Attention to the Unseen

Disturbing from Communist China. Chinese government are only suspecting these people have been exposed & therefore are going to quarantine them w/ people who have #coronavirus. They are fighting because they don’t want to be quarantined w/ the infected. pic.twitter.com/6Lvnr2Cj7o — Nat Shupe (@NatShupe) February 7, 2020 Richard McGregor writes: Soon after Li Wenliang succumbed to the coronavirus in Wuhan early on Friday morning, a drawing of the Chinese doctor appeared on the internet, sleeping and being hoisted gently into…

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The Washington Post reports: China’s streets were quiet and its neighborhoods sealed, but grief and rage against the government poured onto social media on Friday as the country confronted the death of the “whistleblower doctor” whose story was seen as a parable for the Communist Party’s failings. Within hours of Li Wenliang’s death, millions of Chinese, homebound in the coronavirus crisis, tried to bypass censors to post the hashtag “We demand freedom of speech” in a remarkable but short-lived digital…

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Colorized scanning electron micrograph of filamentous Ebola virus particles (blue) budding from an infected cell (yellow-green). NIAID, CC BY By Linda J. Bilmes, Harvard Kennedy School As coronavirus continues to spread, the Trump administration has declared a public health emergency and imposed quarantines and travel restrictions. However, over the past three years the administration has weakened the offices in charge of preparing for and preventing this kind of outbreak. Two years ago, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates warned that…

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Nicholas Kristof writes: China’s leaders sometimes seem 10 feet tall, presiding over a political and economic juggernaut that has founded universities at a rate of one a week and that recently used more cement in three years than the United States did in the entire 20th century. President Trump has hailed China’s president, Xi Jinping, as a “brilliant leader,” and Michael Bloomberg says Xi is “not a dictator.” But we’re now seeing the dangers of Xi’s authoritarian model, for China…

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The Washington Post reports: The U.S. Department of Agriculture has taken another whack at former first lady Michelle Obama’s signature achievement: Establishing stricter nutritional standards for school breakfasts and lunches. And on her birthday. On Friday, USDA Deputy Under Secretary Brandon Lipps proposed new rules for the Food and Nutrition Service that would allow schools to cut the amount of vegetables and fruits required at lunch and breakfasts while giving them license to sell more pizza, burgers and fries to…

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The Washington Post reports: Death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, liver disease and dozens of other causes have been rising over the past decade for young and middle-aged adults, driving down overall life expectancy in the United States for three consecutive years, according to a strikingly bleak study published Tuesday that looked at the past six decades of mortality data. The report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, was immediately hailed by outside researchers for its comprehensive…

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The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is preparing to significantly limit the scientific and medical research that the government can use to determine public health regulations, overriding protests from scientists and physicians who say the new rule would undermine the scientific underpinnings of government policymaking. A new draft of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal, titled Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, would require that scientists disclose all of their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the agency could…

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