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More than 90 million ballots cast as of Saturday, as hopes and tensions magnify ahead of Election Day

InternationalNov 01. 2020A voter casts a ballot in Detroit on Oct. 15. In Michigan, voting has been characterized by concern about the pandemic, potential violence at polling places and legal disputes over how and when ballots will be counted.. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Salwan Georges 

By The Washington Post · Michelle Ye Hee Lee · NATIONAL, POLITICS
At least 90 million Americans have already cast their ballots for the general election with three days left until Election Day, a historic early turnout that underscores voters’ intense desire to be heard in a divisive election despite the voting challenges caused by the coronavirus pandemic. 

The massive early turnout is roughly 65% of the 139 million votes cast in 2016, and it essentially guarantees that, for the first time in history, a majority of ballots will be cast before Election Day. The early turnout puts the country on pace for record voter participation not seen in more than a century, and if the current rate holds, more than 100 million ballots will have been cast before Tuesday. 

The U.S. has already hit 66% of total 2016 voting Photo by: The Washington Post — The Washington Post F

Democrats have had an edge in early voting, but that gap has narrowed in some key battleground states in recent days, including in Florida, North Carolina and Georgia, according to data maintained by the U.S. Elections Project, a nonpartisan early-voting tracker. President Donald Trump has urged his voters to cast their ballots on Election Day, and his campaign is hoping that his supporters take heed and show up in full force to close that gap. 

As anxiety intensifies ahead of Election Day, election officials are bracing for potential conflict at polling sites. On Saturday, a march organized to encourage voting and in support of Black lives led to several arrests. A number of marchers reported being sprayed with an irritant, including a 3-year-old. 

The record-breaking turnout has stunned election officials and campaign operatives alike, and it has upended the presidential campaigns’ expectations of which states would be pivotal to their path to victory. Texas, for example, has led the country in early voting and has already surpassed its 2016 turnout; the number of ballots cast there so far has made the state competitive for the first time in decades. 

As the early-voting period comes to an end in most states Monday, some voters have taken extraordinary measures to make sure they can cast their ballots early, including waiting hours in line and traveling across the country to avoid problems with mail delivery. Their overwhelming demand to vote early comes despite the president’s attacks on the integrity of mail voting, and as spikes in positive coronavirus cases have exacerbated voters’ anxiety about potential exposure at busy polling places Tuesday. 

“Obviously, this race is far from decided. But to the extent that President Trump is entering Election Day with a deficit, the degree of difficulty that he’s facing to surmount that deficit is substantially higher because of his tactical rejection of early voting,” said Tom Bonier, chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm. 

Roughly two dozen states and Washington, D.C., will allow early voting through Monday. 

One of those voters who raced to get their ballots in before Tuesday was Joe LaMuraglia, 52, who drove more than 800 miles to Georgia from Massachusetts to vote in person because his absentee ballot never arrived. LaMuraglia, a registered Democrat from Savannah, Ga., has been living in Boston during the pandemic and requested his absentee ballot in early September. The election office had mailed it out on Sept. 18, he said, but the ballot was somehow sent to Virginia, where he has never lived. 

When his ballot had not arrived as of Tuesday, he decided to drive to Georgia instead. After a 15-hour road trip, LaMuraglia waited in line for 52 minutes at his early-voting site and finally cast his vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. 

“It’s too important to sit this one out,” he said. After voting, “I had a sense of relief, just this huge sigh of relief, that I got it done.”

At least 90,488,149 Americans had voted as of Saturday afternoon, including at least 32.9 million who cast votes in person, according to the U.S. Elections Project, run by Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida. In the 20 states where party registration data was available, 45.9% were Democrats, 30.2% were Republicans and 23.3% had no party affiliation, according to the tracker.

Nearly 28 percent of the early ballots nationally were cast by voters who did not participate in the 2016 election, according to a TargetSmart analysis. 

Black voters have turned out in large numbers nationally and in some key battleground states, such as Georgia and North Carolina. 

And voters under 30 have exceeded their 2016 early-voting rates in the majority of battleground states, amid signs that they may be on track to massively turn out as they did in the 2018 midterms, when they more than doubled their rate of voting compared with the prior midterm election.

In Graham, N.C., a racially diverse crowd of about 400 people was making its way from a Black church to an early-voting site when the group stopped at the Confederate monument where anti-racism activists have clashed for months with white nationalists.

It was not immediately apparent from the outer edges what led law-enforcement officers to start arresting marchers. Graham police said the department would not release the total number of arrests until Saturday night and would not discuss the charges individuals face until Monday. The Alamance County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to an interview request.

Kyesha Willis, who was at the march with her mother and her 3-year-old, said they were struck by a tear-gas-like irritant that led all three to start coughing and caused her to vomit.

One young man was taken into custody after a Graham officer told him to move off the sidewalk and into the designated protest area, or face arrest. “Is that why you are going to arrest me? Because I’m Black?” he shouted back. The officer cuffed him and led him away as activists, watching from across the street, chanted “let him go” and “what did he do?”

Supporters of the Confederate memorial watched from outdoor tables at a soda shop on the court square. One man shouted: “Get off the streets!” A car with several Trump 2020 flags drove slowly around the courthouse.

The march was organized by two organizations: Justice for the Next Generation and Alamance Alliance for Justice. Among those attending were relatives of George Floyd, the Minneapolis man who died in May while in police custody, and the parents of Christian Griggs, a Black man who was killed by his White father-in-law in North Carolina in 2013.

In Minneapolis, crowds lined up to vote under the shadow of a different kind of threat: the cascade of legal challenges that could leave some votes invalidated.

Hundreds of people stood in near-freezing temperatures at early-voting sites on Saturday, heeding the warnings of state election and other elected officials who urged people to return their ballots or vote in person after an appeals court panel Thursday indicated that mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day may not count.

Minneapolis election officials opened two new early-voting centers this week and set up several ballot drop-off sites across the city and expanded staffing at its Elections and Voter Services office outside downtown, where people began lining up before the facility was open to vote in person Saturday. Across the packed parking lot, several dozen more people sat in their cars waiting for their turn to drive-up vote.

One of the first people in line was Cody Gerrells, 33. He said he had planned to vote by mail and then considered voting in person on Election Day, but he had grown more concerned in recent days about chaos and decided to vote Saturday. 

“I didn’t feel confident that something wouldn’t happen,” he said, adding that he was here “to vote Donald Trump out.”

In Michigan, where Biden is campaigning with former president Barack Obama on Saturday, voting has been characterized this year by concern about the pandemic, potential violence at polling places and legal disputes over how and when ballots will be counted. 

Despite those hurdles, millions in Michigan have voted successfully. More than 3.1 million Michiganders requested absentee ballots this year. Since then, 2.6 million have returned their ballots or voted early at a clerks office, said Quentin Turner, who leads the election protection project for Common Cause in Michigan.

Michigan has been roiled this year by armed right-wing groups protesting efforts to restrict activities following the pandemic. Several group leaders were arrested recently and charged with conspiring to kidnap the state’s Democratic governor. Even with those concerns, there have been no substantive reports of voters feeling threatened or intimidated, according to Turner. 

Mikki Godfrey, 49, an early-childhood education expert who lives in a diverse suburb of Detroit, described the experience of voting early this past week as “heaven” for her and her family and friends.

“It allowed us to participate without having to worry about missing work, long lines or child care,” she said. “I wish we could do it every year.” 

Godfrey went to her local clerk’s office in Farmington Hills, where she and her family live. She waited in a short line with her 25-year-old son, T.J. Voting went smoothly, but the experience was also “very emotional,” she said. This year, Godfrey, like other Black parents, spoke to her son about the risks of being pulled over by police. The election, she believes, is in part about addressing those concerns. 

“I felt like we were making history,” she said of going to vote early with her son. 

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‘People are scared’: Politics pit neighbor against neighbor

InternationalNov 01. 2020John Snider standing outside his home office in Colbert, Wash., just north of Spokane MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Rajah Bose 

By The Washington Post · Annie Gowen, Tim Craig · NATIONAL, POLITICS 

A Democrat in North Carolina changed her voter affiliation, scared to be outed in a red state. A Republican in Washington stopped speaking to his Democratic neighbors and lied to pollsters about his support for President Donald Trump, calling himself a member of the “silent majority.” 

The Rev. W.J. Rideout III said he doesn’t talk to some people about politics. “People feel like Trump supporters are going to hurt them,” he said. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Salwan Georges

Across the United States, political signs have been set ablaze, cars have been vandalized and neighborhood scuffles and shouting matches have proliferated in the waning days of the most toxic election season in more than half a century.

Amid the erosion of political discourse, a fear of retaliation has spread, pitting neighbor against neighbor and squashing the political exchange that fuels a thriving democracy, experts say. Some Americans say they have taken down election yard signs and quit social media over fears they could be physically targeted. The victims are often political minorities: blue voters in red states and red voters in blue states. 

“How did we get to this place where expressing our political beliefs was practically a declaration of war?” asked Beth Dorward, 56, an editor from Maineville, Ohio, who worries about being singled out for her liberal political beliefs. Her signs supporting Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden are sitting on her coffee table under a pile of bills.

There’s a “constant taunt, and the taunt says, ‘C’mon, put them up. Speak your piece,’ ” she said. 

The threats have affected voters from coast to coast. A Pennsylvania family found six gunshots fired through the Biden sign in their front lawn in early October, according to local media reports. An Alabama woman with a Biden sign in front of her home told local news she woke up to the word “Trump” spray-painted in bright orange on the hood of her white Honda Civic.

A convoy of trucks flying Trump flags aggressively chased a Biden campaign bus recently on an interstate near Austin. Video of the chase, which quickly went viral on social media, shows one truck swerve into the path of another vehicle, scraping its passenger door, to tailgate the bus.

