Category Archives: Transparency

Cartoon – Are you Socially Distancing or in Denial?

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Accountability, Cartoon, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Coronavirus, Credibility, Crisis, Crisis Management, Denial, Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), Economic Crisis, Economy Reopening, Expectations, False Claims Act, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Leadership Cares, Leadership Trust, Mortality, National Strategy, Pandemic, Partisanship, Public Health, Public Safety, Social Distancing, Transparency, Trust, Truth, Uncertainty, Undermining, Wishful Thinking • Leave a comment

Weekly Humorist

All 50 states have partially reopened; U.S. death toll surpasses 90,000

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, ACA, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Clinical Testing, Contact Tracing, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Denial, Economic Crisis, Economic Stimulus, Economy Reopening, Emergency Preparedness, Employee Furlough, Employee Hiring Freeze, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employee Protections, Employer-Based Health Insurance, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, High Deductible Health Plans, High Drug Prices, High Premiums, High Prices, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Medicaid, Medicaid Expansion, Mortality, Out of Pocket Expenses, Pandemic, Preexisting Conditions, Public Health, Public Safety, Quarantine, Social Distancing, Transparency, Underinsured, Unemployment, Unemployment Insurance, Uninsured, World Health Organization (WHO) • Leave a comment

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/20/coronavirus-update-us/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most

NC coronavirus update May 18: Wake County leaders meet to discuss ...

Ready or not, the United States is reopening. All 50 states have started easing coronavirus-related restrictions — even though many of them do not meet federal benchmarks — leading public health experts to warn that a new surge of infections could be imminent.

As the U.S. death toll surpassed 90,000, White House officials continued to defend the push to reopen and optimistically predicted a swift economic recovery. As part of the focus on states’ efforts to revive their economies, Vice President Pence on Wednesday traveled to Florida while Trump was set to host the governors of Arkansas and Kansas at the White House.

Here are some significant developments:

  • Trump ramped up his rhetoric against China, claiming on Twitter that the nation’s “incompetence” was responsible for “this mass Worldwide killing!” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also denounced China as a “brutal authoritarian regime” and described its relationship with the director of the World Health Organization as “troubling.”
  • A worker at a mink farm in the Netherlands may have contracted the novel coronavirus from an animal there, the country’s agricultural minister said. If confirmed, this is would be first recorded incident of animal-to-human transmission. 
  • A church in Houston and another in Georgia are closing for a second time after faith leaders and congregants tested positive for the virus shortly after the two churches reopened.
  • The president drew criticism for saying Tuesday it’s “a badge of honor” that America leads the world with more than 1.5 million confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus because “it means our testing is much better.” The United States has more than 30 percent of the world’s known coronavirus infections but accounts for less than 5 percent of the global population.
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laid out a detailed, delayed road map for reopening schools, child-care facilities, restaurants and mass transit, weeks after governors began opening states on their own terms.
  • The president privately expressed opposition to extending unemployment benefits for workers affected by the pandemic.

 

 

 

 

Rick Bright, ousted director of vaccine agency, warns that administration lacks ‘centralized, coordinated plan’

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), Chloroquine, Clinical Testing, Contact Tracing, Coronavirus, Credibility, Crisis, Crisis Management, Denial, Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), Economic Crisis, Economic Recovery, Economic Stimulus, Economy Reopening, Emergency Preparedness, Health Policy, Hydroxychloroquine, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Leadership Culture, Leadership Intent, Leadership Listens, Leadership Trust, National Strategy, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Scientists, Supply Chain, Transparency, Trust, Truth, Vaccination, Vaccine • Leave a comment

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/14/politics/coronavirus-whistleblower-testimony/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0KfVp-njw8vqKFdaLbBC4r4NAx3KeS4rFg2vmFbSneW7PcqOwVYult9rc

Virus whistleblower tells lawmakers US lacks vaccine plan | Where ...

Rick Bright, the ousted director of a crucial federal office charged with developing countermeasures to infectious diseases, testified before Congress on Thursday that the US will face an even worse crisis without additional preparations to curb the coronavirus pandemic.

