COVID workers need support but anti-vaxxers not so much

Maine Writer- Gratitude echoed during this daunting pandemic and any other time, when the goal of our community is to support one another during particularly challenging times. (Be sure to scroll and read the comment posted on this Central Maine Editorial Board opinion. I pasted it at the end of the article.) 

Gratitude and grace needed during the holidays (and any other time too!): The advice of the Maine CDC director strikes the right chord in a bewildering, frustrating time.

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Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, took a few moments at the start of his Wednesday briefing to make some observations about celebrating the holidays during a pandemic.

Before sharing what he knew about the fast-spreading omicron variant of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, the status of the state’s hospital capacity and efforts to vaccinate more people, Shah spoke about how our attitudes toward this disease could fit with the spirit of the season – a time of gratitude and grace.

Central Maine Editorial Board: We couldn’t agree more. Both qualities are in short supply this year, and the need is great.

Our gratitude, Shah said, is deserved by so many people, starting with health care workers, who have been fighting on the front lines of a crisis that keeps changing.

Nirav Shah Director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention

“They do this in a variety of settings,” Shah said. “Health care workers at hospitals, nursing homes, EMS stations, home care workers, hospice workers, every sector of the health care system has played a role in our response to COVID-19.”

Shah continued: “The work they do matters, perhaps more than ever before. And they do it over this holiday season because the disease doesn’t take a break.”

These workers deserve our thanks. “And if you know one – and you must – give them a high-five and thank them for what they have done throughout the pandemic.”

To the list of the deserving, Shah added public health workers – from community outreach workers to lab technicians – as well as volunteers who staff vaccination clinics and other community efforts, and members of the Maine National Guard who have been serving a role since the beginning of the pandemic, which has only expanded.

At the same time that he called attention to the people around us who should be thanked, he reminded us about those who need our generosity – the people in our lives, our friends, families, coworkers and neighbors who may be evaluating the risk of the pandemic in ways we don’t understand.

“These days it seems, when it comes to COVID, each of us feels like we are on an island,” Shah said. “Everyone who is taking COVID more seriously than you is an over-reactionary worrywart. And everyone who is taking COVID less seriously than you, it’s easy to cast them as someone who doesn’t get it, someone who is denying science.”

But, neither of those extremes is right.

“What is true is that everyone approaches COVID differently through their own lens, a lens that reflects and refracts their own health status, their family’s health, whether they’ve been vaccinated as well as a host of other factors,” Shah said. “No two people, right now, will think of COVID and their own risk in the same way. And that means that no two people will take the exact same set of steps, especially as we go into the holiday season.”

This can be frustrating and confusing and has already caused conflict within families, workplaces and communities. 

Yet, Dr. Shah’s prescription is to meet these differences with generosity instead of anger.

“Recognize that they are coming at this world, a messy, bewildering world, with a different set of thoughts and values than you may be,” he said. “It can be frustrating, but it’s also a time where grace will get us much further than will irritation.”

This is not exactly the kind of advice we expect to get from a doctor, but it struck the right tone at a time when so much of the news we have been hearing is bad.

After nearly two years of uncertainty and disappointment, we have learned not to see this pandemic as a transitory phenomenon that will be over sometime soon.

But, rather than settle into despair, we can offer our grace to the people in our lives who need it, and our thanks to those who have been giving so much to protect us from a disease that consistently and stubbornly surprises.

Among those to whom we offer our thanks are the people at the Maine CDC, whose work has never been more demanding or important, and their director, Dr. Nirav Shah.

Comment published on the editorial page:  

From Maine Stoic:  I admire Dr. Nirav Shah very much, make no mistake. I have followed his guidance since the beginning of the pandemic. Nevertheless, I have reached the point where I have to disagree with the notion of being gracious and accepting of those who refuse to be vaccinated. What if twenty percent of the Maine population decided from time to time to put on a blindfold and walk down a busy street firing a deadly weapon in random directions, leaving a trail of injury and death behind them? What would Dr.Shah, or most other rational people think of that scenario? 

How would Dr.Shah have the greater majority of us respond to these people? The unvaccinated are doing very much the same thing. The time is long past where we, individually and collectively, must respond to the vaccine refusers in some stronger and more effective manner.