Trump supporters have been targeted, too. A video circulating online shows a man ripping a Trump flag off a car during a parade supporting the president in Orange County, Calif., in early October. Even the head of the Georgetown County elections board in South Carolina was swept into political tensions when local Republicans said they captured him and his wife defacing a Trump sign. Dean Smith, a 15-year veteran of the board, resigned a few days later, the Coastal Observer reported.

More than 1 in 3 respondents to a Marquette University Law School poll in October said they had stopped talking about politics with at least one other person because of disagreements about the presidential election. That’s about the same total percentage as in 2016, but Democrats specifically showed a jump: About 46% said they have bowed out of political conversations this year, compared with 39% in 2016. 

Democrats also are far more likely to keep quiet than those on the other side of the political aisle, according to the poll. Only 28% of Republican respondents said they had stopped talking politics with someone.

The fear created by threats and violence has a chilling effect on the nation’s political process, said Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“People are increasingly seeing people of the opposite side as less than human,” she said. “When you see the opponents as the enemy, it makes it very difficult for democracy to persist.”

The Washington Post communicated with 98 voters in 33 states who said they have hidden or outright lied about their political views out of fear of physical harm, online harassment or vandalism. Some of those fears are fueled by firsthand encounters, while others said images of armed men at protests and polling places and news stories about political violence have raised their anxieties.

Suzanne Tollefson, a California attorney from a Republican-dominated area in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, has always faced some flak for supporting Democrats in her town. When she supported Barack Obama in 2008, a picture of him as Hitler was stapled to her mailbox.

But this year, the level of vitriol has worn her down. 

“Jacked-up trucks” with Confederate and Trump flags are a common sight, she said, as well as the bumper stickers that say “Make America Beautiful – Kill a Liberal.” The county seat was nearly shut down earlier this summer over a rumor that antifa was coming to burn down any home that has a U.S. flag out front. 

She now only shares her thoughts with people she can trust, she said. With others, she stays neutral, keeps quiet and looks over her shoulder.

“This is the first time in my life I have been afraid of my fellow citizens,” said Tollefson, 57. “I am sad and angry about my self-censorship, because it is not wholly voluntary; it stems from a place of fear and survival. I am exhausted from worry and hate.”

On the other side of the country, Kelly McNamara, 57, a retired military chaplain’s assistant in southwestern North Carolina, said she wasn’t aware of how many Trump supporters lived in her gated enclave until she saw the flags and yard signs sprouting up this year. She said she recently went to the elections board to change her voter registration from Democrat to unaffiliated, “so my neighbors couldn’t look me up.” 

Her fears grew when she saw men with shaved heads, long beards, battle fatigues and guns standing guard outside a polling place in her small town of Rutherfordton, she said.

“I’m afraid to let my neighbors know how I vote in case of a civil war. Being in a gated community, I was looking for better protection, but now I know I am locked inside with mostly Trump supporters, and it’s on a mountain, so almost everybody has guns,” said McNamara, who is also a gun owner.

Some blame Trump for the rise in tension and violence, saying his hesitancy to condemn white supremacists and heavily armed far-right extremist groups has sent a signal to supporters that some level of violence is acceptable in U.S. politics. 

An October Fox News poll found that 58% of Americans said that the way Trump talks about racial inequality and the police is leading to an increase in acts of violence, with about 38% believing the same about Biden.

The Rev. W.J. Rideout III, an independent voter who pastors All God’s People Church in Roseville, Mich., noted the arrests in an alleged right-wing plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D, in explaining his unwillingness to discuss politics with some people. 

“This the most secretive and silent voting cycles we’ve seen in years, only because everyone is so worried about safety,” said Rideout, 52. “People feel like Trump supporters are going to hurt them.”

For quiet Trump supporters, fears of doxing and other online harassment from digital mobs have muted their political talk. Cities suffering vandalism by far-left actors further their concerns about retaliation for their political views, they said.

Bill, a resident of the Dallas suburb of Plano who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used because of concerns about political retaliation, said he is leaning toward voting for Trump. But unlike in past elections, he’s keeping those views to himself. The 56-year-old fears that if he expresses his political leanings publicly, people on social media will track him down and harass him or his family.

Bill, who works in sales, blames much of the tensions on far-left demonstrators, including supporters of the loosely organized far-left network known as antifa.

“There have just been many crazy things out there. . . . And there are too many people who seem to be spoiling for something,” he said. “It’s not safe for me. It’s not safe for my family.”

John Snider, 75, a real estate financier in Spokane, Wash., also believes that left-wing actors are more likely to commit political violence than those on the right and said the risk of being called a racist has shut down his conversations with liberal neighbors. His friends, Republicans who feel like the past four years have been good for their bank accounts, either hang up or lie to pollsters and say they’re for Biden, he said.

“That’s why I think the polls are wrong,” Snider said. “We’re the silent majority. That’s how we see ourselves. Keep your mouth shut.”

Other voters say they’re remaining steadfast in voicing their views in the face of political conflict and intimidation, at least to a certain degree.

Karan Ciotti, 56, a lawyer from Houston, said she stopped wearing her gold V-O-T-E necklace after a co-worker criticized it as a “political statement.” She also stopped interacting with two neighbors who made remarks she felt were racially insensitive toward people of color.

But Ciotti, who is White, continues to display a “Hate Has No Home Here” sign in her front yard, even after her homeowners association sent her a letter asking her to remove it. The sign will stay there at least until after the election, she said, adding that she’s “praying people are less tense once it’s over.”

In South Florida, Democratic activists and candidates have been struggling in recent weeks to curb a wave of sign-stealing and abuse from far-right groups such as the Proud Boys, said Diaundrea Sherill, president of the Miami-Dade Young Democrats. At a recent Democratic car caravan, Sherill said Trump supporters turned up and heckled Biden supporters.

But Sherill, 31, said she is determined to visibly and vocally express her support for her preferred candidates and believes most young voters will, too.

“The younger folks are defiantly open about standing firm in who they support,” Sherill said. “The older generation may not be so, but the younger generation are pretty bold, and willing to say who they are voting for.”

Trish Collins, a nurse in Unionville, Conn., said she questioned whether to advertise her support for Biden after hearing stories from her friends and neighbors about missing yard signs and scowling looks from passing motorists. When she saw news coverage of armed clashes at protests and political rallies and the alleged plot to kidnap Whitmer, her anxiety grew.

“I have been through plenty of elections, but never before was I afraid that someone would come to my house and do something because I had a sign in my yard,” said the 54-year-old Democrat, whose Hillary Clinton sign was stolen from her yard in 2016. “You used to see people always putting bumper stickers on their car. But now you heard that nobody is doing it because people are afraid someone will do something to their car when they are out.”

Collins agonized for several days over whether to put up her Biden signs. Finally, a few weeks ago, she decided to go for it – planting two Biden signs and one sign that reads “Dump Trump” in her yard.

A few days later, an older neighbor walked over to her with a smile. 

“She thanked us for putting the signs up, because she was too afraid to,” Collins said. The anxiety will have been worth it, she said, if just “one person drives by my house and looks at my signs and says, ‘You know what, I am going to go vote.’ “

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The map is wide, Democrats tense and Republicans hopeful in the last days of campaign 2020

InternationalNov 01. 2020Early voting in the U.S. as of Oct. 31. Photo by: The Washington Post — The Washington Post 

By The Washington Post · Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey · NATIONAL, POLITICS 

An unparalleled four-year battle over Donald Trump’s shock election and disruptive presidency raced to a suspenseful conclusion this weekend, as the candidates blitzed an expanded 14-state battlefield with ads and rallies that presented radically divergent visions for the nation. 

President Donald Trump throws a hat to supporters during a rally in Waterford Township, Mich. on Friday. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Salwan Georges Photo by: Salwan Georges — The Washington Post Location: Waterford Township United States

Democrats at all levels remained privately terrified of another surprise result, despite far greater confidence in polling that pointed to a victory for former vice president Joe Biden. Republicans put their faith, once again, in the president’s showmanship as he mounted a final series of irreverent rally spectacles in violation of public health guidance, hoping to motivate a massive late surge of turnout.

Four years ago, Trump broke through traditionally Democratic states along the Great Lakes to upend the electoral college map and preside over a Republican majority in Congress, leaving his opposition with little formal power. Election Day 2020 arrives Tuesday with Democrats comfortably in control of the House, threatening to retake the majority in the Senate and within striking distance of beating Trump in several Southern states once viewed as an unbreakable part of his reelection path.

Supporters line the route of Joe Biden’s motorcade through Flint, Mich., on Saturday. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman Photo by: Demetrius Freeman — The Washington Post Location: Washington United States

Little else has proceeded according to the script of elections past. As the candidates made their closing arguments, the coronavirus pandemic, which has cost the nation more than 230,000 lives and forced nearly 20 million to lose work, reached a new peak in infection rates, threatening yet another blow to lives and livelihoods of voters, as other nation’s around the world announced new shutdowns. 

On television, the Biden campaign had a nearly 3 to 1 advantage in advertising that included five states where they were on air unopposed, according to Advertising Analytics. Early-vote totals across the country broke records, as states such as Texas exceeded all the votes cast in 2016 days before Election Day. A fear of post-election violence and looting led property owners nationwide to board up storefronts. 

Large teams of partisan lawyers prepared to litigate ballot counts should races end up close, their eyes on a series of court rulings concerning deadlines for mail-in ballots and other legal questions that could spark a drawn-out courtroom drama in the days and weeks after the voting ends. 

The two candidates’ contrasting approaches to viral danger provided the starkest choice for the country, as the president mocked mask-wearing at his events and pushed falsehoods such as the contention that the country was “turning the corner” on the coronavirus. He blamed Democratic governors for throttling the economy by following the guidance of public health leaders, even though experts say imposing restrictions will ultimately allow the economy to recover more quickly.

