14 November 21
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Many CDC scientists felt they “were hamstrung by a White House whose decisions are driven by politics rather than science,” according to testimony obtained by the House select committee on the coronavirus crisis
Emails and transcripts of interviews with former senior CDC officials released by the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis reveal just how far administration officials went to tamp down the CDC’s public health communication efforts in the face of an emerging viral threat.
“The Trump Administration’s use of the pandemic to advance political goals manifested itself most acutely in its efforts to manipulate and undermine CDC’s scientific work,” committee Chair Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) wrote to Trump’s former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield. “Through its investigations, the select subcommittee has uncovered a staggering pattern of political interference from Trump Administration officials in critical aspects of CDC’s pandemic response efforts.”
According to the committee’s interview of former National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Nancy Messonnier, she confirmed media reports that she had angered Trump when she told the media in Feb. 2020 that the virus could cause “severe” disruptions to daily life. Her remarks prompted phone calls from then-HHS Secretary Alex Azar and Redfield. Speaking about her call with Azar, Messonnier said that she was “upset” by the conversation.
“I believed that my remarks were accurate based on the information we had at the time,” Messonnier said. “I heard that the president was unhappy with the telebriefing.”
To distract from Messonnier’s remarks, the administration planned another briefing, former CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat told the committee when she testified.
“The impression that I was given was that the reaction to the morning briefing was quite volatile and having another briefing — you know, later I think I got the impression that having another briefing might get — you know, there was nothing new to report, but get additional voices out there talking about that situation,” Schuchat said.
For three months after the February briefing, the administration banned CDC officials from conducting any public briefings at the very same time the virus was rapidly spreading throughout the United States. The administration additionally denied numerous media requests for interviews with CDC officials. Schuchat said that she and many of her fellow CDC scientists felt that they “were hamstrung by a White House whose decisions are driven by politics rather than science.”
Instead of having the CDC lead the federal response to the pandemic, the White House took matters into its own hands by holding its own briefings and refusing to allow the CDC to speak directly to the public. One Health and Human Services employee even ordered CDC employee Dr. Christine Casey to “put an immediate stop to” the publication of its weekly scientific reports, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). In an email to Redfield, then-HHS Science Adviser Paul Alexander accused the CDC of “writing hit pieces on the administration” in the reports.
In her testimony before the committee, Casey said she was instructed by Redfield to delete that email, a request she said “seemed unusual” and “made me uncomfortable.”
The evidence also shows that the administration made changes to CDC recommendations on how to slow the spread. The White House instructed the CDC to soften language giving guidance to meatpacking plants on how to protect their workers from getting the virus after the virus disrupted production at a number of plants. And Dr. Scott Atlas, who was a special advisor to Trump, abruptly changed the CDC’s testing guidance to recommend asymptomatic people do not need a test even after they were exposed to the virus.
This recommendation was not the correct public health response, Dr. Deborah Birx testified to the committee, and she believed the administration made the recommendation in order to reduce the number of positive Covid tests. “This document resulted in less testing and less — less aggressive testing of those without symptoms that I believed were the primary reason for the early community spread,” Birx told the committee, adding, “I did not agree with the guidance as it was written.”
Fleeing heavy bombardment in Baghuz, Syria - the Islamic State's last holdout - on March 18, 2019. (photo: Giuseppe Cacace/AFP/Getty Images)
Kyle Rittenhouse in court in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges. (photo: Sean Krajacic/AP)
A far-right political commentator appeared as a defense witness at Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial. So why were questions about his political views shut down by the judge?
Schroeder has insisted from the start of the trial that it is not political in nature, even though the circumstances of the shootings were driven by politics, since Rittenhouse took an assault rifle to police a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha alongside a volunteer militia.
On Thursday, he reminded the assistant district attorney leading the prosecution, Thomas Binger, that, in his view, “this is not a political trial,” after Binger had asked a defense witness, Drew Hernandez — who recorded video of one fatal shooting — if his employer, Real America’s Voice, has “any sort of political bias or agenda.”
