Kaiser Health News

Progressive and Anti-Abortion? New Group Plays Fast and Loose to Make Points

Published

6 months ago

November 27, 2023

Darius Tahir
Mon, 27 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000

This summer pedestrians, drivers, and passengers in Washington, D.C., saw a new type of graffiti among the usual urban scrawls: anti-abortion advocacy designed to troll this ultra-blue city. On sidewalks, on bridge overpasses, and near Metro stations some people had stenciled or spray-painted missives like “Be Gay: Ban Abortion” and, in stylized lettering, “Abortion Is Murder.”

The messaging was likely a shock in Washington. The graffiti reflects part of a surprising segment of the ideological spectrum: anti-abortion using the language of the radical left.

One group on the vanguard of an increasingly confrontational anti-abortion movement is Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, which operates mostly in the nation's capital. They 've embraced all types of media and a good dose of misinformation to communicate a smashmouth message. One member of the group, Caroline Smith, boasted that they want to make people “uncomfortable.” Their activities have also gotten several members convicted of trespassing and obstructing abortion clinics.

Demonstrations like these, which involve rowdy, obstructive protests livestreamed over the internet, have gotten more scrutiny, especially since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Since the beginning of the Biden administration, the Department of Justice has used the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act to protect access to abortion clinics. As of June, it had pursued FACE Act cases against 48 defendants nationwide, with allegations ranging from shooting pellet guns into facilities to simply locking the gates with super glue.

Graffiti also is part of PAAU's strategy, with the group's social media providing instruction on “decorating public space,” celebrating defacement as “culture jamming.” (The group's founder, Terrisa Bukovinac, told KFF Health News in an interview that she did not “know anything about the specifics” about whether PAAU had done any anti-abortion graffitiing in Washington this summer.) The group's no-holds-barred strategies include livestreamed protests with combative counterprotesters and passersby.

In recent years, the group and its allies have been featured in livestreamed videos, some of which show protesters shouting combustible, misleading claims that have been rejected by medical experts and others. These livestreams include bystanders, patients, clinicians, and abortion rights activists, who, once they are on the livestream, risk becoming the subject of online attack, whether they are associated with the abortion clinic or not.

“It's a vector for doxxing and honestly would be foolish to think it's anything other than an aggression tactic,” said Daly Barnett of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, speaking generally of livestreams and other social media about protests at abortion clinics. Doxxing describes a form of online attack in which someone's personal information is made public without permission.

PAAU's Bukovinac left a San Francisco anti-abortion organization in 2021 to help create this unorthodox group. She and some of her colleagues wanted to find “a space for themselves” on the ideological spectrum. The group's website boasts of “progressive feminist values of equality” and members' willingness to put their bodies “in between the oppressor and the oppressed.” But the use of graphic anti-abortion rhetoric drew a cold reception from what Bukovinac called the “leftist” part of the pro-life movement.

A Curious Fit

Despite its otherwise progressive verbiage on inclusion and gay rights, the group mixes quite naturally into the right. Bukovinac, for instance, is a faculty member at the Leadership Institute, a conservative training group endorsed by the likes of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). She also attended a Heritage Foundation gala at which Tucker Carlson spoke.

She blames liberals for this strange company. “It should be embarrassing that I have to rely on Christofascists to end a genocide,” she said.

Politically, it's a dissonant fit, too. Despite having made clear to documentarians that she didn't vote in the 2020 election, she recently declared a Democratic presidential run. In her view, that's because anti-abortion Democrats are underrepresented. Citing data of unspecified provenance, she claimed in an interview that a quarter of Democrats identify as pro-life, and that a majority say they want more restrictions on abortion. She said she intends to show graphic anti-abortion television ads as part of her campaign.

Her campaign is an escalation of the group's all-media tactics, which include livestreaming videos across the internet, accessible far and wide.

