Category: reason

Some small preliminary studies published a month ago suggested that the anti-malarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin, might be a potent treatment for COVID-19. Subsequently, at a March 19 press conference, President Trump touted chloroquine, an analog of hydroxychloroquine, as a treatment for COVID-19. “It’s shown very encouraging, very, very encouraging early results, and we’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately, and that’s where the FDA has been so great,” said the president.

Obviously, it would be tremendously good news if chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine turn out to be really effective in treating COVID-19. Unfortunately, more recent research is not validating that hope.

A new nationwide retrospective study of patients treated at Veterans Administration medical centers is providing the largest dataset yet reported on the outcomes of COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine, with or without azithromycin, anywhere in the world. The results are unfortunately not promising.

“Hydroxychloroquine use with or without co-administration of azithromycin did not improve mortality or reduce the need for mechanical ventilation in hospitalized patients,” reported the researchers, who are affiliated with the Universities of Virginia and South Carolina. “On the contrary,” they added, “hydroxychloroquine use alone was associated with an increased risk of mortality compared to standard care alone.”

The fact that this is an observational study rather than a randomized controlled trial is an important caveat with respect to evaluating its conclusions. The study assessed 368 male patients treated for COVID-19 at Veterans Health Administration medical centers. In the study, 97 patients were treated with hydroxychloroquine (HC), another 113 received hydroxychloroquine in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin (HC+AZ), and 158 were not treated with hydroxychloroquine (no HC), receiving standard supportive management.

In the meantime, new treatment guidelines issued by an expert panel convened by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases recommended against the use of the combination of hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin because of the potential for toxicities. The panel also observed that there “are insufficient clinical data to recommend either for or against using chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19.” If physicians choose to use either of the two antimalarials, the panel recommends that they should carefully monitor patients for dangerous heart rhythms problems known to be associated with the two drugs.

The researchers who analyzed the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in treating Veterans Administration patients conclude, “These findings highlight the importance of awaiting the results of ongoing prospective, randomized, controlled studies before widespread adoption of these drugs.”

While further research may eventually show that these drugs could offer some therapeutic benefits, they are right now not looking like the anti-COVID-19 silver bullets many people had hoped they would be.

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Attorney General William Barr, who has not hitherto distinguished himself as a civil libertarian, had some sensible things to say about constitutional rights during the COVID-19 pandemic in a radio interview yesterday. While Barr’s responses to questions about President Donald Trump’s extraconstitutional impulses were disingenuous at best, his comments about the need to respect civil liberties even in an emergency were encouraging.

“When you’re faced with a potential catastrophe,” Barr told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, “the government can deploy measures and even put temporary and reasonable restrictions on rights if really necessary to meet the danger. But it still has the obligation to adapt to the circumstances. Whatever powers the government has, whether it be the president or the state governor, still is bounded by constitutional rights of the individual. Our federal constitutional rights don’t go away in an emergency. They constrain what the government can do. And in a circumstance like this, they put on the government the burden to make sure that whatever burdens it’s putting on our constitutional liberties are strictly necessary to deal with the problem. They have to be targeted. They have to use less intrusive means if they are equally effective in dealing with the problem. And that’s the situation we’re in today. We’re moving into a period where we have to do a better job of targeting the measures we’re deploying to deal with this virus.”

That position is well-grounded in Supreme Court precedent. Even in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the 1905 decision that is frequently cited as validating broad state powers to deal with communicable diseases, the Court noted that those powers have limits. The Court rejected a challenge to mandatory smallpox vaccination, observing that “real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.” But it also acknowledged that judicial intervention could be appropriate in different circumstances.

“Smallpox being prevalent and increasing at Cambridge, the court would usurp the functions of another branch of government if it adjudged, as matter of law, that the mode adopted under the sanction of the state, to protect the people at large was arbitrary, and not justified by the necessities of the case,” the justices said. “We say necessities of the case, because it might be that an acknowledged power of a local community to protect itself against an epidemic threatening the safety of all might be exercised in particular circumstances and in reference to particular persons in such an arbitrary, unreasonable manner, or might go so far beyond what was reasonably required for the safety of the public, as to authorize or compel the courts to interfere for the protection of such persons.”

The one specific example of such abuses that Barr mentioned was local bans on drive-in church services in Kentucky and Mississippi, which imposed restrictions on religious activities that were not consistent with general social distancing rules. The Department of Justice supported the churches in those cases, saying such restrictions violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Kentucky agreed, calling Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer’s unilateral ban on drive-in Easter services “stunning,” “unconstitutional,” and “not even close” to satisfying the test for regulations that target religious activities.