“I just want normal life,” Trump said Friday at a rally in Wisconsin, a state gripped by epidemic spread. “You do, too.” 

Biden, by contrast, called for a new national effort to fight the pandemic with mask mandates and warned of a deadly winter if Trump is reelected, echoing the concern of the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony Fauci, who has criticized Trump’s events. Biden’s campaign has refused to plan mass rallies, choosing socially distanced events, with supporters honking their approval from cars instead of applause.

“This isn’t a political statement of us wearing these masks. For God’s sake, it’s a patriotic duty,” Biden said in Wisconsin hours after Trump, while speaking through a surgical mask. “I’m not going to shut down the economy. I’m going to shut down the virus.” 

Republican advisers argued that the president’s denial of medical reality would have a positive effect, by projecting optimism. 

“If you’re just tuning into this campaign, you see one candidate cheerfully entertaining an adoring crowd of thousands three times a day, while the other is yelling at parked cars,” Republican strategist Josh Holmes said of the advantage Trump hoped to achieve. “You’d be forgiven if you assumed Trump was about to win in a landslide.” 

Inside the Trump campaign, advisers admitted they still trailed in polls, skeptical of their chances of winning Michigan. But they think they have better shots in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and are confident about Florida and North Carolina. Arizona is close to even, two Trump campaign officials said, taking a more optimistic tone than the public polling.

The Biden campaign has been focused on getting mail-in ballots returned and turning out less frequent voters, a younger and more diverse crowd, on Election Day. The fact that so many Democratic ballots have already been returned has helped narrow the targets they know they need to get to the polls. 

“This is exactly what we expected in a lot of ways. We have tremendous early-vote enthusiasm,” said Jenn Ridder, national states director of the Biden campaign. “The race is competitive and we expect it to narrow in the last few days.”

While Biden offered a broad message about restoring American values to national leadership, Trump’s final message, with rants against the media, crowd chants calling for Biden’s imprisonment, and conspiracy theories, focused less on persuasion than on turning out Trump’s base, along with similar voters who sat out 2016 but have been targeted and in some cases registered to vote by a large Republican field operation. They are also counting on Democratic turnout to disappoint on Election Day, particularly among Black and Hispanic voters.

“Many observers are missing what a gamble it is for the Biden message to be 10% pro-Biden, 90% anti-Trump,” Trump 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said. “It’s mystifying that Biden has become increasingly negative and even Obama has traded in ‘hope and change’ for ‘harangue and complain.’ “

Some Democrats expressed concern over early-vote turnout in some parts of the country, but both the Biden campaign and outside groups remained confident that the numbers were holding for a Biden victory. They also continued to predict that Trump’s decision to ignore health warnings at his rallies would backfire, given polling that shows continued high levels of concern about the pandemic. 

“We are on the lookout for a surge of mysterious previously unnoticed Trump voters and we keep on not seeing it,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler said.

Public polling averages showed a very different race than in 2016, when Trump had benefited from a late surge that was recorded in public polling. Over the past two weeks, by contrast, Biden’s lead has held steady in Michigan, widened by a point in Wisconsin while falling by two points in the national average and Pennsylvania and one point in North Carolina, according to averages of public polls. 

The shifts toward Trump so far, where they have occurred, are smaller than his 2016 gains over the same period and still leave Biden with a considerably larger lead going into Election Day. Biden now leads by nine points nationally, according to a Washington Post average of polls, compared with three to four points for 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Biden’s standing in Florida, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is roughly two points larger than Clinton’s lead over Trump at the same point, depending on how polls are combined.

Several Democratic strategists, who were privately polling in the final weeks, said they had detected no significant shift toward Trump. They also argued that the election environment was far from that which began around the same time then-FBI Director James Comey announced the discovery of Clinton emails on a laptop owned by her aide’s husband. 

“We spent the last two weeks of 2016 focused on Hillary Clinton and the FBI announcement, and from that point forward the race was closing day over day. That is not the case now,” said Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, the largest Democratic super PAC supporting Biden. “The focus of this race has been covid and the president’s handling of covid. That has been true for several weeks.” 

Demographic breakdowns of public national polls also showed a rather stable race, with clear advantages for Biden. The Democrat has been leading voters over age 65 by nine points, in a Washington Post average, a shift of 17 points from 2016, when Trump carried the group. Trump’s margin among White men has dropped 15 points and his support among White women has fallen by 10 points.

By contrast, the president has gained sizable strength among Hispanic voters since 2016, according to the same polls, and at least maintained his support, albeit small, among black voters. 

“If he wins this thing, you know who he is going to owe his victory to?” asked one Trump campaign adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak more frankly. “African American men and Hispanics. The trick is where are these independent suburban women.”

Republicans have been particularly cheered by the early-vote numbers in Miami-Dade County, a Democratic stronghold, which they believe show a strong Hispanic vote for Trump. Democratic strategists also have raised alarms in recent days at the early turnout among their targeted Black and Latino voters in the state. 

“Democrats are underperforming their turnout,” said Ryan Tyson, a voter data consultant in the state who has worked with Republicans. 

Tyson nonetheless said that it was too soon to tell from the vote count who would win Florida, which he predicted would come down to 50,000 to 80,000 votes. 

“Anybody who thinks they can read the tea leaves is fooling themselves,” he said. 

Strategists for both parties say Georgia may be more likely to go Democratic this cycle than Florida, which would mark a dramatic shift from the typical electoral college map. The state, which features two U.S. Senate races, has been trending toward Biden in recent weeks on the strength of strong African American turnout, large Democratic registration efforts and lingering frustration over the 2018 gubernatorial election, which Republicans won narrowly. 

Consultants for Hawkfish, a Democratic data firm funded by former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, produced an analysis Saturday that argued that the remaining path for a Trump victory was a collapse in vote-by-mail returns from Democrats in the final days. 

“This comes down to Democratic turnout at this point,” said Michael Halle, a Hawkfish consultant who previously worked for former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Republicans agreed. Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien has argued that Republicans will vote en masse in person on Tuesday, while he has said that Democrats have scared their voters from turning out with warnings of the potential health risks of voting in person during a pandemic.

Trump’s closing argument over the past week has been woven with false and inflammatory claims. He boasted of having passed the biggest tax cut in history, even though it is smaller as a share of the economy than a 1981 cut. He said Democratic governors still had their states shutdown, when they did not, and that Mexico was paying for the border wall that is being built with U.S. taxpayer funds. 

He also has joked that Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., could not pronounce her own name, and said that Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn, a Muslim Black woman, “does not love our country.” He claimed repeatedly that Biden wants to shut down the country, which Biden has said he does not plan to do. 

“No Thanksgivings, no Christmas, no Fourth of July,” Trump said.

Biden has answered with events by former president Barack Obama, who has taken on Biden’s 2012 reelection role, as an attack dog, mocking Trump for having a smaller inauguration crowd, among other things. 

“Remember when Republicans were saying, ‘Let Detroit go bankrupt,’ ” Obama jibed at a Saturday rally in Flint, Mich., reviving a talking point from the 2012 campaign. “Now they might as well be saying, ‘Let America get covid.’ “

With just days to go, neither campaign expressed certainty of the result, in sharp contrast with 2016, when Democrats entered Election Day with high confidence. 

“The difference is four years ago they didn’t think we could win,” Trump pollster John McLaughlin said. “This time they are afraid we can win.” 

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Sean Connery, first James Bond of film, dies at 90

InternationalOct 31. 2020

By The Washington Post · T. Rees Shapiro 

Sean Connery, the Scottish-born actor who was film’s first – and for many viewers, the only – “Bond, James Bond,” and whose charismatic swagger enlivened dozens of other movies including his Oscar-winning performance in “The Untouchables,” has died in the Bahamas. He was 90.

The death was announced by Eon Productions, producers of the James Bond films, on the company’s website. Complete details were not immediately available.

In a career spanning more than five decades, Connery developed a screen magnetism that combined the seductive charm of his honey-thick Scottish brogue with an alluring physical presence. He was strikingly cocksure – brimming with authority and impudence – and appealed to audiences in even the most ludicrous of star vehicles.

“Connery looks absolutely confident in himself as a man,” the film critic Pauline Kael once wrote. “Women want to meet him, and men want to be him. I don’t know any man since Cary Grant that men have wanted to be so much.”

He made more than 60 films – most of them in the leading role. The Bond series aside, only a handful drew critical acclaim: “The Untouchables,” “The Man Who Would Be King,” “The Hill,” “The Offence” and “Russia House.” Many were flubs such as “Zardoz” and the “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” A great many were audience-pleasers such as “The Hunt for Red October” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

As a young man, Connery was roguishly handsome, with dark features and a 6-foot-2 bodybuilder’s physique. A onetime contender for Mr. Universe, his sex appeal was tinged with the rough edge of his working-class upbringing in Edinburgh. He had been a coffin polisher and swimsuit model before a quick rise to movie stardom in the most popular spy franchise of all time.

In his novels, Ian Fleming created Bond as an impossibly suave British secret agent. The sybaritic Bond was an ace with women, a master of intricate weaponry and the double entendre, a cultured vinophile (who preferred martinis – shaken, not stirred) and a violent thug who wore bespoke tuxedos.

Starting with “Dr. No” in 1962 and continuing in six more Bond films over two decades, Connery’s ability to convey unvarnished toughness and self-assurance captivated moviegoers. “All I did,” Connery once said, “was add a sense of humor that was lacking in Fleming’s novels and a quality of effortlessness.”

As played by Connery, Bond dispatched the enemy without sentiment and displayed a calm wit when sparring with evildoers bent on world destruction.

“Do you lose as gracefully as you win?” a villain once asked Bond.

“I don’t know, I’ve never lost,” Connery said.