One livestream documented a 2020 blockade of a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic. It became a right-wing cause célèbre after several activists, including Lauren Handy, PAAU's director of activism, entered the clinic, injuring a person while blockading the rooms, and livestreamed the whole thing — later earning an arrest, indictment, and conviction under the FACE Act. Right now, five of the 10, including Handy, are appealing; defense counsel Martin Cannon says it's “likely” a total of nine will appeal after sentencing. In March 2022, police found the remains of five fetuses in Handy's house, which she said came from the clinic via a medical waste driver. The transport company disputed her account.

The group has enlisted multiple anti-abortion members of Congress, who have pressed their case — about the fairness of the prosecutions — to the Department of Justice and Washington city officials. More broadly, some congressional Republicans are gearing up to repeal the FACE Act. Former GOP presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) even complained during the first primary debate that prosecutors were pursuing anti-abortion activists.

Whatever their appeals to the right wing, the group and their allies are careful to appeal to the left too. Before their October 2020 blockade in Washington, organizers planned to present an aggressive — yet also multicultural, progressive — image, according to prosecutors' filings in federal district court, on the FACE Act charges. “The idea of deliberately breaking the law is sexy,” advised Jonathan Darnel, an evangelical Christian activist, about their language advertising the event. Later another activist counseled making the language seem “more woke,” according to text messages obtained by the government and provided in a trial brief.

Livestreams: A Digital Megaphone

In real time, the nearly three-hour livestreamed videos had a more Christian, conservative bent, with protesters blockading and subsequently getting arrested and featuring speakers extolling religious themes and praising “anti-abortion, anti-Sodomite” activists. An internet broadcast like this “presents the potential for martyrdom,” said Mackenzie Quick, an assistant professor at Flagler College who has studied the rhetoric of anti-abortion movements. She thinks such streams might emerge as a common tactic for activists.

In the livestreamed videos, the protesters made typical anti-abortion claims in on-camera appearances, like that a fetus can feel pain at 12 weeks' gestation, which the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists rejects.

The livestreams also employ a take-no-prisoners approach to identifying — or misidentifying — people who, whether intentionally or not, become part of the video. “This may be the abortionist,” Darnel said in the halls of the abortion clinic, of one potential target of the protest who walked in view of the camera. Then an offscreen speaker is heard telling him the person was an FBI agent.

At another point, Darnel speculated on the livestreamed video whether someone — it was unclear whom he was referring to — was a well-known, Washington, D.C.-based abortion rights activist. Then he changed his mind: “Oh wait, we don't know — we don't know who she is,” he said.

Darnel summarily dismissed any potential concerns with his behavior. In a message to KFF Health News, he asked, given his opposition to abortion, why would he “be concerned with the privacy of the murderers or the corrupted police who sought to protect those murderers?” Days later, asked about a different subject, he added that these concerns are raised only against anti-abortion protesters.

It's not illegal in Washington, D.C., to film people in public without their consent, but the progressive anti-abortion types are “very media-oriented and they're very noisy and aggressive,” said Megan S., who helps run a volunteer group that escorts patients to appointments. She and other clinic escort volunteers are very aware of the risks of being identifiable. (Megan S. withheld her last name to protect herself from such risks.)

Exposing or potentially misrepresenting identities became a thorny point during the trial on the October 2020 obstruction, at which both Darnel and Handy were defendants.

The proceedings were marked by multiple clashes pitting expression and publicity against protecting courtroom deliberations.

Some pro-life activists, who Bukovinac maintained were unaffiliated with the progressives, protested outside the courthouse when jury selection began.

Once the trial began, the conflicts continued, with the judge raising concerns that activists' audible comments constituted witness tampering, Bukovinac said. The trial record showed the judge ultimately granted requests from prosecutors to shield witnesses' identities and restrict the dissemination of discovery material to only the defense team members.

The defense also attempted to introduce photos and videos of fetuses and a video of the clinic's doctor purportedly describing what he does to fetuses post-abortion, which counsel claimed would justify Handy's belief that fetuses were born alive before being killed. But the judge ruled that the photos were “particularly incendiary.” She wrote that the defendants planned to mischaracterize the video, which she said was “propaganda.”

