Rick Bright

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg in her column this morning entitled, We’re All Casualties of Trump’s War on Science, examines how the President and his administration “kneecaps” science experts as the coronavirus rages.  She reviews the cases of several scientists including Rick Bright, the Department of Health and Human Services immunologist who was reassigned last month.  The entire column is below.

When we need science most, Trump turns his back and people will die!

Tony

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 New York Times

We’re All Casualties of Trump’s War on Science.

By Michelle Goldberg

 May 11, 2020

In 2004, “60 Minutes” aired a segment on what it called “virus hunters,” scientists searching for bugs that can leap from animals to humans and cause pandemics. “What worries me the most is that we are going to miss the next emerging disease,” said a scientist named Peter Daszak, describing his fear of a coronavirus “that moves from one part of the planet to another, wiping out people as it moves along.”

In the intervening years, Daszak became president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization focused on emerging pandemics. EcoHealth worked with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology to study coronaviruses in bats that could infect humans, and, as Science magazine put it, “to develop tools that could help researchers create diagnostics, treatments and vaccines for human outbreaks.” Since 2014, the EcoHealth Alliance has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health, until its funding was abruptly cut two weeks ago.

The reason, as “60 Minutes” reported on Sunday evening, was a conspiracy theory spread by Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who in March wore a gas mask on the House floor to mock concern about the new coronavirus. On April 14, Gaetz appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and claimed that the N.I.H. grant went to the Wuhan Institute, which Gaetz intimated might have been the source of the virus — the institute may have “birthed a monster,” in his words.

The first of Gaetz’s claims was flatly false, and the second unlikely; the C.I.A. has reportedly found no evidence of a link between the virus and the Wuhan lab. But at a White House briefing a few days later, a reporter from the right-wing website Newsmax told President Trump that under Barack Obama, the N.I.H. gave the Wuhan lab a $3.7 million grant. “Why would the U.S. give a grant like that to China?” she asked.

In fact, Trump’s administration had recently renewed EcoHealth’s grant, but Trump didn’t appear to know that. “The Obama administration gave them a grant of $3.7 million?” he asked. Then he said, “We will end that grant very quickly.”

And they did. But ending the grant dealt a blow to efforts to find treatments and a vaccine for the coronavirus. Remdesivir, the antiviral drug that’s shown some promise in Covid-19 patients, was earlier tested against bat viruses EcoHealth discovered. Now the nonprofit is facing layoffs.

This political hit on Daszak’s work is far from the only way that the Trump administration’s contempt for science has undermined America’s coronavirus response. Conservative antipathy to science is nothing new; Republicans have long denied and denigrated the scientific consensus on issues from evolution to stem cell research to climate change. This hostility has several causes, including populist distrust of experts, religious rejection of information that undermines biblical literalism and efforts by giant corporations to evade regulation.

But it’s grown worse under Trump, with his authoritarian impulse to quash any facts, from inauguration crowd sizes to hurricane paths, that might reflect poorly on him.

Until recently, it seemed as if Trump’s sabotage of efforts to combat climate change would be the most destructive legacy of his disregard for science. But the coronavirus has presented the country with an emergency that only sound science can solve. That means that the Trump administration’s disdain for expertise, its elevation of slavish loyalty over technical competence, has become a more immediate threat.

Months before this pandemic began, Reuters reported, the Trump administration axed the job of an epidemiologist working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in China to help detect emerging disease outbreaks. As the pandemic raged, the administration removed Rick Bright, one of America’s premier experts on vaccine development, from an agency overseeing efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine. Last week Bright filed a whistle-blower complaint claiming he’d suffered retaliation because he resisted “funding potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections and by the administration itself.” (A federal watchdog agency has called for him to be reinstated pending its investigation.)

Another whistle-blower complaint, filed by a former volunteer on the coronavirus team assembled by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, claims the effort has been beset by inexperience and incompetence. The Associated Press reported on how the White House buried guidance from the C.D.C. on how communities could safely reopen. Now the president is urging Americans to return to work even as the White House itself has proved unable to keep the coronavirus at bay.