Connery, who harbored an admittedly brutish side to his personality, brought verve to the role.

“Bond was meant to be a classy character and Connery was not – he was working class and that kind of gave him an abrasive edge,” British-born film critic and historian David Thomson said in an interview. “Bond was English and Connery was Scottish, and the Scots hold the English in contempt and that brought a very important energy to his approach.”

This barely concealed menace brought a compelling depth to many of his best-remembered films, notably his Oscar-winning supporting role as a gritty Irish street cop in Brian De Palma’s Prohibition-era drama “The Untouchables” (1987). Kevin Costner played lawman Eliot Ness, and Robert De Niro was gangster Al Capone.

Connery said he was drawn to the part for its “contrast.”

“I like it when an actor looks one thing and conveys something else, perhaps something diametrically opposite,” he told the New York Times in 1987. “With Malone, I tried to show at the beginning he could be a real pain . . . so that you wouldn’t think he could be concerned with such things as Ness’s feelings or Ness’s family, and then show he was someone else underneath, capable of real relationships.”

Connery had first shown promise in his 1957 BBC television role playing a punch-drunk prizefighter in “Requiem for a Heavyweight.”

Directed by Sidney Lumet, he drew critical praise as an unjustly persecuted British soldier in a North African military prison in “The Hill” (1965), appearing opposite Michael Redgrave, Harry Andrews and Ian Bannen. Connery dove wholly into the role of a brutal British police detective in Lumet’s “The Offence” (1972), opposite Trevor Howard and Bannen.

He also was a rabble-rousing coal miner in Martin Ritt’s “The Molly Maguires” (1970), a role that a Time magazine movie critic lauded by calling him “one of the screen’s most underrated stars, an actor of tightly controlled power and technical accomplishment.”

Connery said he was drawn to parts that displayed humor. One of the best examples was John Huston’s film adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” (1975). Connery and Michael Caine played British soldiers who stumble onto the riches of a tribal kingdom and try to execute a massive con by pretending that Connery is a demigod.

These films tended to be the exception in Connery’s prolific resume, which was littered with dozens of lesser assignments.

He played the frustrated husband of Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s bland psychodrama “Marnie” (1964); a bare-chested, ponytailed gunslinger of the future in “Zardoz” (1974); and a trenchcoat-wearing adventurer in the graphic novel adaptation “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (2003).

He gave over-the-top performances in over-the-top films such as “Highlander” (1986), in which he plays an immortal swordsman; “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), as a Russian nuclear submarine commander; and “The Rock” (1996), as an ex-con who helps disrupt a terrorist plot.

Connery could enliven the most commercial of films like “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989), starring Harrison Ford as a whip-cracking archaeologist and Connery as the adventurer’s comically disapproving father.

Connery’s high profile allowed him to command huge salaries. He was a multimillionaire and often donated his movie payments to the Scottish International Education Trust, an organization he helped start that offers grants primarily to young artists.

As “Dr. No” director Terence Young once said, “There are only two great stars in my recollection who have not been changed by great massive success: Sean Connery and Lassie, and both of them Scottish.”

Thomas Sean Connery was born Aug. 25, 1930, in Edinburgh, where his father was a truck driver and his mother was a maid. He grew up in an industrial neighborhood where he recalled that the dueling aromas of a rubber factory and brewery hung over the streets.

He dropped out of school at 12 and joined the British navy four years later. He said he was discharged before completing his enlistment because of stomach ulcers. As a veteran, he gained entry to a vocational program in Edinburgh and trained to be a furniture polisher. In between jobs buffing tables and pianos, he worked as an undertaker’s assistant nailing coffins at a funeral parlor.

In his off time, he participated in a weightlifting club, and with his sculpted physique posed as a life model at an art school. In 1953, a friend persuaded Connery to compete in the Mr. Universe bodybuilding contest in London.

Having won a bronze medal in the tall men’s division, he saw an audition call for actors with a touring company of “South Pacific.” Motivated to impress the show’s producers, he landed a part in the musical’s he-man chorus by performing handsprings. “No one else could do them,” he said.

On the advice of a castmate, Connery began an autodidactic education to improve his acting. He read plays by William Shakespeare and studied acting technique by reviewing texts by Kostanin Stanislavsky.

Connery also set about taming his Scottish burr. It was said to be so thick that other cast members in “South Pacific” thought he was speaking Polish. He bought a tape recorder and devoted hours to practicing his diction, but the remnants of his accent eventually became his trademark.

His good looks helped propel his career from supporting screen roles to a leading part opposite Lana Turner in the World War II melodrama “Another Time, Another Place” (1958).

It was Connery’s portrayal of Count Alexis Vronsky in a 1961 BBC adaptation of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (opposite Claire Bloom in the title role) that piqued the interest of Harry Saltzman and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. The producers had secured the film rights to Fleming’s Bond books and were trolling for an actor to star in their low-budget production of “Dr. No.”

At first, casting Connery in the Bond role seemed a risky choice. They considered many established names for the part, including Richard Burton and Redgrave, before inviting Connery to read scripts. The producers had no choice – the movie’s $1 million budget called for someone cheap but promising. The role of Bond came with a $16,500 salary.

“It was the sheer self-confidence he exuded,” Broccoli told the New York Times in 1964. “I’ve never seen a surer guy. Every time he made a point he hit the desk with that great fist of his, or slapped his thigh. It wasn’t just an act, either. When he left we watched him through the window as he walked down the street. He walked like the most arrogant son-of-a-gun you’ve ever seen. . . . ‘That’s our Bond,’ I said.”

Connery returned as Bond in “From Russia with Love” (1963), “Goldfinger” (1964), “Thunder Ball” (1965), “You Only Live Twice” (1967) and “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971).

The world was overcome with “Bondmania.” Johnny Rivers’s pop tune “Secret Agent Man” played incessantly on the radio. A Bond-inspired cologne promised a secret aromatic weapon of desire.

Connery said he tired of the fuss. “The first two or three were fun,” he once said. “Jumping out of planes was entertaining, although it was tough on my hairpiece.”

After “Diamonds,” he swore he’d never return to the screen as Bond. Other actors came in his place, including George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton. Revivals of the franchise have starred Pierce Brosnan and, most recently, Daniel Craig.

Despite his vow, Connery reprised the role a final time in 1983. A remake of “Thunderball,” the movie was called – in a nod to the actor’s broken promise – “Never Say Never Again.”

He also gave finely tuned performances as a murder suspect in the 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s ensemble mystery “Murder on the Orient Express”; as an aging bow-wielding hooded hero in “Robin and Marian” (1976) opposite Audrey Hepburn; as a criminal mastermind in “The Great Train Robbery” (1979); as a monk who investigates a murder in “The Name of the Rose” (1986); and as a publisher recruited by British intelligence to spy on Russia in “The Russia House” (1990), based on the John le Carre novel.

Off screen, Connery could be combative and litigious with producers over fees, but also used his reputation as a bankable star to help struggling projects directed by friends. He accepted the role of King Agamemnon in “Time Bandits” (1981) when he learned that the director, Monty Python veteran Terry Gilliam, was having trouble securing financing.

At times, Connery’s private life erupted into public view. Actress Diane Cilento, whom he wed in 1962, described him in her memoir as a misogynist who was psychologically and physically threatening. She accused Connery of beating her, but he denied it. He was trailed by comments he made to Playboy magazine in 1965 saying that it was acceptable to hit a woman to keep her in line. He later apologized for the remark.

After his divorce from Cilento, Connery married French-Moroccan artist Micheline Roquebrune in 1975. They had met at a celebrity golf tournament in Casablanca.

A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

To his fans, Connery was the only actor worthy of donning the Bond tuxedo. As his career progressed, however, he fiercely defended his independence from the role that launched him to superstardom.

“I would never deny that Bond made me, and I’ll be everlastingly grateful to him,” Connery told the Times in 1964. “But that doesn’t make me a Bond-slave. I can cut the shackles free any time I want to. And they aren’t made of steel chains any longer, either, but smoothest silk.”

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White House sidestepped FDA to distribute hydroxychloroquine to pharmacies, documents show

InternationalOct 31. 2020White House trade adviser Peter Navarro listens as President Trump speaks during a coronavirus briefing Aug. 14 at the White House. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford. 

By The Washington Post · Christopher Rowland, Debbie Cenziper, Lisa Rein · NATIONAL, HEALTH, WHITEHOUSE, HEALTH-NEWS

WASHINGTON – The phone call in March from President Donald Trump’s adviser carried an urgent message.

For days Trump had touted the off-label use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential cure for covid-19, despite a lack of scientific evidence it worked and amid mounting concerns about the dangers to patients with underlying medical conditions.

Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro wanted to make sure the administration’s top vaccine expert would be on board with a White House plan to distribute the unproven drug to hard-hit cities.

“The first thing out of his mouth was, ‘I want to know what team you are on,’ ” recalled Rick Bright, who at the time was responsible for stockpiling drugs for medical emergencies as director of the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

The immunologist, who later filed a whistleblower complaint against the administration, said in an interview with The Washington Post that he told Navarro he was on the side of medical evidence. Navarro, Bright said, replied, “I won’t hold it against you, but we need to move this forward.” Navarro declined to comment on Bright’s account.

The White House decision to set aside the mandatory safety controls put in place by the Food and Drug Administration fueled one of the most disputed initiatives in the administration’s response to the pandemic: the distribution of millions of ineffective, potentially dangerous pills from a federally controlled cache of drugs called the Strategic National Stockpile.

Over a span of four days in early April, the White House ordered the distribution of 23 million hydroxychloroquine tablets from the stockpile to a dozen states, enough pills for 1.4 million covid-19 patients, according to public records obtained by The Post in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Post review found that the process was marked by haphazard planning, little or no communication to local authorities about the flow of pills into their communities, and a lack of public accounting about where they ended up.