“Our window of opportunity is closing,” Bright said. “Without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history.”
Bright criticized the Trump administration for failing to implement a “standard, centralized, coordinated plan” to combat the virus and questioned its timeline for a vaccine. His testimony came a week after filing a whistleblower complaint alleging he was fired from his job leading the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority for opposing the use of a drug frequently touted by President Donald Trump as a potential coronavirus treatment.
About an hour before Bright’s hearing, Trump tweeted that he had “never met” or “even heard of” Bright, but considers the NIH senior adviser a “disgruntled employee, not liked or respected by people I spoke to and who, with his attitude, should no longer be working for our government!”
Before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s health subcommittee, Bright urged the Trump administration to consider a number of actions, including increasing production of essential equipment and establishing both a national test strategy and a national standard of procurement of supplies. He calls on top officials to “lead” through example and wear face coverings and social distance.
Bright claimed that the administration missed “early warning signals” to prevent the spread of the virus. He said that he would “never forget” an email from Mike Bowen, the hearing’s other witness and the vice president of the medical supply company Prestige Ameritech, indicating that the US supply of N95, the respirator masks used by health care professionals, was at a perilous level.
“He said, ‘We’re in deep shit,'” testified Bright. “‘The world is.'”
Bright said he “pushed” that warning “to the highest levels” he could at Health and Human Services but received “no response.”
“From that moment, I knew that we were going to have a crisis for health care workers because we were not taking action,” said Bright. “We were already behind the ball.”
In his written statement, Bright blamed the leadership of HHS for being “dismissive” of his “dire predictions.” Bright wrote that he knew the US had a “critical shortage of necessary supplies” and personal protective equipment during the first three months of the year and prodded HHS to boost production of masks, respirators, syringes and swabs to no avail. He alleged that he faced “hostility and marginalization” from HHS officials after he briefed White House trade adviser Peter Navarro and members of Congress “who better understood the urgency to act.”
And he charged that he was removed from his post at BARDA and transferred to “a more limited and less impactful position” at NIH after he “resisted efforts to promote” the “unproven” drug chloroquine.
A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson responded that it was “a personnel matter that is currently under review” but said it “strongly disagrees with the allegations and characterizations.”
Bright is seeking to be reinstated to his position as the head of BARDA. The Office of Special Counsel, which is reviewing Bright’s complaint, has determined that was a “substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” in removing him from his post, according to Bright’s attorneys.
Rep. Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat and the panel’s chairwoman, said Bright “was the right person, with the right judgment, at the right time.”
“We can’t have a system where the government fires those who get it right and reward those who get it completely wrong,” added Eshoo.
In his testimony, Bright also cast doubt on the Trump administration’s goal of manufacturing a vaccine in 12 to 18 months as overly optimistic, calling it “an aggressive schedule” and noting that it usually takes up to 10 years to make a vaccine.
“My concern is if we rush too quickly, and consider cutting out critical steps, we may not have a full assessment of the safety of that vaccine,” Bright said. “So, it’s still going to take some time.”
Some Republicans on the subcommittee said that the hearing shouldn’t have been held at all.
Rep. Michael Burgess of Texas, the top Republican on the panel, said “every whistleblower needs to be heard,” but added the hearing was “premature” and a “disservice” to the Special Counsel’s investigation since Bright’s complaint was filed only a week ago.
And Republican Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina claimed that the hearing was not about the whistleblower complaint but “undermining the Administration during a national and global crisis.”
Thursday’s subcommittee meeting comes two days after a blockbuster hearing in the Senate that featured Dr. Anthony Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci said that access to a vaccine in time for the fall school year would be “a bit of a bridge too far” and warning against some schools opening too soon, which Trump later called “not an acceptable answer.”
Fauci testified from his modified quarantine at home since he had made contact with a White House staffer who tested positive. But Bright appeared masked and in-person for his hearing on Capitol Hill, as did the lawmakers who questioned him. Many members of the House have steered clear of Capitol Hill since the onset of the outbreak, although they are expected to return on Friday to vote on a multi-trillion dollar Democratic bill responding to the crisis.

 

 

I’m a nurse in a Covid-19 unit. My hospital’s leaders frighten me more than the virus.

Posted on by • Posted in Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Failure, Frustration, Health System, Healthcare Providers, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Leadership Cares, Leadership Conversation, Leadership Culture, Leadership Listens, Nurses, Nurses Union, Pandemic, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Physician, Talent Management, Transparency • Leave a comment

I’m a nurse in a Covid-19 unit. My hospital’s leaders frighten me more than the virus

As a nurse, my hospital's leaders frighten me more than Covid-19 ...

I’ve been a nurse for almost 10 years, working mainly on a hospital’s cardiac floor.

One day I was assigned to a makeshift intensive care unit that had previously been an observation unit for highly stable patients waiting for test results. Many of the patients in this new Covid-19 unit were intubated, with ventilators breathing for them.

When I started the shift, a trained intensive care unit nurse was crying in the supply closet. She was overwhelmed and anxious, hadn’t worked on her familiar unit in weeks, and had been told that her next shift would be an overnight one — and she had no choice in the matter.