The case is set to get tested in the appeals court, where some anti-abortion advocates see an opportunity to undo the FACE Act, which was designed to regulate these made-for-social-media protests that have become a signature of PAAU.

That's the hope of Cannon, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, an anti-abortion public interest law firm representing one of the defendants. The law is questionably constitutional, despite its nearly 30-year history, he said. “We're not tilting at windmills.”

If the courts won't end the law, the activists' next best hope may be their congressional allies. The Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising has rebranded one of its social media accounts previously devoted to providing trial updates “#RepealFACE.”

——————————
By: Darius Tahir
Title: Progressive and Anti-Abortion? New Group Plays Fast and Loose to Make Points
Sourced From: kffhealthnews.org/news/article/anti-abortion-protesters-tactics-graffiti-livestreams-2/
Published Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.biloxinewsevents.com/how-the-thyroid-gland-mystifies-doctors-and-patients/

Post Views: 200

Related Topics:Featured Health Kaiser Health News News

Up Next

Many Autoimmune Disease Patients Struggle With Diagnosis, Costs, Inattentive Care

Don't Miss

How the Thyroid Gland Mystifies Doctors and Patients

Kaiser Health News

The Chicken and Egg Problem of Fighting Another Flu Pandemic

Published

2 days ago

May 31, 2024

Staff Editor

Arthur Allen
Fri, 31 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Even a peep of news about a new flu pandemic is enough to set scientists clucking about eggs.

They worried about them in 2005, and in 2009, and they're worrying now. That's because millions of fertilized hen eggs are still the main ingredient in making vaccines that, hopefully, will protect people against the outbreak of a new flu strain.

“It's almost comical to be using a 1940s technology for a 21st-century pandemic,” said Rick Bright, who led the Health and Human Services Department's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) during the Trump administration.

It's not so funny, he said, when the currently stockpiled formulation against the H5N1 bird flu virus requires two shots and a whopping 90 micrograms of antigen, yet provides just middling immunity. “For the U.S. alone, it would take hens laying 900,000 eggs every single day for nine months,” Bright said.

And that's only if the chickens don't get infected.

The spread of an avian flu virus has decimated flocks of birds (and killed barn cats and other mammals). Cattle in at least nine states and at least three people in the U.S. have been infected, enough to bring public health attention once again to the potential for a global pandemic.

As of May 30, the only confirmed human cases of infection were dairy workers in Texas and Michigan, who experienced eye irritation. Two quickly recovered, while the third developed respiratory symptoms and was being treated with an antiviral drug at home. The virus's spread into multiple species over a vast geographic area, however, raises the threat that further mutations could create a virus that spreads from human to human through airborne transmission.

If they do, prevention starts with the egg.

To make raw material for an influenza vaccine, virus is grown in millions of fertilized eggs. Sometimes it doesn't grow well, or it mutates to a degree that the vaccine product stimulates antibodies that don't neutralize the virus — or the wild virus mutates to an extent that the vaccine doesn't work against it. And there's always the frightening prospect that wild birds could carry the virus into the henhouses needed in vaccine production.

“Once those roosters and hens go down, you have no vaccine,” Bright said.

Since 2009, when an H1N1 swine flu pandemic swept around the world before vaccine production could get off the ground, researchers and governments have been looking for alternatives. Billions of dollars have been invested into vaccines produced in mammalian and insect cell lines that don't pose the same risks as egg-based shots.

“Everyone knows the cell-based vaccines are better, more immunogenic, and offer better production,” said Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Health Security. “But they are handicapped because of the clout of egg-based manufacturing.”

The companies that make the cell-based influenza vaccines, CSL Seqirus and Sanofi, also have billions invested in egg-based production lines that they aren't eager to replace. And it's hard to blame them, said Nicole Lurie, HHS' assistant secretary for preparedness and response under President Barack Obama who is now an executive director of CEPI, the global epidemic-fighting nonprofit.

