Politics

The United States should temporarily suspend the punishing sanctions it has placed on the leaders and economies of Iran and Venezuela and bolster humanitarian aid in order to help both countries deal with worsening outbreaks of the coronavirus, 11 Democratic senators argued in a letter to the Trump administration Thursday afternoon.

“As these countries struggle to respond to their domestic health crises, U.S. sanctions are hindering the free flow of desperately needed medical and humanitarian supplies,” the senators wrote in the letter, which was led by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 

“While the shortcomings of these national governments are largely due to their endemic corruption, mismanagement, and authoritarian behavior, broad-based U.S. sanctions have exacerbated the failing medical response,” the letter said. “The Iranian and Venezuelan regimes are American adversaries, but the good people of these nations are not our enemy.”

The senators called on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to temporarily suspend sanctions that may “impede” the delivery humanitarian assistance in Venezuela and Iran for 90 days and said the administration should clearly authorize the delivery of medical equipment like testing kits to the countries. The senators also said the administration should provide “unconditional aid” to Iran and Venezuela through a third-party country or organization. 

The letter added to the increasing calls on President Donald Trump to ease the sanctions he has placed on Venezuela and Iran, the latter of which now has nearly 30,000 confirmed cases and more than 2,000 deaths linked to COVID-19. But the administration has refused to back down, saying this week it would not suspend or limit sanctions on Iran even in the midst of the crisis.  

Trump has taken an even more aggressive approach toward Venezuela, where he has wielded sanctions as the primary tool in his yearslong battle to oust socialist President Nicolás Maduro. On Thursday, the Trump administration announced that the Justice Department would indict Maduro and other top officials on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. 

That announcement came as the South American nation is already in the midst of two major crises: an economic collapse that has devastated its currency and caused millions of Venezuelans to flee to other nations, and a political crisis during which the increasingly autocratic Maduro has faced internal and international efforts to dislodge him from power.  

Since March 13, when Vice President Delcy Rodríguez announced Venezuela’s first two confirmed coronavirus cases, the number of infections has grown to more than 100. Maduro implemented a nationwide quarantine last week, but experts have warned that the pandemic could explode in Venezuela in the coming days, as the crisis-stricken economy and political system combine to exacerbate the global health crisis it now faces.

“I think what we’re going to see in Venezuela is a transmission rate that is far higher than anywhere else in the hemisphere and a mortality rate that’s significantly higher as well,” said Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela expert at the Washington Office for Latin America, a progressive think tank. “The things that we’re worried about in the United States are just a blip on the radar compared to how serious this crisis is going to be for public health in Venezuela.”

Whether the Trump administration eases the sanctions or not, the United States has “a moral obligation” to help address the coronavirus outbreak in Venezuela, given that it has directly involved itself in the country’s affairs, said Fernando Cutz, who served as a Latin America adviser on the National Security Council under both Trump and former President Barack Obama. 

“What we need to do is create a real robust international aid package that is specific to COVID-19 and Venezuela,” Cutz said. “That’s a moral obligation because of the humanitarian crisis they’re going through, and because of our involvement in this crisis. We can’t say [it has] nothing to do with us. We are directly involved in Venezuela.”

Few places in the world are less prepared for a pandemic than Venezuela, which ranked 176th out of 195 countries and last among the 33 nations in Latin America in a 2019 measure of nations’ abilities to respond to a global health crisis. 

The economic collapse that has occurred under Maduro has left the country short on medical supplies, food and even basic needs like soap. Running water is a luxury many poor and working-class Venezuelans cannot afford, and in many of the barrios around Caracas and other cities, social isolation is borderline impossible. The economic crisis has led to widespread malnutrition and declines in health quality, especially among poorer Venezuelans. 

Venezuelan hospitals are “easily the worst” in Latin America, a region that already spends meager amounts on public health compared to most of the rest of the world, Ramsey said. The number of doctors, meanwhile, has been halved since 2015, as thousands of physicians have been among the estimated 4 million Venezuelans who’ve fled the country over the last four years. Those left behind are still professionally trained and capable, but they often lack access to even basic medicine. 

“The doctor can tell you what you have and what you need, but he doesn’t have anything to give you,” said Marianne Menjivar, the country director for Colombia and Venezuela at the International Rescue Committee. 

Maduro has continued to crack down on dissent as the outbreak has worsened: Venezuelan special forces arrested a journalist this week whose reporting had suggested the government was ill-prepared for the pandemic, and there is at least some distrust among Venezuelans in the government’s counting of cases, said Phil Gunson, a Venezuela expert at the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit that works in crisis-stricken countries. 