According to Axios, Trump has even privately started expressing skepticism of the coronavirus’s death toll, suggesting it’s lower than official statistics say. (Most experts believe the opposite.) “A senior administration official said he expects the president to begin publicly questioning the death toll as it closes in on his predictions for the final death count and damages him politically,” reported Axios. The Trump administration’s approach to the coronavirus began with denialism, and that’s likely how it will end.

Any progress America makes in fighting Covid-19 will be in spite of its federal government, not because of it. “I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way,” Dr. Bright said when he went public with his complaint in April. Trump won’t let that happen. He’d rather essentially give up on combating it at all.

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump abruptly ended his coronavirus press briefing yesterday after getting visibly angry with two female reporters.  The ending came after Trump told a reporter of Asian descent to “ask China” her question about COVID-19.

During the briefing, Trump took a question (see video above) from CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang, who asked him why he so often claimed the U.S. was “doing far better than any other country when it comes to testing” and framed it as a “global competition” when so many Americans are still dying, she said. 

“Well, they’re losing their lives everywhere in the world. And maybe that’s a question you should ask China,” Trump told Jiang, who is of Asian descent and was born in China. “Don’t ask me. Ask China that question, OK? When you ask them that question, you may get a very unusual answer.”

Trump then called on another female reporter, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who paused to let Jiang ask a follow-up question: “Why are you saying that to me specifically?” 

Trump fired back at Jiang that she was asking a “nasty question.” Then, seemingly punishing Collins for yielding time to Jiang, Trump refused to let Collins get her question in and called on someone else. 

“Next, please,” Trump said, speaking over Collins as she tried to ask him her question. But before actually moving on to the next reporter, Trump abruptly ended the briefing and walked off stage.  

Jiang has been on the receiving end of Trump’s frustration before. In early April, he got angry with her line of questioning and charged at her: “It’s such a basic, simple question, and you try to make it sound so bad. You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Trump said, calling her tone “very nasty.” 

Trump really let’s women reporters get to him and show his ugly side!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Labor Department reported on Friday that the unemployment rate hit a record 14.7%, but Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said yesterday that the actual rate could be closer to 25%.

The latter figure would match the joblessness rate during the Great Depression, which is estimated to have peaked at 24.9% in 1933.

On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace asked Mnuchin (see video above) about the Labor Department’s report, which excluded the 7 million jobs lost since April 18, the millions of people not currently looking for work, and people who are underemployed.

Wallace noted that a recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the rate actually hit 22.8% in April. That report accounted for workers not looking for jobs and the underemployed; however, it did not include the millions of jobs lost after mid-April. 

“Aren’t we talking close to 25% at this point, which is Great Depression neighborhood?” Wallace asked.

“Chris, we could be,” Mnuchin said. “But let me just emphasize: Unlike the Great Depression where you had economic issues that led to this, we closed down the economy. So it wouldn’t be a surprise if you closed down the economy that in half of the workforce, half the people didn’t work.”

He continued: “That’s why we’re very focused on rebuilding this economy and getting back to where it was. This is no fault of American business. This no fault of American workers. This is the result of a virus. … You are correct. The reported numbers are probably going to get worse before they get better.”

White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told CBS’ “Face The Nation” in an interview that aired Sunday that the unemployment rate could climb to “north” of 20% because of the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused businesses across the country to shut down.

“The fact is we’re burning up initial claims for unemployment insurance right now at a rate of about 3 million a week running through the rest of the month,” he said.