From P. Turlo: “These days it seems, when it comes to COVID, each of us feels like we are on an island.” The island analogy is misleading. There are certainly shades of gray. Yes, we should take into account the fact that many "may be evaluating the risk of the pandemic in ways we don’t understand." But there's another group who will simply deny science and who will put others at risk for 'political' reasons. Those 'reasons' involve a deep, unfounded distrust of 'science.' Dr. Shah has been extremely helpful and comforting for months on end. His attempt to promote 'grace' is commendable, but in some cases it will fall on deaf ears. When it comes to the deniers, "grace," in many cases, won't get us further. I agree with the thanks we should give to all the healthcare workers and the long list of support staff who tend to those with COVID. 

They have many, many long days ahead. God keep them safe.

Right Wing extremism is terrorism

A forensics official works at the al Noor mosque after the white supremacist massacre attack.
Tessa Burrows/AFP/Getty Images

Police Commissioner Mike Bush speaks to the media during a news conference in Wellington New Zealand. Bush said two improvised explosive devices were attached to a vehicle as part of the attack. One device was disabled and authorities were working on the other.
Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

Echo opinion published in the Central Maine newspaper Kennebec Journal by Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

The deadly attacks on two New Zealand mosques should draw attention to an obvious fact: Terrorists linked to the far right are no less murderous than the Islamist groups that get more headlines and attention from politicians.

Western governments shouldn’t be fooled by the skewed headline count; watching white supremacists should be a priority — alongside preventing the radicalization of Muslim minorities. This is not just a moment to grieve the 50 dead in Christchurch. It’s time to review the data and make a conscious policy shift.

Islamist terrorists killed hundreds of people in Western Europe and the U.S. between 2014 and 2016, the heyday of the Islamic State. That drew attention away from far-right terrorists, but they have kept on killing: 66 people in 113 attacks around the world between 2013 and 2017, according to the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace.

The Australian think-tank’s count is, however, too low. It includes only expressly politically motivated killings accompanied by white supremacist manifestos or preceded by racist social media posts – like those perpetrated by Norwegian Anders Breivik, who shot 77 people in 2011, or Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. There are other murders that aren’t always confessed so clearly. They are often mixed in with everyday thuggery and violent psychosis in police statistics.

The U.S. Anti-Defamation League attempts a broader count, stressing murderers’ links with far-right organizations rather than their stated motives. According to the group, right-wing extremists were responsible for 70 percent of the 427 extremist-related killings that occurred in the U.S. in the past 10 years. In 2018, every one of the perpetrators of the 37 extremist-related murders in the U.S. had ties to at least one far-right movement, although one had recently switched to supporting Islamist extremism, the ADL says.

Importantly, the number of incidents of violence perpetrated by the far-right is on the rise. The Institute for Economics and Peace noted in its 2018 Global Terrorism Index report that the number of such killings increased from three in 2014 to 17 in 2017.

Meanwhile, Islamist-inspired terrorism appears to be on the wane, with the attempt to create a caliphate in the Middle East roundly defeated and the ideal of pure Islamic statehood losing its attractiveness to the assorted misfits among the West’s Muslim minorities. 

According to Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center’s Global Attack Index, fatalities linked to Islamic State declined by 51.5 percent in 2018.

The far right has never killed on the same scale as the Islamic State. But it has grown by feeding off white supremacists’ fears of Muslim immigration and the public perception that terrorism is Islamist by nature. That process has been helped by the fact that Islamist-linked attacks receive disproportionate media coverage. 

A recent paper by Erin Kearns of the University of Alabama and her colleagues showed only 12.5 percent of the 136 terrorist acts that occurred in the U.S. between 2006 and 2015 were linked to such groups — but they received more than half of the news coverage. If the perpetrator is a Muslim, the number of stories about the attack increases by 357 percent, the academics calculated.

In a separate paper, Kearns showed that giving people more data about terrorism doesn’t necessarily change their minds about its prevalence and nature. Policymakers, though, should be more willing to put their biases aside. While it would be foolish to ignore militant Islamist groups, governments must pay close attention to right-wing extremist organizations.

In Germany, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution already monitors all such groups (or 25,250 people at the last count in 2017, up from 9,600 in 2012). The authorities don’t just make a special effort to track right-wing crime by motivation, they also try to assess how many of their members are capable of violence through monitoring and infiltrating radical groups.