Venezuela’s problems predate the sanctions the United States first began to implement in 2015, when Obama put restrictions on members of the Maduro government.

Trump has ramped those sanctions up repeatedly to include dozens more officials; as part of his regime-change strategy, he has also expanded the sanctions to include a de facto embargo on Venezuelan oil and PDVSA, the state-owned oil company.

Food and medical supplies are exempt from the financial sanctions, a fact U.S. officials have reiterated over the last year to dispute arguments that the restrictions have primarily punished ordinary Venezuelans rather than members of the Maduro regime. But while Maduro’s own corruption and mismanagement may be the primary cause of Venezuela’s woeful state in the face of a pandemic, the aggressive nature of the sanctions, experts say, has also driven many organizations who want to facilitate food and medical deliveries to avoid Venezuela altogether out of fear that even exempted activities could draw scrutiny from the United States. 

“The reality is there’s widespread overcompliance with the financial sanctions that hampers the work of humanitarian organizations and restricts the ability of the government to be able to pay for badly needed medicine and medical goods,” Ramsey said.

Cutz, the former NSC official, has been critical of Trump’s sanctions-heavy approach in Venezuela but is skeptical that easing sanctions would have a dramatic impact on the country’s ability to stem the crisis. 

Rather, he suspects Maduro and his allies inside would siphon off money meant for relief in order to shore up the government’s meager cash reserves before sanctions were strengthened again. 

“If they had a different leader in place who would actually spend money on the people, that would be huge and that would be great,” Cutz said. “Given the patterns we’ve seen over the last decade-plus, Maduro would just spend the money on his cronies, on himself, on keeping himself in power, on saving for a rainy day when we tighten the belt again.”

But even if the U.S. doesn’t ease sanctions, Cutz said, it should issue clear guidance to humanitarian organizations that it will not target any group trying to deliver aid inside Venezuela. And the U.S. government should work to piece together an aid package itself, he argued, in order to help Venezuelans through the crisis. 

The Trump administration has likely already poisoned the well on its own ability to deliver aid to Venezuela, thanks to its politicization of a supposed humanitarian mission last year. It is unlikely Maduro would accept any aid directly from the United States.

As Murphy and the group of Democrats suggested Thursday, the U.S. could get around that problem by coordinating aid delivery through international partners and nongovernmental organizations already working in Venezuela, including the United Nations, the Red Cross or the Catholic Church, Cutz said. 

The United States could also help ease tensions between Maduro and the opposition, which is led by National Assembly President Juan Guaidó ― whom the U.S. and more than 50 other nations regard as Venezuela’s legitimate leader.

The U.S. has broadly opposed any negotiations between Guaidó and Maduro throughout the political crisis, but the two sides need to work together to implement a response ambitious enough to stem the spread of the virus. 

“We’re at this weird moment where in order to properly address the crisis, both Maduro and the National Assembly are going to have to set aside their political aspirations in the name of addressing the health needs of the Venezuelan population,” said Ramsey, of the Washington Office of Latin America. 

“Unfortunately,” he continued, “everything we’ve seen over the last week suggests that neither of the opposition nor the Maduro regime has much interest in reconciling with the other. I’m expecting the political crisis to make the health crisis far worse.”

The U.S. Senate has focused primarily on responding to the coronavirus outbreak at home, but discussions about how Congress may be able to help stem the crisis in other countries, including Iran and Venezuela, could intensify in the near future, a Senate aide told HuffPost this week. The group of Democratic senators also said in their letter that continuing the sanctions without providing aid would amount to a strategic error in the effort to reach political solutions in both Venezuela and Iran.

“By allowing our sanctions to contribute to the exceptional pain and suffering brought about by the coronavirus outbreaks in both nations, we play into the anti-Americanism that is at the heart of both regimes’ hold on power,” the senators wrote.

But the Trump administration seems wedded to its aggressive policy in Venezuela, with hard-liners seeing the coronavirus outbreak not as a threat to ordinary Venezuelans, but as an opportunity that could finally break Maduro.

That approach will be disastrous for Venezuela and for the Americas as a whole.

“To simply reiterate the existing policy ― which is essentially that anything that helps induce the collapse of the government here is a good thing ― is extremely irresponsible,” Gunson said from Caracas. “If you’re going to cause the collapse of government in the middle of a pandemic, then you will be responsible for instilling chaos.”