This obviously is not good news.  We are grateful to Mnuchin and Hassett for their honesty which is not the long suit of this administration particularly the President.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I just finished reading The Dream Universe:  How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way,  by David Lindley.  This is a thoughtful review of the critical issues in the world of theoretical physics and the author, who himself is a highly-regarded physicist,  takes the reader on a tour of how we have gotten to here in a search for a unified theory of the universe and all things big and small.  He starts with Plato and Aristotle, moves to Copernicus and Galileo, and continues through the pantheon of modern-day theoretical physicists. It is a plea that physicists base their understanding of reality on what they can observe and not on pure thought.  He frowns on those who would use only mathematics to prove their theories and hypotheses.  Lindley gets into the mathematical weeds at times but still his overall message is clear even to those of us without training in the sciences.

I found it an interesting read that provided me with good insight to fundamental questions in the world of physics.  If you are at all disposed, I recommend it.

A review courtesy of Kirkus is below.

Tony

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THE DREAM UNIVERSE

HOW FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICS LOST ITS WAY

by David Lindley

RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

A striking examination of an important scientific question: “What, exactly, are scholars of fundamental physics today trying to achieve?”

A former editor of Science and Nature, Lindley (Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science, 2007, etc.) expressed unhappiness with his profession in The End of Physics (1993). Since then, matters have changed without actually improving, so he returns to the attack. He maintains that today’s theoreticians have reverted to a pre-modern way of thinking that harks back to the ancient Greeks, who are regarded, incorrectly, as the founders of modern science. Led by Plato, they belittled observation because human senses are imperfect. Greek thinkers believed that true knowledge required reason and logic. They also had a profound respect for mathematics, which they did not consider a useful tool but a source of deep insights. “Fundamental physics has [become] a version of philosophy…one that shares with other areas of philosophical inquiry an endless capacity to ask deep questions and an impressive inability ever to answer them.” Lindley makes his case through a fine capsule history of physical science with an emphasis on Galileo, in the opinion of many the first modern scientist. Galileo looked around, wondered about phenomena (do heavy things fall faster than light things?), performed experiments, and calculated. He produced groundbreaking discoveries, as did his followers, from Newton to Maxwell to Einstein to the founders of quantum mechanics. Lindley believes that physics peaked in the 1970s with the development of the standard model, an excellent if imperfect explanation of fundamental particles and forces. Since then, he adds, researchers have attacked still unexplained problems (dark matter, dark energy) with complex mathematics-based systems (supersymmetry, string theory), some of whose predictions are untestable. He joins a minority of colleagues who complain that a 30-year obsession with pure mathematics has reached a dead end, although the physics establishment remains convinced that deep insights are just around the corner. This scientific polemic deserves mention alongside Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math (2018).

A delightful addition to a widespread, ongoing scientific debate.

Thank you to all of the moms, grandmas, aunts, godmothers maternal figures, and other women in our lives who do so much for us!

God bless you!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a spokesperson and member of the White House coronavirus task force, says he’s going into a “modified quarantine” after coming into contact with an administration staff member who contracted COVID-19, CNN reported yesterday.

Fauci told CNN that his contact with the staff member is considered “low risk,” meaning he did not come into close proximity with the infected person, who remains unnamed.

At least two members of the administration who have close contact with President Donald Trump’s inner circle have tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, tested positive for the virus on Friday.

Miller is married to Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller.

One day earlier, the White House reported that a personal military valet who comes into contact with Trump and his family had also tested positive for COVID-19.

While Fauci is only doing a “modified quarantine,” other high-level administration officials have had to go into a full quarantine.

Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, went into a two-week self-quarantine after making contact with a person who tested positive, an FDA spokesperson revealed to NPR on Saturday.

Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Robert Redfield entered a similar two-week quarantine after making contact with a “person at the White House” who contracted COVID-19.

The Trump administration has been criticized for not appearing to take the federal guidelines designed to prevent spread of the virus seriously.

In early April, Trump announced that new CDC guidelines suggest that people wear a mask when they are out in public. He also noted that the measure was “voluntary” and said he wouldn’t be wearing a mask. 

Later that month, Pence didn’t wear a mask while touring the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and meeting with staff members and patients, apparently shirking the clinic’s policies requiring the protective gear. 