Barr also spoke more broadly about balancing COVID-19 control measures against individual rights:

Obviously, states have very broad police powers. When a governor acts, especially when a governor does something that intrudes upon or infringes on a fundamental right or a constitutional right, they’re bounded by that. And those situations are emerging around the country, to some extent. And I think we have to do a better job of making sure that the measures that are being adopted are properly targeted…

When a crisis hits, I think the government needs a little bit of latitude to adopt the means to deal with it. But those can frequently be blunt instruments, and over time, I think the government has the burden of tailoring its measures to make sure they are not unduly intruding on civil liberties. And that’s the question that’s being presented today in our country, which is the extent to which government has to tailor its approach more to the circumstances on the ground and not do undue damage or broad deprivations of civil liberties.

Barr outlined what a more tailored and targeted approach might look like:

We have made a lot of progress in [flattening] the curve, and I think we now, as I say, have to fine-tune these things. I think we have to make a distinction…Orders that tell people, or principles that say, you have to keep your distance of six feet, you should be washing, you should be wearing PPE [personal protective equipment] when you’re out and about—those are fine, because I think those arrest the transmission from person to person. But [orders] that say everyone has to shelter in place, to stay at home regardless of the situation on the ground, or…shut down a business regardless of the capacity of the business to operate safely for its customers and its employees—those are very blunt instruments…

I think we have to adapt more to the circumstances….We have to give businesses more freedom to operate in a way that’s reasonably safe. They know their business. They have the capacity to figure out…how to conduct their business in a way that’s safe. I think we have to give businesses that opportunity. The question really shouldn’t be some governments saying, “Well, is this essential or not essential?” The question is, “Can this business be operated safely?”

Regarding the balance between state and federal powers in responding to the epidemic, Barr suggested that the Constitution could empower Congress to intervene if it decides that state policies “impair interstate commerce.” But in general, he said, “our federal system” lets governors “execute what they think is best at the local level,” as long as it is consistent with constitutional rights. “That can be a messy business,” he added, but it is a “better approach than trying to dictate everything from Washington.”

But isn’t that exactly what Trump has repeatedly threatened to do? When he asserted that ordering businesses to close or allowing them to reopen “is the decision of the President,” claimed he has “total” authority in that area, and insisted that “the president of the United States calls the shots” under “numerous” unnamed constitutional provisions, he was hardly showing respect for “our federal system.” Yet when Hewitt asked Barr whether Trump had done “anything at all to give rise in you to a concern that he does not respect the Constitution or intend to abide by its separation of powers,” Barr insisted that he had no such concerns: “Never. Never at all.”

Hewitt then proceeded to ask Barr about “rhetoric” that “has been deeply deranged at times.” He was referring not to Trump’s delusional claims of autocratic powers but to the criticism of those claims. “We hear ‘dictator,’ ‘authoritarian’ being applied to the president,” Hewitt said. “Is there anything he’s actually done that’s departed from well-worn furrows of presidential authority?”

Not surprisingly, Barr agreed that such criticism is unfair. “When you actually look at his record,” he said, “his actions have been well within the traditional rules of law.” That claim, even if it is limited to policies Trump has actually tried to implement, is debatable. But Barr, like Trump loyalists throughout the country, wants us to ignore the import of this particular president’s words in a way that would have seemed strange under any prior administration. It is surely not a standard that Republicans would apply to any occupant of the White House from the opposing party.

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Concerns that she might get infected with COVID-19 shouldn’t be treated as a reason to release Reality Winner from federal prison early, say Department of Justice prosecutors.

Winner was arrested in 2017 for leaking top-secret documents from the National Security Agency showing that the government believed that Russian operatives attempted to hack into United States voting systems during the 2016 election. In 2018 she agreed to a harsh 63-month prison term (the longest for a media leak) for her crime.

As coronavirus spreads through prisons, attempts to try to get some inmates released in order to reduce density and risk of infection have led to some erratic behavior from the Bureau of Prisons, and families are frustrated that the feds aren’t appropriately getting more prisoners out into home confinement.

Under the specter of coronavirus, Winner requested a compassionate release earlier in April, pointing out that she has been suffering from depression and bulimia while incarcerated and claiming to be at greater risk of a bad reaction to the coronavirus due to underlying medical conditions. She is currently being held at Carswell Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas.