Many of us don’t have a choice. We are assigned to work in unfamiliar units, with patients who are outside our expertise, without any training. We’re lost.

Most shifts start with nurses crying. Most shifts end that way too.

“It’s out of our hands,” we hear from hospital administrators.

Nurses who typically work in outpatient clinics are being sent to inpatient floors and assigned to care for patients who are acutely ill. Many haven’t worked at the bedside in decades. The number of patients who have fallen in this unit has risen exponentially in the past two weeks due to lack of training of outpatient nurses.

I wonder if the patients know their nurses are overwhelmed, and that many of them are scared they’ll make a deadly mistake.

“Everyone is out of their comfort zone, just hang in there,” we’re told.

Doctors have been instructed not to enter patients’ rooms unless they must as a way to minimize their exposure to the virus that causes Covid-19 while nurses go from one room to the next, medicating, bathing, turning, and comforting their patients without changing their uncomfortable personal protective equipment, since supplies are limited. This work can take hours. It is not uncommon for nurses to go all day without drinking water or eating because that would mean removing our protective gear.

During one of my shifts, a doctor at my hospital posted several TikToks he made while sitting at the nurses’ station of a busy Covid-19 unit as nurses whispered words of encouragement to patients clinging to life supported by ventilators. Over our words and the hum of the ventilators, I wondered if our patients heard music coming from this doctor’s TikToks.

“We hear your concerns, but there’s nothing we can do,” doesn’t reassure or encourage us.

One day as I worked in the makeshift ICU, one of the hospital’s leaders went floor to floor making an important delivery. She approached our nursing station in her crisp professional attire and fresh disposition, and proudly delivered a supply of makeup-removing wipes. She told us to use the wipes to clean our faces before putting on our N95 masks so we could reuse the masks later, then moved on to the next nurses’ station without asking how our staff was doing or if we needed anything. I wonder if she had noticed the nurse crying in the supply closet.

“That’s above us, we don’t make those decisions,” is passing the buck at its worst.

Excuses from hospital administrators seem to have punctuated every shift for the past six weeks. The praise and applause from hospital leadership only go so far.

I can read in my co-workers’ faces and hear from the stories they tell that the biggest danger we face is not Covid-19. It’s the hospital’s administration.

Leadership is failing us, even as we stand firm in not failing our patients. We care for your loved ones, Covid-19 or not, monitor their vital signs, give them medications, rub lotion on their backs, help them to the bathroom, and brush their hair. We FaceTime their families from our personal phones so they can see their loved ones fighting to live. This is important care that nurses are proud to provide.

The narrative is simple. Nursing, and nurses, are not valued. It’s a shame, and maybe even a deadly shame, that hospital leaders don’t care about nurses like we care for our patients.

 

 

 

The White House said it was following health experts’ advice. Then we learned it isn’t approving a key CDC document.

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Accountability, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Coronavirus, Credibility, Crisis, Crisis Management, Denial, Economic Crisis, Economy, Ethics, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Leadership Alignment, Leadership Decentralized, Leadership Integrity, Leadership Intent, Leadership Trust, Mortality, Pandemic, Partisanship, Public Health, Public Safety, Quarantine, Scientists, Social Distancing, Transparency, Trust, Truth • Leave a comment

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/07/white-house-said-it-was-following-health-experts-advice-then-we-learned-it-isnt-approving-key-cdc-document/?fbclid=IwAR1TRmiDX4IF5WgkAEVT0BeV0qnYxHCZhF1YwfWrmM79FmS6UOivaFbNBA4&utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

Diseases & Conditions | CDC

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany made a point at the start of Wednesday’s news briefing to emphasize that President Trump is following health experts’ advice as we enter what Trump has labeled the “next stage” of the coronavirus response — reopening the economy.

“As you are well aware, President Trump has consistently sided with the experts and always prioritized the health and safety of the American people,” McEnany said.

Several hours later, we got another example of the White House resisting what those health experts are advising.

The Associated Press reported around midnight that the White House had shelved planned guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The document, which was due nearly a week ago, was aimed at providing local authorities with step-by-step guidance on how to reopen:

The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.
It was supposed to be published last Friday, but agency scientists were told the guidance “would never see the light of day,” according to a CDC official. The official was not authorized to talk to reporters and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

A coronavirus task force official told The Washington Post that the document has not been completely shelved but was in the process of being revised because it was “overly specific.” The official also indicated that it was felt the document was too broad, as “guidance in rural Tennessee shouldn’t be the same guidance for urban New York City.”