Pence defended his decision to forgo the mask, saying that he and his regular contacts are tested regularly for COVID-19. In the aftermath of the criticism, Pence wore a mask during a tour of the General Motors plant days later.

Fauci told CNN that he would be working remotely from home and will be tested daily for the next 14 days. He also said he might work from his office at the National Institutes of Health, where he would be the only one in office, the news network reported.

If the White House cannot protect high-level officials from contracting the coronavirus, how can all the facilities that most of our nation’s governors are getting ready to open this week, protect the public?

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In her column this morning, Maureen Dowd takes down Donald Trump and likens him to a heartless vampire who keeps coming back. She quotes David Axelrod that “You’ve got to drive a stake right through his heart. He’s going to keep coming. There’s nothing he won’t do. Even in this environment, you can’t count on him losing. He will not admit to anything, and down faces everybody. If he can’t out-argue them he bullies them, and then takes their silence for agreement with his views”  Here is an excerpt.

“…Trump has always been fixated on numbers and perfectly willing to fake them — his billions, his inaugural crowd, even the number of stories in Trump Tower — and he knows the number of dead, now surpassing 77,500, could be the death knell of his campaign.

So he is despicably turning the dead into the undead, trying to figure out how to claim they weren’t lost.

His talent as an escape artist has run out because he’s up against an even more amoral, vicious enemy. Microbes don’t give a damn about Trump’s fake narrative and suppression of the facts.

When the new Trump press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, was asked Friday what the plan was for reopening, she replied that we must trust the president to open safely because he is relying on the data. Risible.

Trump is too much of a fake tough guy to wear a mask and Mike Pence is too much of a sycophant to the fake tough guy to wear a mask. It was apt that, as the maskless Trump toured a Honeywell factory making masks in Arizona, Guns N’ Roses’ cover of “Live and Let Die” was playing.

Trump’s unmoored assertions add up to a horror story, from his failure on testing to his advice to inject bleach to encouraging rowdy protesters and impatient states to “LIBERATE” from the government’s own guidelines to perpetrating the suicidal idea that we have to choose between public health and the economy when they are the same thing.

When Mike Pompeo tried to push the 2020 re-election line demonizing China, saying there is “enormous evidence” that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, even intelligence and senior officials pushed back. The man who is trusted to lead America beyond the plague, Anthony Fauci, dismissed it, reiterating with near certainty that the virus originated with a bat and jumped species.

Trump has sidelined the nonpareil Fauci and, no doubt consumed with jealousy and irritated by his honesty, would like to get rid of him. He barred the N.I.H. scientist from testifying before the House this month because the committee has “every Trump hater” who “want our situation to be unsuccessful, which means death.”

Wallowing in petty insults, vindictiveness and p.r. piffle even in such a tragic season, the president tried to shut down the pandemic task force as the pandemic is still ravaging the country until alarmed associates intervened. The White House scuppered the safety guidelines the C.D.C. wanted to put out, for fear they would crimp the reopening.

Trump has been leaning into his son-in-law, the pallid nonentity. Jared is like Renfield, the “zoophagous maniac” in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” who eats flies and death’s head moths and does the vampire king’s bidding.

For two of the most urgent missions in American history, hunting for supplies and a vaccine, the president — who is always accusing Joe Biden of nepotism — relied on nepotism and favoritism. As The Times reported,  Jared bollixed up the desperate search for masks, gloves and ventilators this spring, heading a group of volunteers that prioritized tips from those with Trump connections, putting them on a VIP list, like a lead on N95 masks from a former “Apprentice” contestant who runs Women for Trump.

[Trump biographer Michael] D’Antonio says that Trump was always preoccupied with death. When he was young, he was convinced he would die before 40. The early death of his alcoholic older brother, Fred, was his formative experience. He regards every loss or humiliation as a small death.

Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, compared their 2020 bid to the Death Star. (Parscale also modeled a “Trump-Pence, Keep America Great!” mask on Twitter. A pandemic is, most important, a branding opportunity.)

One of Trump’s favorite songs is the morbid Peggy Lee ballad “Is That All There Is?”

Yet now that it is his duty to lead us out of the valley of death, Trump appears removed, shirking responsibility and deflecting blame. He’s the world’s worst empath. As the president tries to prematurely yank the country back to work, he seems less focused on the real suffering than reviving his precious stock market. Maybe Trump doesn’t seem real to Trump, either.

So I must ask, Mr. President, is that all there is, to live and let die?

Trump is indeed the world’s worst empath and we elected him president!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Germany’s Brandenburg Gate was illuminated last night to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of V-E Day and the end of World War II in Europe. The words  “Thank You” in Russian, English, French and German were displayed in appreciation of the liberation of Germany by the allied forces in 1945.

An amazing bit of history

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. unemployment rate rocketed to 14.7% in April, a level last seen during the Great Depression, as 20.5 million jobs vanished in the worst monthly loss on record. It’s stark evidence of how the coronavirus has brought the economy to its knees.

“It’s going to take a long time before the labor market recovers to its pre-recession state,” said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics.

The Labor Department’s monthly report yesterday provided the clearest picture yet of the breadth and depth of the economic damage — and how swiftly it spread — as the coronavirus pandemic swept the country.

Job losses have encompassed the entire economy, affecting every major industry. Areas like leisure and hospitality had the biggest losses in April, but even health care shed more than a million jobs. Low-wage workers, including many women and members of racial and ethnic minorities, have been hit especially hard.  As reported by  the New York Times.

“It’s literally off the charts,” said Michelle Meyer, head of U.S. economics at Bank of America. “What would typically take months or quarters to play out in a recession happened in a matter of weeks this time.”

From almost any vantage point, it was a bleak report. The share of the adult population with a job, at 51.3 percent, was the lowest on record. Nearly 11 million people reported working part time because they couldn’t find full-time work, up from about four million before the pandemic.

If anything, the numbers probably understate the economic distress.

Millions more Americans have filed unemployment claims since the data was collected in mid-April. What’s more, because of issues with the way workers are classified, the Labor Department said the actual unemployment rate last month might have been closer to 20 percent.

It remains possible that the recovery, too, will be swift, and that as the pandemic retreats, businesses that were fundamentally healthy before the virus will reopen, rehire and return more or less to normal. The one bright spot in Friday’s report was that nearly 80 percent of the unemployed said they had been temporarily laid off and expected to return to their jobs in the coming months.

President Trump endorsed this view in an interview Friday morning on Fox News. “Those jobs will all be back, and they’ll be back very soon,” Mr. Trump said, “and next year we’re going to have a phenomenal year.”

But Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton, said that such optimism was misplaced, and that many of the jobs could not be recovered.

“This is going to be a hard reality,” Ms. Swonk said. “These furloughs are permanent, not temporary.”

Many businesses have indicated that employees can work from home throughout the summer, hurting sales at downtown restaurants. Meetings and conferences have been put off as well, reducing demand at hotels and other gathering places. And the longer the pandemic lasts, the more businesses will fail, deepening the downturn.

The broad nature of the job cuts, too, means it will take longer for the labor market to recover than if the losses were confined to one or two areas.

“There is no safe place in the labor market right now,” said Martha Gimbel, an economist and labor market expert at Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative. “Once people are unemployed, once they’ve lost their jobs, once their spending has been sucked out of the economy, it takes so long to come back from that.”

Our coronavirus economic recession is evolving into what I dare say is an economic depression.

Tony

Michael Flynn

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times Editorial Board has a scathing piece this morning on the decision of the the Justice Department, under Attorney General William Barr, to suddenly dropped all criminal charges against Michael Flynn.  I agree with its conclusion, it is  “A black day in D.O.J. history.”  The entire editorial is below.