On Monday, U.S. Attorney Bobby Christine of the Southern District of Georgia (where Winner was arrested and convicted), filed a response opposing Winner’s motion. Christine argues that Winner doesn’t qualify for compassionate release for her underlying conditions and hasn’t gone through the proper administrative procedures, which include having to wait up to 30 days for the Bureau of Prisons to respond to the request. Even in an environment where infections are spreading quickly, Christine is leaning on the slow speed of bureaucracy to justify keeping Winner imprisoned.

Furthermore, Christine argues that the prison Winner is in has taken appropriate measures to screen both staff and inmates and other recommended actions to reduce infection risk. He even uses the attorney general’s directive to transfer more prisoners to home confinement as evidence that the prison system is handling things just fine, even though there’s plenty of reporting out there which says otherwise.

Christine concludes:

Winner is not being treated any differently than any other inmate, and she has not shown that BOP cannot adequately address any potential medical issues she faces during this period. Because Winner has not demonstrated how COVID-19 specifically affects her, apart from pure speculation…her request for compassionate release based on COVID-19 fails.

If her request is rejected, her expected release date is Nov. 23, 2021.

There have been good reasons to oppose Winner’s incarceration all along and it may seem opportunistic to use COVID-19 to echo these arguments, but there’s really no criminal justice value in keeping Winner behind bars. She is never going to be in a position again to repeat her crime. She engaged in nothing violent or threatening. The information she leaked ultimately did become an important public story at a time were some were attempting to downplay Russia’s attempts to manipulate the election. And even if Winner herself is not in any particular risk from COVID-19, removing her from the federal prison population will make it easier to manage inmates that the federal government simply shouldn’t release because they are dangerous.

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BOGOTA, COLOMBIA—In the midst of a pandemic, hitchhiking isn’t a very good way to preserve social distancing and stop the spread of a killer virus. Yet thousands of Venezuelans are now trying to hitch rides along Colombia’s roads and highways. 

The situation isn’t new. For years, I have seen groups of young Venezuelans—often entire families carrying infants and heavy luggage—trekking on foot on the highway that leads from Tunja, a city some 95 miles northeast of Bogota’s colonial city center, to the Colombian capital. 

The striking scenes regularly include makeshift, roadside camps for nighttime shelter from the Andean cold and collective washing sessions at gas station bathrooms. Venezuela’s so-called “21st century socialists” created a 21st century Völkerwanderung, a mass migration movement comparable in scale to the large waves of people that rolled across Europe and the Mediterranean between the 4th and 6th centuries A.D., during the Western Roman Empire’s decline and fall.

To speak of civilizational collapse isn’t far-fetched. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, the projected number of displaced Venezuelans—6.5 million people, or as much as 19 percent of the country’s total population according to another estimate—could soon surpass that of Syria, where civil war has unleashed a humanitarian calamity. 

As I wrote when I visited the Colombian border city of Cúcuta, an uninformed observer might think that the hundreds of Venezuelan evacuees sleeping in parks or pedestrian roundabouts were escaping war or natural disaster. They had actually escaped a man-made catastrophe known as socialism.

Seen from Colombia, the reversal of our neighboring country’s fortune defies belief. I grew up in Bogota in the 1980s and early ’90s and remember the regard for Venezuela as a land of opportunity almost akin to the United States. At school, Venezuelan candy was an exotic luxury. Older, well-heeled Venezuelans will still share fond memories of their Colombian nannies or gardeners. 

While the worst phase of the drug war devastated Colombia, hundreds of thousands of nationals migrated to Venezuela, which was still Latin America’s richest nation in GDP per capita. In 1998, Colombia was under siege by the communist FARC guerrillas, who took over the drug trade and used its enormous proceeds to mount an offensive that left the country on the verge of becoming a failed state. Then, in December of that year, Venezuelans elected Hugo Chávez as their president. 

Since that time, Colombia has avoided Venezuela’s fate and received nearly 1.5 million of its refugees. Colombia didn’t attract large-scale immigration by becoming a free market outpost such as Hong Kong or Singapore; it simply managed—barely—to steer clear of full-throttle socialism of the Chavista or Fidel Castro variety.

While this extreme geopolitical volte-face was two decades in the making, the worst pandemic in a century has brought about a new type of upheaval in a matter of weeks. In its belated yet draconian response to COVID-19, the Colombian government is eroding economic and individual liberties to a degree that Chávez himself would have endorsed with gusto.

The Colombian economy has ground to a halt. Mayors of towns and cities have imposed curfews, only allowing citizens to shop for basic goods on certain days, depending on their gender or national ID number. Food is being rationed, the government is fixing prices, and, unsurprisingly, the authorities are abusing their increased and arbitrary powers. In fact, the police are frisking people’s groceries at checkpoints, purportedly to halt the circulation of “non-essential” items, and handing out fines to those who leave home to buy medicine if they deem their documents lacking. 