The documents also demonstrate the steps the administration took to bypass the FDA’s March 28 authorization for emergency use of the tablets, which limited their use to hospitals and clinical drug trials. According to FDA guidance at the time, state authorities were supposed to request stockpile supplies before they were delivered. But interviews and documents show that procedure was not followed in many cases.

The White House ordered more than a third of the tablets sent to the three major drug distributors in the United States with instructions to deliver them not only to hospitals but also retail pharmacies in five U.S. cities, despite the FDA controls, according to public records.

“At the direction of the White House, SNS did a one-time shipment of hydroxychloroquine to several commercial distributors to support further distribution of hydroxychloroquine directly to hospitals and retail pharmacies in the hard hit areas of NYC, Detroit, Chicago, and New Orleans,” a senior analyst at HHS said in an internal email exchange.

One major wholesaler said it shipped to long-term care facilities, which also were not covered in the FDA’s emergency authorization. All three distributors told The Post they did not ship to retail pharmacies, despite the administration’s request.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the stockpile, confirmed in an email to The Post that the pills were supposed to go to retail pharmacies but that the agency does not know where the pills ultimately ended up. Through a spokeswoman, the agency said the drugs were supposed to be used for patients with lupus, who encountered shortages early in the pandemic.

The FDA withdrew its emergency authorization in June, after it found hundreds of adverse events linked to the drug’s use in covid-19 patients, including dozens of deaths. In June, two months after the White House’s urgent orders to ship the millions of doses of hydroxychloroquine, health officials told holders of the pills in a general notice they could destroy them.

– – –

The government’s Strategic National Stockpile is maintained for pandemics and biological attacks, with large caches of drugs and medical supplies warehoused around the country for rapid deployment. In his whistleblower complaint, Bright alleged that, from the early days of the pandemic, the White House sought to bypass regular emergency response channels and directly control distribution of hydroxychloroquine. Bright alleged in his complaint, which is still pending, that he was removed from his post in part because of his resistance to the Trump distribution plan.

“The whole thing reeked of political pressure to get that stuff” into state health systems, Bright said in an interview after he departed the federal government this month. “There was no scientific reason or rationale. It was completely political.”

Navarro declined to discuss his role in leading the Trump administration’s push to distribute hydroxychloroquine. Despite the FDA’s revocation of its emergency use order, Navarro continues to insist the drug benefits patients in early stages of infection, both in the hospital and at home as outpatients.

“It is one of the great tragedies of this pandemic that the anti-Trump mainstream media demonized a cheap and effective medicine that could have saved tens of thousands of American lives,” Navarro said in an email to The Post. “How that happened is the only story worth writing about. The rest is just political garbage, and I have no interest in participating further in another hit piece timed around the election cycle.”

Trump said in May he was taking the drug as a preventive measure, but when he contracted the novel coronavirus early this month it was not included in the publicly released list of medications he received.

Navarro was a relentless advocate for hydroxychloroquine in the administration, said Olivia Troye, a former official who served on the staff of Vice President Mike Pence and worked on Trump’s coronavirus task force.

Troye, a public critic of Trump’s pandemic response, said Navarro became visibly irritated at times when other officials would not share his enthusiasm for the drug. He would personally distribute articles and studies around the White House that supported use of hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19, she said.

“He was really passionate about it,” Troye said. “He was like, ‘Send it out to everyone.’ He was the number one backer of it.”

The anti-malarial drugs in the stockpile were donated by Sandoz, the generic drug division of drug manufacturer Novartis, which dispatched more than 80 million tablets over several months; and Mylan, which is becoming part of Pfizer and donated 10 million.

But even as the manufacturers issued news releases calling attention to their large contributions, they made no claims of their effectiveness to treat covid-19. Medical associations and researchers strongly warned against widespread adoption of the untested pills. Hyroxychloroquine, particularly in combination with the antibiotic azythromycin, a cocktail for covid-19 treatment that a handful of doctors promoted, poses a risk of fatal heart arrhythmia in a small percentage of patients, numerous medical studies have found.

Those concerns were cited in the FDA’s March 28 emergency use authorization, which restricted the Strategic National Stockpile supplies of the drug to hospitalized patients and patients in clinical trials only. The agency wanted to be able to monitor outcomes and track adverse events, according to the EUA.

Despite the EUA’s controls, the administration made plans to ship hydroxychloroquine to pharmacies so patients at home could get the treatment on an outpatient basis. In an exchange of internal HHS emails during the weekend of April 4 and 5 discussing a first shipment of 620,000 pills, top officials outlined a plan to send 220,000 tablets to hospitals and 400,000 to pharmacies in the New York City area, Detroit, Chicago and New Orleans. (The April emails were first reported by Vanity Fair and became public in May when Bright included them in his whistleblower complaint.)

Two of the highest-ranking HHS officials – Adm. Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary of health, and Robert Kadlec, assistant secretary of preparedness and response – agreed that the EUA did not limit the intended distribution.

Under prescribing rules, doctors may prescribe approved drugs for additional “off-label” purposes, meaning for illness other than the approved indications. Hydroxychloroquine has been approved for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients for decades.

Giroir, responding to a Strategic National Stockpile official who raised the subject of the EUA limits, was emphatic in an April 5 email that “off-label” outpatient prescribing of hydroxychloroquine was appropriate in the case of covid-19. Giroir is a pediatrician, academic and former hospital administrator appointed by Trump to the rank of four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service.

“NOPE,” Giroir wrote. “Needs to go to pharmacies as well. The EUA matters not – The drug is approved any [sic] therefore can be prescribed as per doctor’s orders That is a FINAL ANSWER.” Giroir added that pharmacies needed the drug for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis as well.

Kadlec answered in a one-word response: “Agree.” Through HHS, he declined to comment.

FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, the top drug safety official, also approved sending drugs to pharmacies, despite his agency’s EUA, according to an email in the same chain from Peter Gaynor, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Gaynor told the other officials on the email chain that he had spoken to Hahn about the issue by phone. FEMA referred questions to HHS.

The FDA referred a question about Hahn’s actions to a blog post published on the FDA website in May. In that post, Hahn explained that outpatient prescribing was justified despite the EUA limits because donation agreements with Sandoz and Mylan for hydroxychloroquine “allowed for it to be distributed for clinical trials and to the commercial market for use in the outpatient setting, if appropriate.”

Hahn also said in the blog that part of the need for outpatient supplies was to relieve shortages of the drugs for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients.

On the Monday after that weekend of emails, an order for more than 9 million pills went from the White House to the stockpile, according to a spreadsheet of hydroxychloroquine distributions provided to The Post in response to a Freedom of Information Act records request.

The April 6 order, relayed via email by a White House aide who worked with Navarro’s staff, resulted in 3 million pills sent to each of the three major wholesale distributors of prescription drugs, McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen.

A former pharmaceutical executive with one of the three distributors, who is familiar with discussions around hydroxychloroquine distribution and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said Navarro had been in direct phone conversations with the executive’s company.

The message from Navarro was very clear, the former executive said: “You take it, you send it, you manage the distribution.”

In response to detailed written questions from The Post, each of the wholesalers declined to provide data on how many of the government-supplied free drugs they distributed, where they went, and how many they had left by the time the EUA was revoked in June.

A spokesman for Cardinal Health said the drug was sent to hospitals and long-term care facilities but would not provide numbers or elaborate. McKesson said it limited shipments to hospitals and one small order for a hospital-affiliated long-term care facility that it did not name. AmerisourceBergen said it limited shipments to hospitals.

Of the large retail pharmacy chains, CVS and Walgreens said they did not receive or distribute shipments of hydroxychloroquine from the national stockpile. Rite Aid did not response to requests for comment.

– – –

Next, the White House ordered another shipment of 10.1 million pills on April 8. In a spreadsheet supplied to The Post, the government redacted information about the destination of those drugs or who was responsible for distributing them, citing an exemption from public disclosure for stockpile supplies. The White House ordered another 4 million drugs shipped on April 9. Again, the government would not disclose where the drugs were sent.

FEMA told news outlets at the time that the drugs were being sent to cities across the country, starting with New York, Chicago, Detroit and New Orleans, followed by D.C., Baltimore, Miami, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baton Rouge, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Milwaukee and Houston.

ASPR, the section of the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees the stockpile, does not have an accounting of where all the drugs were sent once they went to wholesalers, an HHS spokeswoman said in an email.

“The SNS does not maintain visibility on where product was distributed once it left federal custody and has not received such a list,” the spokeswoman said.

State and local officials contacted by The Post said they were unaware whether drugs went to retail pharmacies in their states.

Officials in Michigan, Illinois, New York and Louisiana said they either were not told by the Trump administration of its plans to distribute large quantities of hydroxychloroquine to hospitals and retail pharmacies in their states – or were aware of the plan but did not participate in decision-making.

“The State was not made aware of the SNS distribution to the health systems until after it was completed,” Lynn Sutfin, the spokeswoman for Michigan’s health and human services department, said in an email.

Garth Reynolds, executive director of the Illinois Pharmacists Association, said he and other officials were unaware of any delivery of hydroxychloroquine from the national stockpile.

“It kind of surprises me that it was given to any pharmacy outside of a health system,” Reynolds said in an interview, “because there would be no rationale for a community pharmacy to be giving it out.”

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., demanded an investigation last spring of a shipment of 335,000 pills that FEMA told her office it shipped to Milwaukee. A top state regulator, Philip Trapskin, chairman of the state Pharmacy Examining Board, told The Post he could find no evidence the drugs ever made it to the state’s hospitals.

“I have been asking around to health systems all over Wisconsin. I have not found anyone who received hydroxychloroquine from FEMA,” Trapskin said.

Hospitals were also sometimes surprised by shipments of hydroxychloroquine showing up at their doors without warning, according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, which represents pharmacists in hospitals.