Tony

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New York Times

Don’t Forget, Michael Flynn Pleaded Guilty. Twice.

Even President Trump has said his former national security adviser lied to the F.B.I.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

It can be hard to recall, since so many members of President Trump’s inner circle have been indicted, convicted of federal crimes and even sent to prison, but the first felon to emerge from this administration was Michael Flynn.

Mr. Flynn, who served less than a month as the national security adviser before resigning in disgrace, pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to F.B.I. investigators about his communications with the Russian ambassador.

When asked about the plea at the time, Mr. Trump said, “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the vice president and the F.B.I.”

That was true, of course. Mr. Flynn did lie, as he admitted to under oath in a court of law — twice. He told investigators, falsely, that he had not communicated with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, about possible changes to American foreign policy toward Russia even before Mr. Trump took office.

Last year Mr. Flynn asked the federal judge to throw out his conviction because, he claimed, the prosecutors and F.B.I. agents on his case had engaged in misconduct. The judge rejected his request, finding that the agents had not entrapped Mr. Flynn. And a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general found that the bureau had sufficient evidence to investigate Mr. Flynn as part of its inquiry into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, even as the report was sharply critical of the F.B.I.’s broader handling of that investigation.

Yet on Thursday, the Justice Department, under Attorney General William Barr, suddenly dropped all criminal charges against Mr. Flynn.

In a court filing, Mr. Barr said that the interview in which Mr. Flynn admitted to lying to authorities was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis,” and so his statements were not “material” to an active investigation. Further, the department said it was unable to prove that Mr. Flynn had in fact made false statements.

To review: Mr. Barr is now saying he cannot prove charges to which Mr. Flynn has twice pleaded guilty in court — and for which there is ample evidence.

As for legitimacy and materiality, the F.B.I. was in the middle of a monthslong counterintelligence investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Mr. Flynn was a top aide to that campaign, and he lied about speaking with the Russian ambassador in a way that undermined the Obama administration, which was still in charge at the time.

He had the constitutional right to remain silent, but he chose not to, and then he lied. Defense lawyers across the country will surely leap at the chance to seek similar concessions on behalf of their clients, and we are eager to see Mr. Barr apply this standard in thousands of other cases where the defendant is not a friend of the president’s.

Mr. Trump, his original explanation for firing Mr. Flynn notwithstanding, promptly crowed that his former aide was an “innocent man” who had been targeted by the Obama administration. He said Thursday in an Oval Office appearance that the officials involved in the Russia investigation and the Flynn case were guilty of “treason” and would “pay a big price.”

It’s hard to overstate how dangerous this is. It is a small step from using the Justice Department to protect your friends to using it to go after your political enemies. In other words, watch out, Joe Biden.

It is, of course, entirely in character for Mr. Trump, who lavishes praise on autocrats and dictators around the world. He is now emulating them, using the Justice Department to protect his friends, in the belief that he can do so with impunity. As long as Mr. Barr leads the Justice Department, he can.

The attorney general is supposed to work for the American people, not as a personal fixer for the president. Instead, from the day he took the job, Mr. Barr has worked to provide cover for Mr. Trump. He provided a misleading account of the Mueller investigation’s findings; he overrode his own attorneys’ sentencing recommendations for another of Mr. Trump’s criminal cronies, Roger Stone; he assigned new investigators to sniff out misconduct by the Mueller investigation; and he weighs in publicly on the purported wrongdoing of those involved in that investigation, none of whom have been charged with any crimes.

Career prosecutors who have dedicated their lives to the rule of law and the independent administration of justice are left to wonder what they’re supposed to do now. (Shortly before the Justice Department’s filing, Brandon Van Grack, the prosecutor who led the case against Mr. Flynn, announced his withdrawal from the case.)

Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general, called Thursday “A black day in D.O.J. history.” He’s right. Our institutions have withstood corruption and malfeasance at the highest level, until now. With William Barr at the right hand of Donald Trump, that is no longer assured.