News round-up, July 24, 2023
Quote of the day…
'The Spanish Conservatives' capitulation to the far right would reverberate across the continent'
Le Mode by Op-Ed , Gordon Brown, former UK prime ministerMost read…
Gordon Brown: 'The Spanish Conservatives' capitulation to the far right would reverberate across the continent'
Le Mode by Op-Ed , Gordon Brown, former UK prime ministerClimate crisis: 'Warming is right in line with early predictions. But many of the impacts are exceeding predictions'
InterviewFor climatologist Michael E. Mann, the extreme phenomena affecting the planet are not the result of a sudden acceleration in global warming. But, he warns, without strong action, a runaway effect cannot be ruled out.
Le Monde by Audrey Garric, published yesterday (Paris)Venezuela’s Oil Industry Is Broken. Now It’s Breaking the Environment.
Gas flares and leaking pipelines from Venezuela’s once-booming oil industry, hobbled by U.S. sanctions and mismanagement, are polluting towns and a major lake.
NYT By Isayen Herrera, Sheyla Urdaneta, Adriana Loureiro Fernandez and Sheyla Urdaneta, July 23, 2023Ukraine-Russia war live: Ukrainian drones 'strike near Russian defence ministry
Russia said it thwarted a Ukrainian “terrorist act” on Moscow as two drones hit non-residential buildings, with one crashing near the defence ministry.
The Telegrpah NowTwo Kennedys on covid
TWP Analysis by Dan Diamond with research by McKenzie Beard, July 21, 2023 
At the COA Spring Gala 2023, Andrés Gluski, the CEO & President of AES and Chairman of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, presented President Lacalle Pou with the prestigious Gold Insigne. This award was given in recognition of President Lacalle Pou's outstanding leadership in successfully transforming Uruguay into a prominent technology and innovation hub, all while upholding a thriving democracy and robust economy.
Gordon Brown: Child poverty is growing to ‘horrendous’ levels under Tories and SNP/The Sunday Post/Editing by Germán & CoGordon Brown: 'The Spanish Conservatives' capitulation to the far right would reverberate across the continent'
Le Mode by Op-Ed , Gordon Brown, former UK prime ministerThe former British Prime Minister deplores the Spanish People's Party's plan to ally itself with Vox and its hyper-nationalist, anti-LGBT and anti-immigration program in the event of victory.
Spain's general election Sunday matters not just for the country's future but also for the future of Europe. A defeat for socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez would likely propel the extreme right-wing Vox party from back street demagogues to parliamentary power, and if, as is widely expected, Vox and the Popular Party (PP) enter into a coalition government, it will mark the end of Spain's long aversion to far-right politicians, which has endured since the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in 1975.
Should Vox become part of Spain's government, its chilling, hyper-nationalist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-feminist, and anti-immigrant agenda would push Europe one step further into a right-wing abyss. The capitulation to Vox by Spanish center-right conservatives, who have traditionally rejected alliances with the far-right but are now desperate to return to power, would reverberate across the continent, particularly given that Spain recently assumed the presidency of the Council of the European Union.
This alignment between Spain's conservative and far-right parties has resulted in an election campaign dominated by culture-war issues. Lurid Vox propaganda has demonized immigrants, gays, and feminists, portraying Sánchez and his party as enemies of the state. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the PP president of Madrid, has labeled her political opponents "communists." Seeking to evoke memories of the anticlerical violence throughout Spain before and during the Spanish Civil War, she even accused the opposition of wanting to burn down Catholic churches.
In reply, Sánchez has characterized the upcoming election, which follows the Socialist Party's poor showing in local and regional elections in May, as an existential battle for the future of Spanish democracy. And now, in the last few days of the campaign, the socialist former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has raised the stakes, claiming that "the center-right no longer exists," only the ultra-right, and that having abandoned the center, PP "has gone off the map." Ayuso has already responded in kind to such attacks: "When they call you a fascist, you know you're doing something right."
Reagan-Thatcher doctrine
In addition to targeting civil rights, Spanish rightists have set their sights on rejecting regional autonomy. For years Vox has proposed banning the Catalan and Basque nationalist parties, and there is a genuine risk that after years of relative calm under Sánchez's leadership, a divided Spain could witness a resurgence of separatist, secessionist movements.
The right's embrace of the culture wars is a deliberate strategy to obscure the threat that their neoliberal economic policies pose to living standards and social equity. The PP's agenda, which is taken straight from the Reagan-Thatcher playbook, seeks to abolish Spain's current wealth tax, slash the personal income tax, privatize the country's utilities, and cut social security. When former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss attempted to implement a similar outdated agenda in 2022, she nearly tanked the British economy.