“I don’t know how you would isolate a person’s particular politics and determine that that person is going to evaluate the evidence one way or another,” the judge told the prosecutor, to explain why the witness should not have to answer the question.
The prosecutor appeared to focus on Hernandez’s extreme politics to encourage the jury to disregard testimony in which he repeatedly cast the people who were killed by Rittenhouse as not protesters distressed about the shooting of a Black man by the police, but a mob of rioters and antifascists.
Because this line of questioning was halted, the jury did not get to learn that Real America’s Voice is not a conservative-leaning network; it is a platform for far-right views, including those of Steve Bannon, who uses his show to promote lies and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the coronavirus pandemic.
But Hernandez, who calls himself both a commentator and a reporter, has made no secret of his far-right politics. As I reported previously, Hernandez spent much of last year capturing video of violence, arson or looting on the fringes of racial justice protests, helping to support the misleading Republican talking point that the nation was under siege from violent rioters and antifascists.
When the prosecutor was permitted to resume his questioning, he noted that when Hernandez posted his video on Twitter of Rittenhouse shooting Joseph Rosenbaum in Kenosha last year, he did so with a caption that maligned the victim as a “rioter.”
Forty minutes after posting the video, Binger noted, Hernandez tweeted a clearly biased (and factually incorrect) comment that falsely described the shooting by Rittenhouse as a measure taken to prevent someone from trying to destroy the car dealership he was guarding. “It appears an armed citizen was defending the car dealership and opened fire on the rioter who was attempting to vandalize or burn the dealership down,” Hernandez wrote that night.
In fact, Rosenbaum had chased Rittenhouse onto the car lot, apparently because he was enraged that the armed teenager had taken it upon himself to police the protesters.
Binger said that he wanted to demonstrate for the jury that Hernandez, who repeatedly characterized the protesters as rioters, was not an impartial reporter but a political commentator whose views influenced how he presented the video evidence he recorded in Kenosha that night.
While the prosecution made no mention of it, there is abundant video evidence that Hernandez is a far-right agitator who has called for “bloodshed.” Video recorded by another conservative journalist, Brendan Gutenschwager, who was also in Kenosha, shows that Hernandez gave a fiery speech at a post-election rally for Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., last November, in which he seemed to urge the crowd to use violence against their political enemies.
“Whether Donald Trump wins or not, we will not go down without a fight,” Hernandez shouted to a cheering crowd. “We will not go down without bloodshed!”
At the end of his remarks that day in support of Trump’s delusional claim that he won the 2020 election, Hernandez screamed: “We will make America great again and again and again and again! Let me just say what’s on all of your minds: if they want a second civil war, then they got one, because I will not let this country fall! I will not let this country burn! I will fight to the very last breath!”
The presence of Hernandez on the stand on Thursday was a reminder that almost all of the video of the Rittenhouse shootings were recorded by journalists who either work for far-right websites or hold far-right views. While the judge dismissed the idea that the politics of those witnesses has any bearing on the case, Hernandez and another far-right journalist who recorded video that night, Elijah Schaffer, have played an important role in promoting the idea that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, as “a good guy with a gun” who had put himself in harm’s way to defend the town, rather than an underaged vigilante in illegal possession of a weapon who had provoked the attacks on him by the men he killed.
Hernandez also explained under cross-examination that his video of the shooting of Rosenbaum by Rittenhouse, and the chase that preceded it, which had been played for the jury, was not simply the raw footage from both of the cameras he had used that night — his phone and a body-worn camera — but an edit he made, combining parts of two clips into one sequence. Binger, the lead prosecutor, expressed surprise that Hernandez had submitted edited video instead of just raw footage.
While Schroeder seems to be focused on the fact that there is no evidence before the court that Rittenhouse shot at four protesters because of their politics, killing two and wounding one, it seems clear that the teenage vigilante was only on the streets of Kenosha that night because of his own conservative views.
