification Clause – which bars a state or federal officer who takes an oath to defend the Constitution from engaging in insurrection or rebellion against the United States. Although a criminal conviction of any kind is not necessary to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment against Trump, it certainly bolsters the public and legal case for his disqualification. As conservative academics William Baude and Michael Pauslen wrote: “On the basis of the public record, former President Donald J. Trump is constitutionally disqualified from again being President (or holding any other covered office) because of his role in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election and the events leading to the January 6 attack.”
A lot of the pundit class went from claiming that Donald Trump was an “existential threat” to our democracy to writing him off or telling us to move on. Funnily enough, we saw similar rhetoric in 2016 as well. CREW is a non-partisan organization, so Trump’s electoral prospects are inconsequential to the need for accountability, but it is important to note that the last time that Trump was on a ballot, he was rejected by the voters and responded by inciting a violent insurrection to overturn our election and steal the presidency from the American people. The Constitution makes clear that insurrectionists like Trump should not and do not get a second chance to violate their oaths. I understand that people are exhausted by Trump and want to reject him at the ballot box. However, his actions make him ineligible to be on the ballot in the first place. Just like the American public can’t elect George W. Bush or Barack Obama in 2024 because of the 22nd Amendment, Trump is also ineligible to serve as president pursuant to the Constitution.
Existential threats don’t disappear in a single election cycle. If the Constitution is not enforced against Donald Trump and other insurrectionists, then our democracy will remain at risk of this kind of attack for the foreseeable future. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was built precisely for this moment in history, and that’s what is at stake. If our country finds itself in a similar place, 50 or 100 years from now, there will need to be a public record of accountability and legal precedent addressing Trump’s egregious conduct. The multiple indictments filed over the summer are a great start. Litigation CREW plans to bring to enforce the Disqualification Clause against Trump is another necessary step. Thankfully the drafters of the 14th Amendment had the foresight to ratify this tool for a future insurrection that they could not entirely predict. We cannot afford to leave any tools of accountability on the table, lest we expose ourselves to an even greater threat to democracy than Trump.
Brynn Tannehill is a journalist and author of “American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy.”
This is every 20th Century historian’s worst nightmare come to life. Demagogue unsuccessfully tries to overthrow the government, goes to jail for it, and then goes on to be elected supreme leader on the backs of promises to eradicate communists, degenerates, and his political enemies while restoring power to the herrenvolk.
The worst part is, the polls say things are tied, they have consistently underestimated his strength in elections, and the electoral college gives him a 3.5-4 point advantage (i.e. Biden needs to win the popular vote by 3.5-4 points to have a 50-50 shot of winning the Electoral College). It’s bad for most people with a sense of history, and even worse for me, since I’m considered to be one of the people who need to be eradicated according to the conservative Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership”, which is effectively the GOP playbook for ending democracy and civil rights in the US. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
There are a lot of people who are saying “Trump can’t win,” when fundamentally, NOTHING has changed since 2016 or 2020, except that President Biden has gotten less popular. The indictments don’t move the needle much. The vast majority of Republicans will still vote for him no matter what. It even feeds into the persecution and lost cause narratives popular with his white evangelical base. If you look at conservative media, they’re speculating that it might make him more popular and help “Get Out the Vote” (GOTV) by the base. The sad part is, they might be right: it’s a plausible theory. Independents are swinging a little away from Trump, but they’re not happy with Biden either. If they sit out the election, and Democrats don’t bother voting the way they did in 2016, we’re very much headed for a repeat there.
I think that only the people who are deep down in the weeds, who have read things like the Mandate for Leadership understand the hellscape that awaits us if Trump is elected again. This is going to be orders of magnitude worse than his first term, especially with a fully weaponized Department of Justice and federal bureaucracy via Schedule F.
Rich Logis, a former member of the Republican Party and right-wing pundit, is the founder of Perfect Our Union, an organization dedicated to healing political traumatization, building diverse pro-democracy alliances and perfecting our union.
Trump is in the final stage of cult leadership: martyrdom.
He hasn’t been defrauded and persecuted, he tells his supporters—YOU have been cheated and persecuted. This leitmotif has been present since 2015, but Trump has significantly ramped up the rhetoric, recently. Some of his primary opponents are now mustering up faux courage, saying that, yes, Trump did lose; these opponents have always believed Trump lost, however, and I will continue to posit that candidates such as Pence, Scott and DeSantis are angling for the nomination via a brokered convention. They, and those running the GOP, know that every indictment strengthens Trump’s standing amongst those who matter most to Republican candidates: their primary voters, who are, overwhelmingly, MAGA devotees.
Even having said all this, however, the lower the voter turnout next year, the more likely it could result in a Trump/MAGA victory. The time to begin emphasizing the importance of registering to vote, and turnout, is now. We must leave nothing to chance: Voters of differing political beliefs must form unlikely, but necessary, alliances, to ensure that Republicans suffer electoral losses, next year, up and down the ballot; such alliances have been formed many times in our history, and our current epoch—one in which threats to democracy and democratic institutions are real and prevalent—demands another such alliance.