At the same time, the PP's focus on culture-war issues is aimed at diverting attention from the economic achievements of Sánchez and his coalition as well as his green agenda. Since taking office in 2018, Sánchez's government has made significant strides in reducing high levels of inequality and poverty in Spain. Moreover, Sánchez has successfully brokered an inflation-stabilizing agreement on wages, endorsed by both unions and employers, calling for a 4% wage increase in 2023 and 3% increase in 2024 and 2025, and, currently, the country has the highest growth rate and one of the lowest inflation rates in the eurozone.
If re-elected, Sánchez would focus on housing, which he views as Spain's "great national cause" for the next decade. He has also proposed new health-care guarantees, including maximum waiting periods of 60 days for specialized outpatient consultations and 15 days for psychological care for teenagers and children under the age of 15.
Symbiosis between far-right movements
Spain is far from the only European country where the rise of the extreme right poses a threat. Across the continent, the growing popularity of far-right parties has driven previously moderate parties to embrace extreme positions.
In Germany, the nativist Alternative für Deutschland, now rising in the polls, is pushing the Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, further to the right. And in Finland, the ultraconservative Finns Party has formed a coalition government with the center-right, forcing it to pursue tough anti-immigration policies. A similar pattern can be observed in other Western European countries from Sweden to Austria, and it may appear in next year's European Parliament elections. And, of course, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy party, is further right than any leader the country has had since Benito Mussolini.
The emerging symbiosis between Europe's far-right movements has been supported by wealthy allies in the United States. In September 2022, representatives from 16 European nativist parties, including Poland's ruling Law and Justice, Slovak populists led by former prime minister Robert Fico, and former Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša's far-right movement, gathered in Miami for the National Conservatism Conference, where the keynote speaker was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is also a Republican presidential candidate and Donald Trump impersonator.
The Florida conference bore a striking resemblance to another far-right summit organized by the same group and held at Rome's Grand Hotel Plaza in February 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. Hoping to establish a far-right alternative to the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, attendees championed nationalism, tradition, and the nuclear family as bulwarks against "globalist" attempts to destroy Europe's countries and their respective cultures. It was during this gathering that Meloni outlined her agenda, which ultimately resonated with Italian voters, for "defending national identity and the very existence of the nation-states as the sole means of safeguarding people's sovereignty and freedom."
Ironically, each member of this unlikely global coalition of anti-globalists claims to speak for their own country's unique cultural heritage and their desire to be free from international entanglements while simultaneously using identical us-versus-them xenophobic rhetoric to stoke nativist fears. It has been 175 years since Karl Marx heralded a specter haunting Europe. Today, however, it is not the specter of communism, as Marx had hoped, but that of populist nationalism. The outcome of Spain's election could highlight the gravity and urgency of the threat.
Gordon Brown, prime minister of the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2010, is the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education.
At the Energy Summit 2923 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Edwin De los Santos, President of AES DOMINICANA, emphasized the company's strong commitment to global environmental preservation.
“The relationship between energy and development is symbiotic and interdependent. “
Image by Le Monde/ Editing by Germán & CoClimate crisis: 'Warming is right in line with early predictions. But many of the impacts are exceeding predictions'
“For climatologist Michael E. Mann, the extreme phenomena affecting the planet are not the result of a sudden acceleration in global warming. But, he warns, without strong action, a runaway effect cannot be ruled out.
Le Monde by Audrey Garric, published yesterday (Paris)Over 50°C in the USA and China, around 45°C in Italy, Spain and Greece, deadly floods in South Korea, raging fires in Canada and unprecedented temperatures in the North Atlantic: The planet is experiencing a series of climate catastrophes. July could be the hottest month on record, after June. Climatologist Michael E. Mann, Director of the Center for Science and the Environment at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), refutes the idea that global warming is accelerating, but warns that we could reach tipping points if we continue to use fossil fuels.
South Korean rescuers search for missing people in an underground tunnel where some 15 cars were trapped by heavy rain in Cheongju on July 16, 2023. STR / AFP
Does the current succession of extremes and records mark a new normal?
As I like to point out, it's worse than a new normal – it's a moving baseline of ever-worsening impacts as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels and generate carbon pollution. These episodes are a reminder that we can not only expect to see records broken, but shattered, if we continue burning fossil fuels and heating up the planet. This year, the El Niño phenomenon, a warming of the equatorial Pacific that can increase global temperatures, is adding to this trend.
