“Thanks to the courage and bravery of America’s military and our allies, hope is being restored to many women and families in much of Afghanistan. … [Women’s rights] are universal values which we have a responsibility to promote throughout the world, and especially in a place like Afghanistan,” then-Sen. Hillary Clinton wrote in a 2001 op-ed in Time.
“Morally, there is no significant difference between Halabja and Srebrenica,” New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier wrote in March 2003, on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq. “Unlike the villain of Srebrenica, the villain of Halabja is in the position to perpetrate the same atrocity again, and worse. How can any liberal, any individual who associates himself with the party of humanity, not count himself in this coalition of the willing?”
But it wasn’t just that they passively accepted Bush’s claims: It’s that they developed their own elaborate arguments for Iraq and the war on terrorism, couched in fully liberal terms.
“America’s destiny is literally at stake,” then-Sen. Joe Biden said in a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. “The overwhelming obligation of the next president is clear: Make America stronger, make America safer, and win the death-struggle between freedom and radical fundamentalism.”
But the war in Iraq swiftly proved disastrous. Hundreds of thousands died as a result of the US invasion, which uncovered no weapons of mass destruction. Instead of stabilizing the region and promoting democracy, it gave birth to ISIS and a fragile Iraqi state few wanted to emulate. During the conflict, American troops committed atrocities — including mass murder and torture — that undermined US claims to moral superiority. Meanwhile, Bush neglected the occupation of Afghanistan; Osama bin Laden escaped and the Taliban reconstituted itself, evolving into an effective and deadly insurgency by the time Bush left office.
Ben Rhodes, who would become one of Obama’s leading foreign policy advisers, began his career in in the midst of the early-2000s war fervor — a “24-year-old pissed off about 9/11,” as he puts it. Like most Democrats, he bought into the notion that the war on terrorism would be a “generational endeavor” — only to have his faith shattered when Bush, backed by the bulk of the national security establishment, used this premise as a justification for the invasion of Iraq.
“I never got over that,” Rhodes tells me. “It was a warning sign to me that you could put an intellectual framework around anything, even something as manifestly dumb as invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and then occupying it.”
The catastrophe in Iraq and the long quagmire in Afghanistan undermined two fundamental liberal interventionist premises. First, that America could be trusted to attack the right targets — that liberal ideals would not be abused to justify unjust wars. Second, that defeating murderous tyrants would produce better humanitarian outcomes.
These twin lessons played a pivotal role in the decline of liberal interventionism. Barack Obama won the 2008 Democratic primary in no small part because he had opposed the Iraq War from the outset — while Hillary Clinton, infamously, had supported it. It was a sign of the hawkish tide’s waning, of the rise of a more cautious spirit on the center left.
But liberal interventionism wasn’t quite extinguished yet. As president, Obama surged troops into Afghanistan in an effort to defeat the rising Taliban insurgency. When faced with a potential mass slaughter in the Libyan city of Benghazi in 2011, he chose to launch a Kosovo-style intervention — multilateral, primarily airpower, no large-scale postwar American occupation.
The US and its allies not only stopped the conquest of Benghazi but also toppled Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi — arguably exceeding their UN mandate in doing so. And there was no subsequent quagmire as in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the war was hardly an unmitigated success. Shortly after Qaddafi’s fall, Libya degenerated into violence and civil conflict. It became an anarchic and violent place, a weakly governed space exploited by jihadist militants — one that remains unstable today.
It’s possible — likely, in my view — that Libya would have been even worse off absent US intervention. But for Obama and many liberals, the war was proof that even a “light footprint” intervention typically isn’t worth the costs. Rhodes recalls a conversation with Obama about intervening in Syria’s civil war that crystallized where liberalism had moved to by the mid-2010s:
When it comes to liberal interventionism in the Obama years, Rhodes believes that “Libya ended all of it.” The refusal to intervene in Syria, followed by Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal, were more steps down the same path — toward a new posture among liberals.
After the catastrophes in the Middle East, the most prominent liberal interventionists went in different directions.
Power and Rice are both serving in the Biden administration, but neither works on military or defense policy: Power is the head of USAID while Rice runs Biden’s Domestic Policy Council.
Other hawks are once again warning of alleged existential threats to liberalism, albeit from a different corner: Wieseltier and Berman have both evolved into critics of “cancel culture” and the alleged excesses of the left. Still others, like Beinart and Moyn, have spent years grappling with what they now see as the terrible mistakes of the 1990s and 2000s, becoming influential skeptics in debates over the US use of force.
But on the whole, what was once a vital intellectual and political movement has dissolved. No one event illustrates this more clearly than Biden, who voted for the Iraq War, supervising America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Some liberal interventionists, like the Atlantic’s George Packer, attacked the Biden withdrawal, as did many “straight news” reporters and Washington think tank denizens. But most of these objections focused on either the withdrawal’s execution, like a failure to evacuate Afghan allies quickly enough, or national security concerns (like the terrorist threat posed by a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan).
The liberal move away from interventionism is not solely the result of America’s Middle Eastern misadventures. It is also a reaction to deeper transformations in global politics.
First, the United States is no longer unrivaled in the way it was when the Berlin Wall fell. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, intervention in Syria, and meddling in the 2016 election refocused American attention on its old enemy. Even more important, the rise of China suggested that America might actually face a peer competitor in the future — a rising power that, unlike Russia, might be able to overtake America in global influence.
Russian and Chinese assertiveness has led official Washington to refocus on “great power competition”: a foreign policy primarily concerned with US relations with large rivals rather than the internal affairs of smaller, strategically marginal states. In this paradigm, some liberals began to see wars for human rights as a costly distraction — aligning with realists in a renewed emphasis on traditional power politics.
“I don’t actually think that the failures of foreign policy in the Middle East alone were enough to catalyze this shift” against interventionism, says Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank. “I think it’s the rise of China, and more broadly the fact that America is in relative decline … that is where we start hearing some talk of constraints.”
Biden invoked this concern, quite explicitly, in his speech justifying the Afghanistan withdrawal: “Our true strategic competitors — China and Russia — would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely.”
But it’s not just Russia and China that have doomed liberal interventionism. American liberals now face a threat closer to home: Donald Trump, an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party, and the rise of illiberal populism inside democratic states.
The shock of far-right populism did not just undermine the sense of destiny that motivated liberal global ambitions in the 1990s. It also made liberals acutely aware that the great ideological battle of today would not be waged abroad but at home. Liberalism, on the offensive since the Cold War, has been backfooted by far-right populism.
“How can a country that has January 6 fix Afghanistan?” Rhodes asks, referring to the insurrection at the US Capitol.
It’s a question that captures the shifting mood among liberals — and the rise of fortress liberalism. Twenty years after 9/11, liberals are deprioritizing the spread of liberal values in favor of protecting them where they are already in place.
“Rather than wasting its still considerable power on quixotic bids to restore the liberal order or remake the world in its own image, the United States should focus on what it can realistically achieve,” Mira Rapp-Hooper and Rebecca Lissner, both current Biden NSC staffers, wrote in a 2019 Foreign Affairs essay.
Fortress liberalism is not a clean break from what came before it. Biden, for example, has been quite clear on his willingness to use force against terrorists around the world.
While the door may still be open to future liberal interventions, it is clear that liberal interventionism as a doctrine — that American military policy should be oriented around stopping genocide and spreading liberal values — has been supplanted.
But for all its errors — and they were myriad and massive — liberal interventionism did contain a core insight worth preserving: that a life is no less valuable because it is lived outside America’s borders.
The greatest sins of American foreign policy have not been the result of an excess of concern for foreign life but a lack of it. From the genocide of Indigenous peoples to the transatlantic slave trade to imperialism in Latin America to Cold War-era support for mass murders and torturers, America has a long and horrifying track record of sacrificing people on the altar of its own economic and strategic interests.
Liberal interventionists were right to recoil from this past and seek something better. But they were too quick to conclude that the solution was moralized militarism — to see the use of American might against manifestly bad actors as righteous rather than dangerous.
Preserving the moral outlook of ’90s liberal interventionism while abandoning its militarism means discharging our moral duties to non-Americans through nonviolent means: leading the world in the fight against climate change, opening America’s doors to many more refugees, and sending humanitarian aid to the world’s impoverished.
It also means recognizing the toll that any war, however just-seeming, has on civilians — and, as a result, opposing the use of force as anything but a last resort under truly desperate circumstances.
Liberal interventionism barely had a pulse these past few years; Biden’s withdrawal is less its formal end than a long, drawn-out coda. Today’s liberals do seem to have internalized at least one key lesson from its failures: concluding, as John Quincy Adams put it, that America should not survey the world “in search of monsters to destroy.”
But they should also remember the second half of Adams’s formulation: that the United States must also proclaim “the inextinguishable rights of human nature and the only lawful foundations of government,” that “wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.”
In December 2018, I visited a large dyeing facility inside the Shaoxing Industrial Zone, south of the coastal city of Hangzhou, China. Twenty minutes out from the manufacturing hub, I began to smell it: the rotten-egg stench of dye effluent.
The Zone, as it’s known, is 100 square kilometers, nearly double the size of Manhattan. More than 50 textile printing and dyeing companies stand in huge rows, facing out over the Cao’e River where it flows into Hangzhou Bay. Trucks stream north on the highway from the Zone carrying miles of dyed and printed fabrics, en route to becoming billions of dollars’ worth of shirts, dresses, shorts, and leggings.
I was there to research a book I was writing about clothing and textiles, and the Zone, in terms of its sheer scale, was unlike anything I had ever seen in the US. Yet it’s a landscape that a mammoth American consumer market — and the steady, supersize patronage of US clothing brands and retailers — has been critical in shaping.
The US has gobbled up far more Chinese garments and textiles than any other nation every year since 2006. Between 2002 and 2020, China was by far the largest source of garment imports into the US. In 2020, Vietnam outstripped China as the biggest exporter of garments to the US market, but that fact obscures the reality that the cloth used to make those Vietnamese garments is frequently Chinese-made, and is often sewn in Chinese-owned factories.
Because of the deep reliance on this single source to meet insatiable clothing appetites, clothing companies — and consumers — now have a particularly big moral dilemma on their hands.
US officials and human rights organizations say the cotton fields and factories in the Xinjiang region of China are using forced labor, mainly that of the Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs imprisoned in the vast internment camp system that the Chinese government has built in the region in recent years.
In January, the Trump administration banned cotton from Xinjiang because of its connection to the alleged human rights violations, roiling a fashion industry heavily reliant on Chinese textiles. Reports of the detention camps began circulating in 2019, but by 2020, reports had surfaced that major international brands’ supply chains were marred by forced labor. Soon, those brands were rushing to make public statements condemning China’s actions in Xinjiang, eagerly professing a zero-tolerance policy on forced labor. Some, like Adidas, pledged to cut Xinjiang-made materials from supply chains; others, such as Patagonia and the millennial “it” brand Reformation, have said they will stop using Chinese cotton altogether. The problem, however, had been building for some time.
Though Beijing has vociferously denied using forced labor, calling it “totally a lie fabricated by some organizations and personnel in the United States and the West,” US senators met in committee in March to hash out possible solutions to the problem and its presence in the supply chains of US companies.
One of the witnesses giving expert testimony that afternoon, Julia K. Hughes, president of the United States Fashion Industry Association, suggested that it was important to focus on “the real actions that will get to the perpetrators of the crime, which is not the US companies that are good corporate citizens.”
But just who is responsible is, by any account, a difficult question to untangle. China is both the world’s largest producer of cotton yarn and its largest yarn importer, buying up cotton thread from India, Pakistan, and Vietnam to supplement its domestic thread. This yarn is knit, woven, and dyed to make textiles that will become summer dresses for Zara, T-shirts for Gap, and socks, hats, and jeans for the Japanese retailer Muji, even the cotton tote bags that have proliferated in recent years as a replacement for plastic. China is also one of the world’s biggest producers of raw cotton. And nowhere in China produces more cotton than Xinjiang.
An autonomous region located in the country’s far northwest corner, bordering Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia, Xinjiang has been under Chinese control since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. Uyghurs — the majority of whom follow the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence, one of four schools of thought within Sunni Islam — are by far the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, although the region is also home to many Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Hui (Chinese Muslims). Their culture is distinct from that of Han Chinese — the majority ethnic group in China — in many ways: Their food is largely halal, based on mutton, wheat noodles, nan, and savory pastries.
Uyghur farmers in Xinjiang were formidable farmers, making virtuosic use of rain-fed agriculture to grow food. But a new agricultural regime would turn the land to another crop: cotton.
Xinjiang has long been strategically central to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure project intended to link China globally via railroads, shipping lanes, and gas pipelines. The initiative’s central arteries crisscross the province, which happens to also hold huge reserves of natural gas. As the Chinese government has moved to assert tighter control over the region, cotton has operated as both an end and a means. In the 1990s, it was used as a way to encourage Han migration into the region. Today, it feeds the Chinese textile industry.
Beijing’s effort to move cotton and cloth production west to Xinjiang unfolded in several phases. The Eighth Five-Year Plan (1991-1995) highlighted the region’s huge potential for cotton, and the subsequent plan specified that Xinjiang be turned into a national cotton-producing base. Meanwhile, planners also transferred textile production west, from its traditional base on the east coast. Central planners felt that China’s textile industry could become more competitively priced by being closer to the cotton fields and employing a cheaper rural workforce.
Twenty years later, Xinjiang has a cheaper workforce than planners in the ’90s could have dreamed, and the reason is disturbing. From softer, coercive policies — like giving cotton quotas to Uyghur farmers that they had to meet, even if it wasn’t profitable — Beijing has turned to a policy of forcefully interning Uyghurs in massive, heavily guarded camps, subjecting them to what it has described as “reeducation” but is believed to include sterilization and forced labor. They are actions that, when taken together, constitute what the US State Department has termed a genocide. They are actions that have also been a boon to industry.