Observers of the trial, which is being streamed live online, have previously questioned Schroeder’s own politics and his competence to make rulings on digital video evidence he has appeared confused about at times.
On Wednesday, when the judge’s phone rang during the proceedings, several critics noted that his ringtone seemed to be from the patriotic Lee Greenwood song “God Bless the U.S.A.,” which is also used at rallies by Trump.
On Thursday, Schroeder began the proceedings by asking the court, including the jurors, to applaud the service of the first defense witness, an Army veteran, to thank him for his service on Veteran’s Day.
During Rittenhouse’s testimony on Wednesday, the judge also accepted a garbled and factually incorrect objection from the defense that the prosecution should not be allowed to zoom in on drone footage that showed the shooting of Rosenbaum, because the “pinch and zoom” function of an Apple iPad would fundamentally alter the original video.
“iPads, which are made by Apple, have artificial intelligence in them that allow things to be viewed through three-dimensions and logarithms,” Mark Richards, one of Rittenhouse’s lawyers, claimed. “It uses artificial intelligence, or their logarithms, to create what they believe is happening. So this isn’t actually enhanced video, this is Apple’s iPad programming creating what it thinks is there, not what necessarily is there.”
Instead of asking the defense to produce an expert witness to testify that this was the case, Schroeder told the prosecution that they would have to find a witness to say that that was not the case within 20 minutes, or they could not show the jury the zoomed-in footage.
The prosecutors then decided to show the video without zooming in, which made it more difficult to see something that was not captured in the video of the same scene Hernandez had submitted to the court: that Rittenhouse had turned around and pointed his rifle at Rosenbaum near the start of the chase.
The prosecutor argued that this was an important detail, since it showed that Rosenbaum had reason to fear for his life when he decided to charge at Rittenhouse in what appeared to be an attempt to disarm him before the fatal shooting.
Before breaking for lunch on Thursday, the judge also made a bizarre joke about when the “Asian food” he was expecting might arrive, saying that he hoped it was not still on a boat waiting to dock in a California port.
Texas governor John Connally with President and Mrs. Kennedy prepared for motorcade into Dallas from airport, November 22. (photo: Getty Images)
“Many people make huge sacrifices financially, in their relationships, in their lives, just to be there.”
She had spent every waking hour of the past two weeks organizing a list of hundreds of QAnon supporters who were traveling to Dallas to see the resurrection of JFK, based solely on the predictions of one man, Michael Brian Protzman.
McNamara, along with hundreds of Protzman’s other followers, had been camped out in AT&T Plaza in downtown Dallas for up to nine hours at this point, and her patience was wearing thin.
“There were children sleeping on that ground,’ McNamara told VICE News. “There were elderly people, there were people with walkers, people with canes, people that were in pain, in a lot of pain.”
For hours, the crowd had been told that the big reveal was coming. There were whispered rumors about a house that would accommodate thousands of people that would become the “new White House.” Then a rumor made its way through the crowd that someone was about to appear in the windows of one of the hotels that overlook AT&T Plaza, with everyone from Princess Diana to JFK Jr. rumored to be appearing.
No one appeared, but then Protzman started to shout at everyone to turn off their phones and put them away, that something was about to happen. He told everyone to push back against the walls of the plaza and get ready. He stood three feet away from McNamara and told her:
“Don't worry, you have the best viewing position there is, you won't miss a thing. You won't miss a thing. Keep your eyes open. You're right where you need to be right now.”
But, again, nothing happened. Then, suddenly, everyone was racing towards a small group of Protzman’s closest advisers. McNamara wondered if something was finally happening. But when she got through the crowd, she saw that all that was happening was that everyone was being given a T-shirt with Protzman’s online alias, Negative48, printed on it.
“Everybody's scrambling to get one, like we flew all the way to Dallas and stood around for 16 hours so we could have a T-shirt,” McNamara said.