Though the German record of fighting right-wing violence is far from spotless (and the growing membership of radical groups is evidence of that), the approach itself is correct. Western governments must make an effort to keep a close eye on the far right just as they do on potentially dangerous Muslim groups.

And they should adopt the approach to recording crime used by the Anti-Defamation League. This means assuming the specific motives of a violent crime are less important than the perpetrator’s links to a white supremacist group. 

Such assumptions, after all, are already being made about Islamists.

The mechanisms of radicalization are similar regardless of religion and ethnicity. Anti-terror policies should be based on that fact and be equally tough on every kind of murderous radicalism. The Christchurch killings are a reminder that this is not yet the case.

Leonid Bershidsky 

Health Care continues to concern Americans- a Maine letter to the editor

"Letter to the editor" in a Maine newspaper calls for everyone to pay something for health care coverage. Although well intentioned, the author of the letter must realize how we already pay for health care coverage, whether or not we are the consumers. (Let's support a Medicare For All insurance program?)

Americans pay for health care coverage through revenue sharing to programs like:

1.  Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) budgets funded by tax revenues.

• Medicaid assistance to children and the elderly in nursing homes
• Immunization and public health programs
• Health care research and disease prevention
• Grants for medical and nursing education programs
• CHIP- Childrens Health Insurance Program 

2.   By funding Veterans Health programs and providing access to care at Veterans Health Hospitals.

3.    By supporting the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services - CMS- where Medicare is administered.  

4.   By contributing to the payroll assessment matched by a contribution from employers to qualify for Medicare.

Moreover, Americans also pay privately for health care, whether or not we use it, when we are mandated to have automobile insurance whereby accident injuries are paid by the insurer.  

Home owners insurance provides health coverage for incidents allowable under the beneficiaries' personal injury provisions.

Workman's Compensation is a mandated program, whereby employee injuries, occurring on the job, are covered and paid at 100 percent without co-pays.

The above are just "top of mind examples" of how Americans already pay plenty for health care, and most of the time, we don't even use the coverage.  Unless we're on Medicaid, in a nursing home, a child who qualifies under CHIP or happen to be the unfortunate victim of an accident, we are already paying for health coverage, that we don't use.

What Americans need and we could all benefit from is taking every premium paid under the above plans and condensing the accumulated revenue into one big health care benefit fund.  

We can call it Universal Coverage or Medicare For All - or something else.  It doesn't matter,  because, in fact, by sharing the cost of all the health care we already fund but don't use, we could cover every man woman and child who qualify and probably lower our other insurance premium costs, in the process. Unfortunately, private insurance companies don't like the idea because it takes away premium payments to fund the universal health care provided. Too bad. Nevertheless, maybe insurance companies can figure out a way to receive tax credits for enabling universal health care to be made available to all Americans. 

Here is the text from the Letter to the Editor- although it is certainly a well intentioned opinion, I hope the author will come to realize how the ideas put forth are already included in his IRS bill. 

"Two basic principles should guide health care"

I would like to suggest that our elected officials take another crack a fixing health care, and in doing so adhere to two basic foundational principles.

1. Equal access to the health care for everyone. Access needs to be on a level playing field, not one where some have access to better or more comprehensive services than others. Factors such as employment, preexisting conditions or income should have no bearing on one’s access to health. Can we go so far as to say that access to health care services is a right, not a privilege?

2. Everyone pays. It’s true that some can afford to pay more than others, but everyone can and should pay something.

I believe that these are simple basic principles that everyone can agree to. They should not conflict with anyone’s political ideology be it conservative or liberal. I’ve heard people say that the issue of health care reform is complicated. I wouldn’t argue with that. What I would suggest though is that sometimes, simplicity can serve as a good foundation for building the solution to a complex problem.

Dennis Dalheim
From Wayne (Maine) published in the Central Maine Newspapers- KJournal

Maine Governor LePage has "misread" the Maine Constitution says state's court

Gov. Paul LePage talked tabout his veto messages as he left the Maine State House on July 16. He indicated in interviews, before the Supreme Judicial Court ruling, that he will not enforce the 65 laws he vetoed after the 10 day window expired, and would seek additional relief in court to block their implementation. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

Well, guess what happens now?  

There's little doubt, the outcome of today's Maine Supreme Court ruling about Governor LePage "misreading" the state's Constitution, about when the legislature is adjourned (or just in recess) will lead to his resignation.  