Right on cue, after yet another Trump indictment, America’s national centrist and center-left press continued rolling out their achingly yearning op-eds and columns wishing, hoping, and praying for a Republican to save the GOP. At this point, I’ve accepted that the press will remain in its well-meaning, but delusional, enchantment of making the GOP great again; it is now self-parody. If our national press devoted less time to a seemingly mythological Republican savior who will never come, and more to highlighting those who left behind the politically traumatic world of MAGA/Trump, I suspect they’d be more bearish on the prospects of repairing the irreparable GOP. I just wish our media recognized that; but, since they don’t, the onus falls on we the people to disabuse Americans, of all political beliefs, that the GOP will finally move on from Trump.
Some cautious optimism: Yes, the GOP is irredeemable. But just as I had my own Road to Damascus epiphany, renouncing my support for MAGA/Trump, let’s pay close attention to those in our lives who remain in the thrall of MAGA abuse and trauma; I anticipate that some may start to doubt their allegiance to Trump. There is, very much, an abuser/abused dynamic with MAGA supporters and Trump. Those who might question their past political choices and votes need to see and hear the stories of those who severed from MAGA; the regretful, understandably, will be ambivalent about publicizing the errors of their ways. They will have fewer qualms, though, if they see living examples of former MAGA/Trump/DeSantis/GOP voters.
MAGA voters are undeserving of being dehumanized, and had some valid motivations for supporting Trump, even though, yes, Trump exploited those concerns and fears. We must, as a nation, build a broad consensus that electing Trump was one of the most egregious mistakes in our history. Admitting when we’re wrong is an unnatural act, but it is possible—and liberating. When I look back at my MAGA time, I remain stunned at the level of political trauma I put upon myself; my hope is that others will begin to recognize their own trauma, which has been, to some extent, self-inflicted.
Joe Walsh was a Republican congressman and a leading Tea Party conservative. He is now a prominent conservative voice against Donald Trump and the host of the podcast “White Flag with Joe Walsh.”
I’ll be blunt. The vast majority of Americans have no clue where this country is at right now. Way too many in the media, commentary, and political world cling to this notion that this is just kind of an extreme political time, that it’s a game that’s gotten a little crazy, but that we’re still playing in the general boundaries of normal society and politics. Bull**it!
This country is on the precipice of sustained violence we haven’t seen in 150-160 years, we are on the verge of complete institutional breakdown, we’re on a path that, if continued, will lead to democracy’s end here.
I have a different perspective than virtually everyone in the political commentariat. I come from the populist Republican Party base, I left that base, and I still engage with that base every day. That base is the animating force of one of our two major political parties. Trump radicalized that base. By radicalized, I mean – they no longer believe in basic truths, they’ve given up on democracy, they eagerly embrace authoritarianism, and they don’t want to simply defeat their political opponents, they want their political opponents destroyed & killed.
This is the stuff I hear from them. Every day for the past 5-6 years. How are we doing? I just described the status of one of our two major political parties. It’s now fully anti-democracy. This isn’t tenable.
So, with all that as context, where are we with Trump? How am I feeling? As concerned and frightened as ever. The media treats this like some game. I was actually on CNN a couple of weeks ago and two reporters on the panel with me talked about the GOP race for president as if it was actually some kind of contest. Still a contest? Bull**it. It never was. The guy leading the anti-democracy cult was always going to be the nominee. It’s no contest. Barring death or a jail cell, Trump will be the nominee, and he has a better than 50/50 shot at getting elected. You heard me right. Assuming Trump is the nominee, he’d be the odds-on favorite against Biden. I know everyone says he can never win a general election. Again, bull**it! Large swaths of independents are privately dying for an excuse to vote for him again. An underappreciated segment of Americans wants that entertaining buffoon in the White House. They’ll never say that publicly.
Trump has moved beyond cult leader. He’s a full-on martyr with his base. I hear it every day. Each new indictment has strengthened his support among “non MAGA” Republicans & conservatives who’ve told me it really seems like they’re piling on him now and he’s being unfairly targeted by the justice system. That’s a powerful narrative.
The chatter about violence that I hear now is greater than what I heard before January 6th. We’re in for 14-15 months of danger this country just doesn’t understand. And danger the media refuses to discuss.
So yes, I’m feeling pretty damned despondent. And angry. We’re only a few years into this storm and so many people still don’t understand the gravity of the approaching storm. We’ve entered a revolutionary period in America. A revolution that will determine whether this great democracy stays united or not. And having most of the country in denial about where we are scares me even more.
Chicago roasting in record-setting heat that feels like 120 degrees
Denise Chow and Bill Karins – August 24, 2023
Brian Cassella
Chicago set a heat index record Thursday after “feels like” temperatures at an airport hit a blistering 120 degrees Fahrenheit, smashing the previous record set in July 1995 during a heat wave that killed more than 500 people in the city.