The Chinese government dramatically scaled up its repressive policies against Xinjiang’s Uyghurs in late 2016, when Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, a hardliner who has escalated invasive, tech-driven policing and monitoring tactics in China, assumed leadership of Xinjiang. Massive internment camps, which Beijing terms “vocational education centers” — though satellite imagery has revealed that these camps are encircled with barbed wire fencing and surveilled from watchtowers — have since been erected.
The policy of “reeducating” Uyghurs has dovetailed with a desire to keep garment production in China after labor costs there grew uncompetitive with those in places like Vietnam or Bangladesh. By 2018, evidence began to emerge of a major pipeline between detention centers and factories producing garments for US brands when the Associated Press tracked shipments from a factory inside a Xinjiang internment camp to Badger Sportswear in Statesville, North Carolina. Badger quickly moved to source its sportswear elsewhere.
But garments stitched by imprisoned Uyghurs were quietly entering the American wardrobe through myriad avenues — much of it, it would soon be revealed, made from cotton harvested by enslaved people. In January 2021, a shipment of men’s cotton shirts from Uniqlo was blocked from entering the Port of Los Angeles by US Customs agents who believed the goods were produced in part using forced labor in Xinjiang. In July, France’s antiterrorism prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into four brands that it has alleged profited from human rights crimes in Xinjiang: Zara, Uniqlo, Skechers, and SMCP (owner of Sandro and Maje). Even after the situation in Xinjiang had become unmistakable, it was clear that the effort to remove cotton harvested by forced labor from the market was squarely at odds with the imperative to produce ever-cheaper clothing.
Journalists face extreme restrictions in their attempts to enter Xinjiang, but I had procured a tourist visa for my December 2018 research trip to China and, following my time on the nation’s east coast, I had planned to head to Xinjiang in the guise of a sightseer, to gather whatever I could that way. My research focus was, at that time, on the ecological costs of cotton.
I had enrolled in a formal “Silk Road” tour as a way to avoid imperiling Uyghur interview subjects, who can be arrested for something as minor as speaking to an American. Days before I was scheduled to fly out, I got an email from the tour company with the subject line “URGENT.” “I regret to inform you that we have to cancel your tour,” the email said. “It is something beyond our control.”
Months passed before I again heard from the American employee of the Uyghur-owned tour company who had informed me of the cancellation. She was back in the US, she said, and wanted to explain what had happened now that she had access to a secure email account. Days before my tour, the family that ran the company had been rounded up and “sent to their home village” — a euphemistic way to say that they were sent to an internment camp.
At the time, the detention of Uyghurs by the Chinese government was just beginning to be widely reported. I felt sick. I had assumed that I was being kept out because the ruling Chinese Communist Party was becoming more careful about concealing its actions in Xinjiang and didn’t want to risk even the occasional nosy tourist. This, however, was more direct, more brutal, more blunt.
Since that first inkling that something was awry in the region, Xinjiang has emerged as the center of an international crisis. In March 2020, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) called on the Commerce Department to take steps to prevent goods produced by forced labor in Xinjiang from entering the US market. Even as the international outcry grew, Beijing worked to keep the region cloaked in secrecy. Journalists looking to document what is occurring in Xinjiang are forced to rely on satellite photos, sift through government budget reports, and collect footage of closed doors and high fences. In the startling glimpses that have emerged, cotton was front and center.
In July 2020, more than 190 organizations — interfaith groups, labor unions, Uyghurs’ rights groups, environmental organizations, anti-slavery organizations — spanning 36 countries issued a call to action, seeking formal commitments from clothing brands to completely disengage from any connection to Uyghur forced labor, either through sourcing, business relationships, or labor transfers, which serve to pipe Uyghurs from internment camps in Xinjiang to factories in other regions of China. In December 2020, German anthropologist Adrian Zenz released an intelligence briefing directly linking the cotton harvest with forced labor.
When I learned about how cotton was being harvested in Xinjiang, I thought about the tour guide who had been scheduled to drive me around, talking about the silk of China’s past. I wondered if he had become one of the prisoners laboring in the fields, picking the cotton of China’s present.
Corporations didn’t end up sourcing garments from Xinjiang internment camps by accident.
Apparel is a footloose industry, and forced labor is rampant. Brands actively seek out countries that don’t enforce their labor laws, said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, “then put enormous price pressure on suppliers, guaranteeing that they’ll violate labor laws.” The companies’ public statements reveal a desire to project certainty: “Nike does not source products from the [Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region] and we have confirmed with our contract suppliers that they are not using textiles or spun yarn from the region,” reads an undated statement from Nike that also acknowledges that its supply chains are opaque, even to the company itself. “Nike does not directly source cotton, or other raw materials,” the statement continues, but “traceability at the raw materials level is an area of ongoing focus.” The company concluded by saying that it was working with suppliers and others to better “map material sources.”
Slave cotton is far from new. The use of forced labor by an authoritarian communist regime to grow cotton can — and ought to — inspire the ire of the democratic West. But “free market” cotton has generally entailed very little freedom for most of those involved in its production. There is no global cotton trade outside of brutal colonial or neocolonial relations of power. Cheap cotton has been morally compromised for several hundred years.
The history of European imperialism, industrialization, and cotton are so intertwined as to be nearly identical. Cotton textiles were among the main products for which Britain colonized India. This cotton fabric was in turn the main currency used to purchase enslaved people from Africa, who were forced to grow commodity crops in the New World. After the invention of the cotton gin, cotton became the plantation’s crop par excellence in the United States. In the post-Civil War South, cotton continued to be made by unfree labor, as systematic efforts deprived formerly enslaved people of both land and alternative means of subsistence, all to force them into cotton sharecropping arrangements. Whatever could not be accomplished by this means was accomplished by Black Codes that allowed local authorities to arrest freed people for minor infractions and commit them to involuntary labor.
Large Southern landowners, cotton traders, and merchants — the same actors who had benefited from the antebellum order — were so successful in their efforts to reestablish cotton growing in the American South by forcing formerly enslaved people and landless white tenants to grow cotton via a punishing system of perpetual debt, that their strategy, known as sharecropping, became a model the world over. Today, small cotton farmers in India, for example, face crushing debt.
Private companies may direct flows of garments, but they travel along routes drawn by imperial legacies and colonial armies. In the cotton field, the division between the state and the corporation often fades away entirely. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, the Chinese state-owned entity that administers Xinjiang and directs the cultivation of most of its cotton, is both a corporation and an army.
As for the garment trade itself, that too has relied on the movements of big state actors, and not just a handful of errant entrepreneurs. The globalization of the US garment industry came about as the result of the US State Department’s Cold War policy. After World War II, the Allied powers under Gen. Douglas MacArthur occupied Japan and moved to re-industrialize it as swiftly as possible so it wouldn’t “fall” to communism. MacArthur’s first economic priority was the Japanese textile industry, which had been nearly wiped out by the war. Factories were rebuilt and modernized. The State Department even subsidized the shipment of raw American cotton to Japan.
To absorb the product of these new mills, the United States then opened up its hitherto heavily protected garment market, and Japanese cloth and clothing flowed in. The US textile and garment industries were made a sacrificial lamb, and over the next half-century, garment workers’ rights eroded, and Americans got used to spending less and less on clothing made by workers whose pay became worse and worse.
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The pipeline of low-cost Asian-made clothing had been long established by the time China opened its economy and revved up as a garment producer. Workers’ rights had never been on the minds of the architects of these policies, and remained an afterthought.
In March 2021, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Chinese counterpart, Director Yang Jiechi, for a conversation that quickly devolved into a war of words. Yang made a thinly veiled allusion to the history of slavery in the US and suggested that with a record like that, the US had no right to lecture China. “It’s important that we manage our respective affairs well instead of deflecting the blame on somebody else in this world,” he told Blinken. (This line of attack is frequently taken by Chinese troll armies, networks likened to Russian troll farms mobilized online to attack anyone posting concerns about the Uyghurs.)
Wang’s throwdown was cynical and self-serving. But it highlighted the irony of the US position. The US had emerged as a global leader in the fight against China’s oppression of the Uyghurs: It is the first government to call it a genocide, the first to ban imports of Xinjiang cotton — steps that Canada, the UK, Australia, and the EU also appear to be on their way to taking. In taking a hard stand, however, on China’s actions as a genocidal power using slave labor to harvest cotton for a voracious global market, the United States was looking at itself in the not-so-distant past.
Self-reflection (or lack of it) aside, there are enormous complexities involved in trying to force the global tentacles of Western multinationals out of a forced labor industry.
According to Nova of the Worker Rights Consortium, an estimated 1.5 billion garments made with Xinjiang cotton streamed into the US market each year before the ban took hold, and there are significant obstacles to knowing how much the ban has reduced that number. “Most consumers do not want to wear clothing made with forced labor,” Nova told me. “That’s a given. And if they knew that a particular product was made with forced labor, very few people would buy it. Of course, that’s where transparency comes in.”
Rights groups have expressed frustration recently that, although the US has placed restrictions on Xinjiang cotton, it is nearly impossible to see how they are being enforced. US Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency responsible, discloses the total number and dollar value of shipments detained quarterly, but that’s it. There are some exceptions — as when the news broke about blocked Uniqlo goods — but most such detentions never reach the press. The public has no way of knowing how many of them involve Xinjiang cotton, let alone which brands are implicated.
Ana Hinojosa, the agency’s executive director for trade remedy law enforcement, acknowledges that in the reporting, Xinjiang cotton detentions and others “are all lumped in together, mainly because it would be very difficult for us to continually update these moving numbers.”
The federal agency “is not required to make that any of that public,” confirms Esmeralda López, legal and policy director of the International Labor Rights Forum, but, she adds, “we think that it’s necessary to ensure effective enforcement.”
It matters, said Nova, because corporations are “waiting to see whether there’s going to be aggressive enforcement before they decide whether to really exit the region.”
Garment supply chains are incredibly complex. So far, Eileen Fisher, ASOS, Marks and Spencer Group, OVS, Reformation, WE Fashion, and others have all publicly committed to follow the steps laid out in the call to action put forward by the Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region. These steps demand that companies engage in intensive research into their own supply chains. Without this kind of work, watchdog groups say, it’s nearly impossible to suss out Xinjiang cotton from the rest.
Cotton picked in Xinjiang may be mixed with cotton from other regions as it is spun into yarn. That yarn may be knit or woven into fabric far from Xinjiang, cut and sewn into a garment still farther afield — likely in Vietnam or Bangladesh. Brands like to point out this complexity to disavow knowledge of what occurs in their supply chains.
But rights groups argue that companies do have choices. “I don’t think that we need to accept those limits,” said Allison Gill, forced labor program director/senior cotton campaign coordinator at Global Labor Justice — International Labor Rights Forum. “A company can tell us that a product was produced in a facility that also processes sesame and nuts. They can tell us all kinds of things if they want to.” According to Gill, “Xinjiang is the central case that we will use for years to show what an absolute failure voluntary standards have been [in] the auditing approach to supply chain. I mean, all of these companies that were operating there, they were all audited, they all passed their audits.”
In Xinjiang, there are known unknowns. “If you have clear due diligence policies, and if you’re saying, ‘We don’t use forced labor goods,’ and you can’t have factory auditors go in and actually check factories,” said Peter Irwin, senior program officer for advocacy and communications at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, “then you need to leave.”
The Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region is calling on brands to make public commitments to disengage from the region, but many brands have said they’d rather exit quietly because they fear losing Chinese market share if they pull out of Xinjiang openly. They’re afraid the Chinese government and nationalist consumers there will interpret any criticism of its conduct in Xinjiang as an open threat and retaliate.
That’s not an unrealistic fear. Days after Sweden joined in the coordinated sanctions on senior officials involved in human rights violations in Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Youth League launched an online attack on the Swedish retailer H&M, zeroing in on a year-old statement on H&M’s website expressing concern over human rights violations in the Uyghur region. The next day, H&M vanished from the Chinese internet. Major e-commerce platforms including Alibaba’s Taobao dropped its goods, and one ride-hailing app, Didi Chuxing, did not recognize its stores as locations. The party newspaper also leveled criticisms at Burberry, Adidas, Nike, New Balance, and Zara for past statements on Xinjiang, some from as long ago as two years. Celebrities including pop singer Wang Yibo announced they were breaking endorsement contracts.
“Normally in our work, it’s easier to get the brands to say they’re doing the right thing than it is to get them to do it. That has flipped to a degree on this issue,” said Nova. “If their position is that their level of access to China’s consumer market is more important to them than not being directly complicit in the worst human rights crimes that are taking place in the world today, their consumers have a right to know that.”
Then there are those, he argues, that have simply done nothing. “We’ve seen nothing whatsoever from Target, nothing whatsoever from Walmart. Nothing except rhetoric from Amazon, among many others,” Nova says. (Neither Target nor Walmart replied to Vox’s requests for comment; Amazon issued a statement that read, in part, “Amazon expects all products sold in the Amazon Stores to be manufactured and produced in accordance with our Supply Chain Standards. Whenever we find or receive proof of forced labor, we take action and remove the violating product and may suspend privileges to sell.”)
One promising new tool in supply chain transparency is technology developed by a company called Oritain, which can analyze a cotton fiber and determine its point of origin. Cotton from different locations bears different molecular blueprints: Distance from the sea will affect its sulfur content, for instance, while altitude will impact its hydrogen. However, Grant Cochrane, Oritain’s CEO, cautioned, “We’re not a standalone service. We work with other systems: really solid traceability systems.”
Even if the US cotton ban is made airtight, to work optimally, “It’s very important that a cotton ban … be a global effort,” said Johnson Yeung, urgent appeal coordinator and campaigner at the Clean Clothes Campaign. Yeung points to Muji, the Japanese retailer, which has said it has stopped sending Xinjiang cotton products to the US but will continue to sell them in countries without the ban. In Hong Kong, where Yeung is based, Muji actively advertises the presence of Xinjiang cotton in its products — a practice it jettisoned in Western markets after an uproar in the human rights community — attempting to brand “Xinjiang” as an upscale, luxury marker.
