Weekend Reads 10/17/20

Feeling the Heat

Polls, which have long shown strong support for climate action on the left, are starting to indicate that climate change is becoming an increasingly important issue for voters across the board. And young Republicans, the demographic McCarthy is most worried about losing, are starting to sound a lot like young Democrats on the issue.

“If President Trump wants to get my vote, he’s going to have to prioritize climate change in a way that he has not done over the past four years,” Benji Backer, the 22-year-old founder of a conservative environmental group called the American Conservation Coalition, said in a recent interview.

Proposal to hasten herd immunity grabs White House attention, appalls top scientists

Critics of focused protection say the idea is impractical, unethical and potentially deadly. There is no way, they say, to segregate society neatly by levels of vulnerability. Many vulnerable people live in multigenerational households. And although it is true that younger people are unlikely to die of COVID-19, they can still become sick, potentially with chronic lung damage or other long-duration symptoms known as “long COVID.”

QAnon’s Obsession With #SaveTheChildren Is Making It Harder To Save Kids From Traffickers

“It’s extraordinarily frustrating,” said Lisa Goldblatt Grace, co-founder and executive director of My Life My Choice, an anti-trafficking nonprofit. “We’ve worked so hard for the last 18 years to shift the narrative and have people understand this is happening in our communities. QAnon instead gives folks this incredibly sensationalized ‘other’ to fear and be angry about.”

How the Trump admin devastated the CDC—and continues to cripple it

The CDC has been neutered, shamed, and blamed amid the novel coronavirus pandemic and global crisis. From internal missteps that bungled the country’s rollout of diagnostic testing to blatant political interference and strong-arming on critical public health guidance, the CDC has gone from the world’s premier public health agency to a silenced, overridden, distrusted afterthought in the US response—an agency stripped of its ability to collect even basic health data from hospitals during a raging pandemic.