Has the climate gone out of control?
This is not the case. It's getting steadily worse and that's bad enough. There's no evidence of runaway feedback process or tipping points that have been crossed. But Earth's long-term history provides examples of where things did spin out of control, often in surprising ways, a reminder that this cannot be ruled out for us if we continue to burn fossil fuels, generate carbon pollution, and warm the planet. We still have time to prevent the worst effects from occurring if we act now.
For scientists like Johan Rockström, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, we have already exceeded seven of the eight "safe and just" planetary limits, thresholds beyond which humanity would be in peril...
I think there's some misunderstanding in the language. Are we talking about climate tipping points or societal tipping points. These are not the same thing. Whether or not we've exceed 6 planetary limits (I don't think there's any consensus at all that's the case), that's not the same as a climate tipping point. Steady, linear warming could in principle lead to a societal tipping point, because there's a point beyond which the complex system of the economy can no longer function. But there is no evidence that things are spinning out of control. Instead they're getting steadily worse as the planet warms in response to our continued burning of fossil fuels. So yes, there is great urgency. And there's not the slightest consensus about planetary limits.
Are the current impacts of the climate crisis in line with model predictions?
The warming itself [ 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels] is right in line with early climate model predictions. But many of the impacts are exceeding the model predictions. The best example of that is extreme summer weather events – like we are seeing play out in North America, Europe and Asia this summer, from heat waves to wildfires and floods. We can also cite the melting of the ice caps, the shrinking of the Arctic ice pack and rising sea levels.
“Other scientists, such as James Hansen, former director of NASA's main climate science laboratory, are talking about accelerated warming...
I have the utmost respect for Jim. He's been one of the key contributors to our science for decades. But I think he's just incorrect when he claims there's evidence of acceleration of warming. The warming is steady and that's bad enough!
The World Meteorological Organization considers that we are entering "uncharted territory." Do you agree?
It depends on what you mean. There are examples of far greater extremes in Earth history. So in that sense, no. But, over the time span of the emergence of human civilization, are we entering uncharted territory? The answer is almost certainly yes. July will likely be the hottest month this planet has seen in more than 100,000 years.
If we stop emissions immediately, will global warming and its effects stop immediately?
Surface warming stops very soon after emissions reach zero. There is increasing scientific consensus on that point, and the impacts that are tied to surface warming – such as extreme summer weather events – will stabilize when that happens. Some impacts, however, like deep ocean warming, ice shelf collapse and ice sheet destabilization, sea level rise, ocean acidification, could continue on for some time. So no, not all impacts will stop getting worse, and we'll need to focus on adapting to those changes that are inevitable. But much of it will stop getting worse. The bottom line is we've got to stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible. I don't think there is any disagreement about that among experts – at least I hope not.
By focusing on achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, aren't we forgetting that it's the accumulation of emissions between now and then that counts?
It is absolutely the rate at which emissions fall that matter. Our carbon budget [maximum emissions] for 1.5°C warming is rapidly decreasing. That's the reason the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] talks about needing to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 and reach net zero by mid century, to have a decent change of averting 1.5°C warming. Of course, climate impacts aren't a cliff at 1.5°C. I prefer the analogy of a mine field. The greater the warming, the greater the danger.
What's your view on political action in favor of the climate and on the forthcoming world conference (COP28) to be held in December in Dubai (United Arab Emirates)?
I'm worried about the process being hijacked. In the past, I've counseled others to be supportive of the UN climate negotiation process as it's our only multilateral framework for coordinated global action. And I continue to feel that this framework is essential. But I”m troubled, as are many climate activists, by the way it has been hijacked recently by oil-producing middle east nations that have an awful track record on climate. Just as I'm troubled by the way that Saudi Arabia is trying to reabilitate it's deserved reputation as a ruthless petrostate, so am I concerned of the potential for the COP process to be hijacked by bad actors using it as an opportunity to greenwash their terrible legacy on climate.
Image: Germán & CoCooperate with objective and ethical thinking…
Source: NYT/Adriana Loureiro FernandezVenezuela’s Oil Industry Is Broken. Now It’s Breaking the Environment.
Gas flares and leaking pipelines from Venezuela’s once-booming oil industry, hobbled by U.S. sanctions and mismanagement, are polluting towns and a major lake.