“Most vaccine companies that responded to an epidemic — Ebola, Zika, covid — ended up losing a lot of money on it,” Lurie said.

Exceptions were the mRNA vaccines created for covid, although even Pfizer and Moderna have had to destroy hundreds of millions of doses of unwanted vaccine as public interest waned.

Pfizer and Moderna are testing seasonal influenza vaccines made with mRNA, and the government is soliciting bids for mRNA pandemic flu vaccines, said David Boucher, director of infectious disease preparedness at HHS' Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response.

Bright, whose agency invested a billion dollars in a cell-based flu vaccine factory in Holly Springs, North Carolina, said there's “no way in hell we can fight an H5N1 pandemic with an egg-based vaccine.” But for now, there's little choice.

BARDA has stockpiled hundreds of thousands of doses of an H5N1-strain vaccine that stimulates the creation of antibodies that appear to neutralize the virus now circulating. It could produce millions more doses of the vaccine within weeks and up to 100 million doses in five months, Boucher told KFF Health News.

But the vaccines currently in the national stockpile are not a perfect match for the strain in question. Even with two shots containing six times as much vaccine substance as typical flu shots, the stockpiled vaccines were only partly effective against strains of the virus that circulated when those vaccines were made, Adalja said.

However, BARDA is currently supporting two clinical trials with a candidate vaccine virus that “is a good match for what we've found in cows,” Boucher said.

Flu vaccine makers are just starting to prepare this fall's shots but, eventually, the federal government could request production be switched to a pandemic-targeted strain.

“We don't have the capacity to do both,” Adalja said.

For now, ASPR has a stockpile of bulk pandemic vaccine and has identified manufacturing sites where 4.8 million doses could be bottled and finished without stopping production of seasonal flu vaccine, ASPR chief Dawn O'Connell said on May 22. U.S. officials began trying to diversify away from egg-based vaccines in 2005, when avian flu first gripped the world, and with added vigor after the 2009 fiasco. But “with the resources we have available, we get the best bang for our buck and best value to U.S. taxpayers when we leverage the seasonal infrastructure, and that's still mostly egg-based,” Boucher said.

Flu vaccine companies “have a system that works well right now to accomplish their objectives in manufacturing the seasonal vaccine,” he said. And without a financial incentive, “we are going to be here with eggs for a while, I think.”

——————————
By: Arthur Allen
Title: The Chicken and Egg Problem of Fighting Another Flu Pandemic
Sourced From: kffhealthnews.org/news/article/bird-flu-potential-pandemic-vaccine-chicken-egg-quandary/
Published Date: Fri, 31 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.biloxinewsevents.com/after-grilling-an-nih-scientist-over-covid-emails-congress-turns-to-anthony-fauci/

Post Views: 31

Kaiser Health News

After Grilling an NIH Scientist Over Covid Emails, Congress Turns to Anthony Fauci

Published

2 days ago

May 31, 2024

Staff Editor

David Hilzenrath
Fri, 31 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Former National Institutes of Health official Anthony Fauci has faced many hostile questions from members of Congress, but when he appears before a House panel on Monday, he'll have something new to answer for: a trove of incendiary emails written by one of his closest advisers.

In the emails, David Morens, a career federal scientist now on administrative leave, described deleting messages and using a personal email account to evade disclosure of correspondence under the Freedom of Information Act.

“i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia'd but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021, email. “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”

The pressure is on as Fauci himself prepares to appear June 3 before a House subcommittee exploring the origins of covid-19. The NIH, a $49 billion agency that is the foremost source of funding in the world for biomedical research, finds itself under unusual bipartisan scrutiny. The subcommittee has demanded more outside oversight of NIH and its 50,000 grants and raised the idea of term limits for officials like Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an NIH component, from 1984 to 2022.