In the meantime, for Uyghurs in the diaspora, an act as simple as clothes shopping has become fraught. Zumretay Arkin is the program and advocacy manager at the World Uyghur Congress, part of the coalition asking brands to leave the Uyghur region. “I’m not an angel,” said Arkin. “I used to shop fast fashion.” Now, though, when Arkin sees cotton clothes in stores, “I just freeze there, thinking, ‘Maybe one of my relatives made this piece.’”
Arkin’s grandmother was a retired seamstress who used to sew clothing for Arkin using colorful printed cloth, sometimes cutting up her old dresses and veils to use as materials. Arkin brought these handmade garments along as a treasured memory when she immigrated to Canada at age 10. When Arkin’s grandmother passed away in 2017, Arkin could not go back for the funeral. The risk of detention was too great. Today, long dresses like the ones Arkin’s grandmother both wore and repurposed for Arkin’s wardrobe have been criminalized in Xinjiang. Uyghur women are stopped on the street to have long dresses shortened with scissors on the spot.
Rushan Abbas, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs, also finds it fraught to shop for clothes these days. In retaliation for Abbas’s activist work in the US, she alleges, authorities in Xinjiang detained her sister, a retired medical doctor, in September 2018. (Radio Free Asia has confirmed her detention.) “I’m afraid of going out and buying some of the things in the store now. Because I don’t know where my sister is,” or whether she is being forced to make products, Abbas said. Although China’s government has framed its labor transfers with the dystopian euphemism of “job training” programs, Abbas notes that “Uyghurs being held and sent to those factories to work, they are professors, writers, doctors, successful business people, elites — they’re professionals in the different fields.”
Abbas lives with her husband, who is also Uyghur, in Herndon, Virginia. His parents, both over 70, have been missing since 2017. So have four siblings and their spouses, along with 14 nieces and nephews. The Abbas family is far from exceptional in this, she said. “Me and my husband are the example of every single Uyghur in the diaspora.”
The United States’ link to the Uyghur internment camps isn’t just a matter of parallel histories.
US corporations have played a central role in creating the situation in Xinjiang today, and consumers have been their unwitting accomplices. “When you pour money into a region where there’s rampant forced labor, you’re both supporting and profiting from forced labor,” said Nova.
“Forced labor is a spectrum,” Gill said. “People in forced labor very often have agency, they are often making very hard choices. But genocide — genocide is different.”
“We hear a lot of different arguments for basically ignoring these atrocities, one being, well, the US needs to clean up their own act first,” said Julie Millsap, director of public affairs and advocacy at the Campaign for Uyghurs. “It’s not that simple. This is also our issue. We don’t get to say that while we’re improving things … in the States that we’re going to outsource human rights abuses.”
Sofi Thanhauser is the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books on January 25, 2022. She teaches in the writing department at Pratt Institute.
September 7 was Brazil’s Independence Day, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro used the occasion to continue his assault on the country’s democratic institutions.
Bolsonaro had called on his hardcore supporters to rally, as he battles Congress and the judiciary over their refusal to go along with his attempts to rewrite electoral rules ahead of the 2022 election and over probes into him and his allies that could imperil them criminally.
He addressed crowds in Brasilia and São Paulo, using the platform to attack and threaten the supreme court. “Either the leader of this branch of power gets this minister under control, or this branch will suffer what none of us want,” Bolsonaro said. He said he would not follow the decisions of certain justices, including one who will be in charge of the electoral tribunal during the 2022 elections.
Though an estimated 100,000 Bolsonaro backers gathered in the capital, Brasilia, as well as in São Paulo, according to Brazilian media outlets, the marches did not erupt in mass violence and chaos. Ahead of September 7, some feared a repeat of something like the January 6 insurrection in the United States.
That didn’t happen, despite worries that pro-Bolsonaro demonstrators might try to storm the Supreme Court. Though police and protesters clashed, attempts to push past police barriers largely failed.
But the threat to Brazil’s institutions has not lapsed, not from Bolsonaro nor from those who unquestionably back him.
That danger comes from Bolsonaro’s political weakness. A large swath of the public is angry over his mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 580,000 people, one of the worst death rates in the world. That, along with Brazil’s still-sluggish economy and the myriad scandals following Bolsonaro, has tanked his popularity; his approval rating has hit an all-time low of around 23 percent. Right now he’s losing — badly — in most recent presidential polls, with some suggesting the incumbent might even fail to advance to a runoff.
Bolsonaro is seeing his political, and maybe personal, downfall in real time. Faced with these crises of his own making, he is creating another one against Brazil’s democracy, in a desperate attempt to hold power and protect himself.
“We cannot accept a voting system that does not offer any security in the elections,” Bolsonaro said in São Paulo on Tuesday, according to Reuters. “I can’t participate in a farce like the one sponsored by the head of the electoral court.”
Bolsonaro’s rhetoric isn’t new — from him or, you know, other people. But just because the playbook isn’t original does not make it less of a menace.
“They are fine with going with these democratic processes, provided that they are the winners,” Paulo Barrozo, an associate law professor at Boston College, said of leaders in the mold of Bolsonaro and former US President Donald Trump. “The moment that there is any indication that they’re not going to win, then they are no longer committed to electoral democracy.”
“The playbook is the same, the motivation is the same,” Barrozo continued. “And it remains to be seen how much traction [Bolsonaro] is going to get in the larger Brazil society.”
The September 7 marches were a culmination of Bolsonaro’s attempts to discredit democracy
Bolsonaro’s campaign to discredit Brazilian democracy began way, way before September 7. He decried possible voter fraud even after his first victory in 2018, and his efforts have intensified once in the presidency and as his electoral prospects have worsened.
For months, Bolsonaro has been trying to sow doubt in the electoral system and frame the institutions defending those norms as corrupt actors out to get him. It may sound familiar.
He has repeatedly attacked Brazil’s electronic voting system — a kind of mirror image of Trump’s attacks on vote-by-mail and the like during the 2020 election. He is insisting that Brazilian voters must use paper ballots in the 2022 election, otherwise the results can’t be trusted. (Brazil’s electronic voting system was created to reduce fraud and corruption and to manage the logistics of a complex voting system, and has been in use since the country’s 2002 election.) “I’ll hand over the presidential sash to whoever wins the election cleanly,” the far-right Bolsonaro said in July. “Not with fraud.”
Bolsonaro pushed Congress to change the rules, and on the day Congress debated the voting proposal, he presided over a military parade in Brasilia. Still, Congress declined to pass a law requiring paper ballots; Bolsonaro attacked some of those lawmakers as having been “blackmailed.”
Bolsonaro has also directed his ire toward the judiciary, both the supreme court and what’s known as the Superior Electoral Court, which oversees and administers the country’s elections.
Some current and former supreme court justices have directly criticized Bolsonaro’s anti-democratic rhetoric and defended the integrity of Brazil’s elections. Ultimately the Supreme Court opened an investigation into Bolsonaro’s efforts to spread voting misinformation and threatening Brazil’s democracy.
The supreme court has also opened a bunch of other investigations into Bolsonaro, along with those in his inner circle, including an ally arrested for allegedly spreading fake news. Bolsonaro is under investigation for posting a sealed document from an electoral investigation on social media, in an attempt to prove voter fraud. He’s under investigation for his mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, including a possible vaccine kickback scheme. He and his sons are also implicated in other corruption schemes, with potential criminal consequences.
All of these pressures are looking harder and harder for Bolsonaro to shake, and it’s happening against the shadow of Covid-19 and high unemployment and inflation. “The political scenario is worsening for him, so he’s trying to figure out some way to hold on to power to protect himself,” Sean T. Mitchell, an associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, told me last month.
The September 7 marches fit with Bolsonaro’s attempts to hold power. The question now is whether the demonstrations were enough to embolden him to launch even more aggressive attacks on the country’s institutions.
Brazil’s September 7 rallies were not January 6. But they are still ominous for Brazilian democracy.
In Brasilia and in São Paulo, Bolsonaro’s supporters draped themselves in the Brazilian flag, or wore its green and yellow colors.
It wasn’t record turnout, but it also wasn’t a total flop. Bolsonaro’s loyalist base showed up, and they are motivated. (There were also some anti-Bolsonaro counterprotests in cities Tuesday, though opposition leaders largely urged their supporters to gather on September 12 instead to avoid potential clashes.) The marches also showed that they are buying into Bolsonaro’s attacks on Brazil’s democracy. They carried pro-Bolsonaro signs, a number in English. Some blasted the Supreme Court. Some called for a military takeover.
It was a show of President Bolsonaro’s die-hard supporters, which was the goal. Bolsonaro is losing popular support, and the calls for his impeachment have intensified. But so far, the public outrage hasn’t fully translated into political consequences; Bolsonaro still has allies in Congress, whom he’s managed to keep by making deals, not out of any ideological loyalty (Bolsonaro actually doesn’t have a political party right now). But Bolsonaro doesn’t want those ties fracturing.
“He’s trying to give a demonstration that will somehow overwhelm his 20 percent approval numbers, show that he has support where it’s really needed — he can bring people out to the streets,” said Amy Erica Smith, an associate professor of political science at Iowa State University. “He’s trying to rally support to himself by showing that he already has support.”
The September 7 marches were also a test for how far Bolsonaro and his backers might take their threats against democracy, and how law enforcement might respond.
Bolsonaro escalated his rhetoric against the supreme court and other institutions — walking up to the coup line, perhaps, but not quite crossing it. There was his threat that if the judiciary continued to act as it had been, it “will suffer what none of us want.” He also declared that he would no longer follow rulings made by one of the supreme court justices, Alexandre de Moraes, who initiated some of the investigations against him.
“I want to tell those who want to make me unelectable in Brazil: Only God removes me from there,” Bolsonaro said in São Paulo, according to the Associated Press.
“There are three options for me: be jailed, killed or victorious. I’m letting the scoundrels know: I’ll never be imprisoned!”
Bolsonaro’s supporters spoke in all-or-nothing language. “Even if we need to pick up arms and die for Brazil then we’ll do that,” Luis Bonne, a 50-year-old civil servant and rally attendee, told the Guardian.
And though the fears that September 7 might become a preemptive “stop the steal” didn’t materialize, experts said the danger hasn’t passed. Instead, it seems clear from Bolsonaro’s language that there is no scenario where he will let the election play out and not challenge the results, or willingly leave.
Where the military stands on this adds to the precariousness of the situation. Bolsonaro does have support among lower ranks and military police, and elected leaders feared that many would turn out for the September 7 marches.
But whether high-ranking generals would go along with a Bolsonaro power grab or break with him is not at all clear. Experts said it’s unlikely he has enough of their support to launch a full-scale coup, but unlikely is not exactly a comfort when it comes to a military takeover. “Nobody can say this with 100 percent certainty among many observers who are watching this,” Smith told me last month. “And the fact that people can’t say this with 100 percent certainty is a source of power for [Bolsonaro].”
Brazil’s institutions have, so far, reacted to Bolsonaro, in some cases quite strongly. “There are very good signs of that working,” Barrozo said. “But again, it’s too close to a fatal accident that it could derail things.”
September 7 showed that Bolsonaro is testing Brazil’s democratic institutions. The question is how far those institutions can push back on him — and how much of his onslaught they can withstand.
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Covid-19 testing in the US improved dramatically over the first half of 2020, but things now appear to be breaking down once more as coronavirus cases rise and outstrip capacity — to the point that the mayor of a major American city can’t get testing quickly enough to potentially avoid spreading the virus.
“We FINALLY received our test results taken 8 days before,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms tweeted on July 8. “One person in my house was positive then. By the time we tested again, 1 week later, 3 of us had COVID. If we had known sooner, we would have immediately quarantined. Perhaps the National Guard can help with testing too.”
Anecdotally, I’ve heard of similar delays across the country — people waiting days or even weeks for their Covid-19 test results after standing in lines for hours to get tested. Labs have warned about problems: Quest Diagnostics, one of the biggest lab companies in the US, said wait times for test results are now averaging between four and six days for most people.
“Basically, two things are happening,” Ashish Jha, faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI), told me. “One is the outbreaks are getting much bigger, so the amount of testing we need to get our arms around the outbreak is going up. And second, what we did [before] was some tweaking on capacity issues to get ourselves up to 500,000 to 600,000 tests a day, but didn’t fundamentally address the supply chain problems.”
He added, “This was supposed to be the job of the White House. … But they just never have prioritized really building up a robust testing infrastructure for the country.”
The problems have become more localized than in previous months. New York and Connecticut’s testing capacity seems to be holding up pretty well, largely because their Covid-19 outbreaks seem to be under control for now. States where epidemics are raging, such as Arizona, Florida, and Texas, are where testing problems seem to be spiraling.
As Bottoms’s story conveys, this is a big problem for getting the coronavirus outbreak under control: Testing is crucial for controlling disease outbreaks because they let officials and individuals see when further action, such as isolation and contact tracing, is necessary. But if testing is slow or insufficient, it can’t show people they’re infected and need to take action until it’s likely too late. That’s especially true with Covid-19 because people can have the virus and spread it without showing any symptoms.
“This is the same story we heard in the earlier days of the outbreak,” Jennifer Kates, vice president and director of the Global Health and HIV Policy Program at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “But it’s much worse because everyone felt like the US was a little caught off guard at the beginning. … What we’re learning now is that none of the things that should’ve happened in the interim [during lockdowns] happened.”
So as America faces a surge of new coronavirus cases, the testing delays threaten to make the pandemic even worse.
America improved its testing capacity — to a point
America made huge improvements in Covid-19 testing capacity over the past few months, largely due to local, state, and private action as President Donald Trump’s administration delegated the issue downward and said the federal government would act merely as a “supplier of last resort.”
Nonetheless, the improvements were substantive and real. The US went from testing hundreds of people a day (at most) in late February and early March to consistently hitting 500,000 to 700,000 tests a day in June and now July.