NYT By Isayen Herrera, Sheyla Urdaneta, Adriana Loureiro Fernandez and Sheyla Urdaneta, July 23, 2023Each morning, José Aguilera inspects the leaves of his banana and coffee plants on his farm in eastern Venezuela and calculates how much he can harvest — almost nothing.
Explosive gas flares from nearby oil wells spew an oily, flammable residue on the plants. The leaves burn, dry up and wither.
“There is no poison that can fight the oil,” he said. “When it falls, everything dries up.”
Venezuela’s oil industry, which helped transform the country’s fortunes, has been decimated by mismanagement and several years of U.S. sanctions imposed on the country’s authoritarian government, leaving behind a ravaged economy and a devastated environment.
The state-owned oil company has struggled to maintain minimal production for export to other countries, as well as domestic consumption. But to do so it has sacrificed basic maintenance and relied on increasingly shoddy equipment that has led to a growing environmental toll, environmental activists say.
Mr. Aguilera lives in El Tejero, a town nearly 300 miles east of Caracas, the capital, in an oil-rich region known for towns that never see the darkness of night. Gas flares from oil wells light up at all hours with a roaring thunder, their vibrations causing the walls of rickety houses to crack.
Many residents complain of having respiratory diseases like asthma, which scientists say can be aggravated by emissions from gas flares. Rain brings down an oily film that corrodes car engines, turns white clothes dark and stains notebooks that children carry to school.
And yet, paradoxically, widespread fuel shortages in the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves mean virtually no one in this region has cooking gas at home.
Soon after President Hugo Chávez rose to power in the 1990s with promises to use the country’s oil wealth to lift up the poor, he fired thousands of oil workers, including engineers and geologists, and replaced them with political supporters, took control of foreign-owned oil assets, and neglected safety and environmental standards.
Then, in 2019, the United States accused Mr. Chavez’s successor, President Nicolás Maduro, of election fraud and imposed economic sanctions, including a ban on Venezuelan oil imports, to try to force him from power.
The country’s economy collapsed, helping to fuel a mass exodus of Venezuelans who could not afford to feed their families even as Mr. Maduro has managed to maintain his repressive hold on power.
After grinding nearly to a halt, the oil sector has seen a modest rebound, in part because the Biden administration last year allowed Chevron, the last American company producing oil in Venezuela, to restart operations on a limited basis.
Neighbors playing board games under a sky lit by gas flares near Punta de Mata in eastern Venezuela.The national oil industry’s travails have been worsened by a corruption investigation into missing oil money that has so far led to dozens of arrests and the resignation of the country’s oil minister.
In eastern Venezuela, rusting refineries burn off methane gases that are part of the fossil fuel industry’s operations and are important drivers of global warming.
Even though Venezuela produces far less oil than it once did, it ranks third in the world in methane emissions per barrel of oil produced, according to the International Energy Agency.
Cabimas, a city about 400 miles northwest of Caracas on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, is another center of regional oil production. There, the state oil company, PDVSA, built hospitals and schools, set up summer camps and provided residents with Christmas toys.
Now oil seeps from deteriorating underwater pipelines in the lake, coating the shores and turning the water a neon green that can be seen from space. Broken pipes float on the surface, and oil drills are rusting and sinking into the water. Birds coated in oil struggle to fly.
The collapse of the oil industry has left Cabimas, once one of the richest communities in Venezuela, in extreme poverty.
Every day at 5 a.m., the three Méndez brothers — Miguel, 16, Diego, 14 and Manuel, 13 — untangle their fishing nets, clean them and row into the polluted waters of Lake Maracaibo, hoping to catch enough shrimp and fish to feed themselves, their parents and their younger sister.
They use gasoline to wash the oil from their skin.
Diego, 14, Manuel, 13, and Miguel Méndez, 16, fishing in Lake Maracaibo, which has been polluted by oil leaking from damaged pipelines.Children play and bathe in the water, which smells of rotting sea life.
The boys’ father, Nelson Méndez, 58, was once a commercial fisherman, back when the lake was cleaner. He worries about getting sick from eating what his children catch, but he worries more about hunger.
He said he was hired by the state oil company about 10 years ago to help clean a fuel spill in the lake, but the work damaged his vision.
“Everything I worked for in life, I lost because of the oil,” Mr. Méndez said.
The poor maintenance of the fuel production machinery in Lake Maracaibo has led to an increase in oil spills, which have contaminated Cabimas and other communities along its shoreline, according to local organizations focusing on the issue.
