Cartoon – Importance of Critical Thinking
Category Archives: Ethics
Importance of Honesty and Ethics in our Communities
Kenyan runner Abel Mutai was just a few feet from the finish line, but became confused with the signage and stopped, thinking he had completed the race. A Spanish runner, Ivan Fernandez, was right behind him and, realizing what was happening, started shouting at the Kenyan to continue running. Mutai didn’t know Spanish and didn’t understand.
Realizing what was taking place, Fernandez pushed Mutai to victory.
A journalist asked Ivan, “Why did you do that?” Ivan replied,
“My dream is that someday we can have a kind of community life where we push and help each other to win.”
The journalist insisted “But why did you let the Kenyan win?” Ivan replied, “I didn’t let him win, he was going to win. The race was his.” The journalist insisted, and again asked, “But you could have won!”
Ivan looked at him and replied,
“But what would be the merit of my victory?
What would be the honor in that medal?
What would my Mother think of that?”
Values are passed on from generation to generation.
This election year, what values are we teaching our children?
Let us not teach our kids the wrong ways and means to WIN.
Instead, let us pass on the beauty and humanity of a helping hand.
Because honesty and ethics are WINNING!
Billions in Hospital Virus Aid Rested on Compliance With Private Vendor
The Department of Health and Human Services told hospitals in April that reporting to the vendor, TeleTracking Technologies, was a “prerequisite to payment.”
The Trump administration tied billions of dollars in badly needed coronavirus medical funding this spring to hospitals’ cooperation with a private vendor collecting data for a new Covid-19 database that bypassed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The highly unusual demand, aimed at hospitals in coronavirus hot spots using funds passed by Congress with no preconditions, alarmed some hospital administrators and even some federal health officials.
The office of the health secretary, Alex M. Azar II, laid out the requirement in an April 21 email obtained by The New York Times that instructed hospitals to make a one-time report of their Covid-19 admissions and intensive care unit beds to TeleTracking Technologies, a company in Pittsburgh whose $10.2 million, five-month government contract has drawn scrutiny on Capitol Hill.
“Please be aware that submitting this data will inform the decision-making on targeted Relief Fund payments and is a prerequisite to payment,” the message read.
The financial condition, which has not been previously reported, applied to money from a $100 billion “coronavirus provider relief fund” established by Congress as part of the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, signed by President Trump on March 27. Two days later, the administration instructed hospitals to make daily reports to the C.D.C., only to change course.
“Another data reporting ask,” a regional official in the health department informed colleagues in an email exchange obtained by The Times, adding: “It comes with $$ incentive. We really need a consolidated message on the reporting/data requests, this is past ridiculous.”
A colleague replied, “Another wrinkle. What a mess.”
The disclosure of the demand in April is the most striking example to surface of the department’s efforts to expand the role of private companies in health data collection, a practice that critics say infringes on what has long been a central mission of the C.D.C. Last month, the federal health department moved beyond financial incentives and abruptly ordered hospitals to send daily coronavirus reports to TeleTracking, not the C.D.C., raising concerns about transparency and reliability of the data.
Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services say that the moves were necessary to improve and streamline data collection in a crisis, and that the one-time reports collected in April by TeleTracking were not available from any other source.
“The national health system has not been challenged in this way in any time in recent history,” Caitlin Oakley, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement, adding that TeleTracking offered a “standardized national hospital capacity tracking system which provided more real-time, better informed data to make decisions from.”
But critics remain alarmed.
“In the middle of a pandemic, the Trump administration is using funds meant to support hospitals as a tool to coerce them to use an unproven, untrusted and deeply flawed system that sidelines public health experts,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Health Committee, said in a statement.
In a statement, TeleTracking said it has three decades of experience providing health care systems “with actionable data and unprecedented visibility to make better, faster decisions.”
Still, public health experts and hospital executives are puzzled as to why the health agency chose such a difficult time to employ an untested private vendor rather than improve the C.D.C.’s National Healthcare Safety Network, a decades-old disease tracking system that was deeply familiar to hospitals and state health departments.
The N.H.S.N., as it is known, had built up trust over decades of working with hospitals and state health departments. Administrators were reluctant to make the switch.
“People — especially in public health and clinical health — are very protective of their data, so that trust factor is certainly an issue,” said Patina Zarcone, the director of informatics for the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “The fear of having their data leaked or misused or used for a purpose that they weren’t aware of or agreed to — I think that’s the biggest rub.”