The benchmark of 500,000 tests per day was particularly important, as it was the minimum experts had long called for in order to get the pandemic in the US under control.
But as the country neared that benchmark, attention to testing seemed to plummet. The Trump administration, which had already delegated testing down to lower levels of government and private actors, especially appeared to lose interest: The country’s “testing czar,” Brett Giroir, stood down and went back to his regular job at the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump falsely claimed in May that “America leads the world in testing”; at his Tulsa rally in June, he said he told his people to “slow the testing down” because the rising case count made him look bad. (He later asserted that his statement at the rally was not a joke, despite White House officials insisting it was.)
As all this happened, many of the underlying problems with testing capacity remained.
For one, there’s still a lot of variation between states. While most states, as of July 8, had 150 new tests per 100,000 people per day — the equivalent to 500,000 daily tests nationwide — 18 states still didn’t.
The state-by-state situation looks worse through another metric: the test positive rate, or the percentage of tests that come back positive. If a place tests widely enough, allowing it to catch even the people who show few symptoms but could still spread the virus, it should have a low positive rate — typically below 5 percent, though some experts now argue for less than 3 percent. A high positive rate indicates only people with obvious symptoms are getting tested, so there’s not quite enough testing to measure the scope of an outbreak.
As of July 8, most states in the US had a positive rate above 5 percent, suggesting their testing capacity isn’t keeping up with the scale of their outbreaks.
The consequence is delays in testing results as the demand for tests outmatches the supply. So people can’t get their test results quickly enough to act on a positive report, preventing tests from achieving the exact goal they’re supposed to accomplish.
Testing was always supposed to scale with larger outbreaks
The diversion between many states hitting 150 daily tests per 100,000 people and still having positive rates that are too high exposes another problem: The call for 500,000 tests a day nationwide was supposed to be only the minimum. Experts always warned that if the Covid-19 outbreak got much worse, there would likely need to be even more testing to keep up with the rise in new potential patients and cases.
“There’s the testing capacity you need to get to the place of opening up, then there’s the testing capacity you need to be open,” the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Kates said. “Once economies start to open again, people start moving and returning to the public sphere, and there are outbreaks. If there’s not enough testing, and testing hasn’t been built along with contact tracing, you’re going to have this explosion that we’re seeing, and the testing is not going to catch up with it.”
Jha, from the HGHI — which was one of the more vocal advocates for the threshold of 500,000 tests — said he worries something got lost in his communications to journalists and government officials.
At the same time, Jha and the other experts I spoke to were always clear, at least to me, that the 500,000 benchmark was a minimum. In fact, even before the current testing problems, Jha and the HGHI said the number was likely too low to keep up with the US epidemic and called instead for a minimum of 1 million daily tests.
“We were the ones who generated the 500,000-a-day number. We did it based on a particular size of the outbreak,” Jha said. “Clearly, things have gotten much worse since then.” He added, “We’re learning. We’re trying to figure out how to control the virus and where the country should go. And obviously in that we’re going to be updating data as it goes along.”
With the positive rate, it’s a similar story. Thomas Tsai, a health policy expert at Harvard, said the real goal for the positive rate is 0 percent — when the coronavirus is vanquished. So it’s important for states not to get complacent just because they’re now below an “acceptable” maximum of 3 percent or 5 percent. “The tests are a mean to an end,” Tsai said. The metrics “are just signposts along the way to give you directions.”
But as Covid-19 cases dropped and plateaued for the greater part of May and early June, much of the public and officials may have become complacent with the testing situation. They set their attention to other issues, such as the rise of new Black Lives Matter protests. Trump and the rest of the White House stopped focusing on the topic, halting daily press briefings about Covid-19, perhaps as officials realized that the president’s botched response to the crisis had made him look much worse. Meanwhile, there was a push, from Trump in particular, for states to reopen as quickly as possible to boost the economy.
Now it’s clear that problems with Covid-19 testing remain.
Earlier on, the hurdles with testing were linked to supply chain problems: not enough swabs to collect samples, vials to store them, or reagents and kits to run the tests. Over time, those problems were fixed or worked around.
The issue, experts say, is that these kinds of problems were always bound to come back as testing demand increased. Fixing a bottleneck for kits may let the country get to 500,000 tests a day, but that bottleneck can easily come back if, for instance, the nation needs 1 million per day and there are only enough kits for 700,000.
Jha pointed to basic economic concerns as a key problem. “If we decided to tomorrow, do we have the technological capacity to be able to get many millions of tests a day? Absolutely,” he said. But labs aren’t sure that making the massive investment for way more tests is financially sustainable, he explained, especially as Covid-19 outbreaks ebb and flow — and, as a result, occasionally deplete demand for those tests, as well as the number of people who need them.
Ideally, the federal government would be in charge of handling these problems. It’s the one entity that can go to labs across the country, see what the holdups are, then work along the global supply chain to see what can be done to address the issues. It has the funding ability to ensure labs and suppliers remain whole. And it can prioritize limited resources to specific cities, counties, or states that need them most, instead of leaving these supplies to a free-for-all.
This is, in fact, what the federal government does with other issues — such as when it ensures that a manufacturer has all the parts needed for an order of guns, tanks, or jets.
“The military has visibility into the entire supply chain, and the military oversees the entire supply chain,” Jha said. “It may be working with private companies, but the [Department of Defense] doesn’t leave this all up to chance.”
The Trump administration, however, has described the federal government as a “supplier of last resort.” That’s very different from the kind of proactive approach the feds take on other issues to get ahead of supply constraints.
So the problem is left to private actors as well as local and state governments, which often face legal, financial, and practical constraints that hinder their ability to move quickly. And the problem persists, even as Covid-19 cases continue to rise.
Testing always mattered and still matters
It’s been said a countless number of times in recent months, but it’s still true: Testing is key to stopping the Covid-19 pandemic.
When paired with contact tracing, testing lets officials track the scale of an outbreak, isolate the sick, quarantine those with whom the sick came in contact, and deploy community-wide efforts as necessary. Aggressive testing and tracing are how other countries, such as South Korea and Germany, got their outbreaks under control, letting them partly reopen their economies.
This testing problem is solvable in the US. “New York at its peak had people dying in the hallways of hospitals. Test positive rates were routinely above 20 percent,” Tsai said. “Look at it now, with a test positive rate of about 1 percent. In Massachusetts, our positive rate is about 2 percent now. These states show that concerted efforts … can not just mitigate the pandemic, not just flatten the curve, but also contain and suppress the pandemic.”
This only works, however, if officials can move quickly on a test, preferably within 24 to 36 hours. In the time it takes to confirm whether someone either has Covid-19 or came into contact with someone who has it, the person is more likely to continue their typical routine, potentially infecting others in the public or even within their own homes. In this context, every day and hour matters to get people to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Testing and tracing can’t solve the pandemic all on their own. They have to be paired with precautions such as wearing masks and keeping 6 feet apart in public. In extreme cases, lockdowns can still be warranted if an outbreak is so out of control that a stay-at-home order becomes the only way to reel things back.
Lockdowns, however, were also supposed to buy the nation time to build up its testing system. As Natalie Dean, a biostatistics professor at the University of Florida, previously told me, “The whole point of this social distancing is to buy us time to build up capacity to do the types of public health interventions we know work. If we’re not using this time to scale up testing to the level that we need it to be … we don’t have an exit strategy. And then when we lift things, we’re no better equipped than we were before.”
It’s now clear that the US didn’t take full advantage of the time it bought with lockdowns. While testing did dramatically improve compared to the early days of the pandemic, it’s still not at a point where America can handle the higher demand brought on by another surge in coronavirus cases.
“It’s pathetic. This is not how a first-world country functions,” Jha said. “That people should not expect to access a test to an infectious disease many, many months into a pandemic — I find myself amazed that this is where we are as a country.”
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Covid-19 is upending our lives and forcing us to make complex decisions with little information and conflicting guidance from authorities. Summer, typically the season of staying up late and popsicles in the park, offers no escape. Many of us are already turning to the fall, and the fate of schools.
What will we do with our kids? Can we really send them back to school? If we keep them at home, will they forget how to read? If we send them to school, what might be the consequence? We are living a nightmare, but this is where we are. The choices are high-stakes and plagued by uncertainty. Even thinking about them makes me sweat.
I am the father of three girls ages 16, 13, and 10, and like every parent in America, I am worried about the fall.
I’m also an infectious disease doctor and epidemiologist, and have spent the past four months drinking from the fire hose of Covid-19 science, designing infection control policies for my hospital, and caring for patients on the front line. I serve on the reopening committee for my synagogue and for my school district. I consult for businesses as they reopen.
I have a first-row seat to the coronavirus pandemic, both as a parent and as a professional. In both of those roles, I hear the same questions, repeated with mounting urgency: “Are our kids going to be safe?” “Are our teachers going to be safe?” “Will kids bring Covid-19 home to our family?” “Will opening schools lead to a second wave and lockdown?” “What are the risks of not reopening?”
I have spent time reviewing the data and seeking answers to the challenging questions we face. Having the knowledge to make your own assessment, however, need not be a position of professional privilege. With this short primer, I hope you can add your voice to the debate and advocate for yourself, your family, and your community. The good news is, we can hope to send kids back to school in the fall, but there is a lot of work to do.
Are our kids going to be safe?
If any of us is ever going to send our kids to school again, we need a clear answer. Fortunately, I think we have one, at least for the children. Children are less likely than adults to be infected with Covid-19. There are multiple ways to study this question, and all the approaches arrive at this same conclusion.
First, when we look at public health reporting, children under the age of 18 make up only 2 percent of cases in the US, even though they represent 22 percent of the total population. Similar studies in Chicago and Massachusetts found that children make up fewer Covid-19 cases than expected, as have studies in Italy, South Korea, and Iceland. For me, that is a lot of similar results for this to be a fluke. When one study in one location produces a finding, it is notable. When five studies from five different settings find the same thing, it is compelling.
One reason case counts may be lower among kids than would be expected is that we did close our schools in March. Maybe we protected our kids by keeping them out of harm’s way. But if we send them back to school this fall, will they still enjoy protected status from the coronavirus?
One way to study this question is to estimate the “attack rate” of the disease — that is, the proportion of people exposed who become infected. Multiple studies from China investigated the attack rate among people living in a house with someone who is infected. They found that only about 4 to 5 percent of kids developed an active infection. In comparison, about 17 to 20 percent of adults became infected after exposure.
To be fair, data in the US is more concerning. In New York state, 57 percent of people living with a Covid-infected person developed an infection. It is hard to take reassurance from that fact. But even with such a high attack rate, children were still less likely to develop an infection and there was a gradient over ages, a sort of “dose effect” for age.
Finally, even in the worst-case scenario, in which a child does contract Covid-19, the outcomes of the disease are less severe in younger people than among older adults. In one analysis of more than 550 confirmed cases among children under age 18 in China, Italy, and Spain, only nine people (1.6 percent) had severe or critical disease. In another study, approximately 5 percent (one out of 20) developed symptoms that required hospitalization, but only 0.6 percent required intensive care. In comparison, a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report indicates that among those ages 60 to 69 who have the coronavirus, 22 percent require hospitalization and 4 percent require intensive care.
Are teachers going to be safe?
There is far less data specifically on teachers and staff than on kids. One study in France is reassuring. In that investigation of 541 students and 46 teachers, there were no documented transmission events from students to teachers. However, while many of us immediately think of the risk to teachers from exposure in the classroom, we may not consider the additional risk that teachers face in break rooms and staff meetings.
Working in the hospital, I have personally seen that staff have a difficult time maintaining personal protection at all times. Doctors and nurses tend to let down their guard when they are away from patients and during breaks. Masks come down, people eat snacks in potentially unsafe spaces, and social distancing lessens.
The same will likely be true in schools. The potential risk to teachers, therefore, goes beyond the classroom. Staff risk in schools likely looks similar to the risk of any adult working in a crowded indoor environment during the pandemic. School opening plans must consider teacher safety in addition to the well-being of students.
Will my kids bring Covid-19 home to our family?
For most parents, the next question after the safety of their kids will be their own safety and that of loved ones in the house. Even if the kids are all right, could they bring the coronavirus home?
Here, again, the data appears reassuring. One large review of over 700 scientific publications found that children accounted for only a small fraction of Covid-19 cases, and that they were rarely the first case in a cluster of infections in a household. For example, in China, only 5 percent of household clusters were found to have a child as the index case. Similarly, in Switzerland and Holland, children accounted for only 8 percent of household transmission clusters.
Unfortunately, the US numbers make me a little less certain. In a Chicago study of 15 households with available data, 73 percent of infected children contracted the virus from an adult. However, that means that 27 percent of infections were child-to-child, which is substantially more than 5 to 8 percent.
Still, the Chicago study only examined 15 households, and adult-to-child transmission remained far more common than child-to-child or child-to-adult.
Will someone in America contract Covid-19 from their sick child? Yes. Should I structure my life around such a rare occurrence? I do not think so.
Will opening schools lead to a second wave and more lockdowns?
We have reached the most challenging question to answer and one that is a holy grail for Covid-19 epidemiologists. I want to give you the plain answer here — we do not know.
An objective summary of the evidence in hand suggests that schools will play little role in sustaining the pandemic. A recent review of 210 transmission clusters around the world found that only eight of them (3.8 percent) involved school transmission. Case studies of outbreak investigations in Ireland, France, and Australia demonstrate almost zero cases of in-school transmission.
Modeling studies demonstrate no clear role of in-school transmission in explaining current Covid-19 epidemiology. All of this data tells us that despite our gut instincts and parental anxiety, schools will likely be okay this fall.
But the story does not end there. First, there are examples of in-school outbreaks that did force a second shutdown. Israel is an example.
Israel reopened schools with limited class sizes in early May and lifted class size restrictions on May 17. By June 3, they had to reclose after a major outbreak. The largest outbreak was 116 students and 14 teachers at one school. Per NPR, one child tested positive without symptoms and the school decided to quarantine the grade. Next, a child in a different grade tested positive and they closed the school.