Maine cannot support a chief executive who misreads the state's Constitution, for his own purposes.  Today's state Suspreme Court ruling is especially difficult for LePage, because he has taken an oath to protect and uphold what's written in the state's Constitution. "Misreading" the document is simply not allowed.

Maine's High Court Spurns LePage, is today's headline in the Kennebec Journal.  By Steve Mistler

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court says the governor misread the Maine Constitution as it rules in favor of the Legislature in a dispute over 65 new laws.

Maine’s top court has ruled unanimously against Gov. Paul LePage in his dispute with the Legislature over whether he has more time to veto 65 bills already processed into law, delivering a significant blow to a governor already engulfed in withering criticism and scrutiny seven months into his second term.

The court’s advisory opinion ruled that the governor misread the Maine Constitution when he failed to veto 65 bills within the 10-day period prescribed by law. LePage’s legal team argued that the Legislature prevented the governor from returning the vetoes because lawmakers had temporarily adjourned. However, the ruling by six of the seven justices on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court rejected that reasoning. (The seventh justice recused himself and did not participate in the proceedings.)I

In its essence, the 55-page opinion asserted that while the constitutional language describing a situation that prevents the governor from returning bills is ambiguous, the Legislature determines when it’s in session and when it adjourns, not the governor.

“It follows that the Governor’s authority to object to legislation, to communicate those objections to the Legislature, and to require the Legislature to consider and act upon those objections must not be limited or infringed upon,” the court wrote. “In counterbalance, because the Executive (the governor) is not endowed in American democracy with absolute veto power, the Legislature must be able to anticipate and act upon the Governor’s objections and, where it determines it appropriate, override those objections.”

The advisory opinion by the court is a victory for the Legislature, which has repeatedly clashed with the Republican governor in disputes both personal and political. 

LePage indicated in interviews before the ruling that he will not enforce the 65 laws and would seek additional relief to block their implementation in court. The opinion by the state’s top court will likely hinder such efforts.

The 65 bills in question cover a wide range of policy areas, including General Assistance for asylum seekers, expanded use of a medication to treat drug overdoses, property tax breaks for Vietnam War veterans and birth control for MaineCare recipients.

The political dispute between LePage and the Legislature over whether he filed 65 vetoes on time has raged since July, when the governor did not act on 19 bills after the July 4 holiday. Top leaders in the Legislature immediately declared that the bills had become law while nonpartisan staff began writing the bills into law. LePage, leaning on his theory that he had more time to issue vetoes, then allowed another 52 bills to become law. He attempted to veto 65 of the 71 bills when the Legislature reconvened July 16. However, the Republican-controlled Secretary of the Senate and the Democratic-controlled House Clerk, rejected the governor’s veto messages.

The governor then sought an intervention from the Maine Supreme Judicial Courtthrough what’s known as a solemn occasion. Republican Senate President Micheal Thibodeau and House Speaker Mark Eves later hired an attorney to argue that the Legislature had followed precedent and law through its adjournment orders and rejection of the governor’s vetoes.

The Legislature’s position was backed by Attorney General Janet Mills, a Democrat.Mills issued an advisory opinion July 10 stating that the 19 bills that the governor originally failed to veto had become law.

The parties participated in oral arguments last Friday before a crowd of over 100 observers and media. During oral arguments, justices quickly challenged Cynthia Montgomery’s assertion that the Legislature’s recess prevented LePage from returning vetoes.

Chief Justice Leigh Saufley noted that LePage and previous governors have filed vetoes while the Legislature is not in session. Justice Ellen Gorman sharply questioned Montgomery’s contention that poor communication between the Legislature and the Governor’s Office was behind the confusion on when the clock had begun to tick on the 10-day veto period, noting affidavits showing that legislative clerks had been in communication with the Governor’s Office in the days after lawmakers adjourned on June 30, to make the administration aware that the clerks were available to receive the vetoes in the lawmakers’ absence.

There is no way Governor Paul LePage can continue to govern when he has misread the Constitution and caused the state's highest court to rule so decisively against his poor judgement.

Governor LePage will resign and the sooner the better.

This story will be updated.

Steve Mistler can be contacted at 620-7016 or at:

smistler@pressherald.com

Twitter: @stevemistler