Ms. Oakley said the C.D.C.’s system was “not designed for use in a disaster response” and could not adapt quickly in a crisis. Allies of the C.D.C. say withholding taxpayer dollars from the CARES Act in lieu of cooperation was an inappropriate effort to push hospitals into a system they were reluctant to use.
“It’s an absolutely enormous lever,” said William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University. “It’s a compulsion to oblige institutions to report to this TeleTracking system because they knew if it weren’t tied to money, it wouldn’t happen.”
The Pittsburgh company has no obvious ties to the Trump administration. Rather, the push appears to be part of a broader privatization. The Health and Human Services Department has also asked the Minnesota-based manufacturer 3M “to create, and continuously update, a nationwide clinical data set on Covid-19 treatment,” according to documents obtained by The Times.
The effort is separate from the TeleTracking data collection. Tim Post, a company spokesman, said that because 3M already operates hospital information systems, it is “uniquely positioned,” with the permission of its clients, to submit information to the health department to help officials study disease patterns and recommend treatment options.
Some experts say this kind of cooperation with the private sector is long overdue. But the push also appears to be driven at least in part by an intensifying rift between the C.D.C., based in Atlanta, and officials at the White House and Department of Health and Human Services, the parent agency of the disease control centers.
Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, and Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff, have taken a dim view of the C.D.C. and believe its reporting systems were inadequate. In a recent interview, Michael Caputo, the spokesman for Mr. Azar, accused the C.D.C. of having “a tantrum.”
Accurate hospital data — including information about coronavirus caseloads, deaths, bed capacity and personal protective equipment — is essential to tracking the pandemic and guiding government decisions about how to distribute scarce resources, like ventilators and the drug remdesivir, the only approved treatment for hospitalized Covid-19 patients.
The health agency has set up a new database, H.H.S. Protect, to collect and analyze Covid-19 data from a range of sources. TeleTracking feeds hospital data to that system.
But the public rollout of H.H.S. Protect has been rocky. The nonpartisan Covid Tracking Project identified big disparities between hospital data reported by states and the federal government and deemed the federal data “unreliable.”
The tension dates to March, when the novel coronavirus was making its first surge in the United States
On March 29, Vice President Mike Pence, charged by Mr. Trump with overseeing the federal response, informed hospital administrators that the C.D.C. was setting up a “Covid-19 Module,” and asked them to file daily reports which, he said, were “necessary in monitoring the spread of severe Covid-19 illness and death as well as the impact to hospitals.”
But around that time, TeleTracking submitted a proposal for data collection to the Trump administration, through an initiative, ASPR Next, created to promote innovation. On April 10, TeleTracking was awarded its contract.
The health department’s spokeswoman said the intent was to complement the C.D.C., not compete with it. Like the C.D.C.’s network, TeleTracking’s system requires manual reporting on a daily basis. But in June, Ms. Murray demanded the administration provide more information about what she called a “multimillion-dollar contract” for a “duplicative health data system.”
Some hospital officials also objected to the change.
“We have been directing our hospitals to N.H.S.N.,” Jackie Gatz, a vice president of the Missouri Hospital Association, wrote to a regional health and human services official in an email obtained by The Times, “and now this email with a much greater carrot — CARES Act distributions — is routing them to TeleTracking.”
When the order was delivered, flaws had already emerged in the new system.
“H.H.S. has acknowledged long wait times for those calling for technical support, and indicated that TeleTracking recently added 100 staff to respond to call center requests,” the American Hospital Association wrote to its members in a “special bulletin” on April 23. “They also are directing hospitals to leave a message if they are unable to reach someone live.”
At the time, hospitals had the option of making their daily coronavirus reports to TeleTracking or the C.D.C. Few were using the new database.
In June, the administration again used a stick to demand that hospitals report to TeleTracking, this time in order to obtain remdesivir. By July, with Dr. Birx pushing to bolster hospital compliance, the administration instructed hospitals to stop filing daily reports to the C.D.C. and to send them to TeleTracking instead.
One official at a major academic hospital, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering officials in Washington, said the switch left her “unable to sleep at night.”
“Ethically, it felt like they had taken a very trusted institution in the C.D.C. and all of that trust built up with many public health people,” she said, then “moved it onto a politically and financially motivated portion of this response.”
Health and human services officials say the government now has a much more complete picture of hospital bed capacity, with more than 90 percent of hospitals reporting. But Dr. Janis M. Orlowski, the chief health officer for the Association of American Medical Colleges, who worked with Dr. Birx and the administration to bolster hospital reporting, said that she was “stunned” by the switch and that the increase in reporting came because of efforts by her group and others, not the TeleTracking system.