At that time, they discovered that they already had more than 100 cases. It is not certain that all of those children were infected in the school, but the story is concerning and it raises the bar on monitoring our schools.
The data that’s available is mixed. If a person (or school district) wants to tell you that schools play little role in transmission, then ask them how their district is different from Israel’s. Why can an outbreak happen in that setting but not yours? Perhaps there is a reason, but until someone can give you a good one, be skeptical.
What are the risks of not reopening?
A discussion of school closures that focuses only on Covid-19 and not at all on education is incomplete. There are real risks to keeping our children at home. In fact, the risks of staying home are in many ways clearer than the risks of returning to school.
One study using statistical models projects major losses in math performance if we continue with remote learning until 2021. Perhaps more compelling than statistics, however, is some simple common sense.
On any given day, it is hard to point to the loss of learning from home. At the same time, we all agree that education is essential. If we keep our kids home for another school year, they will have missed 12 percent of their total education. I cannot identify the specific losses from that much absence, but I am confident there is a cost to missing that much school. For perspective, missing 12 percent of school time is the same as missing 22 days of school in a single year.
Further, the losses will not be equal. The “Covid-19 slide” will likely be greatest among the socially vulnerable, such as children with learning disabilities and those whose situation at home is not conducive to homeschooling.
We must also acknowledge that the losses will hit people of color much harder than those who are white. Further, school officials account for approximately 20 percent of formal reports of child abuse and domestic violence. Without school-based counselors and social workers, these concerns may not be investigated.
All of these harms weighed on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidance that school reopening plans start with the goal of having students be physically present in schools.
What should we do?
A great mentor of mine, Milton Weinstein at Harvard, is generally credited as being the person who introduced the field of medicine to the concept of rigorous decision-science. The central question to all decision-science is: “What should we do, given that we have imperfect information?”
Milt is fond of the expression “a decision has to be made.” His wisdom has never been more pertinent than it is today. We have to make a decision. There is no choice to do nothing, because either way — go to school or learn remotely — we are making a decision.
Unfortunately for all of us, we are making a decision with significant uncertainty about all the risks involved. Fortunately, this is not the first time that people have been forced to make decisions with uncertainty. There are approaches to making uncertain decisions in a way that maximizes the chances of a good outcome and minimizes the harm if the outcome is poor.
You’ve likely heard of one of them: hedging your bets. When multibillion-dollar investment funds make a choice to invest, they recognize that they could be wrong. They do not make all-in versus out decisions. Instead, they hedge their bets. They may think that the newest beach toy is destined for greatness, but just in case of a rainy summer, they also invest in umbrellas.
When I look across all the data, I see an uncertain decision. First, I propose that the balance of data we have now suggests that we need to try to open schools in the fall. The risks of reopening are uncertain; the harm of staying home is clear.
If your school district cites the data above to you that “schools are safe,” ask your school board: What is the plan beyond reopening? What if we are wrong? How will your district know that things are going well (or not well)? Don’t let the conversation stop at “data suggests that schools are safe.” Don’t let the plan stop with “symptomatic people should call their doctor.”
If we are going to open safely in the fall, we must have the capacity to know — quickly — when an outbreak occurs. Israel is an important cautionary tale. When Israel closed down its schools again, it had only identified two school-based cases, yet in the end it discovered that more than 100 students had been infected.
To do this well, and to do it safely, we must have school-based Covid-19 symptom screening, testing, contact tracing, and isolation. “School-based testing” does not mean that the test themselves must occur in school buildings. “School-based testing” means that students and teachers can easily access a test by contacting the school, and that the results of those tests are sent directly to the school district in real time.
That seems straightforward, but it is not. The community does not yet have adequate testing, contact tracing, or isolation. Schools currently have nothing.
It requires building new capacity in schools for testing and contact tracing. It requires a budget. It requires a formal plan. Ideally, that budget should come from the federal government and be directed to states and ultimately school districts, as part of a national Covid-19 testing strategy. Realistically, given the lack of any such national plan, the funds need to come from individual states.
Building such infrastructure comes at a cost and many districts are already facing budget shortfalls. Districts that rely only on their existing testing infrastructure will not have the real-time information they need to make good decisions. Imagine a child has a fever and cough in October and is told by the school to call the doctor for a Covid-19 test. Results are typically returned in two days to the doctor’s office. After another day (or two), the data might make it to the school district. So it will take at least four to five days for the district to have any information.
We need testing within the school system to shorten the delay at every step of the process and reduce the turnaround time for the test to only a day. With that kind of time resolution, we can increase awareness of the situation at our schools, along with the ability to react appropriately. Without it, we are flying blind and gambling with the health of our children, teachers, and community.
Ultimately, when I look at the decision about school as both a father and a scientist, I see a difficult decision that must be made despite uncertainty. The risks of opening are uncertain, but the benefits are clear. We need to try to reopen.
We have been wrong before about Covid-19. In March, the epidemiology world was quite confident that transmission could not occur before a person develops symptoms. Three months later, there is consensus that asymptomatic people were likely one of the main drivers of the pandemic. In March, the CDC and the US surgeon general told the public that masks play no role in controlling the spread of the disease. Now we see masks as a central component of our reopening strategies.
We could be wrong about schools, but we cannot afford to wait to find out for certain. We need school-based Covid-19 symptom screening, testing, contact tracing, and isolation. Opening without a plan to test is irresponsible and a gamble with our children’s health.
Benjamin P. Linas is an associate professor of epidemiology and an infectious disease physician at Boston University School of Medicine. Find him on Twitter @BenjaminLinas.
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In late March, when Covid-19 was first surging, Jake Suett, a doctor of anesthesiology and intensive care medicine with the National Health Service in Norfolk, England, had seen plenty of patients with the disease — and intubated a few of them.
Then one day, he started to feel unwell, tired, with a sore throat. He pushed through it, continuing to work for five days until he developed a dry cough and fever. “Eventually, I got to the point where I was gasping for air literally doing nothing, lying on my bed.”
At the hospital, his chest X-rays and oxygen levels were normal — except he was gasping for air. After he was sent home, he continued to experience trouble breathing and developed severe cardiac-type chest pain.
Because of a shortage of Covid-19 tests, Suett wasn’t immediately tested; when he was able to get a test, 24 days after he got sick, it came back negative. PCR tests, which are most commonly used, can only detect acute infections, and because of testing shortages, not everyone has been able to get a test when they need one.
It’s now been 14 weeks since Suett’s presumed infection and he still has symptoms, including trouble concentrating, known as brain fog. (One recent study in Spain found that a majority of 841 hospitalized Covid-19 patients had neurological symptoms, including headaches and seizures.) “I don’t know what my future holds anymore,” Suett says.
Some doctors have dismissed some of his ongoing symptoms. One doctor suggested his intense breathing difficulties might be related to anxiety. “I found that really surprising,” Suett says. “As a doctor, I wanted to tell people, ‘Maybe we’re missing something here.’” He’s concerned not just for himself, but that many Covid-19 survivors with long-term symptoms aren’t being acknowledged or treated.
Suett says that even if the proportion of people who don’t eventually fully recover is small, there’s still a significant population who will need long-term care — and they’re having trouble getting it. “It’s a huge, unreported problem, and it’s crazy no one is shouting this from rooftops.”
In the US, a number of specialized centers are popping up at hospitals to help treat — and study — ongoing Covid-19 symptoms. The most successful draw on existing post-ICU protocols and a wide range of experts, from pulmonologists to psychiatrists. Yet even as care improves, patients are also running into familiar challenges in finding treatment: accessing and being able to pay for it.
What’s causing these long-term symptoms?
Scientists are still learning about the many ways the virus that causes Covid-19 impacts the body — both during initial infection and as symptoms persist.
One of the researchers studying them is Michael Peluso, a clinical fellow in infectious diseases at the University of California San Francisco, who is currently enrolling Covid-19 patients in San Francisco in a two-year study to study the disease’s long-term effects. The goal is to better understand what symptoms people are developing, how long they last, and eventually, the mechanisms that cause them. This could help scientists answer questions like how antibodies and immune cells called T-cells respond to the virus, and how different individuals might have different immune responses, leading to longer or shorter recovery times.
At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, “the assumption was that people would get better, and then it was over,” Peluso says. “But we know from lots of other viral infections that there is almost always a subset of people who experience longer-term consequences.” He explains these can be due to damage to the body during the initial illness, the result of lingering viral infection, or because of complex immunological responses that occur after the initial disease.
“People sick enough to be hospitalized are likely to experience prolonged recovery, but with Covid-19, we’re seeing tremendous variability,” he says. It’s not necessarily just the sickest patients who experience long-term symptoms, but often people who weren’t even initially hospitalized.
That’s why long-term studies of large numbers of Covid-19 patients are so important, Peluso says. Once researchers can find what might be causing long-term symptoms, they can start targeting treatments to help people feel better. “I hope that a few months from now, we’ll have a sense if there is a biological target for managing some of these long-term symptoms.”
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Lekshmi Santhosh, a physician lead and founder of the new post-Covid OPTIMAL Clinic at UCSF, says many of her patients are reporting the same kinds of problems. “The majority of patients have either persistent shortness of breath and/or fatigue for weeks to months,” she says.
Additionally, Timothy Henrich, a virologist and viral immunologist at UCSF who is also a principal investigator in the study, says that getting better at managing the initial illness may also help. “More effective acute treatments may also help reduce severity and duration of post-infectious symptoms.”
In the meantime, doctors can already help patients by treating some of their lingering symptoms. But the first step, Peluso explains, is not dismissing them. “It is important that patients know — and that doctors send the message — that they can help manage these symptoms, even if they are incompletely understood,” he says. “It sounds like many people may not be being told that.”
Long-term symptoms, long-term consequences
Even though we have a lot to learn about the specific damage Covid-19 can cause, doctors already know quite a bit about recovery from other viruses: namely, how complex and challenging a task long-term recovery from any serious infection can be for many patients.
Generally, it’s common for patients who have been hospitalized, intubated, or ventilated — as is common with severe Covid-19 — to have a long recovery. Being bed-bound can cause muscle weakness, known as deconditioning, which can result in prolonged shortness of breath. After a severe illness, many people also experience anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
A stay in the ICU not uncommonly leads to delirium, a serious mental disorder sometimes resulting in confused thinking, hallucinations, and reduced awareness of surroundings. But Covid-19 has created a “delirium factory,” says Santhosh at UCSF. This is because the illness has meant long hospital stays, interactions only with staff in full PPE, and the absence of family or other visitors.
Theodore Iwashyna, an ICU physician-scientist at the University of Michigan and VA Ann Arbor, is involved with the CAIRO Network, a group of 40 post-intensive care clinics on four continents. In general, after patients are discharged from ICUs, he says, “about half of people have some substantial new disability, and half will never get back to work. Maybe a third of people will have some degree of cognitive impairment. And a third have emotional problems.” And it’s common for them to have difficulty getting care for their ongoing symptoms after being discharged.
In working with Covid-19 patients, says Santhosh, she tells patients, “We believe you … and we are going to work on the mind and body together.”
Yet it’s currently impossible to predict who will have long-lasting symptoms from Covid-19. “People who are older and frailer with more comorbidities are more likely to have longer physical recovery. However, I’ve seen a lot of young people be really, really sick,” Santhosh says. “They will have a long tail of recovery too.”
Who can access care?
At the new OPTIMAL Clinic at UCSF, doctors are seeing patients who were hospitalized for Covid-19 at the UCSF health system, as well as taking referrals of other patients with persistent pulmonary symptoms. For ongoing cough and chest tightness, the clinic is providing inhalers, as well as pulmonary rehabilitation, including gradual aerobic exercise with oxygen monitoring. They’re also connecting patients with mental health resources.
“Normalizing those symptoms, as well as plugging people into mental health care, is really critical,” says Santhosh, who is also the physician lead and founder of the clinic. “I want people to know this is real. It’s not ‘in their heads.’”
Neeta Thakur, a pulmonary specialist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center who has been providing care for Covid-19 patients in the ICU, just opened a similar outpatient clinic for post-Covid care. Thakur has also arranged a multidisciplinary approach, including occupational and physical therapy, as well as expedited referrals to neurology colleagues for rehabilitation for the muscles and nerves that can often be compressed when patients are prone for long periods in the ICU. But she’s most concerned by the cognitive impairments she’s seeing, especially as she’s dealing with a lot of younger patients.
These California centers join new post-Covid-19 clinics in major cities across the country, including Mount Sinai in New York and National Jewish Health Hospital in Denver. As more and more hospitals begin to focus on post-Covid care, Iwashyna suggests patients try to seek treatment where they were hospitalized, if possible, because of the difficulty in transferring sufficient medical records.
Santosh recommends that patients with persistent symptoms call their closest hospital, or nearest academic medical center’s pulmonary division, and ask if they can participate in any clinical trials. Many of the new clinics are enrolling patients in studies to try to better understand the long-term consequences of the disease. Fortunately, treatment associated with research is often free, and sometimes also offers financial incentives to participants.
But otherwise, one of the biggest challenges in post-Covid-19 treatment is — like so much of American health care — being able to pay for it.
Outside of clinical trials, cost can be a barrier to treatment. It can be tricky to get insurance to cover long-term care, Iwashyna notes. After being discharged from an ICU, he says, “Recovery depends on [patients’] social support, and how broke they are afterward.” Many struggle to cover the costs of treatment. “Our patient population is all underinsured,” says Thakur, noting that her hospital works with patients to try to help cover costs.
Lasting health impacts can also affect a person’s ability to go back to work. In Iwashyna’s experience, many patients quickly run through their guaranteed 12 weeks of leave under the Family Medical and Leave Act, which isn’t required to be paid. Eve Leckie, a 39-year-old ICU nurse in New Hampshire, came down with Covid-19 on March 15. Since then, Leckie has experienced symptom relapses and still can’t even get a drink of water without help.