Heat index values measure what conditions feel like to the human body when humidity and air temperatures are combined. An intense heat wave across the Midwest and through the South sent heat index values skyrocketing well into the triple digits this week, as 98 million people remained under heat alerts Thursday.
Chicago’s previous heat index record of 118 F, set July 13, 1995, stood for nearly three decades. Just before 3 p.m. Thursday, however, a heat index of 120 F was recorded at O’Hare International Airport, becoming the city’s highest in recorded history.
Temperatures up to 20 degrees hotter than normal have been recorded from the Upper Midwest to the Gulf Coast, with heat indexes well over 100 F in Missouri, Iowa and Illinois.
Cities across the southern part of the U.S. are also baking. High temperatures Thursday were forecast to hit 105 in Houston, 106 in Dallas and 101 in Memphis, Tennessee.
Temperatures are expected to cool off in the Midwest heading into the weekend, but high heat and humidity will linger across the South into next week.
Studies have shown climate change is making heat waves more likely to occur — and longer and more severe when they do.
Republican activist says party ‘deserves to lose’ if it fails to address climate crisis
Oliver Milman – August 24, 2023
Photograph: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images
Republicans “deserve to lose” electorally if they can’t show they care about the climate crisis, according to the head of a conservative climate organization that put forward a rare question on the issue to GOP candidates in Wednesday’s televised debate.
The Republican presidential hopefuls, minus Donald Trump, were asked at the Fox News debate what they would do to improve the party’s standing on climate policy by Alexander Diaz, a young conservative who is part of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), a youth conservative group that pushes for action on the climate crisis.
Asked by the moderators for a show of hands over whether climate change is real, none of the candidates did so, with one, Vivek Ramaswamy, the far-right businessman, declaring that the “climate agenda is a hoax”. Two other candidates, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, accepted the well-established scientific reality of global heating but looked to shift the blame to other major carbon polluters, such as China, and even, in Scott’s case, to Africa, which is responsible for about 3% of the world’s emissions.
Benji Backer, founder and executive chairman of ACC, said the question on climate was “historic” and highlighted the desire among young Republicans for their leaders to take the threat of global heating seriously.
“That we didn’t get an immediate hand raise speaks to how much work we have left to do; young people will never vote for a candidate that doesn’t believe in climate change,” he said after the debate. “We’re not going away, we are normalizing this as part of the Republican conversation. Republicans deserve to lose if they are climate deniers and don’t have a plan.”
Backer said that Ramaswamy “has always been wrong on this issue” and that Haley’s answer was a “winning one” for young people. He noted how Ramaswamy, who he said an ACC colleague confronted about his remarks after the debate, was booed by the audience for his dismissal of climate science.
“Republicans are environmentalists, we are the original conservationists,” Backer told a debate after-party attended by campaign staffers, some Republican members of Congress and Ramaswamy, a video shared with the Guardian shows. “And by sitting on the sidelines and letting the Democrats take this issue and run with it over the last few decades we’ve not only lost an entire generation of young voters we’ve also ceded the ground to really, really bad policy that is impacting our day-to-day lives in so many ways.”
Polling shows there is growing concern among all Americans over the impacts of the climate crisis, which have been on vivid display this summer, with devastating fires in Hawaii, floods in California and Vermont and a series of punishing heatwaves that have broken temperature records across the US.
There remains a partisan divide, however, with far more Democrats considering climate a priority than Republicans. Among GOP voters, younger people are more likely to see the climate crisis as a threat that requires action than the party’s older voters, polls suggest.
Few Republican leaders have backed strong climate action in recent years, however, with Trump, the dominant force in the party, calling the climate crisis a “hoax” and “bullshit”. During Trump’s presidency, the US withdrew from the Paris climate agreement and scrapped various regulations designed to reduce carbon pollution. Republicans in Congress have since attempted to demolish key aspects of Joe Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act, which provides enormous incentives to proliferate renewable energy and electric vehicles.
The specter of Trump, the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination despite his various criminal indictments, still haunts Republicans when it comes to dealing with the climate crisis, according to Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman who now advocates for conservative action on climate.
“At the debate last night the future called to the present and the present seized up in fear – the candidates couldn’t answer the future’s call because they are in fear of a certain constituency in the party and the person who leads that,” Inglis said.
“It’s an abysmal failure of vision. The smart money is moving towards innovation to deal with climate change. But that guy [Trump] is an angel of death. He can’t get you elected, but he can kill you in the primary.”
Environmental groups were scathing of the Republican candidate’s responses. “Republicans are stuck between a hoax and a hard place,” said Lori Lodes, executive director of Climate Power. “Their Maga base demands a rigid stance against the obvious reality of climate change, which requires that they ignore what we’re all experiencing – extreme weather that disrupts lives and destroys communities week in and week out.”