McNamara is now working to “wake up” those who are still in thrall to Protzman. Over a week after JFK failed to appear, Protzman remains in Dallas surrounded by dozens of his followers, and he’s still predicting the reappearance of the long-dead president and his son, John F. Kennedy, Jr. There is talk of establishing a permanent base in Dallas and the Telegram channels where Protzman’s followers gather online have become even more openly antisemitic and extreme in recent days.
For McNamara, a devout QAnon supporter, the attraction of coming to Dallas was less the “intriguing” prospect of seeing JFK reappear, and more about seeing like-minded people.
“What drew me in more than that was an opportunity to be with like-minded people, because everybody's story in this movement is that we've lost friends,” McNamara told VICE News.
“We've lost family, we've lost credibility, we've been isolated, we've been lonely and we've been called lots of different names, crazy among them. And so there was this opportunity suddenly to gather with like-minded people and that was what I wanted to do.”
That’s why, even after spending 16 hours waiting for nothing to happen, McNamara got up at 10 a.m. the next day and joined the group at Dealey Plaza in the belief that JFK would return. At all times Protzman was portraying himself as a Christ-like figure, McNamara said:
“He's acting like he's Jesus Christ with his disciples. Everywhere he went, there was this little group around him kissing this ring.”
And yet, she shelled out hundreds of dollars to go to a Rolling Stones concert that Protzman told everyone would be where JFK would finally appear.
“I was never a fan of the Rolling Stones, I had no intention of going there. But then last minute, everyone's saying you got to be there, you got to be there. And so I spent $300 on tickets and it was raw and rainy and cold and miserable.”
At that point, McNamara was done and began calling out Protzman for his empty promises. She was joined by some others, but many remained loyal, and “that is when the entire group just started turning on each other and it was ugly.”
Now back home in Florida, McNamara started a new Telegram group to call out Protzman for his behavior. Protzman’s acolytes in turn labeled McNamara and anyone who questioned their leader’s credential as traitors to the cause.
McNamara says she spent thousands on flights, accommodation, and expenses during the trip and ultimately “ran out of money” before going home, and says this is typical of many people in the group.
“I know many people who won't now be able to afford Christmas, but it was more important for them to be there, or they don't know how they're gonna pay the next month's mortgage payment,” McNamara said. “Many people make huge sacrifices financially, in their relationships, in their lives, just to be there.”
Yet Protzman remains surrounded by a dozens-strong group of loyal supporters in Dallas.
On Thursday evening in one of the many Telegram groups run by Protzman’s inner circle, users posted videos of the group, including Protzman, dancing inside a hotel ballroom. One photo showed a young child inside the same room late at night.
Also on Thursday Protzman urged his hundreds of thousands of followers online to donate money to the group to pay for suits and ball gowns so that the group could attend the “inauguration ball” when JFK returns.
Several new dates are being posited within these channels as the next date for when JFK will actually reappear, with both November 17 and November 22 (the anniversary of JFK’s assassination) mentioned.
Such constant moving of goalposts is a typical technique within QAnon, and allows the conspiracy movement to explain away unfulfilled promises.
VICE News spoke to a family member of one of the people still inside Protzman’s group in Dallas, who requested anonymity to speak openly about his brother.
While the Protzman follower was always into conspiracy theories, he never went too far down the rabbithole, his brother said, until he began watching Protzman’s videos.
“There were times where he would come over to [my sister's] place and say he’s just gotta get away from the computer for a little bit because his brain's just all over the place because he’s watching these videos, they’re so mesmerizing.”
After over a week without hearing from him since he told them he was attending the Rolling Stones’ concert in Dallas, the man’s family finally got a reply from him on Thursday, when they received a message suggesting he’s still in Dallas: “I am fine. I'm surrounded by people who love me.” However, when they tried to verify that it was their brother who sent it, there was no response.
“I don't know if he's ever going to return or how deep he is in this stuff,’ the man told VICE News.