“I’m typing this to you from my bed, because I’m too short of breath today to get out,” they say. “This could disable me for the rest of my life, and I have no idea how much that would cost, or at what point I will lose my insurance, since it’s dependent on my employment, and I’m incapable of working.” Leckie was the sole wage earner for their five children, and was facing eviction when their partner “essentially rescued us,” allowing them to move in.
These long-term burdens are not being felt equally. At Thakur’s hospital in San Francisco, “The population [admitted] here is younger and Latinx, a disparity which reflects who gets exposed,” she says. She worries that during the pandemic, “social and structural determinants of health will just widen disparities across the board.” People of color have been disproportionately affected by the virus, in part because they are less likely to be able to work from home.
Black people are also more likely to be hospitalized if they get Covid-19, both because of higher rates of preexisting conditions — which are the result of structural inequality — and because of lack of access to health care.
“If you are more likely to be exposed because of your job, and likely to seek care later because of fear of cost, or needing to work, you’re more likely to have severe disease,” Thakur says. “As a result, you’re more likely to have long-term consequences. Depending on what that looks like, your ability to work and economic opportunities will be hindered. It’s a very striking example of how social determinants of health can really impact someone over their lifetime.”
If policies don’t support people with persistent symptoms in getting the care they need, ongoing Covid-19 challenges will deepen what’s already a clear crisis of inequality.
Iwashyna explains that a lot of extended treatment for Covid-19 patients is “going to be about interactions with health care systems that are not well-designed. The correctable problems often involve helping people navigate a horribly fragmented health care system.
“We can fix that, but we’re not going to fix that tomorrow. These patients need help now.”
Lois Parshley is a freelance investigative journalist and the 2019-2020 Snedden Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Follow her Covid-19 reporting on Twitter @loisparshley.
Nuclear power has long been a divisive issue in the environmental community. The enormous momentum of anti-nuclear sentiment from the ’70s and ’80s has clashed in recent years with a new wave of advocates who claim that deep decarbonization — eliminating the greenhouse gases that drive climate change — requires the assistance of nuclear power.
The embrace of nuclear in climate and progressive circles has been hampered by two factors. First, nuclear has traditionally been a huge and highly hierarchical industry, peddling enormous plants that cost billions of dollars and produce dangerous waste, with a history of special pleading and corruption — not the kind of industry progressives naturally lean toward.
Second, nuclear advocates have traditionally been, well, men. And not just any men, but the kind of men highly prone to mansplaining why they are rational and you are an over-emotional hysteric. (“Nuclear bros,” in the online argot.) There is a cohort of nuclear advocates who seem to have chosen the issue mainly as a pretext for bashing environmentalists. Insofar as they’ve attempted outreach to climate advocates, the nuclear bros have met limited success.
This has caused quite a bit of angst among the small but growing number of progressives who have turned to nuclear advocacy out of progressivism — out of a concern over climate change and its impacts on the most vulnerable.
Those activists see opportunities in the new generation of nuclear plants, which are smaller, cheaper, and safer than their predecessors, more congruent with the general movement toward distributed energy, microgrids, and community ownership.
But they have struggled to change the tenor of the conversation because they are scattered and lack institutional backing.
Now they are launching a group of their own: the Good Energy Collective, which will develop and advance progressive nuclear policy.
Four of the five board members are women, as are the co-founders: Suzy Hobbs Baker (currently creative director at University of Michigan’s Fastest Path to Zero initiative) and Jessica Lovering (currently a doctoral student in engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University).
I called Baker and Lovering on July 15 to chat about the new group, the values that distinguish it from other groups in the nuclear space, and the prospects for advanced nuclear plants to play a role in the climate fight.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
David Roberts
How did this organization come about?
Suzy Hobbs Baker
We saw a gap in the ecosystem — there was no place to do progressive nuclear policy. It just didn’t exist. And nobody was trying to build it.
David Roberts
What do you mean by progressive nuclear policy, as distinct from what other NGOs are doing?
Suzy Hobbs Baker
There are a bunch of policy shops in DC that do great nuclear work. Most of it has been focused on R&D. Under the auspices of innovation, there’s been a huge emphasis on a fundamentally technical issue: We have to figure out how to design and build reactors again.
Jessica Lovering
There are lots of moderates working on [nuclear], and lots of bipartisan efforts.
Suzy Hobbs Baker
Right. But just at the moment the climate movement was taking off, it became clear there wasn’t a progressive [nuclear] contingent, figuring out how to join forces with and work within the climate movement.
David Roberts
So you decided to make one.
Suzy Hobbs Baker
Yeah! We took stock: Who are the progressives in the nuclear sphere? Oh, there’s like five of us. So it wasn’t that hard to get everybody on the phone and ask, “Do you want to do this?”
David Roberts
Is there no progressive nuclear work going on in bigger environmental or climate groups?
Jessica Lovering
There’s nothing nuclear going on. Some of these orgs, they will acknowledge that nuclear needs to be part of the mix. There’s been some consensus around keeping existing plants open. And that’s great — that’s way different than it was five or 10 years ago. But no one’s really working on the policy.
You can see this in the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force recommendations on climate. They mentioned advanced nuclear, which is amazing, but it’s kind of like … “and also, advanced nuclear needs to be in there.”
There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to actually make that a reality. That’s what we want to focus on.
Suzy Hobbs Baker
It’s different from a lot of the larger orgs, who might have a “nuclear person” who tracks the issue. There aren’t places in the environmental space that have deep expertise on nuclear.
Jessica Lovering
Another thing that’s different — and really couches us in the progressive movement and not in the energy think tank space — is that we are focused on community-level engagement. We want to develop tools and processes to help communities figure out what they want for their low-carbon energy future.
And we want a process where they can decide they don’t want nuclear. That’s fine. We’re not going around trying to sell advanced nuclear. We want equitable processes that people feel are fair and transparent so they can make their own choices.
I think that fits much better with the environmental-justice agenda inside these climate platforms, more so than the R&D/technology side, which a lot of other think tanks are focusing on. R&D still needs a lot of work, and we’re going to be plugged into that, but our focus is going to be more on social science.
Suzy Hobbs Baker
While a lot of think tanks are thinking about deployment, we’re thinking about the other side of the equation, which is adoption. There are folks in DC and private companies trying to figure out how to get the technologies out, and simultaneously there are communities across the nation trying to figure out how to reach their climate goals. We want to transition to working with more focus on the communities.
David Roberts
The nuclear space is notoriously dominated by a certain kind of male voice — left-brained, not particularly emotionally intelligent — and it has often posed a communications challenge for the industry. It’s notable that you’re a female-led organization, but is that tone something you think consciously about changing?
Jessica Lovering
I gave a talk on this topic in November at the [International Atomic Energy Agency conference], about risk perception around nuclear. It’s a talk the nuclear industry asks for all the time: Why do people think nuclear is so risky? And how do we fix that with, I don’t know, better PR?
The talk I gave, which made a lot of people uncomfortable, was about a phenomenon called the white male effect. It’s not unique to nuclear. Across a whole bunch of risks — car crashes, alcoholism, all sorts of things — white males rate things as much less risky than everyone else, even males of color.
A lot of studies look into the drivers of this, but one thing that really struck us is an explanation that comes down to differences in worldview. White males tend to be more hierarchical and individualistic in their worldview, on average, whereas women and people of color tend to be a more communitarian and egalitarian.
One thing that is unique about nuclear, the way it’s been done in the past, the way the industry has been run, is that it has been very hierarchical, very top-down, very arguments-from-authority. And even fancy new nuclear technologies that are safer and cheaper don’t fundamentally change that aspect.
You can’t fix that with better communications. You can’t fix that with a slogan. You need to change how the industry runs.
Can you make nuclear appeal more to communitarians and egalitarians? I think you can, but it’s going to look very different. And that’s where we, who have strong progressive values, consider ourselves part of the left. We need to change the industry from the ground up.
So that comes back to your question about a women-led organization. There have been a lot of efforts in the past to find women who work in nuclear and prop them up as a spokesperson. “Okay, we have a woman talking about nuclear, this is going to change people’s minds.” It doesn’t, because it’s still the same industry and the same business model.
It’s because we have progressive ideals that it tends to be women leading this effort. We don’t just want policies that appeal more to women and progressives, we want to build up a younger generation of diverse leadership that allows people to live their values while working in nuclear, helping to build the case for nuclear in the broader climate change agenda — but really empower them, not just as props.
Suzy Hobbs Baker
It’s not an exaggeration to say that we had to build the organization we needed to move forward in our own careers. In order to move forward into leadership and have a healthy work environment, a new third space — we’re going to have to build it.
David Roberts
Where do you want to focus your policy work?
Suzy Hobbs Baker
We’ve seen this huge shift, with the growth of renewable energy sources in the last 15 years, of much more participatory decision-making in communities around the question of energy. We see where this is going. And a lot of the developers of these new [nuclear] technologies see where it’s going.
But it’s one thing to say we’re committed to a community-based approach, and a whole other thing to build the policy agenda and the infrastructure.
Jessica Lovering
There’s a big movement toward community ownership and community lead on energy projects, with distributed generation and microgrids, and there’s an assumption that nuclear can’t be a part of that because of the scale. But moving toward much smaller nuclear and factory-fabricated nuclear opens up those markets.
The industry just has no idea how to do that, how to approach small towns to see if they’re interested in nuclear. They’re used to dealing with big investor-owned utilities. So we need to develop those processes. How do you do have a community-ownership model or municipality model [for nuclear]? That’s really exciting to me.
David Roberts
Are these new plants ready?
Jessica Lovering
Almost.
Suzy Hobbs Baker
This year, the Department of Energy, mandated by Congress, stood up a new program called the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. They have the slightly bananas mandate to construct two [advanced nuclear] demonstrations in the next seven years, and then support a whole host of other demonstrations over the next five to 10 years. There are folks preparing sites for potential demonstration units.
This is a big piece of my research at Michigan: how we demonstrate best practices for community engagement at the demonstration phase with these new reactors so that it’s baked into the way that everybody’s doing business. We’ve been thinking a lot about the lack of institutions, the lack of training and professionals to help make this happen.
Jessica Lovering
It’s no longer paper reactors that’ll be ready in 20 years. Nuscale submitted their license application two years ago. [Editor’s note: Nuscale submitted its design certification application, which is short of a full license application.] Oklo submitted in December. Oklo is only 1.5 megawatts for the off-grid market, so they’re hoping to get licensed in two years. They can start planning their supply chains and their first build in the meantime. They could start construction in the early 2020s.
We need to get the rest of the supporting infrastructure ready to go before then — not on the construction/engineering side, but in terms of community engagement and everything that goes along with it.
David Roberts
Is there a short way to explain the different kinds of advanced nuclear?
Jessica Lovering
When we say advanced nuclear, there are two big categories.
There are small modular reactors, which are water-cooled like traditional nuclear but manufactured a more standardized way and much smaller. That’s a more gradual improvement.
The other big category is non-light-water reactors that don’t use water as a coolant. There are salt-cooled, called molten-salt reactors; there are gas-cooled, often referred to as high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (the gas is usually helium or CO2); and there are fast reactors, usually metal-cooled with sodium or lead. Those are less common, but there are some groups working on them. They can be really tiny.
David Roberts
Which are the ones that might actually be built soon?
Jessica Lovering
Nuscale is a small-modular light-water reactor of 50 megawatts, and Oklo is a micro-reactor, a sodium-cooled fast reactor — very different than what we operate today, and also very small. [Editor’s note: technically, Oklo’s “Aurora” mini-reactor is a fast reactor cooled by heat pipes, not sodium.] The whole power plant fits in about two shipping containers. It’s 1.5 megawatts, which is less than a standard wind turbine today.
David Roberts
Are the new designs meltdown-proof?
Jessica Lovering
Nuscale is water-cooled, more similar to traditional nuclear. It has a lot of passive safety features, but I wouldn’t say it’s meltdown-proof. For the other ones, the salt- or sodium-cooled plants, they really are meltdown-proof. You could never get temperatures hot enough to melt the fuels. And the fuels are much more heat resistant.
David Roberts
I’m sure communities also ask about the waste.
Jessica Lovering
The fuel and the waste are dependent on which reactor you’re looking at, but all of them use fuel more efficiently, so they make less waste.
With Oklo, the fuel stays in the reactor for up to 20 years. They don’t have a lot of material in there, you’re not doing a lot of refueling, and the waste isn’t handled on-site. The whole reactor is sent back to a central facility. It’s like getting a battery — you’re getting the reactor shipped to you with the fuel inside, and you send it back with the fuel inside. That’s nice for a lot of communities that don’t want to deal with handling or storing waste.
Some advanced nuclear designs also use recycled fuel. You can recycle or reprocess existing nuclear waste to turn it into fuel, which is great because it’s already available. France recycles all their fuel; they use all their fuel twice, whereas in the US, we use our fuel once.
Other than that, we still need to come up with a solution for what to do with spent nuclear fuel. France stores their waste in pods underground.
Suzy Hobbs Baker
Beautiful, super-high-tech facilities where they store high-level nuclear waste. You can go visit. They’re just these big canisters, and you put them in a big room. It’s a lot less scary than it seems.
Jessica Lovering
Another story of American exceptionalism is that we’ve just never gotten our shit together on nuclear waste. It’s not a technological issue, it’s a political issue.
Suzy Hobbs Baker
One of the policy areas we’re interested in revisiting is the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which has not succeeded in any way, at all. We’re going to have to come up with better policy solutions to help unstick these issues. You can’t ask a bunch of communities to stand up new reactors and have no solution for where waste is going. At this point, it’s not a winning proposition.
David Roberts
Where do we store the waste now?
Jessica Lovering
Right now, we just store it on the power plant sites, in dry casks. It’s fine. But the communities did not agree to be storing that waste there. That’s a big issue. They may have been okay with hosting a nuclear power plant, but the plan was always for the Department of Energy to take that waste and put it somewhere. It’s just sitting on these 67 sites around the country.
David Roberts
What are your hopes for progressive nuclear policy?