By late April, the dangers of the drug came into greater focus.

The FDA issued a special caution on April 24 noting hydroxychloroquine can lead to arrhythmia and sudden cardiac death in a small percentage of patients. With millions of doses being sent across the nation, health experts warned that the potential for hundreds of needless deaths was real.

But Trump and the White House continued to tout the drug. On May 18, Trump declared that he was taking hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic to prevent contracting the virus and said he was receiving “so many letters” from constituents who said the drug was great.

“I want the people of this nation to feel good,” Trump said.

The very next day, inside the FDA, drug safety scientists completed a detailed analysis based on reporting by doctors and hospitals in the United States and abroad, that found nearly 400 adverse health events, including 87 deaths, linked to the use of hydroxychloroquine and a similar anti-malarial drug, chloroquine, in coronavirus patients. The report was not posted on the FDA website until July 1.

In the White House, the scientific data detailed in the memo set off conflict, said Troye, the former senior adviser on Trump’s coronavirus task force.

“I remember Dr. Hahn saying they were going to have the revoke the EUA because of it,” Troye told The Post. “It sent Navarro spinning.”

She said Navarro was particularly heated in a Situation Room meeting in May when Hahn said the evidence of harm was clear.

“He was really angry and saying, ‘You can’t do this, taking away a potential therapeutic.’ They had been acquiring this in large amounts,” she said.

Navarro declined to discuss what information the White House has gathered about where the drugs were shipped, and how much of the drugs shipped to states remains unused. Trump dispatched 2 million pills to Brazil as a gesture of goodwill.

Hospitals also had excess, unused supply. Out of 204 hospitals responding to a questionnaire by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, half said they wanted to return excess amounts of the drug to wholesalers.

“In this case, it wasn’t something that the wholesalers would accept back,” said Michael Gaino, the society’s director of pharmacy practice and quality. In June, federal officials said that “holders of the product may choose to destroy the product.”

Sandoz said in response to questions that it is prepared to take back nearly 50 million tablets that remain in the stockpile and were not distributed, but litigation has delayed the return. Sandoz did not identify the litigation.

Some physicians who are continuing to push its continued use have gone to federal court in Michigan against the HHS. A group of physicians called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons sought a preliminary injunction demanding release of all of the stockpile’s hydroxychloroquine supplies. The group lost an initial request and is appealing.

Jane Orient, a Tucson physician and the group’s executive director, said patients are demanding the drug. She said she knows of one Arizona coronavirus patient who drove all the way to Dallas to find a doctor willing to prescribe a hydroxychloroquine prescription. She accused the government of “hoarding” millions of pills.

“It’s probably just sitting there waiting to expire in the government warehouses, instead of giving it to pharmacies,” she said.

In the meantime, normal commercial supplies of the drug – outside of the emergency stockpile – have bounced back after March and April shortages. Doctors who still believe in its benefits for treatment of covid-19 wrote about 100,000 more prescriptions per month in each of May, June, July and August compared to those months in 2019, according to monthly figures provided to The Post by IQVIA, which tracks drug industry data.

“If we want we want to use it off label, we can use it off label,” said Brian Tyson, a primary care doctor who runs an urgent care clinic in a small strip mall in El Centro, Calif. Tyson joined other activist doctors in demonstrating on the Supreme Court steps this monthto demand greater access to hydroxychloroquine. He said he has treated 1,700 patients with the drug and that no one has suffered an adverse event or been hospitalized with symptoms of the coronavirus.

He said he was warned by administrators of a Medicare-managed care plan that his hydroxychloroquine prescribing was above average but said he is not concerned about repercussions from bureaucrats or medical licensing boards.

“If something happens and they want to sue me, that’s fine,” Tyson said. “I’m not going to listen to nonmedical people tell me how to practice medicine.”

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Death toll rises in powerful Aegean earthquake as Turkish rescuers race to find survivors

InternationalOct 31. 2020

By The Washington Post · Kareem Fahim, Zeynep Karatas · WORLD, EUROPE, MIDDLE-EAST

ISTANBUL – The death toll from a powerful earthquake in the Aegean Sea rose to 28 Saturday as rescue workers in the Turkish city of Izmir raced to save more dozens of people thought to be trapped under the rubble of at least eight collapsed buildings, Turkish officials said.

Related story:

Powerful Aegean earthquake kills at least 14 people in Turkey and Greece, injures hundreds

The earthquake, which struck Friday afternoon just north of the Greek island of Samos, caused deaths in both Turkey and Greece, flooded coastal areas and flattened residential buildings. Twenty-six people were killed in Turkey and more than 800 people were injured, Turkey’s health minister and the country’s disaster management agency said Saturday. Two teenagers were killed on Samos after they were crushed by a collapsing wall.

Nine boats sank and more than 20 ran aground, Turkish authorities said.

The earthquake was the second large tremor to strike Turkey this year and came as the government was struggling to contain multiple crises, including a rise in coronavirus cases and a sharp economic downturn. The U.S. Geological Survey said it was a 7.0 magnitude earthquake, while Turkey’s disaster management agency recorded its magnitude as 6.6.

Tremors were felt hundreds of miles from the epicenter, in Athens and Istanbul. More than 500 aftershocks followed, the disaster agency said.

Izmir Mayor Tunc Soyer told Fox News Saturday that rescue teams were still trying to reach 180 people trapped under the rubble. Turkish media showed footage of orange and red-clad rescue workers slowly removing debris from a completely collapsed structure in Bornova, in the northwest corner of Izmir and one of the city’s hardest hit neighborhoods.

More than five thousand rescue personnel and 20 sniffer dogs were deployed to find survivors, the disaster management agency said. The state run Anadolu news agency said 100 people had already been pulled alive from buildings, including an elderly woman who was freed from a pancaked structure on Saturday morning.

Zahide Kucukbozdol, 38, who was at home with her husband two children when the earthquake struck in Bayrakli, another badly-hit district in Izmir, described the panicked rush to find safety.

“First my husband felt it. I took my son in my arms. The earthquake was so strong, and it was very long,” she said in a telephone interview Saturday. When the shaking stopped, plumes of smoke were rising outside her window. “I grabbed my two children in my arms, one is one-and-a-half and the other is four. I felt so strong in that moment and without thinking of what I was wearing or doing, I went out the door. My husband took other essential things like phones, wallets and a baby carriage.”

Outside, “buildings were collapsing around us. It was like the movies. It is depressing and scary when you experience for yourself the things that happen in movies.”

In Greece, there was extensive damage as well to the aging, one-story houses on Samos, where many residents spent Friday night sleeping outdoors or in cars, local media reported. Nine people were injured, including a teenager who was airlifted to Athens in serious condition, the authorities said.

The earthquake provided a temporary respite from an acrimonious feud between the governments of Turkey and Greece over a large range of issues, including contested sovereignty in the Aegean. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – NATO allies who have engaged in a bitter war of words in recent months – spoke by telephone Friday and then posted conciliatory messages on Twitter.

“Turkey counts many victims and great damage. I have already contacted President Erdogan stressing that beyond difficulties in our relations in times like these the priority is the unity of our people,” Mitsotakis said in a televised address Saturday. “For us the importance of human life overcomes borders and differences. Ι thank him for his positive response to my phone call.”

The leaders’ gestures raised faint hopes that the tragedy might quiet their broader arguments. And indeed, there was a precedent for greater cooperation between Turkey and Greece following earthquakes: In 1999, when powerful tremors occurred within weeks of each other in both countries, one about 50 miles from Istanbul and the other in Athens. Each government sent rescue teams to aid the other, contributing to an outpouring of popular goodwill.

After Friday’s earthquake, Morgan Ortagus, the U.S. State Department spokeswoman, said the United States was “heartened by” and supported the cooperation between the two governments.

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GOP senators race to retain the majority

InternationalOct 31. 2020President Trump arrives at a rally in Waterford Township, Mich. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Salwan Georges. 

By The Washington Post · Paul Kane, Seung Min Kim · NATIONAL, POLITICS

From the deepest conservative states to more Democratic leaning terrain, Senate Republicans face a brutal political environment that has left the GOP needing to pull off a near-perfect run in a dozen highly competitive races to retain the majority.

That environment, with a pandemic killing nearly 230,000 Americans and leaving millions unemployed, wounded President Donald Trump’s standing even in his most reliable states, dragging Republican incumbents down with him and opening new avenues for Democrats to pursue the Senate majority, according to interviews with 10 strategists in both parties deeply involved in Senate races.

Neither side is certain of victory, and the quirks of each state’s vote-counting systems means it could be days, weeks or even a couple of months before senators know which party holds power over presidential appointments and sets the Senate agenda.

But the national landscape, represented through the president’s weakened standing across the ideological spectrum, sent shock waves through Senate Republicans in recent weeks.

“Well, the president’s losing Arizona. And, you know, we think that he and Martha are very intrinsically tied together,” Kevin McLaughlin, the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, explained during a 90-minute presentation on the state of the races Thursday. Trump won Arizona by 3.5 percentage points in 2016 and is now trailing Democrat Joe Biden, according to both public and private polling, which Republicans feel is why GOP Sen. Martha McSally is also trailing in her key race.

At one point, NRSC strategists believed Biden hit 50% in Georgia – a figure they found “terrifying” as they try to defend two seats in the state, which Trump won by five percentage points in 2016.

Trump won Kansas by more than 20 percentage points in 2016, but now his lead is in the low single digits, according to Republicans, after bleeding support in the Kansas City suburbs. A state that has voted Democratic just once since 1940 could now be considered a relatively competitive fight between Trump and Biden.

Even in Alaska, which Trump won by 28 percentage points four years ago, the president’s standing has cratered to a narrow lead, in public and private polling, forcing the Republicans’ official campaign arm to spend cash to shore up Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan.