Protzman’s rise was based on his use of a bastardized version of a Hebrew numerology system called Gematria, where he links phases and names together by assigning them a numerical value. In videos posted online he goes into an almost trance-like state, as if channeling some higher power.
Dallas Police Department didn’t immediately respond to VICE News’ question about whether they have been alerted to the group’s presence in the city. Protzman and a person who has spoken for him in the past both declined to comment for this story.
At this point, it remains unclear how this charade will end, but Protzman is continuing to use Gematria to convince those in his orbit that he has some sort of higher power. Those who are no longer under his spell are happy to be far away.
“I don't know how it will end, but I don't think it will end well. I'm glad that I am back in Florida, as far away from that as I can be,” McNamara said.
Ogoni indigenes carrying a poster of Ken Saro-Wiwa in remembrance of the late civil rights activist and environmentalist who was one of the Ogoni Nine executed on November 10, 1995 by military dictator General Sani Abacha. (photo: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images)
Oil giant Shell wrought devastation across Nigeria for years. In 1995, nine organizers from the Ogoni region were hanged after a campaign against the company.
This growing call has historical legacies in local resistance to corporate land grabs; over the past decade alone, indigenous-led resistance in the United States and Canada has prevented the equivalent of a quarter of those countries’ annual emissions. As a consequence, the complicity of fossil fuel giants like Chevron and Shell in human rights violations globally is becoming increasingly visible — an issue which gained international attention in 1995 in the case of the Ogoni Nine.
Twenty-six years ago, the Ogoni Nine were executed by the Nigerian dictatorship after a campaign of resistance against Shell’s pursuit of profit at the expense of their community. The fight for environmental justice continues to be an international struggle against corporate exploitation, and today we should honor the activists whose resistance cost them their lives.
Extractivism in the Niger Delta
Nigeria is the largest oil and gas producer in Africa, and since 1975 the Niger Delta region has accounted for over three quarters of Nigeria’s export income. In the last decade, Shell has reported over a thousand spills, with 17.5 million liters released into the Niger Delta, killing fish, contaminating water supplies, and destroying local livelihoods.
In 2008 and 2009, there were two massive oil spills in Bodo, a fishing town in Nigeria. Shell initially offered an insulting $4,000 compensation to the community, but following legal action alongside Amnesty International, the company admitted it had lied about the size of the oil spills, and the community received £55 million.
Cases like this are not a rare occurrence. Communities in the Global South continue to be rendered collateral damage as they face the worst consequences of climate collapse. Ogoniland is located in the Niger Delta. It has a population of nearly 832,000, predominantly fishermen. While its rivers have long been fundamental to local livelihoods, they’ve now become a source of harm.
Since Shell began its operations there in 1958, Ogoniland has become one of the most polluted places in the world. The Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland found that in one community, families drink water from wells contaminated with carcinogen benzene at levels over nine hundred times World Health Organization guidelines.
The region has produced $30 billion worth of oil since 1957, when oil was first discovered there. Between 1976 and 1991, Ogoniland experienced 2,976 oil spills, accounting for over 2 million barrels of pollution.
Resistance
In 1990, in response to the continued violations against the Ogoni people by the oil industry and the Nigerian state, writer and political activist Ken Saro-Wiwa founded the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). This movement consisted of over seven hundred thousand Ogoni people, all united in campaigning for social, economic, and environmental justice through nonviolent resistance and protest.
The group published the Ogoni Bill of Rights, which aimed to realize political and economic autonomy for the Ogoni people and protect Ogoniland from further environmental degradation. The bill called on international governments and development institutions to take action, and to stand in solidarity with the Ogoni people, including calling for those seeking protection from political persecution by the Federal Government of Nigeria to be granted refugee status.