WASHINGTON, March 22 (Reuters) – Several months before the coronavirus pandemic began, the Trump administration eliminated a key American public health position in Beijing intended to help detect disease outbreaks in China, Reuters has learned.

The American disease expert, a medical epidemiologist embedded in China’s disease control agency, left her post in July, according to four sources with knowledge of the issue. The first cases of the new coronavirus may have emerged as early as November, and as cases exploded, the Trump administration in February chastised China for censoring information about the outbreak and keeping U.S. experts from entering the country to help.

“It was heartbreaking to watch,” said Bao-Ping Zhu, a Chinese American who served in that role, which was funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 2007 and 2011. “If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster.”

Zhu and the other sources said the American expert, Dr. Linda Quick, was a trainer of Chinese field epidemiologists who were deployed to the epicenter of outbreaks to help track, investigate and contain diseases. As an American CDC employee, they said, Quick was in an ideal position to be the eyes and ears on the ground for the United States and other countries on the coronavirus outbreak, and might have alerted them to the growing threat weeks earlier.

No other foreign disease experts were embedded to lead the program after Quick left in July, according to the sources. Zhu said an embedded expert can often get word of outbreaks early, after forming close relationships with Chinese counterparts.

Zhu and the other sources said Quick could have provided real-time information to U.S. and other officials around the world during the first weeks of the outbreak, when they said the Chinese government tamped down on the release of information and provided erroneous assessments.

Quick left amid a bitter U.S. trade dispute with China when she learned her federally funded post, officially known as resident adviser to the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program in China, would be discontinued as of September, the sources said. The U.S. CDC said it first learned of a “cluster of 27 cases of pneumonia” of unexplained origin in Wuhan, China, on Dec. 31.

Since then, the outbreak of the disease known as COVID-19 has spread rapidly worldwide, killing more than 13,600 people, infecting more than 317,000. The epidemic has overwhelmed healthcare systems some countries, including Italy, and threatens to do so in the United States and elsewhere.

In a statement to Reuters, the U.S. CDC said the elimination of the adviser position did not hinder Washington’s ability to get information and “had absolutely nothing to do with CDC not learning of cases in China earlier.”

The agency said its decision not to have a resident adviser “started well before last summer and was due to China’s excellent technical capability and maturity of the program.”

The CDC said it has assigned two of its Chinese employees as “mentors” to help with the training program. The agency did not respond to questions about the mentors’ specific role or expertise.

“CDC has had a 30-year partnership with China CDC and close collaboration,” the statement said. “We had the right staff to engage China and ability to provide technical assistance were it requested.”

The CDC would not make Quick, who still works for the agency, available for comment.

Asked for comment on Chinese transparency and responsiveness to the outbreak, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs referred Reuters to remarks by spokesman Geng Shuang on Friday. Geng said the country “has adopted the strictest, most comprehensive, and most thorough prevention and control measures in an open, transparent, and responsible manner, and informed the (World Health Organization) and relevant countries and regions of the latest situation in a timely manner.”

One disease expert told Reuters he was skeptical that the U.S. resident adviser would have been able to get earlier or better information to the Trump administration, given the Chinese government’s suppression of information.

“In the end, based on circumstances in China, it probably wouldn’t have had made a big difference,” Scott McNabb, who was a CDC epidemiologist for 20 years and is now a research professor at Emory University. “The problem was how the Chinese handled it. What should have changed was the Chinese should have acknowledged it earlier and didn’t.”

Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS)said Friday that his agency learned of the coronavirus in early January, based on Redfield’s conversations with “Chinese colleagues.”

Redfield learned that “this looks to be a novel coronavirus” from Dr. Gao Fu, the head of the China CDC, according to an HHS administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Dr. Redfield always talked to Dr. Gao,” the official said.

HHS and CDC did not make Azar or Redfield available for comment.

Zhu and other sources said U.S. leaders should not have been relying on the China CDC director for alerts and updates. In general, they said, officials in China downplayed the severity of the outbreak in the early weeks and did not acknowledge evidence of person-to-person transmission until Jan. 20.

After the epidemic exploded and China had imposed strict quarantines, Trump administration officials complained that the Chinese had censored information about the outbreak and that the United States had been unable to get American disease experts into the country to help contain the spread.

Azar told CNN on Feb. 14 that he and CDC director Redfield officially offered to send a CDC team into China on Jan. 6 but still had not received permission for them to enter the country. HHS oversees the CDC.