Venezuelans who have sought refuge in Colombia are all too familiar with chronic shortages, price controls, mass unemployment, and the petty abuses of power (“Papers, please!”) that mark the turn toward a police state. There is no incentive for them to stay in a country that has rapidly come to resemble their own. 

For weeks, I have seen Venezuelans in large numbers heading northeast along the Bogota-Tunja highway, as they return to their native land. 

Many were scraping by in Bogota, as Bloomberg reports, often as informal vendors or beggars on now-empty streets, and could no longer pay for housing. Once evicted, they have no choice but to go home. In Venezuela, migrants “have more of a support network to fall back on” if they return, even if the health care system collapsed years ago, a Migration Policy Institute expert tells Bloomberg. While this is true, other factors are also at work.

In 2019, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro tacitly recognized socialism’s inevitable failures and took a series of steps to reverse the country’s total economic breakdown. As The Wall Street Journal reported at the time, this included a limit to frenzied money printing, mandatory salary increases, and devastating price controls, which produced yearly hyperinflation levels of 2.6 million percent. Maduro also eased restrictions on the private sector, which was at an utter standstill, and freed the flow of cash somewhat. 

Crucially, much of the money now circulating in Venezuela consists of U.S. dollars. As the Journal explained, this results from large inflows of remittances from abroad, but also from a loosening of strict currency controls for importers and private businesses that now accept dollar payments. 

The de facto dollarization of Venezuela has come at a good time. In Colombia, the local currency has lost over 26 percent of its value against the dollar in the last year due to relatively large amounts of debt and plunging oil prices. Now, as Colombia faces a grim economic future in the near term, any good news out of Venezuela, however slight, could offer hard-pressed immigrants an additional incentive to return home.

For Venezuelan socialists, however, any economic reprieve might come too late. In March, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Maduro, several of his henchmen, and two of their FARC allies on drug trafficking and related charges. President Donald Trump then sent the largest maritime anti-narcotics operation in the region’s history towards Venezuela’s Caribbean coast.

The Trump administration argues that it doesn’t seek to imprison a foreign head of state since it considers Maduro’s dictatorship to be illegitimate. Instead, it recognizes opposition leader Juan Guaidó, Trump’s guest at his last State of the Union address, as interim president.   

Although I oppose the drug war, I must admit that in terms of pure realpolitik, Trump’s aggressive stance toward Venezuela is both sound and necessary. It certainly contrasts with the Obama years, when the U.S. strengthened Maduro’s hand with its appeasement of Cuba’s communist regime, the power behind the scenes in Venezuela, and its gullible support for the previous Colombian government’s peace deal with FARC, whose leaders gained unearned seats in Congress even though thousands of their former comrades remain up in arms, as they traffick large amounts of cocaine and terrorize certain areas of the countryside. 

Are Venezuelans returning home because they sense an imminent end to their socialist nightmare? Maduro is under unprecedented amounts of pressure; at $15 million, the bounty on his head puts him alongside characters like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian dictator ousted in 1990 after an American invasion. 

Although a military onslaught against Venezuela would be ill-advised—especially if it involves subsequent “nation-building”—Trump certainly should hope for Maduro’s ouster, possibly as a result of betrayal by regime-insiders or negotiations with the U.S. and the largest stakeholders in the country, including Vladimir Putin. However, whether Maduro ends up like Noriega or Fidel Castro, who died as a happy 90-year-old despot, is anybody’s guess.

As with so much else, the U.S. presidential election could determine the result.

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President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis has cratered his approval rating. Meanwhile, Americans increasingly think the country is on the wrong track. So what is Trump doing to reverse his political slide? Turning to his old and tired formula of attacking immigration.

He announced during his press briefing yesterday that he will sign an executive order as soon as this evening suspending legal immigration to the country for 60 days. He is billing this move as necessary to protect American jobs and health in the face of the pandemic. But if the few available details of his plan are any indication, it seems that he himself does not believe that line. This is pure political theater that’ll upend the lives of immigrants and their American loved ones just so that Trump can virtue signal to his anti-immigration hard-right base ahead of the November elections.

Trump launched his first presidential bid by denouncing Mexicans as “rapists” and “criminals” and pledged to build a “big, beautiful” wall on the southern border. But what began as a slam on unauthorized immigration morphed into an all-out assault on legal immigration as soon as he walked into the White House.