“You should’ve seen those [polls] three weeks ago when we had the president down,” McLaughlin said, explaining Trump was actually losing in Alaska this month and how the Senate incumbent’s race sunk with the president. “I mean, it’s not because of Dan Sullivan. I’m just telling you.”

Democrats do not dispute that the environment has opened the door for them to seize the majority, but they contend that this group of GOP senators did little to prepare themselves for such competitive races.

They have known since 2014, when these Republicans won in part by campaigning against the Affordable Care Act, that they should put together their plan to replace it, something that never happened. Trump’s decision to join the legal challenge at the Supreme Court to scrap the entire law in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic made the situation even worse.

“These candidates exacerbated their own unique liabilities. They built their campaigns on a very weak foundation,” said Lauren Passalacqua, spokeswoman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Beneath the surface is another crack in the GOP foundation, as House Republican candidates are floundering in key states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas, according to consultants in both parties. In districts that Trump narrowly won or narrowly lost four years ago, Biden is now solidly ahead along with the Democratic candidate, while in some districts Trump won by significant margins, the president is now narrowly trailing.

That dynamic has left some Republicans privately bracing for a potential across-the-board collapse, but so far that has not happened in the Senate battlegrounds.

That’s in large part because of a massive rescue effort led by the NRSC and its super PAC cousin, the Senate Leadership Fund.

“We’re in, we are in it. And we have a very distinct path, and it’s a good path. I mean, it’s a violent path; it’ll take a toll on all of us,” McLaughlin said.

The NRSC raised and spent $275 million in this election cycle, dwarfing the $151 million raised for the 2018 campaign, and the GOP super PAC stunned Democrats by raising almost $150 million over a six-week period this fall, flooding the airwaves and leveling a playing field that had tilted toward Democrats who smashed records through online fundraising among liberal activists.

For the first time, McLaughlin’s committee has run an aggressive field program trying to drag voters to the polls. That program will be particularly important in states where the presidential contest was not expected to be close like Alaska, Kansas and Montana, because neither Trump’s campaign nor the Republican National Committee is engaged in those states.

Strategists in both parties concede that they will trade Colorado and Alabama as easy victories for the respective challenger, leaving Republicans with 53 seats.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., can then only afford to lose two of 12 remaining GOP-held seats Democrats have targeted to hold the majority, if Biden defeats Trump. McConnell can afford three losses if Trump pulls off another upset as Vice President Pence would be the tie-breaking vote in a 50-50 Senate.

Despite Trump’s sagging popularity, Republicans have not broken ranks with him and instead have tried to rally his most loyal supporters, who remain suspicious of these more traditional, establishment-friendly senators.

McSally joined Trump at an Arizona rally Wednesday, even after the president rushed her onstage and limited her speaking time. “You got one minute! One minute, Martha! They don’t want to hear this, Martha. Come on. Let’s go. Quick, quick, quick, quick.”

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) crossed into Nebraska on Tuesday to get a brief shout-out from Trump at a rally in Omaha, whose media market crosses into western Iowa.

And Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., whose campaign has caused dramatic late concern among GOP strategists, canceled his final debate Sunday, against Democrat Jon Ossoff, so he can instead attend a rally in northwest Georgia with Trump.

Both sides view Mark Kelly, the former astronaut and gun-control activist, as the favorite over McSally and Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., remains in a precarious position.

His opponent, Cal Cunningham, admitted to an extramarital transgression a month ago, but pollsters in both parties say Tillis remains more unpopular than the challenger.

That could leave the majority hinging on Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a 24-year veteran who has built her own political brand that has kept her afloat even as Trump heads toward a significant defeat in Maine. In a recent debate, Collins declined to say whether Trump deserves to be reelected.

Democrats are frustrated that they still consider the race essentially tied after tens of millions of dollars in negative ads that began two years ago when Collins supported Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and almost never let up.

Maine’s unique system of “ranked-choice voting” could delay the final outcome for at least a week after Tuesday’s election. Voters there will rank their preferences among Collins, Democrat Sara Gideon and two unaligned candidates, and if no candidate gets more than 50% on the initial vote, all ballots are sent to the state capital, where election officials will physically review them to count the second and third choices in a complicated formula until one candidate has cleared majority support.

The strongest unaffiliated candidate is running as a staunch liberal encouraging her supporters to choose Gideon second. Most strategists believe Collins will need a lead of several percentage points, near 50%, on the initial vote or else Gideon will overtake Collins when the ranked votes are counted.

Georgia state law says that if no one clears 50% in Perdue’s race and a special election, the top two advance to a runoff election Jan. 5. Republicans concede they expect both races to end up in runoffs and possibly leave the entire Senate majority hanging in the balance until early next year.

Senate GOP officials remain furious that Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., entered the special election against the appointed senator, Republican Kelly Loeffler, in the special election. Almost two dozen candidates appear on the ballot together, and the top two head to the runoff. Loeffler has raced to the right to fend off Collins in a way that could leave the middle open in the runoff for the leading Democrat, Raphael Warnock.

GOP officials believe that had Collins not run, a combination of Loeffler’s wealth and Perdue’s relative strength in the Georgia suburbs compared to Trump could’ve aided the president in the state.

Ernst’s race against Theresa Greenfield might be the closest in the nation. Republicans believe Trump is in better shape in Iowa, which he won by nine percentage points four years ago but where he has struggled throughout the summer and early fall.

“We needed the president to, kind of, right the ship here, and we feel like he has,” McLaughlin said.

Given Trump’s standing there in 2016, Democrats view Iowa as a linchpin – if Greenfield wins, their candidates will probably sweep four other states where Trump performed worse in his first race.

Republicans do not understand why Democrats remain so financially invested in Montana, where they believe GOP Sen. Steve Daines has a stable lead over Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock. Just as Democrats do not understand why GOP super PACs continue to spend heavily this weekend in Michigan, where they believe Democratic Sen. Gary Peters has a steady lead over Republican John James.

If either side pulls off the upset against those incumbents, it is probably going to be a very good night for that party’s chances at securing the Senate majority.

Finally, Democrats have used their online financial engine to boost candidates in four states the president won four years ago by nine percentage points to 28 – Alaska, Kansas, South Carolina and Texas.

In each state, Trump still leads, according to NRSC polling, but by a fraction of his margin from four years ago.

With such undefined GOP incumbents, Democrats believe they have a chance to score a major upset among those conservative states, all of which gives them more chances to reach the majority.

“We go into Election Day with a lot of different paths to the majority,” Passalacqua said, “and we have to see how it shakes out.”

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City locked down for three months has bleak lessons for the world

InternationalOct 31. 2020A customer gets his hair cut in Melbourne, Australia, on Oct 28, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Carla Gottgens. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Sybilla Gross, Jason Scott, Jason Gale · WORLD, ASIA-PACIFIC

As countries across the globe grapple with the prospect of renewed lockdowns, the Australian city of Melbourne offers a stark lesson on the costs of bringing the coronavirus under control.

Cafe chairs and tables are set out on a lane in Melbourne, Australia, on Oct 28, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Carla Gottgens.

The city of 5 million people on Wednesday emerged from one of the world’s strictest and longest lockdowns that shuttered businesses and confined residents to their homes for more than three months.

While infections have dropped from a daily peak of about 700 in early August to just two new cases on Wednesday, the economic and social impact of Melbourne’s second lockdown since the crisis began has been enormous. Australia’s government estimates 1,200 jobs have been lost on average a day across Victoria state, while demand for mental health services has surged by more than 30%.

A diner wears a protective mask while sitting inside a restaurant in Melbourne, Australia, on Oct 28, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Carla Gottgens.

Despite key factors working in Melbourne’s favor, including closed borders, an infection count that was tiny by international standards, and a state government with strong public backing, it still took twice as long as anticipated to crush the curve.

It’s a bleak reality confronting political leaders, particularly in Europe, who have already experienced the damage wrought by full-blown lockdowns and are now weighing options to fight a resurgence of the pandemic.

Australia was in the vanguard of nations that had early success in controlling community transmission. Its first nationwide lockdown, which lasted roughly from March to May, reduced the number of cases to just a handful a day.

But security failures at quarantine hotels for returning overseas travelers, poor communication of critical information to migrant communities and inadequate contact tracing allowed the virus to roar back in Victoria.

On July 7, state Premier Daniel Andrews announced a six-week lockdown, ordering Melbourne residents to stay home except for essential work and services, medical treatment, school or an hour’s exercise a day. Less than a month later, as cases continued to rise, the restrictions were extended across the entire state, Melbourne was placed under a nighttime curfew, schools were closed and large parts of retail, manufacturing and hospitality were shut down.

With Victoria accounting for about a quarter of the nation’s gross domestic product, the restrictions have deepened Australia’s first recession in almost 30 years.

The lockdown has slashed A$100 million ($71 million) a day from economic activity and through August and September resulted in a daily average of 1,200 jobs being lost across the state, Luke Yeaman, a Treasury department official, told a parliamentary panel this week.

Business leaders say it may take years for Melbourne — ranked as the world’s second-most livable city last year — to recover. Melbourne chef Scott Pickett warned that ongoing capacity restrictions would continue to hit restaurants and cafes and that many would fold once government wage subsidies end early next year.

“Some may get to Christmas, January and say they can’t do this anymore,” said Pickett, who owns the bistro Estelle. “It’s going to be a bloodbath out there at some stage.”

“This is the beginning of a long road of recovery,” said Michael Madrusan, co-owner of Made in the Shade, which operates venues in the city including The Everleigh cocktail bar. “We are in no way out of the woods just because we can open the doors.”

The social costs are also mounting. The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners says demand for health services nationwide has risen 15% since early March, and by 31% between September and October in Victoria. Alcohol consumption has risen and domestic violence spiked.