Dr. Orlowski said the data and maps now published on the administration’s H.H.S. Protect data hub are “just not as sophisticated as the C.D.C.”
The switch also generated pushback inside the C.D.C., where officials have refused to analyze and publish TeleTracking data, saying they could not be assured of its quality and had continuing questions about its accuracy, according to a senior federal health official.
Administration officials say the C.D.C. is working with a little-known office in the executive branch — the United States Digital Service — to build a “modernized automation process” in which data will continue to flow directly to the Department of Health and Human Services. But the project is in its infancy, one senior federal health official said.
Critics say that if the department believed the C.D.C.’s health network had problems, those should have been fixed.
“We have a public health system that depends upon communication from hospitals to state health departments to the C.D.C.,” said Dr. Schaffner, the Vanderbilt University infectious disease expert. “It’s very well established. Can it be improved? Of course. But to cut out the public health infrastructure and report to a private firm essential public health data is misguided in the extreme.”
Coronavirus: Some college students returning to campus are being met with liability waivers
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/colleges-students-liability-waivers-112753572.html
Schools that are choosing to reopen amid the coronavirus pandemic are attempting to protect themselves against possible legal blowback with legal liability waivers.
From universities to K-12 districts, some schools are sending forms with titles such as “Assumption of Risk” and “Waiver of Liability” to fend off any lawsuits should students contract coronavirus on campus or in the classroom.
“Institutions are basically trying to have it both ways,” Kevin McClure, associate professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, told Yahoo Finance. “They’re trying to say: ‘We are opening in the midst of significant risk, and at the same time we want you — as students or faculty or staff — to assume that risk and to not hold us responsible for the decisions that we’ve made.’”
‘Students’ ability to take responsibility both for themselves and each other’
Generally, the waiver forms note two things: That there is a risk of contracting the coronavirus if a student appears on campus and that the decision to come back cannot be held against the school.
“I know the challenge these circumstances present, but I also know our students’ ability to take responsibility both for themselves and each other,” Damon Sims, vice president for Student Affairs at Penn State, said in a press release. “If ever there was a time for them to do so, now is that time. We will do all we can to encourage that outcome, and we expect them to do all they can to make it so. We are in this together.”
Students returning to Penn State’s University Park campus, which usually houses more that 45,000 undergraduate students, are required to fill out the following “coronavirus compact” prior to their arrival on Penn State’s campus
‘This is the reality of the current situation’
Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire is another college asking its students to sign a waiver.
The liberal arts school is planning to conduct its fall semester primarily in-person, an option 30% of schools have chosen. Classes start for 2,000 students on August 19, university spokesperson Paul Pronovost told Yahoo Finance.
Aside from the usual safety measures — from reducing density in housing, classroom, and common spaces, restricting visitors, implementing distancing — the school is also going to administer two coronavirus tests on students upon their arrival: A rapid test and a fuller test. Saint Anselm is also planning to do surveillance testing throughout the semester.
Beyond social distancing, testing, and contact tracing, the university wants students and parents to “accept” the unique schooling situation.
There’s “simply no way for the College – or any College or institution, for that matter – to guarantee that our campus will not see cases of COVID-19,” Pronovost said in an email. “We believe it is important for students and families to understand and accept that this is the reality of the current situation.”
The liability waiver notes that students “forever release and waive my right to bring suit against Saint Anselm College, its Board of Trustees, officers, directors, managers, officials, agents, employees, or other representatives in connection with exposure, infection, and/or spread of COVID-19 related to taking classes, living or participating in activities on the Saint Anselm College Campus.”
Colleges fear an avalanche of lawsuits
The possibility of lawsuits worried colleges enough to lobby Congress for protections from liability.
Nearly 80 education groups sent a letter to congressional leaders back in May, stating that reopening schools involves not just “enormous uncertainty about COVID-19-related standards of care” but also the “corresponding fears of huge transactional costs associated with defending against COVID-19 spread lawsuits.”
Rutgers Law Professor Adam Scales argued that we may see an uptick in litigation, at least “until Congress or the courts firmly signal that COVID is not going to be ‘the new asbestos,’” adding that courts will not likely impose severe liability on public entities like schools.
“Just because a student can get into court does not mean the student can win,” Michael Duff, a law professor at the University of Wyoming, told Yahoo Finance. “So even if the waiver does not ‘work,’ and the student can get into court, there is no guarantee that a lawyer would take the case because the case may be weak.”
There is also the issue of proof.