The gas flares that burn across parts of Venezuela also point to the enfeeblement of the country’s fossil fuel industry: So much gas spews into the atmosphere because there is not enough functioning equipment to convert it into fuel, experts say.
Venezuela ranks among the worst countries in the world in terms of the volume of gas flares produced by its decrepit fuel operations, according to the World Bank.
Oil staining the waters of Lake Maracaibo.In a 2021 report, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights expressed deep concern about the state of Venezuela’s oil industry.
“It is imperative that the government effectively implement its environmental regulatory framework on the oil industry,” the report said.
At a U.N. climate change summit last year, Mr. Maduro did not address the environmental damage resulting from his country’s hobbled oil industry.
Instead, he claimed that Venezuela was responsible for less than 0.4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and blamed wealthier countries for causing environmental harm. (Experts say that figure is accurate and note that the country’s emissions have decreased as its oil industry has cratered.)
“The Venezuelan people must pay the consequences of an imbalance caused by the world’s leading capitalist economies,” Mr. Maduro said in a speech at the summit.
A top government minister, Josué Alejandro Lorca, said in 2021 that oil spills were “not a big deal because, historically, all oil companies have had them.” He added that the government did not have the resources to address the problem.
The state oil company did not respond to requests for comment.
In Cabimas, David Colina, 46, a fisherman, wears oil-stained orange overalls with the distinctive emblem of the state oil company.
Thirty years ago, he said, he could catch more than 200 pounds of fish. Now he is lucky if he pulls up 25 pounds in his net before he exchanges them for flour or rice from his neighbors.
When the state oil company was functioning better, Mr. Colina said, he would be compensated if an oil spill affected his fishing business. But now, he added, “there is no government here anymore.”
After Chevron announced last year that it would resume some oil production in Venezuela, the state oil company hired divers to inspect the oil pipelines in Lake Maracaibo.
So far, according to interviews with three of those divers, leaking pipelines have yet to be repaired. The divers spoke anonymously because they said they could be punished for revealing internal company information. A Chevron representative declined to comment and referred questions to the Venezuelan state oil company.
Francisco Barrios, 62, who also lives in Cabimas, repaired boats used by the oil industry for more than 20 years, earning enough to feed his five children and pay for their education.
But he became disillusioned, he said, by the industry’s decline, the pollution it was causing, the increasingly shoddy infrastructure and a salary that could not keep up with a rising cost of living.
He said that one of his sons, who was a diver, was killed 12 years ago when an underwater pipe he was repairing exploded.
“I got tired of seeing the destruction,” he said while using gasoline to try to remove oil that had seeped into his yard.
The road leading to Punta de Mata, lit by multiple gas flares. Flares in this part of Venezuela burn day and night.*Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia, and Ronny Rodríguez from El Tejero, Venezuela.
Seaboard: pioneers in power generation in the country…
…“More than 32 years ago, back in January 1990, Seaboard began operations as the first independent power producer (IPP) in the Dominican Republic. They became pioneers in the electricity market by way of the commercial operations of Estrella del Norte, a 40MW floating power generation plant and the first of three built for Seaboard by Wärtsilä.
A member of the security services investigates the damaged building following a reported drone attack in Moscow CREDIT: MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERSUkraine-Russia war live: Ukrainian drones 'strike near Russian defence ministry
Russia said it thwarted a Ukrainian “terrorist act” on Moscow as two drones hit non-residential buildings, with one crashing near the defence ministry.
The Telegrpah NowThe alleged attack in the early hours of Monday came a day after Kyiv vowed to “retaliate” for a Russian missile strike on the Black Sea port of Odesa.
“A Kyiv regime attempt to carry out a terrorist act using two drones on objects on the territory of the city of Moscow was stopped,” Russia’s defence ministry said.
“Two Ukrainian drones were suppressed and crashed. There are no casualties.”
Russia meanwhile launched fresh attacks on Odesa overnight with a four-hour strike that destroyed a grain hangar, Kyiv said.
Four port workers are believed to have been injured, while tanks for storing “other types of cargo” have also been damaged.
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies before the House select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government on Thursday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)/Editing by Germán & CoTwo Kennedys on covid
TWP Analysis by Dan Diamond with research by McKenzie Beard, July 21, 2023 Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s long-shot campaign for president received its most attention — the wrong kind — after the New York Post published his wild suggestion that covid-19 could be an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon because it “attacks certain races disproportionately.”
“Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” RFK Jr. said at a dinner with journalists last week.
The claim has been roundly condemned by virologists, lawmakers and advocacy groups like the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. It even prompted a rare public rebuke from members of the Kennedy family, including his nephew, former congressman Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.).
