If the Trump administration tries to push out a novel coronavirus vaccine before it’s fully tested, there are three committees of independent experts who could stand in its way. It’s a testament to the massive stakes of this kind of work that some of their names are effectively kept secret. These committees—two in government and one in the private sector—keep tabs on vaccine-testing, sign off on new drugs and vaccines, and advise the government on how to deploy a new inoculation. But it remains to be seen just how much clout they have if the government decides to skirt science and […]
Bypass
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twitter.com Thousands Allowed to Bypass Environmental Rules An AP investigation has found that thousands of oil and gas operations and other sites in the U.S. have won permission to bypass environmental rules because of the pandemic. https://t.co/kA1vrJ7OTx — The Associated Press (@AP) August 24, 2020 Health Editor’s Note: As if ignoring the coronavirus which has long since reached pandemic proportions was not enough of an assault on the American people, the Trump administration has gone a long way toward taking the U.S. back into the dark ages of pollution. After being pressured by gas and oil industries, who lied and said […]
The White House is now requiring hospitals around the country to change how they report data on COVID-19 patients in a move that effectively bypasses the nation’s largest public health agency. In a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the agency mandated that hospitals send information on their COVID-19 patients directly to a database managed by HHS rather than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The order outlining the alteration claims it will help federal agencies move from manual data entry to automated, which would streamline the collection and dissemination of coronavirus data for multiple […]