However, MOSOP’s calls for international action fell on deaf ears, and after multiple arrests, Ken Saro-Wiwa, alongside eight of his fellow leaders — Saturday Dobee, Nordu Eawo, Daniel Gbooko, Paul Levera, Felix Nuate, Baribor Bera, Barinem Kiobel, and John Kpuine — were put on trial under the pretext that the group had incited the murder of four Ogoni chiefs. The trial was widely discredited, with critics worldwide speaking out against the military regime of General Sani Abacha, who was then in power. Despite that, the Nine were found guilty, and on the morning of November 10, hanged.
Blood on Shell’s Hands
MOSOP’s campaigning had led to the suspension of oil operations in Ogoniland in 1993, but Shell’s presence continued to endanger the community. In the same year, troops guarding Shell opened fire on protesters, injuring eleven people. Later, a backlash from the Nigerian military saw around thirty thousand were made homeless by the burning of villages in the region, and approximately a thousand people killed.
Evidence from company documents and witness statements have shown that Shell encouraged the Nigerian military to violently suppress resistance and managed a unit of undercover police that surveilled local activists. Esther Kiobel, widow of Barinem Kiobel, filed a case against Shell in 2002, and although the company denied complicity in the activists’ murders, they eventually agreed a $15.5 million out-of-court settlement with the families.
Today, although the Shell pipelines have remained inactive, its oil spills continue to affect the region. The United Nations predict that cleaning up the pollution in the Niger Delta would take up to thirty years.
The Legacy
Local people’s resistance to corporate extractivism remains at the heart of the climate justice movement. Just last week Amazonian youth from Ecuador and Brazil led the march in Glasgow, which saw a hundred thousand protesters — Glasgow’s largest since the Iraq War in 2003.
The fossil fuel industry continues to operate alongside complicit governments in seeking further opportunities for expansion. Only in 2019 did the Commission on Human Rights declare that fossil fuel companies can be legally and morally liable for harms linked to climate change — but for as long as neoliberal hegemony continues to dominate our political system, fossil fuel giants will be granted priority over the lives of local communities.
In their fight for environmental justice, the Ogoni Nine lost their lives — but they also made it clear that the complicity of the fossil fuel industry in brutal violations of human rights can no longer be denied.
Chicago police officers along with other city workers and their supporters protest the mayor's vaccination policy Oct. 25 at Chicago's city hall. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Who’s really ‘anti-policing’? Police officers who set themselves above the public we serve.
After missing a week with the illness, I went back to work here in my hometown of Savannah, Ga. My left eye was bloodshot because I’d coughed so much, and I still had trouble catching my breath. But vaccination limited my sickness to a truly miserable week and not a lasting stay in the hospital, or worse. A neighbor a block away died of covid the same week. He became one of the 750,000 Americans who got sick and never again could catch their breath.
The Monday I returned to work, a vocal number of New York Police Department officers, along with firefighters and other civil servants, closed down part of the Brooklyn Bridge as they protested the city’s mandate that all city employees get at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine or apply for a religious or medical exemption by 5 p.m. on Oct. 29. Some carried signs that said “We Will Not Comply.” This bizarre protest followed hyped warnings by police unions that thousands of officers would reject the vaccine mandate and that this mandate, not covid, would create a public safety issue when the officers walked off the job.
In Los Angeles this past Monday, police officers — including at least one reportedly in uniform — were among the thousands of people protesting the Dec. 18 vaccination deadline for city workers. Los Angeles Police Department officials say only 75 percent of the LAPD’s 12,000 workers have been vaccinated. Hundreds of officers haven’t disclosed their vaccination status, and many others are seeking exemptions. An LAPD officer who founded the group Roll Call 4 Freedom said he turned in his badge and gun recently because he refuses to get vaccinated. The NYPD and LAPD are far from alone. Officers in Chicago and other cities are also protesting mandates.
These protests and warnings are not sound and fury signifying nothing, even if they haven’t resulted in mass resignations. They are something bizarre and sinister. The revolt is an anti-policing campaign by police.
