Pharmaceutical company Moderna entered phase three trials of its Covid-19 vaccine, and plans to test the efficacy of their drug on 30,000 healthy participants. The director of the NIH said they plan to reach out to communities that have been hardest hit by the virus to form that sample group.
Major League Baseball has already announced that it’s postponing two games after players and coaches tested positive for Covid-19. Vietnam moved to evacuate 80,000 tourists from one city after a man there tested positive for the virus.
And in headlines: Kyrie Irving commits to cover salaries of WNBA athletes, Chainsmokers wreak havoc in the Hamptons, and Melania Trump’s goth rose garden.
Data are so more than just a bunch of numbers, especially when it's the data hospitals are reporting about COVID-19. Earlier this month, the Trump Administration made a sudden change to the way that information is shared. The process bypasses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, raising concern among some public health officials. NPR's Pien Huang explains the recent controversy, and why the way COVID-19 hospital data are reported is such a big deal.
The only thing wilder than Traci on camera, is Traci off camera. Also: Traci gets a rival; Traci gets a company; Traci gets a passport; and Traci gets busted.
There is currently a debate raging over how elections are to be held in the fall amid the coronavirus. Is a pandemic reason to hold an election by mail? Would widespread mail-in voting lead to voter fraud and skew election results?
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a former member of the Federal Election Commission, joins the podcast to discuss how states across America can hold a free and fair election while also protecting individuals' health.
We also cover these stories:
Former Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., passed away July 17 and is lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda.
Robert O’Brien, national security adviser to President Trump has been diagnosed with COVID-19.
Google announced its employees will work from home through 2021.
Amanda Holmes reads Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “A Psalm of Life.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The very person in charge of Homeland Security is essentially "here illegally." The upside is, though, there is a one weird trick to undo everything he has done while overstaying his tenure! And by "trick" we mean a lengthy A. Torrez deep dive, so tune in!
Before that, we talk about updates in the Flynn case and how the government is LYING about a Federal Rule.
We start off this week looking at the roll of bullying in Massachusetts politics & the inauspicious beginning of the MLB season. From there we kind of transition into the ongoing normalization of COVID and Trump’s federal police goon squad in America. Then, after TTRPG’ing contested 2020 election scenarios, we kind of take a left turn towards Brazil’s Looney Tunes fascism, and stick the landing by reflecting on Mormons as the Perfect Americans.
In the interview, Zephyr Teachout is here to discuss her new book Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ad, Big Tech, and Big Money. She and Mike discuss how monopolies have come to dominate so many of our industries, the work that needs to be done to break them up, and why it’s a multi-pronged solution. They also touch on Gov. Cuomo’s response to the pandemic and how her team might have been different if she’d won office.
