Honest Government Ad: A message from the White House

30 July 2020 (The Juice Media) – Hello, I’m from the U.S. government, with an update on our pandemic response. In the space of a few months, our “Don’t worry, bro, it’s just the flu” policy has gotten a shit-ton of you killed. Some say this tragedy was inevitable, but actually, if we’d simply responded […]

Climate scientist Prof. Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. Facebook has placed restrictions on Prof. Hayhoe and blocked her from promoting videos related to climate research, a move that has limited her efforts to refute false claims. Photo: Katharine Hayhoe

Climate denial spreads on Facebook as scientists face restrictions – Company overrules scientific fact-checking group, which had flagged information as misleading

By Scott Waldman 6 July 2020 (E&E News) – A climate scientist says Facebook is restricting her ability to share research and fact-check posts containing climate misinformation. Those constraints are occuring as groups that reject climate science increasingly use the platform to promote misleading theories about global warming. The groups are using Facebook to mischaracterize […]

A performance protest on 15 June 2020 in Brasilia honors Brazilians who died after contracting the novel coronavirus. Photo: Adriano Machado / Reuters

Brazil ignored the warnings about COVID-19 – “A human catastrophe of unimaginable proportions”

By Terrence McCoy 16 June 2020 RIO DE JANEIRO (The Washington Post) – Weeks ago, when this seaside metropolis had recorded fewer than 10,000 cases of the novel coronavirus and there still appeared to be time, some of Brazil’s most respected scientists made their last-ditch appeal. The country had reached a pivotal juncture. Cases were […]

An indigenous woman, wearing a face mask that reads “Indigenous lives matter”, attends the funeral of Chief Messias Kokama, 53, from the Parque das Tribos (Tribes Park), who passed away due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at Parque das Tribos in Manaus, Brazil, 14 May 2020. Photo: Bruno Kelly / REUTERS

Coronavirus pandemic reaches dozens of indigenous groups in Brazil, felling Chief Messias Kokama – Hospitals on brink of collapse as Bolsonaro does pushups with supporters

By Rob Picheta, Vasco Cotovio, and Shasta Darlington 18 May 2020 (CNN) – The health care system in Brazil’s largest city is wavering on the brink of collapse and coronavirus deaths throughout the South American nation are soaring — but President Jair Bolsonaro nonetheless reveled in crowds of supporters on Sunday, joining yet another anti-lockdown […]

Aerial view of coffins being buried at an area where new graves have been dug at the Parque Tarumã cemetery in Manaus, Brazil, in April 2020. On 26 April 2020, 140 bodies of people killed by COVID-19 were laid to rest in Manaus, the jungle-flanked capital of Amazonas state. Normally the figure would be closer to 30 – but these are no longer normal times. Photo: Michael Dantas / AFP / Getty Images

Manaus fills mass graves as Covid-19 hits the Amazon – “They were just dumped there like dogs. What are our lives worth now? Nothing.”

By Tom Phillips and Fabiano Maisonnave 30 April 2020 MANAUS (The Guardian) – Day and night, the dead are delivered into the tawny Amazonian earth – the latest victims of a devastating pandemic now reaching deep into the heart of the Brazilian rainforest. On Sunday 140 bodies were laid to rest in Manaus, the jungle-flanked capital of […]

Aerial view of the Clinical Research Center of the National Institutes of Health. Photo: NIH

Trump cuts U.S. research on bat-human virus transmission over China ties

By Sarah Owermohle 27 April 2020 (Politico) – The Trump administration abruptly cut off funding for a project studying how coronaviruses spread from bats to people after reports linked the work to a lab in Wuhan, China, at the center of conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 pandemic’s origins. The National Institutes of Health on Friday […]

A healthcare worker stands in a crosswalk to block hundreds of pro-death pro-Covid protesters in Denver, on 19 April 2020. Photo: Alyson McClaran / Reuters

Are we finally seeing science denialism for the death wish it is? “Denying the severity of COVID-19 is tantamount to denying the worth of the thousands who have died and the thousands more who will”

By Heather Houser 16 April 2020 (the Austin Statesman) – Every day it seems we read headlines that connect science denialism to cruel indifference and death. Just recently, when talking about the initial COVID-19 response, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi asserted that ”[Trump’s] denial at the beginning was deadly.” In Arizona, some residents called […]

Trump during a daily press briefing on the coronavirus crisis, 10 April 2020. An attack ad for Donald Trump's campaign for reelection showed Gary Locke, a former governor of Washington state and U.S. ambassador to China, as a Chinese official. Photo: Reuters

Masha Gessen: We won’t know the exact moment when democracy dies – “Autocracy creeps in, staking one claim after another, but it does not firmly and finally announce its own arrival”

By Masha Gessen 16 April 2020 (The New Yorker) – In the early days of the Trump Presidency, there was a lot of speculation about when, if, and how we would pass the point of no return, when we would know that American democracy had been destroyed. That conversation faded after a while, drowned out by the […]

Map showing secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during Spring break 2020, tracked as they went across the U.S. Graphic: Tectonix

Tracking mobile phone location data of Florida beachgoers during Spring break shows potential coronavirus spread

By Jason Murdock 27 March 2020 (Newsweek) – Heat maps created using data from citizens’ mobile devices are demonstrating just how quickly potential novel coronavirus cases can spread throughout the U.S. Location data from U.S. mobile technology company X-Mode is being fed into a mapping platform called Tectonix to analyze human movements during the COVID-19 […]

Andrew R. Wheeler, Trump’s administrator of the E.P.A., continued his mission of dismantling environmental regulation in the U.S. by formally revising a proposal that would significantly restrict the type of research that can be used to draft environmental and public health regulations. Experts say the measure, made public on 3 March 2020, amounts to one of the Trump’s most far-reaching assaults on science. Photo: Drew Angerer / Getty Images

Trump E.P.A. updates plan to limit science used in environmental rules – “They’re putting in nonscientific criteria to decide what science the agency can use”

By Lisa Friedman 4 March 2020 WASHINGTON (The New York Times) – The Trump administration has formally revised a proposal that would significantly restrict the type of research that can be used to draft environmental and public health regulations, a measure that experts say amounts to one of the government’s most far-reaching restrictions on science. […]

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