One of his first acts was to ban travel from several predominantly Muslim countries. He also slashed America’s refugee program in less than half and is failing to admit even the number he allowed. But these and other moves were just baby steps toward a much more ambitious agenda to slash and radically revamp America’s legal immigration program.

He demanded that Congress cut family-based immigration in half in exchange for reinstating the legal status of “Dreamers,” which he himself had scrapped. (Dreamers are folks who were brought to this country without authorization as minors, who have grown up as Americans and often have little connection with their birthlands.) But when Congress demurred, he went to town to achieve through administrative means what he couldn’t through legislative ones—the kind of thing that Republicans used to vociferously condemn when Trump’s predecessor attempted it.

Trump scrapped the Obama-era program handing work authorization to the spouses of foreign techies enduring a decades long wait for their already approved green cards. His “Buy American and Hire American” executive order smothered the high-tech H-1B visa program in red tape, vastly increasing the processing time and doubling the rejection rate. As if that’s not enough, he recently implemented something called the public charge rule, which makes it exceedingly difficult for immigrants to upgrade their immigration status—for example, guest worker visas to green cards and green cards to naturalization—if they or their American family members collect or are likely to collect even the smallest amount of some means-tested cash or non-cash public benefits. This, along with other measures, will result in a 30 percent reduction in legal immigration next year, according to a National Foundation for American Policy study.

The coronavirus crisis has been manna from heaven for Trump’s restrictionist agenda.

The only visas that were still being entertained at all—albeit at an extremely scaled-back level—were long-term visas for jobs, visas for studying in the United States, and green cards sponsored either by American employers or American family. This long-term program is what Trump’s unprecedented executive order is now purportedly going after.

Trump claims that the ban will last 60 days after which he may review and renew it for another 60 or so. But his travel ban was supposed to last 90 days. It is now on day 1,181 and covers even more countries.

It is unclear how far-reaching this new order will be. For example, will it be targeted at new applicants or also those already in the pipeline who may have already paid thousands of dollars in visa and legal fees? Will it apply primarily to those applying for visas overseas or also those who are already here in the United States? If it is the latter, then does that mean that, say, the foreign spouse of an American citizen awaiting a green card will have to return home? What about an H-1B foreign high-skilled immigrant awaiting renewal or a green card? Many of them have been in the country for decades and have American children who may be locked out of their parents’ country. Will these families be forced to split, with the parents needing to quit their jobs and return while their children stay in the U.S.?

Trump knows that halting all legal immigration will decimate America’s ability to fight the coronavirus. That’s because immigrants are disproportionately represented in frontline professions. Immigrants are only 13.7 percent of America’s population, but constitute 35.2 percent of the home health care aides, 28.2 percent of physicians, 20.9 percent of nursing assistants, 18.9 percent of health care diagnosing or treating practitioners, 18.5 percent of clinical lab technicians, 15.2 percent of medical assistants, 15 percent of registered nurses and 14.9 percent of health technicians, according to the Cato Institute’s David Bier.

Meanwhile, without foreign farm labor, America’s domestic food supply chains will come to a grinding halt given just how reliant American agriculture is on it. Indeed, even as Trump reduced every other visa program, last year he certified more than 250,000 H-2A agricultural worker visas—a 10 percent increase from the year before—because Republican lawmakers in red states that tend to be more rural demanded it.

So Trump realizes that undercutting foreign workers in health care and agriculture at this juncture with a full ban will massively undermine America’s ability to cope with this pandemic, which is why he has hinted that these categories will be exempted from his executive order.

Meanwhile, given that nearly 40 percent of medical and life scientists and nearly 30 percent of chemists and material scientists are foreign-born—all fields that are racing to find a coronavirus cure or vaccine—Trump says that down the road he might pass a secondary order exempting some of them, too, so that they can keep their H-1Bs.

This will still create massive uncertainty for these folks in the interim. But it’ll also leave many categories of immigrants unprotected, including (most likely) international students who cough up exorbitant out-of-state fees that universities will need even more badly given that the pandemic will almost certainly force state governments to cut funding. (Many universities have already announced hiring freezes.)

But the vast exemptions that Trump is planning to carve in the virtual wall he’s constructing to seal off America from the world are a tacit admission that immigrants are indispensable for vital sectors of the American economy, not a threat to American jobs.

The purpose of Trump’s executive order, then, must be to rally his restrictionist base and ensure that it makes the schlep to the polls this November. It’s pure political posturing that’ll do not an iota of good for America.

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