“Only being allowed outside for an hour a day was awful,” said Tessa Patrao, 27, who is finally back at work as a primary school teacher after the 112-day stay-at-home order. The second lockdown was even harder than the first, particularly as much of the country had returned to normal, she said.

While governments in the U.K., Italy and Germany have faced protests against second lockdowns, Victorians have been largely compliant. That’s in part down to the popularity of the state’s Labor government, which won the 2018 election by a landslide, and the high approval ratings of Premier Andrews. The carrot-and-stick approach taken by authorities has also helped, with A$1,500 payments for people who couldn’t afford to self-isolate and court-imposed fines of as much as A$20,000 for repeat breaches of isolation orders.

“It would’ve been impossible to meaningfully police if there wasn’t community support,” said Terry Slevin, chief executive officer of the Public Health Association of Australia. “It’s an example where a compact between a government and a community that’s been driven by expert advice has achieved a valuable public health outcome.”

According to Catherine Bennett, chair in epidemiology at Deakin University in Melbourne, it’s likely too late for the U.K., U.S. and European countries to replicate Melbourne’s success in crushing new infections. Instead, authorities would likely opt for 2-3 week circuit breaker lockdowns to take the load off the public health system.

“A circuit-breaker just might help bring it back into line and allow it to be containable,” she said. “But unless you’ve gone very early” it’s very hard to bring new cases down to zero.

The lockdown may have quashed the virus for now, but it’s clear from outbreaks around the world that it can come back with a vengeance if not coupled with ongoing requirements such as mask-wearing, social distancing, temperature checks and a robust testing and contact-tracing regime. Such “living with the virus” elements are in place in countries such as Korea, Japan and China, which have been able to keep their cases under control.

“Australians need to have the conversation on what the new normal looks like so we can live alongside this virus without more lockdowns,” said Jennifer Westacott, CEO of the Business Council of Australia. “If mask-wearing and hand sanitizers are the new normal now, is everyone on board? The big question is whether individual Australians are ready to fully adjust their lives to the Covid era.”

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East Europe fights for its life against virus it thought crushed

InternationalOct 31. 2020Police checks at a border crossing between Hungary and Austria, on March 17, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Akos Stiller. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Michael Winfrey, Lenka Ponikelska · WORLD, EUROPE

The leaders of seven eastern European countries who gathered in Bled, Slovenia, at the end of August were so certain they’d overcome the coronavirus that they staged a panel called “Europe after Brexit and Covid-19.”

Pedestrians cross the Old Town Square in Prague, Czech Republic, on Oct. 22, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Milan Jaros,

Less than two months later, that confidence has been shattered. Despite having beaten back the initial wave with some of Europe’s fastest and strictest lockdowns, countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea are suffering an explosion of new cases. Their early advantage squandered, governments across the region are struggling with the same issues as their western counterparts — or often worse.

Soaring death tolls and a spate of high-profile infections are eroding trust and feeding into a communist-era tradition of skirting rules, exacerbating the crisis. Field hospitals are popping up as the virus threatens to overwhelm health-care systems and measures that devastated economies this spring are returning.

“The coming months, quarters — I hope it isn’t years — will be the toughest Poland has faced in decades,” Polish Premier Mateusz Morawiecki told parliament last week.

Morawiecki was on stage at Bled along with leaders from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia. Since then, coronavirus cases have more than tripled in Poland to exceed a quarter of a million on Monday. Deaths there more than doubled to 4,438, according to the World Health Organization.

And it’s not even the region’s worst-hit country. The Czechs now lead the European Union both in new cases and deaths per capita, followed by Hungary.

It didn’t start that way. When Slovakia reported just five cases of the virus on March 9, its capital Bratislava closed elementary schools. Within a week, the Czechs shut schools and banned public gatherings, Hungary declared a state of emergency and Serbia postponed elections. All of that happened before France closed its schools, even though it had recorded more than 3,000 cases and 79 fatalities.

It was a textbook plan to fight a pandemic: eastern European governments shut borders, shops and factories and imposed social-distancing restrictions. With the virus raging in Italy, the U.S. and the U.K., newspaper headlines in the continent’s former communist half declared sympathy while boasting of their countries’ resilience and wisdom in following rules.

That resolve melted in the summer and millions went on holiday abroad as soon as borders reopened. Those who stayed home thronged beer gardens, mountain huts and national parks.

Hoping to rebuild after the lockdowns decimated economies and to save key industries such as tourism, politicians urged people to get back out and spend. Having opened the state’s coffers to help businesses and furloughed workers, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and other leaders vowed that even if the virus returned, they’d avoid strict lockdowns.

Leaders in Western Europe are experiencing a similar sense of dismay. Italy and Spain, had sworn off any second lockdowns. Looking at the situation getting exponentially worse with their eastern neighbors, they too are coming to terms with the idea of whether they also declared victory too soon.

By mid-September, the number of new daily cases in the Czech Republic exceeded those in Germany, a country with almost eight times as many people. They did in Poland too, where President Andrzej Duda won a second term after his allies in the government had to postpone elections. He’s now quarantining after testing positive for the disease.

Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov — another Bled attendee — is also convalescing with covid-19, which is on track to kill as many people in his country in September and October as in the first six months of the pandemic combined.

Governments, however, are reluctant to return to the playbook that served them so well in the spring, or to tap into what the pandemic has taught the world in the past seven months.

Their mixed messaging, along with frequent rule-breaking by leaders, has spread public doubt about the effectiveness of restrictions. That’s especially dangerous in a region where people spent decades circumventing official decrees under communist governments, according to Jan Hartl, chairman of the Prague-based researcher the STEM Institute.

“People in former communist countries perceive authorities differently than citizens in the West,” he said. “They intuitively rebel against strict orders from the government since they intuitively consider them stupid. That’s a heritage of totalitarianism.”

Governments from Prague to Bucharest have tried to once again clamp down. Romanian Prime Minister Ludovic Orban resisted new measures before Sept. 27 local elections and a general ballot planned for Dec. 6 before finally giving in. Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia have closed schools and some non-essential businesses and vowed stricter measures if necessary.

But the message has yet to take hold. At the weekend, as Czech soldiers completed a 500-bed field hospital near a shopping mall in the Prague suburb of Letnany, images flooded media of throngs at a farmers’ market in the city center.

Babis, who imposed a 9 p.m.-5 a.m. curfew from, called the situation “insane.”

“I appealed, begged, asked you here repeatedly, to follow the measures and to take pandemic seriously,” he said. “Since no government can do it on its own, if we don’t manage to flatten the growth together, our medical system will simply collapse.”

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Powerful Aegean earthquake kills at least 14 people in Turkey and Greece, injures hundreds

InternationalOct 31. 2020

By The Washington Post · Kareem Fahim, Matthew Cappucci · WORLD, MIDDLE-EAST

ISTANBUL – A powerful earthquake in the Aegean Sea left at least 14 people dead Friday in Turkey and Greece, flattened at least 20 buildings in coastal Turkey and sent a surge of seawater flooding streets near the Turkish city of Izmir.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/cbc3f442-7e5a-4f0e-9937-3486d19d3171?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

The magnitude 7 earthquake – felt as far away as Istanbul and Athens – occurred about 10 miles north of the Greek island of Samos, according to U.S. Geological Survey.

At least 12 people were dead and more than 400 injured in Turkey, according to Turkey’s disaster management agency, which said one of the victims had drowned. At least 20 structures, including some multistory apartment buildings in Izmir, collapsed, authorities said.

On Samos, two teenagers, a boy and a girl, were killed when a wall collapsed on them, said Greece’s General Secretariat for Civil Protection. Local media reported that the teens were walking home from school.

It was the second major earthquake to hit Turkey this year. In January, at least 41 people were killed in an earthquake that struck Elazig in central Turkey, where questions were raised about the whether the government was adequately enforcing building codes.

Some of the worst damage in Friday’s quake occurred in Izmir, a city of 4.4 million people on Turkey’s Aegean coast. Mayor Tunc Soyer told CNN Turk that search teams were at the scene of the collapsed buildings.

Local television stations showed residents and rescue workers searching for survivors through mounds of rubble. Plumes of white smoke rose from Izmir’s skyline. During one broadcast, cheers erupted as a woman, dazed and grimacing, was pulled from the ruins of a building.

Near Seferihisar, south of Izmir, coastal areas flooded with seawater from what appeared to be a “small tsunami,” said Ismail Yetiskin, a district mayor who was quoted by the NTV news channel.

The authorities had lost contact with several fisherman who were at sea when the earthquake struck, he said. Video posted on the Internet appeared to show flooding in Samos as well.

The quake was very shallow, with the main slip occurring just seven miles below the seabed. Most earthquakes in western Turkey occur within 40 miles below the surface.

Turkey sits atop the Anatolian Plate, a block of the earth’s crust that is slowly rotating counterclockwise and shifting west with time – about an inch of movement every year. But pent-up stress caused by collisions with the African plate and Eurasian plate result in frequent earthquakes.

Most of Turkey’s big quakes over the years have occurred along the North Anatolian Fault, which runs across northern Turkey along the Pontic Mountains.

Occasionally, quakes occur in the country’s western zones, the result of dense, oceanic crust sinking and forcing the ground farther east upward.

The quake was the strongest in nearly a decade to strike Turkey. In October 2011, a 7.1 earthquake struck eastern Turkey, killing more than 600 people.

On Samos, some residents were asked to evacuate their houses for the next 48 hours for precautionary reasons.

The earthquake struck at a moment when the governments of Turkey and Greece are locked in a bitter feud over competing claims to territory and resources in the seas that divide the two countries. After the quake, both nations issued offers of mutual humanitarian aid.

Writing on Twitter, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said he had called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to offer condolences.

“Whatever our differences, these are times when our people need to stand together,” Mitsotakis wrote.