All posts tagged: Coronavirus
As Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, recounted the moment, his eyes welled with tears. A few months before, he and his colleague Anthony Fauci had confided in each other their hopes for a COVID-19 vaccine. The FDA had set the threshold for approval at 50 percent efficacy, roughly what the flu
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“Truth will come to light,” Launcelot Gobbo tells his father in The Merchant of Venice. “At the length truth will out.” For Donald Trump, this past week is when, for all except his most beguiled and gullible supporters, the truth willed itself out. At the start of the week, the ground on which the president’s most
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Since the earliest days of the American republic, political leaders have been concerned about the threat posed by large deficits and mounting federal debt. In a 1790 letter to Henry Lee, James Madison wrote that “as far as this object will permit I go on the principle that a Public Debt is a Public curse
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In case there was any doubt, the past dozen days have proved we’re at the point in his presidency where Donald Trump has become his own caricature, a figure impossible to parody, a man whose words and actions are indistinguishable from an Alec Baldwin skit on Saturday Night Live. President Trump’s pièce de résistance came during
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The day after announcing guidelines the nation’s governors can use to carry out an orderly reopening of their states, which are in the grip of a pandemic, President Donald Trump—through his weapon of choice, Twitter—openly encouraged protests against the social-distancing restrictions that have saved tens of thousands of American lives. As The New York Times reported, in so doing, the president appeared
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Churches are usually packed this week, the holiest on the Christian calendar. But this year, with very few exceptions, they are empty. And not just in America. In Jerusalem’s Old City, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, a major pilgrimage center for Christians all over the world, was closed. The last time it was closed
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For his entire adult life, and for his entire presidency, Donald Trump has created his own alternate reality, complete with his own alternate set of facts. He has shown himself to be erratic, impulsive, narcissistic, vindictive, cruel, mendacious, and devoid of empathy. None of that is new. But we’re now entering the most dangerous phase of
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“There are estimates that if nothing goes right and if we fail to flatten the curve and if health systems are overwhelmed, we might see the deaths of as many as a million and a half people in the United States.” That’s what Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told me on
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When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations I would never vote for Donald Trump, even though his administration would align much more with my policy views than a Hillary Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican friends were befuddled. How could I not
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