“Dr. Redfield and I made the offer on January 6th – 36 days ago, 60,000 cases and 1,300 deaths ago,” Azar said. “We made the offer to send the CDC experts in to assist their Chinese colleagues to get to the bottom of key scientific questions like, how transmissible is this disease? What is the severity? What is the incubation period and can there be asymptomatic transmission?”

Days later, the World Health Organization secured permission to send a team that included two U.S. experts. The team visited between Feb. 16th and 24th. By then, China had reported more than 75,000 cases.

On Feb. 25, the first day the CDC told the American public to prepare for an outbreak at home, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused China of mishandling the epidemic through its “censorship” of medical professionals and media.

Relations between the two countries have deteriorated since then, as Trump has labeled the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” – a description the Chinese have condemned as stigmatizing. Last week, the Chinese government announced that Americans from three U.S. news organizations, The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, would be expelled from China.

The decision to eliminate Quick’s job came as the CDC has scaled back the number of U.S. staffers in China over the last two years, the sources told Reuters.

“We had already withdrawn many technical public health experts,” the same expert said.

The CDC, however, disputed that staffing was a problem or that its information had been limited by the move. “It was not the staffing shortage that limited our ability” it said.

The U.S. CDC team in Beijing now includes three American citizens in permanent roles, an additional American who is temporary and around 10 Chinese nationals, the agency said. Of the Americans, one is an influenza expert with expertise in respiratory disease. Coronavirus is not influenza, though it is a respiratory disease.

The CDC team, aside from Quick, was housed at U.S. Embassy facilities. No American CDC staffer besides Quick was embedded with China’s disease control agency, the sources said.

China in recent weeks has reported a dramatic slowdown in new cases, the result of drastic containment measures including the lockdown of Hubei province, home to 60 million people.

Nevertheless, the infectious disease experts who spoke with Reuters said, the United States could use people like Quick with contacts on the ground, especially if fears of a second wave of infections materializes.

Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the CDC, said that if the U.S. resident adviser had still been in China, “it is possible that we would know more today about how this coronavirus is spreading and what works best to stop it.”

Dr. George Conway, a medical epidemiologist who knows Quick and had served as resident advisor between 2012 and 2015, said funding for the position had been tenuous for years because of a perennial debate among U.S health officials over whether China should be paying for funding its own training program.

Yet since the training program was launched in 2001, the sources familiar with it say, it has not only strengthened the ranks of Chinese epidemiologists in the field, but also fostered collegial relationships between public health officials in the two countries.

“We go there as credentialed diplomats and return home as close colleagues and often as friends,” Conway said.

In 2007, Dr. Robert Fontaine, a CDC epidemiologist and one of the longest serving U.S. officials in the adviser’s position, received China’s highest honor for outstanding contributions to public health due to his contribution as a foreigner in helping to detect and investigate clusters of pneumonia of unknown cause.

But since last year, Frieden and others said, growing tensions between the Trump administration and China’s leadership have apparently damaged the collaboration.

“The message from the administration was, ‘Don’t work with China, they’re our rival,’” Frieden said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Taylor reported from Washinton; Tony Munroe contributing from Beijing

A new attack ad from the Lincoln Project brutally compares President Donald Trump to the coronavirus.

The ad, titled “Virus in the World,” shows scenes of empty streets, labs, and hospital rooms as an ominous voice intones:

There’s a virus in the world. For some people the virus is easy to see, others don’t see it at all.

Some say the virus isn’t that bad; others say its malicious … and dangerous.

Since there are those who still can’t see it, wouldn’t it be smart, to tell the truth about the virus, since there is a virus?

The ad seems to reference conditions created by the novel coronavirus, which has now spread to over 150 countries, resulting in more than 200,000 confirmed cases and more than 8,000 deaths as of Wednesday evening. The virus’ spread has prompted schools and businesses to close, and health organizations to urge social distancing.

The ad concludes, however, by showing a photo of Trump, not the coronavirus.

The ad is the brainchild of the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans dedicated to defeating the president in the 2020 election. Members include George Conway, husband of White House strategist Kellyanne Conway, and GOP strategist Rick Wilson.

Lincoln Project co-founder Jennifer Horn told The Hill that the coronavirus crisis has “once again” revealed the president is ”dangerously unfit for office.”

She added: “A public health crisis of this magnitude requires informed and honest leadership, at a minimum.