Suzy Hobbs Baker
It feels to us like the door is open for advanced nuclear to get on board with the climate movement and to grapple seriously with issues of social and environmental justice, because [nuclear has], second to fossil fuels, one of the worst histories with those issues. In contrast to the savior complex a lot of the sector has, I think we have an enormous amount to learn by joining forces with the broader climate movement.
Currently, there isn’t a deep knowledge of nuclear technology and nuclear issues among progressives. I think we can bring value to the space. We really do want to solve climate change and to do so in a way that supports communities. Ultimately, it’s a commitment to do the work.
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Many schools across the US gambled on offering in-person classes in early August, even as their states were still battling uncontrolled spread of Covid-19.
In some of those schools, it hasn’t gone well.
In Georgia’s Cherokee County School District, for example, there have been at least 80 positive cases since August 3, and more than 1,100 students, teachers, and staff have had to quarantine. At the high school in Paulding County School District, which came to national attention after photos of halls crowded with mostly maskless students went viral, several students and staff have tested positive, forcing the school to adopt a hybrid model of in-person and virtual learning. In Atlanta, one second-grader tested positive the day after classes started; the same week, a 7-year-old with no underlying conditions died from the virus.
Scientists have found clear evidence that children, especially those over 12, can and do transmit the virus, though the disease is generally more mild than in adults. This means school outbreaks can be a risk for students, teachers, and the wider community.
While many school districts that reopened are reporting infected students, these initial cases may not have originated in the classroom. “For most of these cases in Georgia, schools weren’t open long enough for the transmission to be coming from within the schools,” says Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and the director for the Center for Digital Health at Brown University, who researches pediatric mental health.
Nevertheless, infected students and staff arriving in the first week of school have already prompted shutdowns and quarantines around the country; in Mississippi, over half of counties have reported Covid-19 cases in teachers, staff, or students.
What’s remarkable is that health experts predicted that cases among young people would surge if schools reopened before community transmission was under control — yet many school districts went ahead anyway. “This is exactly what we’ve been warning about — when you have high levels of Covid in the community, you will have cases showing up in schools, just because people are catching it out in the community,” says Ranney.
And it’s not just kids, teachers, and parents who are then at risk — school outbreaks can fan wider outbreaks in communities. A recent superspreading event in Ohio, for example, found that children between ages 6 and 16 were part of the chain of transmission, passing the virus on to other children and adults.
The World Health Organization recommends that schools open only if fewer than five percent of those tested for the virus over a two-week period are positive. In the US, the cutoff for what is considered “safe” for reopening schools currently varies by state, but they all tend to look at similar factors: Oregon, for example, has said counties must have fewer than 10 cases per 100,000 people for three weeks before in-person classes resume. Arizona calls for less than 100 cases per 100,000, or a two-week decline in cases, as well as meeting other standards like hospital capacity.
For comparison, Georgia has had 189 cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days as of August 16. (You can check your own state’s rates at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention here.) In Georgia, many schools also reopened despite high positivity rates — the percentage of people being tested for Covid-19 who have a positive result. Georgia’s number of positive tests per 100,000 people were also well above the general threshold that public health experts recommend for in-person activities.
A recent study from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association found that 97,000 children in the US got Covid-19 in the last two weeks of July— representing a 40 percent increase, or almost one-third of the total number of pediatric cases since the pandemic began. It’s unclear whether this is an increase in actual infections or if more children, who are often asymptomatic, are now being tested as schools reopen.
Since testing overall is still inadequate to control the virus in the US, the CDC says the true incidence of Covid-19 in children is still unknown. But as Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC, recently tweeted, kids between 5 and 17 now have the highest positivity rate of all age groups. “Age groups aren’t an island,” he wrote. “Spread in any group is a risk to all.”
The US Department of Education is not publicly tracking Covid-19 cases in K-12 schools, numbers of students quarantined, deaths, or school closures. That led a Kansas teacher to create a crowdsourced Google spreadsheet using media reports to track positive cases of Covid-19 associated with schools in over 40 states. It shows that more than 2,000 students, faculty, administrators, and staff have tested positive for Covid-19 nationwide since early July, and that teachers have already died in Mississippi, Alabama, and California.
Public health experts at the University of Texas at Austin recently published a report analyzing the likelihood that students and teachers would arrive on the first day of school already infected. They found it largely depends on the size of the school and how prevalent Covid-19 is in that school’s community. Based on data from mid-July, their model suggests that in Texas, a school of 100 individuals in Denton County could expect one to two Covid-19 cases in the first week, while higher rates in Harris County likely make up four cases.
Hidalgo County, which currently has a 17 percent positive test rate, looks worse yet, with two to eight cases predicted. (Racial and economic disparities contribute to these differences; Hidalgo County is 90 percent Latinx and has seen a disproportionate number of Covid-19 cases.) These numbers are constantly changing, but they show that with high-enough levels of community transmission, you can pretty much guarantee that at least one person will go to school infected, potentially exposing others.
In other countries where data on school-linked outbreaks is more readily available, the impacts of reopening schools have been mixed. In Denmark, reopening schools for 2- to 12-year-olds didn’t make the country’s already minimal outbreak worse. But many precautions were taken to limit transmission.
Denmark reopened elementary schools with extensive safety measures in place, like staggered entry time. Students were placed in small groups to reduce interaction, and hotels and libraries were utilized as additional class space. Even so, the rate of infection increased after Danish schools reopened, although not enough to keep total cases from declining.
In Israel, new cases have skyrocketed since schools reopened two months ago, but the country also lifted other distancing measures at the same time, making it harder to tease apart the causes. There are many factors that can make reopening schools safer, like mask-wearing, social distancing, and regular testing, so it’s difficult to directly compare different countries’ school plans.
Still, there’s a definite trend: Countries like Vietnam and New Zealand, which have generally done a good job controlling spread, have successfully reopened schools. Others, with higher community transmission, like Chile, have struggled.
With a new disease, it’s important to look at the totality of the emerging body of research on different age groups, rather than individual study results. For example, a widely cited South Korean study initially reported in July found that adolescents might spread the virus more than adults; an update from the same researchers this week found that some of the teens’ purported transmission was likely due to families actually sharing outside exposure.
Overall, the sum of evidence — including independent studies from the US, Iceland, and Germany — finds older children may be as likely to spread the virus as adults when infected. A recent literature review found that “opening secondary/high schools is likely to contribute to the spread of SARS-CoV-2.” (The same review found that children under age 10 may be less susceptible to infection.)
Another review published in The Lancet highlights that adequate testing and contact tracing are essential to reopening schools. That’s not possible currently in many US states, which are still seeing positivity rates as high as 23 percent, along with extreme delays in test results.
Chethan Sathya, a pediatric surgeon and assistant professor of surgery at the Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New York, says that people seem to be missing the point that having an incomplete picture of how Covid-19 impacts kids is not license to send them back to school to find out. Ranney points out that some states, like New York and her home state of Rhode Island, currently have low test positivity, and so it may be safer to reopen schools in those areas. ”The only possible road to reopening schools is with low rates of community transmission,” she says.
“Emerging data suggests that it’s unsafe to send children and teachers into school buildings, even with safety protocols, if the prevalence of cases in the community is too high,” she says. If schools choose to reopen anyway, she adds, “it’s an ongoing experiment on children and staff.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Georgia had 2,236 cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days as of August 16. In fact, it has had 2.236 cumulative cases per 100,000 people and 189 cases per 100,000 in the last seven days.
Lois Parshley is a freelance investigative journalist. Follow her Covid-19 reporting on Twitter @loisparshley.
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Part of the Escape Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
Phil Nichols doesn’t get a lot of unannounced visitors at the long-term sober-living house in Cincinnati where he lives. The two US marshals waiting at the door on a March afternoon in 2018 told Nichols they had information for him. And questions. They wore plainclothes —and smiles — and assured Nichols that he wasn’t in trouble.
He invited them in.
It was all very cordial, very polite, very Midwestern. It was early afternoon, the equivalent of morning for Nichols, who doesn’t wake before noon. Although he was surprised by the visit, Nichols didn’t seem unsettled by it. Then the marshals mentioned an address: 1823 Center Street.
Nichols recognized it immediately. It was his grandmother’s address in New Albany, Indiana. That was where his father was raised, and where Nichols spent time as a child.
It was also the address that Joseph Newton Chandler III, a mysterious dead man that the marshals were investigating, had listed on a rental application in Mentor, Ohio. Only Chandler had listed the city as Columbus, and the resident as Mary R. Wilson, his sister.
Neither the woman nor the address existed — at least not in Columbus.
The marshals then showed Nichols pictures of Chandler and asked whether Nichols recognized the man in the photos.
He did.
In one photo, the man is caught unaware. He wears a wide-brimmed hat and pinstripe suit and stands in front of a cluster of balloons.
“That’s my father,” Nichols said. Except the man in the photo wasn’t Joseph Chandler, he told them. He was Robert Ivan Nichols.
The last time Phil Nichols had seen his father was in the early 1960s. He heard from him once after that, when the elder Nichols sent his teenage son a letter. Inside was a single penny.
That was in 1965. The family reported Robert Nichols missing the same year. They never heard from him again.
Phil thought he also might never find out what happened to his father. Then, more than 50 years later, the marshals turned up at his door and told him a story about a dead boy, a stolen identity, a mysterious man, a suicide — and his father.
In 2002, 76-year-old Joseph Newton Chandler III had been found dead by suicide in his efficiency apartment near Cleveland, Ohio. He had $82,000 in the bank, says US Marshal Pete Elliott, one of the authorities at Phil Nichols’s door that day. In the absence of a will, law enforcement set out to find Chandler’s next of kin. That’s when they discovered the real Chandler had died in 1945 in a traffic accident in Texas on Christmas Day as he and his parents headed to his grandparents’ house in a car loaded with gifts.
Chandler was 8 when he died. Who the Cleveland man was was anyone’s guess.
In 2014, the marshals began comparing the case to unsolved fugitive cases from the 1960s and ’70s. The name change alone was enough for Elliott to suspect the mystery man had committed crimes in addition to identity theft.
“If he’s running away just from his family, typically when we see that, they don’t go to the extent that Joseph Newton — sorry, Robert Nichols — did,” Elliott said in a phone interview.
The dead man in Cleveland had somehow been using Chandler’s identity since 1978. Aside from the familiar street address, which investigators say is not uncommon among impostors, the elder Nichols had done everything he could to erase himself.
Yet there were clues hinting at a darker past, or at least that’s what Elliott believes. Former coworkers in northeast Ohio where the man who went by Joseph Chandler worked on a contract basis as a draftsman and electrical engineer described him as highly intelligent and a loner. They said he kept a suitcase packed and ready to go and would disappear, only to return to work months later. Before he left, he would tell them, “They’re getting close.”
Earlier, in Kentucky and Indiana, when he was still Robert Nichols, he also spoke in code. He told his wife, “I’m leaving you, and one day you’ll know why,” says Elliott. Suspecting something sinister, Elliott dug up cold cases in the area. Nothing matched. The same was true of other cold cases he tried to connect to Nichols. He couldn’t find any evidence, possibly because Nichols knew how to hide it.
“He didn’t want to be found,” says Elliott. “Dead or alive.”
Using genetic genealogy and GEDmatch — the same site used to identify the Golden State Killer in 2018 — the California nonprofit DNA Doe Project finally solved the Nichols mystery. Law enforcement relies on DNA databases that look at only around 20 markers in the genome. The results from databases that get uploaded to GEDmatch (which accepts data from all the various companies creating genetic profiles, such as 23andMe and AncestryDNA) test for 600,000 markers. It’s the difference between being able to identify only siblings and parents and identifying even distant cousins. Genealogists can use the information to build family trees, which is how DNA Doe Project co-founders Colleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press located Phil Nichols.
The story made headlines for its oddness. Because Nichols had spent time in California, there were theories he could have been the Zodiac Killer. On Reddit, which is teeming with amateur genealogical and true crime forums, the case attracted the attention of web sleuths. Yet despite its intrigue, it was only one of dozens of cold cases in the past two years that have been solved by combining family tree genealogy with DNA database searches.
DNA Doe Project alone has solved many of them, including that of Lavender Doe, a young woman whose charred body was discovered in Kilgore, Texas, in 2006. Investigators noted her perfect teeth and the purple shirt she was wearing when she was found, earning her the nickname Lavender Doe. The project was able to give her back her real name, Dana Lynn Dodd. It also was able to name Buckskin Girl, a young woman whose body was discovered in Troy, Ohio, in 1981 dressed in a deerskin poncho over jeans and a sweater. That woman was Marcia L. King. She was from Arkansas and was 21 when she was killed.
But similar techniques are also being used to help families find members they never knew they had, unearthing secrets of illegitimacy, suicide, and ethnic background.
Now the historical narrative for families and society at large can no longer be shaped by the destruction of documents and the selective telling of stories, Matthew Stallard and Manchester historian Jerome de Groot wrote in the Journal of Family History in March. And finding those who don’t want to be found, like Robert Ivan Nichols, can also be devastating, as painful secrets once thought irretrievable are exposed. Which has ethicists and genealogists wondering: Who exactly has the right to tell our ancestors’ stories, and who has the right to simply disappear?
Genealogy, or the exploring of family history, was once done by lovely, generous, and cooperative people, says de Groot. But it was a bit dry.
Now, archival genetic material is no longer kept in public institutions with historians; it’s in the hands of private organizations aggregating DNA for their customers. The largest of the databases, AncestryDNA, has the genetic material of 20 million people, says de Groot. He estimates that 23andMe has about 10 million people.
“If you add all the big databases together, you would get 50 to 60 million people,” he says. “By extrapolation, you could probably get the entire world.”
That huge amount of data is now being used to build out family trees and solve mysteries, of both the familial and forensic sort. The internet has only added to the genealogists’ role, enabling them to interact and crowdsource in ways they never could before. On sites like Reddit, they work with more general sleuths to solve mysteries.