Police officers are sworn to promote and protect the public good. Public health is a big part of the public good. Vaccinations are basic public health measures that have been accepted for 100 years; they are by far the best defense against covid and therefore essential to public health. Why do so many police officers seem to believe that this is a “personal choice” and that being an officer doesn’t come with increased responsibility to the public, whom we took an oath to protect?
It can’t be that they fear the “risk” of vaccination. Being a local cop in America means there is always some risk, especially from ubiquitous guns. Traffic accidents are also a leading risk to police officers. We can’t pick and choose what risks we will accept in this job, but we can seek to mitigate them. Cops wear ballistic vests to reduce the risks from guns; we wear brightly colored vests to reduce the risks while working traffic accidents. Given that covid-19 is by far the greatest risk right now for police, it is bewildering that officers would not only refuse a vaccine administered to literally billions of people, but do so proudly and make it yet another part of the “us vs. them” dynamic that is a cancer on American policing. I’m not saying police must be selfless; I’m just saying we must not be selfish.
Police are rejecting vaccines or vaccine mandates for a variety of reasons, but there is a common thread to the high-profile actions and statements by police unions: that officers should not be held to the same rules that apply to all other government employees — or the public at large. Police saying “We will not comply” isn’t just a threat to public health; it’s also a threat to the idea that policing must be done with the consent of those we police. Officers encounter a great number of people during their shifts, and there is often little choice in these encounters. It is the essence of anti-policing for officers to create increased and wholly unnecessary exposure to a killer disease, especially when the rationale seems to be that we should get special deference.
Police officers wield the immense power of the state, which is why it is so dangerous when we set ourselves above those we police. The spectacle of some officers insisting that their personal preferences supersede public safety is part of an ugly trend of police seeking to be treated as distinct from the communities we work for and with and, ideally, live in. And officers yelling their refusal to “comply” with long-established and previously uncontroversial public health fundamentals does not go unnoticed by communities and neighborhoods with strained or tenuous relations with their police departments.
Like so many Americans, I spent the last 17 months doing what I could to avoid catching the coronavirus. Since I am a detective, this involved wearing a mask and maintaining social distancing in a job where a fair amount of the work is up close and personal. Wearing a mask while investigating shootings in the seemingly endless Savannah summer was uncomfortable, but it was mandated by the city and the department, because it was and is the right thing to do in the face of an airborne illness. Trying to protect myself and my neighbors also involved getting vaccinated as soon as possible. In the early days of the vaccines, supplies were limited and distribution was imperfect. We in health and law enforcement roles were given priority because of the inherent risks of our jobs. This needs repeating: Governments — federal, state and local — had to make hard choices about who could go to the front of a very, very long line, and these governments all chose police officers: Protecting the public meant protecting the police who served them. It wasn’t just the risks of our jobs but their perceived social value.
Millions of people in our communities waited for a chance to get vaccines that some police officers still refuse to get. Hundreds of thousands of people died before those vaccines were available. Covid doesn’t care if a person quit their job over the vaccine: A San Francisco family and community is mourning the loss last Saturday of an officer who was placed on leave for refusing his city’s vaccine mandate – he was one of more than 1,000 people a day that covid still claims in this country. We don’t have to be this way. Vaccination rates for police officers nationwide, like those for the overall population, are rising as mandates kick in, but there are still high-profile instances of dissent. And the reasoning behind it is suffocating.
A North Atlantic right whale severely entangled in fishing gear. The rope has damaged the whale's baleen, hindering its ability to feed. (photo: Nature Picture Library/Alamy)
Critically endangered North Atlantic right whales are dying in alarming numbers after getting caught in lobster trap ropes
Last month, a federal judge in Maine rejected a federal ban on lobstering in a section of the Gulf of Maine that is meant to protect the whales.
The decision reflects the tense battle between a centuries-long lobstering industry – and bedrock of the local economy – that is fighting for its survival and conservation groups, who argue lobster fishing in the area has had detrimental effects on an endangered species who have been injured and killed by the fishing equipment.