“The idea that liability — whether caused by negligence or gross negligence — is easy to prove is a myth,” Duff said. “The student would first have to prove that the college did not act ‘reasonably’ in the COVID-19 context.”
Given that the definition of acting “reasonably” would not necessarily involve a college being perfect with its coronavirus mitigation, Duff added, gross negligence would be “a very hard thing to prove.”
At the same time, Scales added, a liability waiver could not serve as a “get-out-of-jail-free card” a school taken to court in a coronavirus-related case brought by a student.
‘A stark dilemma’
At the end of the day, McClure noted, colleges need students to return to campus and pay tuition to survive as institutions of higher education.
“I do genuinely believe that many institutions and the people running them want to do what’s right and keep people healthy,” McClure said. “On the other hand, there are the financial realities of attempting to keep an organization up and running, and an organization whose revenue is often very much tied to people coming to campus.”
Schools are thus faced with “a stark dilemma,” McClure added, of either bringing students and faculty back to campus or “make significant cuts because we are not able to pay our bills.”
That said, given that students are paying a lot more today than previous generations in terms of tuition and fees, there is a sentiment that “institutions actually have a greater duty of care to their students.”
That idea is being put to the test amid the coronavirus pandemic, McClure said, and the liability waivers — which essentially abandon the “duty of care” that these institutions should take — fly in the face of this “consumerist moment” in higher education.
“Anytime that you’ve got people that are forking over large amounts of money and making a significant investment,” McClure said, “you can expect that they’re going to want a certain level of service and are going to be unhappy when a company or an organization isn’t delivering their end of the deal.”
60% of Sturgis residents were against a motorcycle rally that brings in thousands but the city approved it. Here’s why
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/10/us/sturgis-motorcycle-rally-residents-decision
Before deciding on whether to hold the 80th annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, the local city council turned to its residents to get their take.
“There was a significant amount of discussion that the council had with residents, businesses and state health officials as well as local health officials,” Daniel Ainslie, the city manager, told CNN Sunday.
The city, home to fewer than 7,000, sent a survey to all households asking if they wanted the rally to proceed on its scheduled date. The massive event usually brings in crowds of about 500,000 over 10 days of drag races, contests and concerts. On its 75th anniversary, nearly three quarters of a million people showed.
A little more than 60% of people in the city voted against holding the event this week. But the city council approved it anyway.
Fauci says family has faced threats, harassment amid pandemic
Fauci says family has faced threats, harassment amid pandemic
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said he and his family are getting death threats because people don’t like what he says about COVID-19.
“Getting death threats for me, and my family, and harassing my daughters, to the point where I have to get security is just — I mean, it’s amazing,” Fauci said during an interview with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta on Wednesday.
“I wouldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that people who object to things that are pure public health principles, are so set against it and don’t like what you and I say, namely in the world of science, that they actually threaten you.”
He noted that crises like COVID-19 has brought out the best of people but also the worst of people.
Fauci’s notoriety has been elevated by COVID-19, as he is often on TV offering a blunt portrayal of the state of the pandemic in the U.S.
Fauci, 79, is one of the world’s most respected infectious disease experts, having advised six presidents on HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Zika and other health crises. He has earned a reputation for being blunt and willing to correct the president.
Fauci has had a security detail since at least April.
Fauci also reflected on what he says is a degree of “anti-science” sentiment in the U.S. that is making it difficult to get people to do things to slow the spread of COVID-19 like wearing masks.
“There is a degree of anti-science feeling in this country, and I think it is not just related to science. It’s almost related to authority and a mistrust in authority that spills over,” he told Gupta.
“Because in some respects, scientists, because they’re trying to present data, may be looked upon as being an authoritative figure, and the pushing back on authority, the pushing back on government is the same as pushing back on science.”
He said the scientific community should be more transparent and reach out to people to underscore the importance of science and evidence-based policy.
“I know when I say that if we follow these five or six principles, we can open up we don’t have to stay shut…There are some people that just don’t believe me or don’t pay attention to that. And that’s unfortunate because that is the way out of this,” he said.
President Trump has repeatedly undermined Fauci, questioning the White House coronavirus task force member on Twitter and in interviews with the media.
Over the weekend, Trump tweeted out a video of a portion of Fauci’s testimony explaining why the U.S. has recorded more cases than European cases and called it “wrong.” Trump has falsely claimed several times that the U.S. has more cases because it is doing more testing.
Trump has also retweeted multiple messages that question Fauci’s expertise, including one last week that said he had “misled the American public.”
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HENRY KOTULA 