Covid-19

Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Trump

Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Trump?

Post published:November 30, 2020
Post category:Politics

To the dismay of Democrats, the president’s strategy of ignoring the pandemic mostly worked for Republicans. By Will Wilkinson Contributing Opinion Writer Nov. 27, 2020 President Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic probably cost him re-election. Yet it seems mind-boggling that he still won more votes than any incumbent president in American history despite his dereliction of responsibility at a time of a once-in-a-century health crisis and economic devastation. Why are President-elect Joe Biden’s margins sothin in the states that clinched his victory? And why did the president’s down-ticket enablers flourish in the turbulent, plague-torn conditions they helped bring about? Democrats, struggling to make sense of it all, are locked in yet another round of mutual recrimination: They were either too progressive for swing voters — too socialist or aggressive with ambitious policies like the Green New Deal — or not progressive enough to inspire potential Democratic voters to…

The U.S. and U.K. Were the Two Best Prepared Nations to Tackle a Pandemic

The U.S. and U.K. Were the Two Best Prepared Nations to Tackle a Pandemic—What Went Wrong?

Post published:July 17, 2020
Post category:Articles Health History Politics Safety Science Society

By Gavin Yamey and Clare Wenham July 1, 2020 6:00 AM EDT Yamey is a physician and professor of global health and public policy at Duke University, where he directs the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health. Wenham is an assistant professor of global health policy at the London School of Economics, where she directs the master of science degree program in global health policy. On Oct. 24, 2019—45 days before the world’s first suspected case of COVID-19 was announced—a new “scorecard” was published called the Global Health Security Index. The scorecard ranked countries on how prepared they were to tackle a serious outbreak, based on a range of measures, including how quickly a country was likely to respond and how well its health care system would “treat the sick and protect health workers.” The U.S. was ranked first out of 195 nations, and the U.K. was ranked second.…

Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’

Post published:April 10, 2020
Post category:Articles Economics Environment Health History Politics Regimes Safety Society

California this week declared its independence from the federal government’s feeble efforts to fight Covid-19 — and perhaps from a bit more. The consequences for the fight against the pandemic are almost certainly positive. The implications for the brewing civil war between Trumpism and America’s budding 21st-century majority, embodied by California’s multiracial liberal electorate, are less clear.