On 17 October, District Judge Lance Walker ruled in favor of several lobstering bodies including the Maine Lobstering Union when he rejected a four-month federal ban that would have prevented lobstering from continuing on offshore fishing grounds in the Gulf of Maine. Lobster industry advocates argued that there was insufficient evidence to prove that the whales frequented the area.
Walker questioned the federal statistical models used to evaluate the risk of whales becoming entangled in lobster fishing equipment. According to him, federal regulators from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration used “markedly thin” modeling to prove the whales’ presence in the thousand-square mile area off the Maine coast.
Lobstering advocates such Virginia Olsen of the Maine Lobstering Union praised Walker for his decision, saying, “we felt like someone actually took a look at that data that we had been looking at and finally came to some of the same conclusions.
“We felt like this was a step that was going to hurt our fishery, our communities,” Olsen said, referring to the federal ban. “What we needed as fishermen was some validation that what we were doing was actually in the best interest of the right whale … and we didn’t feel like the seasonal closure was that right step,” she added.
Maine’s $1.4bn lobster industry has for decades been the lifeline for numerous lobster fishers including Olsen herself. But conservationists see its lobstering practices as a significant factor in the reduction of right whale populations over the years.
In data released last month, the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium revealed that in 2019, the right whale numbered 366, before dropping to 336 in 2020, the lowest number in nearly 20 years. Entanglement is a leading cause of death among right whales.
The consortium cited human activities as the driving force behind the species’ extinction, as 86% of identified right whales have been entangled one or more times in fishing gear.
“When they encounter a vertical line that’s in the water, there’s a buoy on the surface and then there’s a string of up to twenty traps on the seafloor … [The whales] generally can’t see the ropes and it’s very violent. The whale will thrash in the water and at the surface, trying to escape,” said Gib Brogan, a fisheries campaign manager at Oceana, an international ocean conservation group.
Ropes entangling the whales can dig into their flesh, and wrap around their mouths, preventing them from feeding, breeding and socializing, Brogan said. . Entangled whales, especially young calves, may drown if they cannot reach the surface; others die slowly of starvation.
“What the government is saying is that [the Gulf of Maine] may not be an aggregation area. [Rather] it may be a pathway as the whales are migrating from either the eastern Gulf of Maine or the Gulf of St Lawrence … This is a time and place where a lot of whales are using this as their habitat … which have a lot of functions. It can be a breeding, feeding and socializing area,” Brogan said.
Noaa has appealed Walker’s order, arguing that the lobster unions and dealers failed to provide evidence of irreparable harm that the closure of the waters would have on them. It also argued that the lobstering bodies did not provide hard evidence that the closure would result in economic havoc.
Over the years, ropeless fishing has been promoted as an alternative to lobstermen that would pose less risk to whales. Instead of using the traditional lines that connect traps on the seafloor to a buoy, ropeless traps can be raised to the surface by remote control.
However, the industry has not yet widely embraced this method, with many such as Olsen citing ropeless fishing’s availability, cost and safety as major concerns. A ropeless trap costs about $4,000, while a traditional lobster trap costs between $80 and $180.
The National Marine Fisheries Service loans experimental gear technology to collaborating fishers, but Noaa expects a maximum of only 330 ropeless traps to be available coastwide – from Maine to Florida – in the coming years.
Some groups are calling for collaboration between the two sides. Erica Fuller, a senior attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation, said promoting new methods of fishing – and providing the means for lobstermen to adopt them – would help solve the fight.
“I don’t think any conservationist would say that ropeless fishing is ready today, nor is it affordable yet. But we have to get there,” said Fuller. “What in a collaborative fashion would be helpful would be if fishermen that might be otherwise closed out of a certain area or fishermen who generally want to be part of a solution would try on some of this gear … Based on fishermen’s feedback, we get the best gear modifications.
“If Maine wants to play a more collaborative role in trying to move that transition forward, that would certainly be an area where we do everything in our power to help those fishermen,” she added.
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