And it’s just the latest moment when experts have said RFK Jr.’s assertions were wrong, offensive and possibly dangerous, following his years of high-profile skepticism about a variety of vaccines.
RFK Jr. has since said he was misinterpreted about the “targeted” virus, but he’s also tried to distance himself from some of the fury.
“There’s no Jewish cabal out there making bioweapons,” RFK Jr. said in a conversation with Washington Post reporters on Thursday afternoon.
Yet he continues to reiterate his claim that the U.S. government is experimenting with bioweapons, despite being unable to point to a specific bioweapon after being pressed by The Post.
Fringe views
RFK Jr. is a Kennedy, but he doesn’t speak for the famous political family — a point hammered home during the pandemic, prompting a New York Times article last year about how RFK Jr.’s vaccine criticism had anguished his relatives.
Take Dec. 13, 2022, when Joe Kennedy and other family members gathered in Boston to honor Anthony Fauci at a dinner at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute — even as RFK Jr. was blasting the longtime infectious-disease doctor in an interview with British television.
Fauci “has transformed NIH from the most prestigious and important scientific research organization on Earth, and turned it into an incubator for pharmaceutical products, with all of these corrupting entanglements with the pharmaceutical industry,” RFK Jr. said on “Dan Wootton Tonight.”
The longtime vaccine skeptic — who wrote the 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health” — also has said that if elected president, he could target Fauci.
“People ask me, would I prosecute him? … I’ll look at it, certainly,” RFK Jr. told The Health 202 on Thursday.
He has hinged much of his long-shot campaign around the coronavirus pandemic, trying to capitalize on frustrations about shutdowns, government policies and officials’ efforts to stifle dissent. In his conversation with Post reporters on Thursday, RFK Jr. repeatedly returned to a broader theme around covid: The U.S. vaccination policy failed to prevent many deaths, and no one is questioning why. For instance, he said, look what happened after vaccines became widely available at the end of 2020.
“We’re seeing in 2021 and '22, this huge increase in excess deaths that nobody is asking about. Nobody is explaining, how is that happening?” RFK Jr. said.
Your author countered that excess deaths were higher in the first year of the pandemic than in the year after vaccines were widely available. Andrew Stokes, a Boston University researcher who has studied excess deaths, also emailed the Health 202 on Thursday night to say that his team found that in places where vaccine uptake went up, excess mortality in the second year of the pandemic went down.
“It is impossible to reconcile the exceptionally strong inverse relationship between vaccination and excess mortality with the possibility that the Covid-19 vaccines [have] contributed to the large toll of excess mortality in the second year of the pandemic,” Stokes added.
Faced with repeated questions — and disagreement — the presidential candidate stressed to Post reporters he was “not anti-vaccine” and would be happy to look at clinical studies.
“I’m open to the fact that I’m wrong,” RFK Jr. said. His years of questioning vaccine safety despite persistently being told that he's wrong suggest otherwise.
The younger Kennedy
Joe Kennedy, who spoke on the phone later Thursday, acknowledged that the nation’s response to the pandemic wasn't perfect.
“Did we get everything right? Clearly not,” he said, recounting communication missteps around when to wear masks, whether household objects needed to be scrubbed with cleaning supplies and other miscues that had frustrated Americans.
But the former Democratic congressman — who spent the first year of the pandemic serving as vice chair of the House Energy and Commerce’s oversight panel, which was responsible for probing the federal health agencies — credited policymakers for pursuing those policies “with the best of intentions.”
And unlike his uncle, he saw no reason to doubt the vaccine process and the officials who worked directly on it.
“The Trump administration legitimately deserves credit for developing and approving a vaccine that would be used to save millions of lives and vaccinate billions of people around the world in record time,” said Joe Kennedy, who currently serves as President Biden’s special envoy to Northern Ireland for economic affairs. He singled Fauci out for special praise, calling him a “hero” for his work on covid but also on other infectious diseases over the years.
“I have no doubt that if our health system had more Dr. Faucis, we would be in a better place, even more than we are,” Joe Kennedy added.
Asked why he decided to publicly distance himself from his uncle this week, the younger Kennedy chose his words carefully.
“Family is family, and it’s a critically important part of my life. That being said, we have disagreements … this is a big one,” Joe Kennedy said.
“I love my uncle. I think he's wrong on this. And … his views, unfortunately, can have, will have a negative impact on our country, our discourse and our health system. I think I'll leave it there.”