“You can basically just put people together and match and not really deal with the consequences,” says de Groot.
The Golden State Killer case marked a huge pivot from using the databases for educational or informational purposes to using them to solve crimes, says Benjamin Berkman, a faculty member in the National Institutes of Health Department of Bioethics with a joint appointment in the National Human Genome Research Institute. But their use has only recently begun to raise ethical questions.
“There’s been a long, robust history of thinking about the ethics of genetics in a medical context, but as these new technologies developed, there hasn’t always been, at least at the outset, the same sort of attention,” says Berkman.
But there are ethical dilemmas to consider, such as the tendency of people to not want to know unpleasant things.
“Knowing that your parent had committed a crime a long time ago, for example, would be traumatic for a lot of people,” says Berkman. “So you are imposing a burden on people by digging around and uncovering stuff that they want to keep hidden.”
Indiana veterinarian turned genealogist Michael Lacopo recently wrote a cautionary chapter about uncovering family secrets in the 2019 book Advanced Genetic Genealogy: Techniques and Case Studies. While Lacopo appreciates the thrill of solving a genealogical puzzle, he also worries about the ramifications.
“I think you lose track of the trail you leave behind you and the ripple effect you have in front of you,” he says.
Fake names, as in the case of Robert Nichols, can be even more troubling. If a person has committed a crime and is fleeing it, that is one thing. But if they are innocent and possibly fleeing an unsafe situation, Berkman says he believes that they “would have a right to not have their past dredged up.”
In the Nichols case, police were looking for relatives of the man they knew only as Joseph Newton Chandler III when they learned he hadn’t taken the name until 1978, the same year he started working in northeast Ohio. Fingerprints were unattainable, and the dead man seemed to have no friends or family. They did have a tissue sample from an earlier hospitalization, and the mystery man’s DNA profile was uploaded to national databases. When nothing turned up, law enforcement in 2016 contacted Colleen Fitzpatrick, half of the two-person forensic genealogy consulting company IdentiFinders International. She tracked down one match, but it ultimately led her nowhere.
It was around this same time that California genealogist Margaret Press approached Fitzpatrick with an idea. Press wanted to form an organization to help identify Jane and John Does using her years of genealogy experience building family trees combined with DNA databases. It was something she and other genealogists had been doing to help adoptees for some time. Together, the women developed data to generate genetic profiles for forensic cases in the same way companies such as 23andMe create genetic profiles for individuals. They then uploaded those profiles to GEDMatch. What they needed were cases. Fitzpatrick thought of Elliott. He agreed to let her have another crack at the mystery suicide case.
Although Nichols’s DNA was very degraded, the women, using techniques they developed, were able to obtain more genetic information than Fitzpatrick originally found, locating a number of third and fourth cousins. With the help of volunteers, they built family trees, narrowing their search to a single family with four sons. There were death certificates for three, but there was no death certificate for one of them — Robert Ivan Nichols. A volunteer looked up his birth certificate. He recognized the address it listed: 1823 Center Street.
New Albany, Indiana — that’s where it all began for the family. A suburb of Louisville, just across the Ohio River in Kentucky, is where Robert Ivan Nichols returned after fighting in World War II. Robert got a job delivering Coca-Cola, and played standup bass in a “hillbilly” band, Phil Nichols says. Phil’s maternal grandfather was a farmer who called square dances. Robert met Phil’s mother, Laverne Agnus Korty, at a dance.
Robert never talked about the war, but Robert’s mother did. He joined the Navy in 1944, straight out of high school. In May 1945, six Japanese kamikaze planes attacked the ship he was serving on in the South Pacific. He was part of a 16-man team that fed ammunition to one of the ship’s armored guns or turrets. Robert was one of only four men on his turret to survive the attack. In a newspaper account published in the Courier-Journal New Albany Bureau, he describes it as “52 minutes of hell.”
“When it was all over, all I thought about was home,” Robert told the newspaper.
He was 18. The newspaper listed his home address: 1823 Center Street.
When Robert returned to Center Street from the war, Phil’s grandmother told Phil, he put his uniform in the coal bin and burned it. Then Robert got the wooden airplanes he had built as a child and took them outside. He aimed a model machine gun at them.
Rat-a-tat-tat.
The model airplanes were destroyed by the gun’s BBs. That’s what Phil remembers his grandmother telling him. As children, Phil and his two younger brothers, Charlie and Dave, often spent time with their grandparents. It was one of his brothers who found the newspaper article about their father’s ship. Dave, the youngest, died of cancer in 2015; he was 9 when his father disappeared. Phil was 16 and Charlie was 14.
In 2018, after the marshals identified their mystery suicide as Robert Nichols, media accounts followed. Several accounts described how Robert burned his military uniform after returning from the war. Phil was upset that some commenters misinterpreted that as Robert being unpatriotic.
He wants to make it clear that his father was a patriot, but that after the war, he became a pacifist. Robert returned with a Purple Heart and shrapnel in his back and hip. At home, he was quiet and well mannered, rarely showing either affection or anger.
“Even when he was home, it was like nobody was there,” says Phil.
According to Phil, about a year before he left, Robert began encouraging his wife to get a driver’s license and a job. They separated and filed for divorce. Robert asked Phil if he wanted to come with him. Phil told him he didn’t, but not in quite such polite terms. Instead, Phil enlisted in the military after he graduated from high school. His goal was to be a pilot, but he spent most of his off-duty hours in a bar. He wonders now how his life might have been different had he left with his father.
The last message Phil received was the penny, mailed to him while he was stationed in Mississippi. It arrived in a business-size envelope with a California postmark. But there was no letter offering an explanation, nor a return address.
“There was nothing,” he says.
Robert’s letters to his parents, shared with Vox by Elliott, were more prolific. After leaving Louisville, Robert moved to Dearborn, Michigan. In August 1964, he told his parents about going to church in the hope of meeting “the right kind of people.”
“I thaught (sic) it would be a good time to start again since my moving up here was sort of a new beginning,” he wrote.
A year later, he sent them a letter from California.
“I will write as often as I can and let you know how I am doing,” he said. It was his last letter.
Other correspondence came instead — letters from all the organizations Robert’s mother contacted asking for help locating him. A woman named Pauline at the Salvation Army was sympathetic but firm in her 1966 reply, explaining that the organization could not help when the person does not want to be found.
“It’s so hard to understand why so many leave home and neglect to keep in touch …” she wrote.
There were many of those, especially at the turn of the 20th century, says Franchesca Werden, DNA Doe Project’s media director. Before the internet and DNA, it was relatively common and easy for people to disappear. That happened a lot, says Werden. A man could move four towns over and change his name, or not change his name, and just lead another life. In the 19th century, taking on an alias was relatively simple, wrote Beverly Schwartzberg in the Journal of Social History in 2004. Schwartzberg cited a song popular among California miners, the refrain of which is: “Oh, what was your name in the States?”
That doesn’t mean it did not have a profound effect on the families left behind. In her genealogical research, Werden has found that what happened generations ago is woven into the tapestry of a family’s story. A father who walked out in 1939 to buy a pack of cigarettes and never came back has an impact on his grandchildren. How exactly this plays out differs from family to family. It’s “sort of Tolstoy,” with each family suffering a unique sort of grief, says Margaret Press, the DNA Doe co-founder, who happens to write her own true crime and mystery books.
Before co-founding the DNA Doe Project with Fitzpatrick in 2017, Press worked on finding parentage in adoption cases. (Fitzpatrick left in June to spend more time on IdentiFinders.) Both in adoption and in Jane and John Doe searches, the ethical questions are the same, says Press, including “whose rights trumps whose.” In the case of adoption, the primary question is whether an adoptee’s right to know their history trumps a birth parent’s right to privacy. Press believes it does. Although she finds it “sad” that sperm donors and birth parents may have been promised that they would never be named, she says she believes “anonymity is not a right.”
There are times she is less sure of herself. She acknowledges “there’s conflicting moral rights,” and that without the benefit of a law, the DNA Doe Project has to make its own ethical decisions. Press is firm in her belief that families have the right to know and authorities have the right to close cases, but she points out that the Doe Project only makes recommendations based on its findings and leaves it to law enforcement to decide about notifying families. Yet the project often contacts distant family members to narrow down their search. Press recalls accidentally contacting a first instead of third cousin.
“And I kind of stepped on a snake, if you will,” she says. “I overturned a bucket I didn’t expect to overturn.”
Press also cites the case of an African American man who discovered his birth father was a white man who had a wife, two grown children, and a country club membership. After the father rebuffed his son, Press wondered if she should tell the half-siblings about their half-brother. Someone else asked whether the father had the right not to know.
“And I thought that was an interesting semantic twist,” says Press. “Do people have a right not to know? And how do we make that decision for them?”
In some ways, it is easier to make decisions in Doe cases because the person at the center of the mystery is dead. In other ways, it is more complicated. In the 30 cases the project has solved, Press says mental illness and family estrangement are common. In many cases, the families never declared the Does missing, says Fitzpatrick. It could be because of the estrangement, or lack of support from police, or even lack of power to conduct a national search, which was true when some of these cases occurred more than 30 years ago. Law enforcement officials were limited by technology and their own biases, and some families might not have seen any reason to involve them, says Press. While online sleuths sometimes fault families for not reporting the member missing, she sees it differently.
“Yes, there were families where the mother was in jail or didn’t care or didn’t seem to care. We don’t know how they really feel,” she says.
Yet she and others doing this sort of work generally operate under the assumption that the family must want to know. It gets more complicated when suicide and fake names are involved. Fitzpatrick remembers one case involving a woman who appeared to have fled her original family. The woman, who went by the name Lori Erica Ruff, killed herself in Texas in 2010. Afterward, it was discovered that she had been using an alias. Her true identity was revealed in 2016. She left home in Philadelphia in 1986 at 17 because she did not get along with her stepfather. Did she have an obligation to let the family know when she apparently didn’t want to be found? Fitzpatrick wonders. In some ways the question is moot; DNA and genealogists are already in play.
Investigative journalist James Renner, who reported on the Chandler case and even wrote a novel loosely based on it, believes Ruff and those like her who are running from something terrible should be able to disappear.
“What right do we have to open up those doors?” he asks.
He makes an exception for rape and murder, and he is not the only one who believes the Nichols case may have involved both. Because of Robert Nichols’s various eccentricities and the time he spent in California in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when the Zodiac Killer was active there, some web sleuths and even members of law enforcement — like Elliott, who says he can’t rule it out — suspect Nichols could be the killer. Phil is less sure.
“I find it hard to imagine because he was always such a gentle person,” he says.
Instead, he thinks his father was running from responsibility, in particular paying child support. When reporters come asking about the case, he is polite and open yet protective of other family members. He has the introspection and patience of a man who has spent years in Alcoholics Anonymous. He is reluctant to criticize or dwell on what he cannot change. But he does ask what the family gets out of it. The press gets a story, law enforcement gets to close a case, the Doe Project gets congratulations, but what does the family get?
His dad is still missing, in ways. All Phil knows now is how he died. Little was left in his apartment aside from the gun he used to kill himself. Elliott offered it to Phil and his brother. They told him to keep it. Of the press conference where his father’s identity was announced, Phil says, “I was just a minor part of it.” He is one of the few family members who have spoken publicly. While Press doesn’t think Does have a right to privacy, she believes their families do. Yet the work she does can lead to their exposure.
Without guidelines and rules, genetic genealogy is a sort of a Wild West, says Renner.
“Not that DNA databases are new,” adds de Groot. “It’s just that suddenly there’s this enormous ability for amateurs to get involved, and that opens up all kinds of ethical issues.”
Fitzpatrick wants to try to address some of those issues through a think tank that will bring together prosecutors, law enforcement, genealogists, missing persons experts, database engineers, and family members. (GEDMatch changed its policy earlier this year so users now have to opt in to allow law enforcement access to their data.)
“We are past the ‘oh, my god’ era,” says Fitzpatrick.
Now, she says, we have to address where we are going with it.
The Nichols case was one of the first “oh, my god” tales. If it were a Hollywood script, it might end with Robert being the Zodiac Killer, says Renner. But Robert also could have been a Don Draper, who on the television show Mad Men lives a double life after being traumatized by war.
“So, which is it?” asks Renner.
Elliott, the US marshal, says he is still trying to figure it out. Phil may never know. He is 72 and haunted by his own ghosts. After he was discharged from the military, Phil held a series of jobs: in printing, driving trucks, with various temp agencies. He’s been married four times and has five children. The women and children are not really part of his life anymore, aside from one daughter who lives in Louisville. Over the years, he’s moved many times. Somewhere along the way, he lost his father’s Purple Heart. He also lost any pictures he had of them together.
In the single room where he lives in Cincinnati, about 100 miles northeast of Louisville, he keeps several pictures of his father on his computer. Some are labeled “Dad as Joseph Newton Chandler,” and others are from when his father was Robert Nichols. There are a coffeepot and microwave in the room and a deck where he can smoke. He has lived in long-term sober living homes for almost two decades. His earlier life was spent largely in the haze of alcohol and drug addiction.
The $82,000 his father left behind would have been useful. Some of the money was spent on private investigators, and some went to the coworker who served as executor. All of it is gone. Before he killed himself, Robert Nichols had been diagnosed with colon cancer and was undergoing treatment. He was nearing the end of his life and, living in the Midwest again, he had almost come home. His last stop was Cleveland, a city just four hours from where his eldest son was living and a little over five from his original home on Center Street in Indiana.
Phil never got to tell his father he forgives him for leaving — and for not really being there in the first place. He has never visited the graveyard in Cleveland where his father’s ashes are interred. He doesn’t believe that’s where his father is. Not his soul, at least.
In a way, he is right. The name on the wall where his father’s remains rest is that of another man: Joseph Newton Chandler III.
Katya Cengel has written for the New York Times Magazine and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications, and is the author of three nonfiction books. Her most recent book, From Chernobyl with Love: Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union was awarded an Independent Publisher Book Award and a Foreword INDIES.
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