Lawmakers are likely to put Fauci on the spot about Morens' emails at a time when Republicans are questioning NIH's credibility and integrity. Even Democrats have cautioned the agency's leaders.

“When people don't trust scientists, they don't trust the science,” Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) told Morens.

The subcommittee has yet to turn up evidence implicating the NIH or U.S. scientists in the pandemic's beginnings in Wuhan, China. Nor has its work shed light on the origin of the virus.

But in a May 28 letter to NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli, the subcommittee's chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), said the evidence “suggests a conspiracy at the highest levels of NIH and NIAID to avoid public transparency regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Rep. Jill Tokuda, a subcommittee Democrat from Hawaii, said the evidence shows no such conspiracy. She predicted the bipartisan criticism of Morens, 76, will give way to “a clash of intentions” at the hearing as Republicans try to pin covid on Fauci.

“For them, I think this is their moment to, again, bring a lot of these baseless, false allegations to the front,” Tokuda said.

On May 29, Wenstrup asked Fauci to turn over personal e-mails ahead of his testimony.

Here are things to know as the subcommittee gears up for Fauci's appearance.

What Is the Subcommittee Looking For?

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic is supposed to be investigating how the pandemic started and the federal government's response. That includes such hot-button issues as vaccination policies and school closures.

A central question is whether the covid virus leaped from animals to humans at a market in Wuhan, China, or spread from a leak at the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Wuhan lab received funding from an NIH grant recipient called EcoHealth Alliance.

The congressional probe is in some ways an extension of the nation's political, cultural, and scientific battles arising from the pandemic.

The Republican-led subcommittee has been examining NIH's performance and that of Fauci, who advised both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, becoming the face of many of the government's most polarizing pandemic policies.

The panel called for the government to cut off EcoHealth's funding, a process the Department of Health and Human Services recently initiated.

EcoHealth's president, Peter Daszak, was Morens' friend and the recipient of many of the emails under scrutiny. A wildlife biologist credited with helping to develop the first covid antiviral drug, remdesivir, Daszak said he and his organization did nothing wrong.

“We were so accurate in our predictions that a bat coronavirus would emerge from China and cause a pandemic, that when it did, we're dragged in front of the crowd with their pitchforks and blamed for it,” Daszak said in an interview.

What's at Stake for NIH?

The Republican-led subcommittee is challenging NIH's credibility. The agency performs and funds a wide variety of medical and scientific research, work that is often the foundation of new medicines and other treatments, and has long enjoyed bipartisan support from Congress. The agency is home to the “Cancer Moonshot,” a Biden priority.

As head of NIAID and a presidential adviser, Fauci helped guide the public during the pandemic on measures to avoid infection, such as mask-wearing and maintaining physical distance.

But at a May 22 hearing, Wenstrup said Fauci's NIAID “was, unfortunately, less pristine than so many, including the media, would have had us all believe.”

In his letter to Bertagnolli, Wenstrup said there was evidence that a former chief of staff of Fauci's might have used intentional misspellings — such as a variant of “EcoHealth” — to prevent emails from being captured in keyword searches by FOIA officials.

Wenstrup's office did not respond to questions or an interview request.

An aide to the top Democrat on the subcommittee, Rep. Raul Ruiz of California, said he was unavailable for an interview.

Why Were Morens' Emails Alarming?

The emails show a pattern of trying to shield communications from public disclosure.

“We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn't put them in emails, and if we found them we'd delete them,” Morens wrote on June 16, 2020.

“The best way to avoid FOIA hassles is to delete all emails when you learn a subject is getting sensitive,” he wrote on June 28, 2021.

Some of Morens' emails included sexual or sexist remarks, including one from December 2020: “Beverage is always good, and best delivered by a blonde nymphomaniac.” In another email, discussing how former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky got her job, he remarked, “Well, she does wear a skirt.”

Morens apologized at the May 22 hearing and called some of what he wrote “misogynistic.”