The denial, though, reinforces that the White House is reluctant to submit to the CDC’s more detailed prescriptions for reopening the economy. And it’s difficult to divorce the delay in this document’s publication from Trump’s anxiety to reopen the economy — and the tension that has created with past guidelines.

The administration in mid-April issued phased advice on when areas should start to reopen places such as restaurants and other nonessential businesses. But many states have moved forward with certain elements of reopening without actually satisfying those guidelines. Most notably, they have begun to reopen without meeting the Phase One guideline that they should see a decrease in confirmed coronavirus cases over a 14-day period.

As The Post’s Philip Bump reported, some states that have pushed forward with reopening have also seen an increase in cases — which would prevent them from satisfying the requirement for moving into Phase Two. That requirement is that the decline should continue for another 14 days after Phase One begins.

Issuing a detailed document would seemingly complicate further reopenings, because it would again restrict what states and local authorities are supposed to do.

The Washington Post’s Lena H. Sun and Josh Dawsey previewed what the document was set to look like last week. And they also obtained a draft of the document. The new guidelines were to go beyond the initial ones in prescribing specific actions that could be taken in each phase of the reopening. Advocates for reopening have worried that strict guidance could make it difficult for businesses, churches, child-care centers and other facilities to actually function.

Trump, who has long signaled a desire to begin reopening that economy sooner rather than later, has doubled down on that rhetoric in recent days. Despite a steady national death rate that approached previous highs on Tuesday and Wednesday, and even though cases continue to increase outside the major U.S. hotbed of New York City, Trump on Tuesday signaled that we are entering the “next stage” of reopening the economy.

“Thanks to the profound commitment of our citizens, we’ve flattened the curve, and countless American lives have been saved,” Trump said. “Our country is now in the next stage of the battle: a very safe phased and gradual reopening. So, reopening of our country — who would have ever thought we were going to be saying that? A reopening. Reopening.”

Trump has been resistant to the advice of the health officials around him, from the early days of the outbreak when he continuously downplayed the severity of the situation. On several occasions, this tension has boiled over.

We’re also hearing from those officials less and less. The CDC long ago ceased holding briefings on the coronavirus outbreak, and the White House coronavirus task force briefings, which often featured health experts Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah Birx, have now been halted in favor of less-frequent and less-coronavirus-focused briefings from McEnany. Fauci has also been prevented from testifying to the Democratic-controlled House, although he is still slated to testify in the GOP-controlled Senate and has continued doing some interviews. The cumulative effect is that these health experts aren’t on the record as much as the effort to reopen the economy begins in earnest.

In the place of those public comments, the CDC guidelines were to provide firm and detailed advice from those officials for the new stage. But for reasons that seem pretty conspicuous, we still don’t have them.

 

 

 

Whistleblower alleges Trump administration ignored coronavirus warnings

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Clinical Research, Clinical Research Funding, Clinical Testing, Clinical Trials, Conflicts of Interest, Coronavirus, Credibility, Crisis, Crisis Management, Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health Policy, Hydroxychloroquine, Misinformation, Mislead, Misleading, Mistake, Mistrust, Scientists, Transparency, Trust, Truth, U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) • Leave a comment

https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-rick-bright-whistleblower-f48cc9c6-8e6e-4662-a127-03e51f323288.html?stream=health-care&utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alerts_healthcare

Whistleblower alleges Trump administration ignored coronavirus ...

Rick Bright, the former director of the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), filed a whistleblower complaint Tuesday alleging that the Department of Health and Human Services failed to take early action to mitigate the threat of the novel coronavirus.

Flashback: Bright said last month he believes he was ousted after clashing with HHS leadership over his attempts to limit the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus.

What’s new: In his complaint, Bright claims he was excluded from an HHS meeting on the coronavirus in late January after he “pressed for urgent access to funding, personnel, and clinical specimens, including viruses” to develop treatments for the coronavirus should it spread outside of Asia.

  • Bright alleges it “became increasingly clear” in late January that “HHS leadership was doing nothing to prepare for the imminent mask shortage.”
  • Bright claims he “resisted efforts to fall into line with the Administration’s directive to promote the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine and to award lucrative contracts for these and other drugs even though they lacked scientific merit and had not received prior scientific vetting.”
  • He adds that “even as HHS leadership began to acknowledge the imminent shortages in critical medical supplies, they failed to recognize the magnitude of the problem, and they failed to take the necessary urgent action.”

The White House declined to comment. HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6882494-NEW-R-Bright-OSC-Complaint-Redacted.html