“Some of the emails I've seen that you all have provided look pretty incriminating,” he testified.

Asked if he ever sent information related to covid to Fauci's personal email, he said he didn't remember but might have.

Morens said some of his comments were “snarky jokes” intended to cheer up his friend Daszak, the EcoHealth president, who was receiving death threats over media coverage of his organization's relationship with the Wuhan lab.

Morens testified that he didn't knowingly delete official records.

Ross, the North Carolina representative, said the emails “inflict serious damage on public trust for the entire scientific enterprise.” She said the dangers can be seen in eroding public confidence in vaccines, contributing to recent outbreaks of measles.

Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) said Morens showed disdain for the Freedom of Information Act. The subcommittee's investigation has been an unfounded effort to pin the blame for the pandemic on NIH and NIAID, and Morens' emails have helped blur the issues, she said.

Do the Emails Reveal the Origins of Covid?

No, as Democrats have emphasized.

In a way, Morens' correspondence undercuts allegations that people at the top of NIAID covered up a lab leak in Wuhan.

None of Morens' emails describe any effort to suppress evidence of a lab leak and, in an email sent from a private account, he ridiculed the idea, calling it “false to the point of being crazy.” But the subcommittee's senior Democrat, Ruiz, criticized Morens for dismissing the lab leak theory.

“Unless and until we see specific evidence on the origins” of the virus that causes covid, “the scientific process requires that we examine all possible hypotheses with objectivity,” Ruiz said.

KFF Health News senior correspondent Arthur Allen contributed to this report.

——————————
By: David Hilzenrath
Title: After Grilling an NIH Scientist Over Covid Emails, Congress Turns to Anthony Fauci
Sourced From: kffhealthnews.org/news/article/nih-scientist-covid-emails-congress-anthony-fauci-hearing/
Published Date: Fri, 31 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Post Views: 19

Kaiser Health News

KFF Health News’ ‘What the Health?’: Waiting for SCOTUS

Published

2 days ago

May 30, 2024

Staff Editor

Thu, 30 May 2024 18:45:00 +0000

The Host

Julie Rovner
KFF Health News

@jrovner

Read Julie's stories.

Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News' weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z,” now in its third edition.

June means it's time for the Supreme Court to render rulings on the biggest and most controversial cases of the term. This year, the court has two significant abortion-related cases: one involving the abortion pill mifepristone and the other regarding the conflict between a federal emergency care law and Idaho's near-total abortion ban.

Also awaiting resolution is a case that could dramatically change how the federal government makes health care (and all other types of) policies by potentially limiting agencies' authority in interpreting the details of laws through regulations. Rules stemming from the Affordable Care Act and other legislation could be affected.

In this special episode of “What the Health?”, Laurie Sobel, an associate director for women's health policy at KFF, joins host Julie Rovner for a refresher on the cases, and a preview of how the justices might rule on them.

The cases highlighted in this episode:

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce, about how much discretion federal agencies should have in interpreting laws passed by Congress.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, about whether the FDA exceeded its authority in relaxing restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone.
Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States, about whether the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requirement for hospitals participating in Medicare to provide needed medical care overrides Idaho's near-total abortion ban in emergency cases.

Previous “What the Health?” coverage of these cases:

Where to find Supreme Court opinions as they are announced:

The Supreme Court's official website
The SCOTUSblog (not an official government website but run by lawyers and journalists)

Credits

Francis Ying
Audio producer

Rebecca Adams
Editor

To hear all our podcasts, click here.

And subscribe to KFF Health News' “What the Health?” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

——————————
Title: KFF Health News' ‘What the Health?': Waiting for SCOTUS
Sourced From: kffhealthnews.org/news/podcast/what-the-health-349-supreme-court-abortion-cases-may-30-2024/
Published Date: Thu, 30 May 2024 18:45:00 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.biloxinewsevents.com/an-obscure-drug-discount-program-stifles-use-of-federal-lifeline-by-rural-hospitals/

Post Views: 29